Google optimization tips
Owning a website is a cool thing in itself, but it’s even greater if you’re able to welcome a lot of visitors to it. One of the most effective ways to accomplish this, is by making sure your site is easily found through search engines like Google.
Info on search engines
The two biggest search engines are Google (used by Google / AOL) and Overture (used by MSN / Yahoo). Google fills it’s database mainly by robots automatically crawl and index the web. The Overture database is mainly filled through affiliate programs. That has a cost to you, so let’s look at Google.
Visit by a bot
You can ask a Google bot visit your site at www.google.com/addurl. The bot will look at your site and index it’s contents. Expect to have to wait for a couple of weeks for this. Plus list your site at www.dmoz.org. This is Google’s webdirectory and, next to the google bot, an important source of the google search API.
Find your keywords
Your website is not ranked one item. Keywords are used to determine the relevancy of your website for particular subjects. So, before buiding your site, make sure you have a relevant keyword. Check yor for keywords / search terms and use the good ones for your own site. You can get an indication on the frequency people search for a certain keyword (and alternatives to it) at inventory.overture.com. Use a dictionary or thesaurus for alternatives.
Insert your keywords
The most important elements to insert keywords into are the URL [domain name + path + filename] and title of your web page. Also, a low-level URL [www.mysite.com/page.htm] is considered more important than a higher level URL [www.mysite.com/subdir/anothersubdir/
page.htm]. Check out this website “Nu.nl” for a good example. Notice how every news item has it’s own title in the titlebar and how every item’s html file is named after its title. These tricks make you score!
It’s also important to use your keywords in the body of your site, frequency (a lot) and proximity (close to each other) are important. The higher in a page, the more important a keyword is considered to be. Text in headline (h1 or h2), bold or caps is considered more important than regular text.
Keywords checking
Once you think you have found the right keywords and you’ve written your text so that these keywords appear all over the page, it’s time to check out how your site is doing. At googlerankings.com you can check your position in Google for the keywords you have chosen. Top of the ranks? Great! Not even close to it? Don’t worry, here are some tips to improve your rankings.{/column1}{column2}Technical and formatting tips & tricks
First, make sure your site, especially your homepage, is frequently updated. Google seems to like frequently changing websites, this might be why weblogs tend to score very well at Google.
Second, make sure to have a lot of incoming and outgoing links (especially to and from big, relevant, high-quality websites). If something can be a link, make it a link! By doing so, Google will rank you pages higher as others who are not that embedded. This link relevancy system is called Google Pagerank. You can check out your pagerank at pagerank.net. Pagerank works on a scale from 1 to 10. If you have a rank of 1 or 2, you’re likely to be way down the search results. If you have a higher rank, your site will appear at the top of the search results, even if there are a lot of competitors for your specific keywords or business.
Third, make sure your site is clean and correctly formatted, preferably in web standards / xhtml. Avoid certain technologies the Google robot doesn’t understand. Don’t use a frameset for your website. Robots may skip frames or only index the upper one (refering will be a mess anyway). Avoid javascript or Flash menus, only a.href links are followed by a robot. Additionally, all javascript and comments are skipped by search robots. For the same reason, full-flash websites should be avoided if search accessibility is important (actually, if ANY accessibility is important). If you do feel the strong need to use Flash, all you can do is to make sure you have a keyword descriptive URL and page title. Also navigation at the top seems to rank better.
Fourth, alt tag your images. Text only browsers only read the name of your images so 0001.jpg does not tell a search bot very much. A short description of the picture is much better. Also if you combine graphics in your authoring program tag these as well.
And finally
Google will put a 30 days block upon sites that use sneaky keyword tricks (hidden text/div or text in the same color as a background), so don’t bother trying. Detecting and catching a bot with javascript or IP cloaking or using linkfarms to boost your Pagerank are considered even more a no go. Do this and you may be blacklisted for good.
Just remember that a bot will be optimized over and over to be able to judge webpages the way a human does. In the end, if you make sure your site is clean, easy to navigate, and your content is good and relevant, websurfers will find your site..
Of course this article only covers the most basic elements of search engine optimization. GoogleRankings.com is a great resource and also the diagnostics guide there to for more information