How to get good with Google

While you may not be the technical person writing code for your website, it is helpful to understand what is required to get a good listing with the search engines. Understanding these principles will also help you to manage the people building or maintaining your site.

1. Follow the standards.

Remember that search engines don’t see what we see. They see the code that produces what we see. Think of your Web page as an outline. What would be the key topics (Roman Numerals I, II, III)? What would be the secondary topics under the key topics (A, B, C)? What would be third or body copy level? The importance of the content should be reflected in the HTML mark up tag that surrounds it.

After the hierarchy is in place, use other Web standards, namely CSS (style sheets) to define how those elements should look to the visitor on screen and in print.

2. Don’t do anything foolish.

Don’t try to trick the search engines with “splash” pages or gateway pages. The pages are typically light on real content and have a lot of metadata trying to make the search engines think there is more to your site than there really is.

Search engines will catch on and will penalize your site either by reducing ranking or removing your site from their listings altogether.

Search engines are smart. They look at the content of your site, the text content, to determine if the metadata corresponds to the content.

3. Submit your site. Check your listings regularly.

You must submit your site to the search engines before they will ever be indexed. Each search engine has its own registration page and most have pay and free services. But after you submit your site you should check your listings regularly to see how it is performing. All of the search engines use different algorithms to rank pages, so just because you’re number 7 in Yahoo! Doesn’t mean you are within the top 30 in Google or MSN.

4. Above all, provide useful content.

Make sure that the content of your site is appropriate for your audience. If you sell seating, don’t talk about stocks and bonds. There should also be enough content on the page. A general rule is that Google will not rank highly a page that contains fewer than 200 words.

You should not try to load up your pages with keywords either. Your page should read well. Don’t talk in the 3rd person all the time. “Company X is available 24-7 for your copy needs. Company X can copy in b/w and color.” Not only is it annoying to the reader, but search engines don’t benefit from it. And besides, if anything, it will only increase your ranking for your company name. That won’t help much if the searcher doesn’t know who you are.

5. Write.

Get published. This will definitely be your area. Write articles for magazines (print and online) and get links back to your website. Inbound links from reputable sites will increase your search ranking greatly.

Don’t pay to have a site link to you. That will generally just cause problems in the long run and won’t help your search ranking at all.

Building a good website takes a lot of work. Make the most of your effort by ensuring your site is designed properly and submitted to the major search engines. The results are well worth the effort.