Blogs

Every owner wants to be at the top of every relevant search to their website. This is simply because nearly 80% of users, who search using Google, open the websites they see on first page of the results, and rarely venture into succeeding pages. So being on page 1 means that your website is on its way to attracting audience numbers.

This blog is a guide to help assist you to rise in Google rankings. Google is the search engine we will feature as it owns more than 90% of the Australian search engine market.

Website owners must keep in mind that the Google search results page includes organic search results and often paid advertisements (aka Sponsored Links) as well. Advertising with Google won't have any effect on your website's presence in the search results. Google never accepts money to include or rank websites in their search results, and it costs nothing to appear in their organic search results. Free resources such as Webmaster Tools, the official Webmaster Central blog, and the discussion forum can provide you with a great deal of information about how to optimise your website for organic search.

For your better understanding, it is important to know that Google delivers search results after undertaking three processes, namely crawling, indexing and serving. Crawling simply answers ‘does Google know your website'? Indexing is just about adding your website to Google's index. And Serving is concerned in websites having good and useful content that is relevant to the user's search.

Now that you know the process, following the below guidelines (taken from http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769 and expanded on) will help Google find, index, and rank your website:

1. 1. When your website is ready, submit it to Google at http://www.google.com/addurl.html.
      
      
   2. Submit a Sitemap using Google Webmaster Tools. The sitemap you submitted will be use by Google to learn about your structure and increase coverage of your webpages.
      
      
   3. Make sure all the sites that should know about your pages are aware your site is online. And make sure that other websites link to yours, the many links that you'll have will increase your ranking.
      
      
   4. Provide high-quality content on your pages, especially your homepage. Make a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.
      
      
   5. Offer a site map to your users with links that point to the important parts of your site. If the site map is larger than 100 or so links, you may want to break the site map into separate pages.
      
      
   6. Give visitors the information they're looking for by creating a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.
      
      
   7. Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it.
      
      
   8. Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. The Google crawler doesn't recognize text contained in images. If you must use images for textual content, consider using the "ALT" attribute to include a few words of descriptive text.
      
      
   9. Make sure that your elements and ALT attributes are descriptive and accurate.
      
      
   10. Check for broken links and correct HTML.
       
       
   11. If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a "?" character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few.
       
       
   12. Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100).
       
       
   13. Use a text browser such as Lynx to examine your site
       
       
   14. Allow search bots to crawl your sites without session IDs or arguments that track their path through the site.
       
       
   15. Make sure your web server supports the If-Modified-Since HTTP header.
       
       
   16. Make use of the robots.txt file on your web server.
       
       
   17. If your company buys a content management system, make sure that the system creates pages and links that search engines can crawl.
       
       
   18. Use robots.txt to prevent crawling of search results pages or other auto-generated pages that don't add much value for users coming from search engines.
       
       
   19. Test your site to make sure that it appears correctly in different browsers.
       
       
   20. Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines.
       
       
   21. Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings.
       
       
   22. Don't participate in link schemes designed to increase your site's ranking or PageRank.
       
       
   23. Don't use unauthorized computer programs to submit pages, check rankings, etc.
       
       
   24. Avoid hidden text or hidden links.
       
       
   25. Don't use cloaking or sneaky redirects.
       
       
   26. Don't send automated queries to Google.
       
       
   27. Don't load pages with irrelevant keywords.
       
       
   28. Don't create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.
       
       
   29. Don't create pages with malicious behavior, such as phishing or installing viruses, trojans, or other badware.
       
       
   30. Avoid "doorway" pages created just for search engine or other "cookie cutter" approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.
       
       
   31. If your site participates in an affiliate program, make sure that your site adds value.
       
       
   32. Keep in mind that our algorithms can distinguish natural links from unnatural links and only natural links are useful for the indexing and ranking of your site.

Much of the above requires technical knowledge, and this is why SEO professionals like us make a living!

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) service providers are specialists in doing all of the above. A great time to hire is when you're considering a website re-design, or planning to launch a new website. That way, you and your search engine optimiser can ensure that your site is designed to be search engine-friendly from the bottom up.

But you must take great caution when acquiring SEO services as there are unethical players in the market, who have given the industry a black eye through their overly aggressive marketing efforts and their attempts to manipulate search engine results in unfair ways. Practices that violate Google's guidelines may result in a negative adjustment of your website's presence in Google, or even the removal of your site from their index.

Webmasters who spend their energies upholding the spirit of the basic principles will provide a much better user experience and subsequently enjoy better ranking than those who spend their time looking for loopholes they can exploit. So just keep these in mind and be guided.

We at KayWeb (Sydney and Melbourne) are ethical SEO professionals.

If you have read any of my blogs, you will know that when forming a strategy for your website, you must have 'traffic' in mind - specifically, how you plan to attract traffic to your website. Google, Bing and other search engines remain the single most potent source of traffic delivery to all websites.

For this reason, it is important that when you are typing content for your website, you consider Google and other search engines as much as your customer, who will eventually read it.

Here are my top 3 tips to consider when typing copy for your website:

1. A page for each keyword

   It may seem an attractive proposition to litter your Homepage, or Services page, with all your important keywords.
   
   This will only confuse search engine spiders. It is important to give each of your keywords their own page, and by showing these keywords such respect, you will encourage search engines like Google to do likewise.
   
   
   

2. Repetition of keywords

   It is a fact that the more times you mention a keyword on a particular page, the more likely it is that page will be indexed by Google.
   
   But this is one people tend to get a bit silly with. You don't want to do so much repeating that when a human reader lands on your website, they think the copywriter has some sort of weird condition that makes them repeat stuff nonsensically.
   
   
   

3. Inter-linking OR Contextual Linking

   Within your content, if you refer to a keyword that has its own page, link that keyword to that page. For example: I am mentioning search engine optimisation but am actually writing about something else, so I have linked search engine optimisation, which is a keyword, to KayWeb's search engine optimisation page. Please click the keyword to see for yourself.
   
   The reason this is good is because search engine spiders will click those links to navigate through your pages. You end up mapping a route for these spiders.

I blogged at haigkayserian.com.au last week about the pending release of Bing; Microsoft's new search engine and the company's latest attempt to win some market share over the globally-dominant Google.

Since that blog, Microsoft has released a video previewing the features of Bing, which they are pinning their hopes on to drift internet searchers to this engine. Click here to see video.

Despite this clever marketing, my opinion - as well as those of other search engine experts - remains unchanged.

Bing will not challenge Google's dominance!

The cleverest Bing feature as we stand is the ability to categorise search results by what Bing feels is relevant. Recently, Google already did this with Universal Search and the latest version of Google allows us as users to select what results we wish to see first by dragging one result above another.

We will watch with interest when Bing is released in the first week of June. Its challenge will be to lead regular internet searchers from Google to Bing. Despite what is certain to be a massive PR and marketing drive, will you be swapping typing google.com.au for bing.com.au for future internet searches?