SEO > Search Engine Optimization - Have You Missed This Basic Step?

The web is awash with a glut of great and not so great information about how to get your site a high ranking on Google and the other major search engines. But there is one key source of information that is far too frequently overlooked. Google itself!

When was the last time you went to Google’s main page and clicked on the “About Google” link? Before you do anything else to increase your page ranking – this is where you should start. In there you’ll find pages and pages of helpful hints and guidelines explaining exactly how to get your site listed and optimized for the best results. Here are just a few of those basic tips:

Tip 1 – Create a sitemap. This is a page that lists all the other pages in your site and how they link together. One thing that Google looks for is a site with a healthy number of links, but the search spiders don’t always spot them. So it’s a great idea to create a site-map that shows the spiders exactly how to find their way round your site.

You can create a map easily using the simple tool that Google provides.

Tip 2 – Relevance. The whole purpose behind search engines is to lead their users to the sites that are most relevant to their search. If you type the word “gardening” into Google, you don’t want to be presented with a page full of sites about astronomy; so Google’s indexing algorithms are continually being refined to ensure that they only turn up sites that are completely in tune with their users needs.

As a site owner you must make sure that what appears on your site supports and enhances the keywords you are targeting. People search the web to find solutions – if you can solve their particular problems, then Google will rate you highly.

Tip 3 – Graphics. A fantastic looking site with amazing graphics is great to see, but make sure that the most relevant, user specific information always appears on your site in text form. Google cannot read words that appear in an image file and might well miss some of your most important keywords are not indexed.

Tip 4 – Link, link, link. As I mentioned above links are important, but not just any links. Google will give you page a higher ranking if your site has lots of incoming links from other RELEVANT sites.

In other words it is very important that the connections you set up help to support the content of your site and show that it is part of a virtual network of content-rich sources which are going to be helpful to the searcher. The scatter-gun approach, with hundreds or thousands of links to any old site, just won’t help your cause – in fact it may well work against you. So, think before you link.

Tip 5 – Fill in the blanks. Make sure that you are using all the available HTML capabilities to help index your site. Many webmasters wonder why their sites aren’t ranking well when they haven’t even bothered to create keyword rich meta tags and a title; they haven’t put their keyword headers in H1 tags; they don’t have keywords in their image tags and many other basic things which should never be overlooked.

There are of course many other things you can do to build your ranking but if you haven’t addressed these basics and you don’t regularly visit the Google Help Center for Webmasters – you are definitely leaving easy money on the table.