Jim Carrillo

10 Tips to Making Google Happy

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1. No Tricks - Like everything in life, cheaters never prosper. Google makes their living on ranking pages effectively on their search engine. Any tricks that can cause their system to put the wrong pages at the top will make them look bad – and they’ll do everything they can to prevent this. Any trick today will become a liability tomorrow. The same goes for links to those web pages, or schemes, just to increase your ranking. Google responds quickly and harshly to this type of behaviors. Google rewards sites with good information that people like. If you keep that in mind, you’ll do fine.
2. META is for People - Meta, a prefix in the English language roughly translating to “about”, is a carryover html tag from the good old days (mid to late 90’s) that web developers used to load with searchable words. Search Engines in the early days relied on these tags, or META tags, to classify sites. This then became one of the biggest tricks people used to fool search engines. Today’s search engines are smarter, and instead look through the text of the website for these searchable words, or key words. Google now only uses the META tag as the description that is show when displaying search results. WordPress manages the creation of META tags for you.
3. SiteMaps are a Must - Not sure what site maps are? You’re not alone; it’s a difficult concept to implement. This is probably the best service a consultant can provide for Search Engine Optimization (SEO). A SiteMap is basically a single page that identifies all pages on your site, and a simple way to access them – it’s really only important for search engines to make it easy to find all your pages. There are very simple ways to implement a SiteMap for your site. If you use WordPress, you can install a free plugin, “All in One SEO Pack” that manages all this for you without any skill required.
4. Submit to Search Engines – Once your site is up and running you’ll want to submit your URL to web directories, like Google, Yahoo and other free directories. There are many that will to link to your site and visitors can learn of your site and Blog. To make it easy on yourself, use WordPress, and install the free plugin, “All in One SEO Pack”. This plugin will submit your site for you anytime you update a page.
5. Give Images Descriptions – When most people upload images to their site, they don’t provide a description. Why should you, a picture’s worth a thousand words isn’t it? True – but Google doesn’t have eyes. Google will look at the descriptions of your pictures to help categorize your site. Use those special key words in the titles and description of your picture too, and it will pay off. Many content management systems (CMS), including WordPress, provide this ability by simply filling in a form.
6. Simple Site Navigation – Creating new pages for the sake of creating pages is fun, but if Google can’t find them, they aren’t worth anything (to Google). Make sure each of your pages is either referenced through a menu of pages, or linked to one of your main pages within the text. Special hidden pages can be a fun way to create member only content, but Google won’t be able to find them. For WordPress users, not a problem, all pages are automatically added to the sidebar of each and every page (Google loves that!)
7. Links – This is one of the easiest ways to improve your ranking on Google. Make sure your site links to other sites, and other sites link to you. This can be done many ways, but the easiest is by people commenting on your Blog, and you commenting on theirs. Each comment has a website linked to it. The more comments you make on other Blogs (which have a link back to your site), and vice versa, the better. You don’t have a Blog?, get one.
8. Content is Key - Key words are searchable terms that people type into Google to find sites. As noted above, key words used to be typed into META tags. Today, search engines look through the content, or words of the site, for “themes”. For example, if you’re a painter, and Google sees the word “paint” many times in your content, you’ll be categorized correctly. On the other hand, if you use that word sparingly, you get no acknowledgement. The first paragraph of your home page is very important. It must be at least 200 words long and should contain your keyword up to 15 times. Don’t go crazy though, as the first tip points out, tricks get punished by Google.
9. Static Pages Die – Google constantly checks your site once it finds it the first time. Google is looking to see whether the content on your site is changing, or static. If Google determines that your site is dormant (nobody is updating it), it starts to ignore it – in the same way people will ignore the site. The key here is updating your site often. Use a system like WordPress to make it easy on yourself, and both you and Google will be happy.
10. The Egg Comes First - Do you work on getting your site noticed by Google, or do you get people to visit your site? Isn’t Google necessary for people to find your site? This is a myth!, and as a matter of fact, Google isn’t interested in a site that nobody else is either. Print your site on business cards, and share it with friends. Ask everyone you know to visit your site, and to leave a comment on your Blog. Once you have at least 10 new visitors a day, Google will see this activity as a good thing, and become more interested in your site too.

 

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