How to Improve Your Google Ranking . . . Strategies for Achieving Website Success

You type your business’s name into Google’s search engine and hey presto it appears on your results screen . . . on page 12.

Ouch.

In the mind of your potential customers that might as well be somewhere in outer space because you’re definitely off their radar.

So what can you do about it?

It’s time to consider employing a Search Engine Optimisation (or SEO) strategy.

Search Engine Optimisation might sound technical – the sort of thing only a web developer should be interested in – but in fact it’s based on a simple concept. Search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN put the most relevant choices per search at the top of their results page, so their users don’t waste time weeding through thousands of entries to find what they’re looking for.

The search engine companies use bots (robots) or spiders to crawl the Internet examining the context of pages and the quality of their content and rank them accordingly.

For sound SEO, keywords are vital.

A keyword is simply a word or term someone might type into the search box in order to find your website, or a single page from it. Have a brainstorming session: write down all the possible terms potential customers might use to find your business. You can test your findings using Google’s AdWords keyword tool.

AdWords reveals how popular your search terms are by listing the number of local and global searches during the past month. It will also offer you some alte
atives similar to those you have come up with.

Keep the search engine ‘bots’ in mind, but write for humans!

Ever come across a web page or online article that has been stuffed with a particular keyword to the extent it makes you cringe at every sentence, because the word or phrase in question has been so over-used?

It used to be that unscrupulous web developers could saturate their sites with keywords and fool the bots into giving them a higher ranking. Only now the bots have got savvy and refuse to take the bait!

So build your website for your human visitors (not for bots) and make it as engaging and user-friendly as possible. Remember, ultimately it’s the quality of your content that will determine your website’s ranking. Another thing to bear in mind is that ‘spiders’ are unable to see Flash-based content, JavaScript content and other so-called ‘rich media’, techie people seem to love.

How Can You Tell if Your SEO is Working For You?

You can measure the effectiveness of your SEO efforts using Google Analytics. This handy tool will tell you how many people visit your site (by individual page), how they arrived at your web page (ie. via Google or from a link on someone else’s site). If they arrived via a search engine it will also tell you what keywords your visitor used.