A FEW TIPS

A couple questions I get asked all the time:

Why doesn’t my site show in Google?

How do I get my site a higher ranking on Google.

Well the real trick behind this is SEO (Search engine optimization). SEO has come to mean just about anything and everything that is geared towards making your site more search engine friendly, or increasing your ranking.

Here are a few tips for increasing your ranking:

1. Provide quality content. Ask your self, “Am one of the 10 best sites in my indestery?” If you answer no, then improve your site.
2. Don’t use JavaScript drop downs, images, or image maps for navigation.
3. Make sure that your content focuses on your keywords.
4. Make sure that your back links come from legitimate sites that are related to you somehow. Random back links will decrees your ranking.
5. Page rank is important but not that important. Don’t focus too much on it.
6. The titles of your page should have a unique keyword in the title. The company name should come at the end if at all.
7. Keep your site up to date. Switch out content on a regular basis. A blog is good for this.
8. Make sure your back links link to your key words, not “click here”
9. Focus on search phrases over terms. People will look for terms before they look for single words.
10. Design your site with SEO in mind. A flashy site is often chosen over one that is SEO friendly. Search engines can not navigate things that aren’t text.
11. Use your keywords and phrases in in the meta tags (like img alt, a title) correctly. Using them incorrectly will decrees your ranking.
12. Check canonicalization issues (i.e. www.site.com and site.com point to the same place.)
13. When you link to your home page just link to / not /index.html
14. Don’t use frames or flash to deliver content. Use Ajax sparingly.
15. For new sites get a link from another established site.
16. Try to change content 3 times a week. Blogging is a great way to do it.
17. When link building, think quality, not quantity. One single, good, authoritative link can do a lot more for you than a dozen poor quality links, which can actually hurt you.
18. Use shorter copy. Get your point across but make sure you don’t repeat your self a lot. Search engines give higher rankings to pages with natural language on them, and lower rankings to pages that are chuck full of keywords.
19. Surround links with descriptive text. Links in the middle of know where are harder for search engines to figure out.
20. If your on a shared server make sure your not sharing with a spammer. (For example, my server is clean and I limit it to my customers so it stays clean)
21. When you register a domain, make sure you leave all the ownership info in the open. Blocking that info could hurt your page rankings.
22. Make sure your site is easy to use. This will help with link building.
23. Create some out bound links. These links will encourage others to link to you.
24. Make sure you serve quality content. Real information.
25. Email messages should be optimized as well. Gmail for instance scans and can add page ranking based on that.
26. You get NOTHING from paid links except a few clicks unless the links are embedded in body text and NOT obvious sponsored links.
27. Links form .edu sites will give a nice ranking boost.
28. Make sure your “call to action” is clear. I.E. Buy my product today.
29. SEO is not a one-shot process. The search landscape changes daily, so expect to work on your optimization daily.
30. Respond to comments on your blog. Responding shows that you care about your business and will increase your ranking.
31. If you publish RSS feeds make sure they are optimized as well.
32. Use captions with your images, like newspapers have captions. Make sure they are keyword rich.
33. Make sure the text surrounding your images are relevant. Ranking can be adjusted for images that are not relevant to the surrounding text.
34. XML Site map is a bit over rated. If a search engine naturally finds your page you will get higher ranking.
35. Links form a high ranked sites will grant you a higher page rank.
36. Use absolute links. i.e. “/page.html” instead of “../../../page.html”
37. Surround videos with keyword rich text. search engines use the surrounding text to decide if the video is relevant.
38. In images that you want found use the keyword “image” or ‘picture”.
39. Add some social content to your site, like comments, feed back, or video posts.
40. Make sure that the server responds with a 200 OK or a 301 Moved status. Those are the best for keeping Google happy.

It’s important to note that these changes make your site search engine friendly, not marketing friendly, people friendly, or pretty. It’s up to you to decide how to maintain the balance between SEO and your other goals.