How to create a presence in Google and other search engines

Achieving good ranking and a visible presence with “ethical” methods is not rocket science, simply a lot of hard work and attention to detail for all the elements which make up a successful web site.

Ethical methods means no landing pages, no duplicate domains, no redirects, no invisible text and other so called “black hat” techniques. To argue whether these are unethical or not is not the purpose of this article. Neither is it to argue whether Google and other search engines act ethically when banning domains for alleged misconduct. Fact is that is does happen, so we will concentrate on “white hat” techniques for now.

Ethical search engine optimisation consists of two main pillars:

a) On site optimisation
b) Site placement

This is how Google and others look at your site. Their bots scour your pages and determine what content you have, how much of it and how it is distributed. Then it looks at how you are positioned on the Internet to determine weight and “Page Rank”.

Both elements require equal amounts of attention and work load. However the former you can control more than the latter which is why a larger part of this article will focus on techniques of optimising your website itself.

On site optimisation

Content content content! Build lots of content, prepare 100 pages of content stuffed with valuable information about your product, or better, about what the visitor has come to find on your site! Use the keywords your keyword analysis produced throughout these pages. Use them as often as you can. Interlink all pages. Every page with keyword rich content should have a link to every other page with keyword rich content. At least for started, shifting page weight around by placing strategic incoming and outgoing links is more advanced and further down the road.

Got the 100 pages? Get ready to prepare another 100!

Site technology: The rule of thumb is very simple: Your text should outweigh your tags. You don’t want Google to read this:

“var version = "";

if (navigator.userAgent.indexOf("Opera") == -1) {

if (navigator.appName.indexOf("Explorer") != -1){

version = '<a href="/static/ redirect.html" .....”

You want it to read:

“Keyword, information about my keyword, with my keyword spread all over keyword rich texts.”

To achieve this use:

· pure CSS layouts, separate all content from presentation (all presentational markup should be contained in external CSS files).

· Use XHTML which lacks support for any presentational markup. It is the leanest and cleanest from of writing HTML.

· Use (X)HTML as simple as you can afford to. Your pages should *validate* and work on any device which can be thrown at them, then they are also simple enough for bots to gobble up all the nicely laid out information you want them to find. Apart from just being the sensible thing to do, it appears that MSN values validating pages. It has been rumoured that Google does, too.

· Avoid: dom, java, java script, dhtml etc. The rule is simple: If people can’t read or understand it then search engine bots can’t either. It costs you valuable % in the content vs mark up ratio. Whatever scripting you have to use, put it into an external file and link to it instead of bloating your (X)HTML document.

· This also means that your content is higher up on the page. Look at your source and make sure content starts as high up as possible. Line 15 – 20 is very good, line 150 - 200 is bad.

· Avoid: Flash! Anything you put into Flash disappears like into a black hole. It’s content is inaccessible, it cannot be ready by bots. Therefore, anything which is keyword related or content related should be kept out of Flash. Any navigation should be kept out of flash so that bots can read your links, follow them and “spider” your site – meaning find all the content on your website. (this of course also means to steer clear of java/javascript menus. Most of their effects can be reproduced by CSS in any case)

· Organise! Either place all files with keyword related names in the root (which seems to get good long term results) or place them in sub directories with keyword rich names.

· Keep it clean: Remove anything which is not necessary. Counters, redundant text, or toys and gadgets like links to weather reports, someone else’s headlines etc. They clutter your mark up and take up space which could be used for placing keywords.

Follow these steps above and you have created a web presence which hands Google exactly what it wants to see on a silver plate.

Hand it to your visitor in the same way and they will be enjoying the visit just as much as a Google bot:

Keep page size down! Surfers like it, Google likes it just as much. If you can fit it into 10k you’re looking very good! Remember that the vast majority of your users will still use modems (80%+ !). And some search engine bots are known to have a small attention span, too!

Keyword density: Spread out your keywords, optimise one page for one keyword. Place that keyword: Once in the page title, once in the description, once in the keywords, once in the URL, once in a H1 header, once in a H2 header (and as many headers as you like), once bold, once italic, one in a bullet list and lots in normal paragraphs. Try to get a density of between 5% and 20% but keep it readable to humans. No-one likes to visit a site which looks like a list if keywords, even if it’s number 1 in Google.

Use alt tags! Not only do they improve accessibility, they can be used to further keyword presence on your pages. Usually you will have your company logo as an image somewhere near the top of the page. Place keyword rich alt tags and they will appear high up in your mark up. Do the same for all other images. Alt tags are read just like text by search engine bots.

Write short paragraphs, break with dashes, lists, headers…web readers don’t read, they skim over the pages. Clean and simple design, short and simple, well organised texts are the order of the day.

Give the visitor what he’s looking for. Not what you want to give him! The visitor doesn’t come to find what you have to offer, he comes to find what he is looking for! Therefore brochure type sites don’t work. Keep low key about yourself and be loud about what he came to find. What did he come to find? Well, the keyword he typed into the search engine!

Position your page on the web and link them:

· Outbound links: On every page place one outbound link to a high ranking site for the keyword you optimise for. Use your keyword in this link. It might cost a little page rank in the short terms but will pay off in the long term because it establishes your place in the net.

· Cross link all your pages with keyword rich links. This spreads Page rank evenly across your whole site. You do not want 1 over performer and 49 underperformers, you want 50 pages each of which attracts the same amount of traffic. You do not want 50 hits to one page and 1 to the other 49, you want 1 hit on every page because then you attract 50 different customers.

· If you do have an out performer, crosslink heavily to your other pages. Share your Page Rank. Together your pages are strong, alone they are weak.

· Create a site map. Link to the site map from every page. Place no content further than 2 directories deep and interlink it all as explained above.

Now that your site is ready and organised: Submit! Don’t do this before, don’t even put anything online before it is ready. It will cost you more work to recover from a bad start than starting from scratch. Submit to DMOZ (or/and Google), Fast, Altavista, WiseNut, (Teoma), DirectHit, and Hotbot. Try Yahoo if you have the budget. Forget about Wanadoo, they feature paid results at the top of their listings.

You’re online, you’ve submitted, you’re optimised, you’re ready to take Google et al by storm and dominate the rankings. Now comes the day to day:

Analyse!

Get a quality tracker and log analyser. Download your logs and see where your referrals come from and what they searched for.
Look out for Search Engine Spiders, make sure they spider your whole site, at least Google and Fast should have the entire site spidered by the second visit. How do you know they’ve been here? The first thing a search engine spider looks for is a file called robots.txt. It is used to guide spiders through the site. Create one and place it in your root. The keep track of who’s requesting it in your logs. If there are repeated requests it’s likely to be a search engine. Usually spiders will carry the search engine name as an identifier in it’s agent name. The name of an Inktomi spider is: j2001.inktomi.com
The following names are included in their agent

§ Altavista ->Scooter
Google -> Googlebot
Inktomi -> Slurp
Lycos -> Lycos_Spider
Northern Light -> Gulliver
Infoseek -> InfoSeek Sidewinder
Excite -> ArchitextSpider

· Use your logs to find out your referrals. Study where they come from and what people were looking for. Is your site about “Spanish language courses”? Do your referrals come from “language courses in Spain”? Re-write your content to feed the search engine what it is looking for. Reverse-engineer your site with the results of your logs and keyword analysis combined.

Site Placement

The site is, online, optimised and the logs have been analysed. Time to get some weight on the famous “Page Rank”.

There are a number of sources which explain in detail the Google algorithm and how it calculates your page rank. This is not the purpose of this section. Suffice to say that you can have an empty page rank #1 in Google if you have the right incoming links.

The rule of thumb is: The higher ranking the site which links to you the better. The closer this site comes to your keywords the better. If it uses your keywords in its link to you, you will gain more PR.

The perfect scenario: The number one page for your keyword in Google links to you with that keyword in the link text. Let’s take it from there:

Look at the Google Open Directory Pages for your keywords. Look at the directories and see where you are located. Pages are listed by page rank. Find top ranking pages which exchange links and offer to exchange links with them.
Monitor your position in Google. Find sites higher than you and offer link exchanges. Make sure to request links with your keyword in the link text.
When you get requests to link back to other pages make sure they are quality pages, check their page rank and check other pages they link to. Make sure they are no “link farms”! (pages with huge lists of links purely for the sake of accumulating page ranks) This can actually penalise you rather than help.

Create more traffic, use all tools at your disposition: “Email a friend”, forums, blog, mailing lists, newsletters…whatever you can think of. Keep it quality content!

Keep up with the latest trends in your sector. If the leader in your sector comes up with product “A” follow suit, create content about A. Notice how all of a sudden we have XP, XBOX, AthlonXP, RacerXP, XP Eberything…? The sites which ranked top for XP when it was launched were already built, optimised and online 6 months before the launch!
Visit forums in your sector. Keep up with the latest. Place links to your pages.

Positioning for specific keywords in search engines is getting more competitive every time. This shows especially with multi language sites. It is (still) a lot easier to achieve top positions in languages other than English.

There are no guarantees! Everyone who gives out a hands down guarantee for keyword positions within certain time limits is a scam! Let’s face it, who knows if your direct competitor is not doing exactly the same thing as you?

The road to success lies in applying ALL of the above with great attention to detail. In today’s competitive market no-one can afford to leave out any of the elements. Because if you do, your competitor won’t!

Article written by Christoph Herrmann who specialises in standard compliant web design and development. He sells his products as Lemon Digital Design and places an emphasis on combining standards based design with great looks, smooth functionaility/usability and notable results in terms of achieving client objectives.