Being good for Google (I)

As said on one of the lyrics of Chicago musical, but changing a word, “When your good to Google, Google is good for you”.

In my previous post, Hill Valley exposed their information on the Internet, but how can you be notorious if you are not shown on Search Engines when users perform a query on them? And let’s face it, Google still the widest spread Search Engine.

How can Google be good for you? It’s kind of obvious, but being the widest spread Search Engine, means that if you’re well positioned on it, you’ll be more likely to appear when people search in Google for information related to your activity.

How can you be good for Google? This question is not as easy to answer as the previous one, as many people could tell you lots of ideas to promote your page on the Google results list, even paying, but these lines won’t talk about paying or cheating to get to the top. This post will contain a set of practices that even though might not take your own BMW fan site on top of BMW official page, for example, but that for sure will make Google to reach it easier.

Previous to getting your site as polished as possible for Google, let me introduce some concepts that are important in order to scale positions on their results lists, even though I’ll be referring to some external links, as usual:

• SEM – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_marketing
• SEO – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_optimization
• Pagerank – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank

There are some basic instructions that can help Google crawler to read and understand your HTML code:

• Make sure each page have a title tag. Preferably, your targeted keywords should be at the beginning of the tag. You can leave your web site’s name in the title, but it is recommended that you leave it at the end and that each title is descriptive enough on its information.
• Ensure that you use meta keywords and descriptions. Although it is not as important as other tips, description is often used in the search engines results pages to describe your site, so please make sure it is correctly written and it is not too long.
• Include on your meta keywords both your primary keywords as well as some common typos and grammatical errors.
• enable linking the rest of the site.
• Don’t duplicate pages. Make sure that each page and its content is unique.
• Use only one H1 tag by page with keywords similar to the title tag. Using sub-titles (H2 and/or H3) before each paragraph or logical section of your page. Structuring your information helps gaining readability and defining your content for search engines. Bullets and numbered lists or bold texts could also be used to gain readability.
• Text links are preferred than image or flash links, try to avoid this last ones when possible.
• Site map link could be very a very powerful tool when set on each site page, as it will
• Images and flash are not currently being read by bots, so try to avoid using them for text and titles.
• When using images, make sure that they always have an alt tag to describe the image, this tag could contain keywords related to the image.
• Each page should always contain some of its keywords and try to be as relevant as possible.
• The easier to navigate your site, the longer that both visitors and bots will stay. Keeping some links at the bottom of the page to the most relevan places of your site could benefit along with the site map we already defined.
• The home page should have links to the most important places of your site. Don’t forget it is the entry point to your web, so if you want to highlight something, it should be the most appropriate place to do it.

Wow!!! When I started this post, I wasn’t sure I was going to make it so long, so I think I will keep the rest of the information for the next post.

See you soon.

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