The boom today in internet marketing is nothing less than phenomenal and finding your website with a top three position in Google searches can literally be company changing.
However, there are plenty of socalled specialist internet firms out there, all towilling to relieve you of your money whilst selling you the dream. Gaining top search engine positions is all about understanding what Google wants and giving it exactly that. Everything you do – or don’t do – is awarded positive or negative points and we all know what they make. The following five key elements are tried ad tested and have helped us to achieve more than 10,000 traffic generating top Google positions for our clients.
1. Choosing the right keywords = traffic
Choose the wrong keywords at your peril. Every single word or phrase in the world represents a keyword and we don’t all use the same words when searching for stuff online. Some words are more popular than others and some rarely get typed in – you don’t need an optimiser to be top of those. Use our handy tool at www.netcallidus. com/keyword to find out what words your customers are using to find your product or service.
2. Bigger is Better (saturation)
Google is an information resource and the ‘geeks’ at Google have been working extremely hard to make sure their technology can analyse your site and its content. As an information resource, Google likes BIG sites – the more pages you have, the better Google likes it and the more points you get (not to mention that every page is another opportunity to targetmore keywords and gainmore traffic). We call this measurement ‘saturation’ – ie, the number of pages you have saturated online. However, before you diligently start adding pages to your site you mustmake sure you include the following. Which brings us on to...
3. Keep it up-to-date (percentage change)
If you can’t be bothered to keep your site up to date why should Google add you to its lucrative results pages? Google check many items when visiting your site, including how often you keep it up to date. Don’t think of your site as a brochure, think of it as a monthly magazine and always change and modify the content. The more active a site, the more Google will visit it, the more points you will gain, themore pageswill be included, themore traffic youwill receive.
4. Can Google read you? (technology and structure)
You have bought a lovely website. You can update it yourself, add products and change content – so surely Google must love you according to the above, right? Well, that depends on what technology was employed to build your site. Every time Google visits your site it costs them money. And although Google can speak lots of computer languages it takes more processing power to read some languages than others – and that costs them money. For this reason they want your site built in an easy to read fashion. If yourUniformResource Locators (URLs) contain (?) or (Section id = ) then in most cases your pages will not be read. You can read what Google does and doesn’t like at the following address http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/
5. How popular are you? (link popularity)
Believe it or not, get all of the other four points correct and it only influences your positions by up to 20 per cent. By far the least understood and most important part of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is having other websites reference/link to yourwebsite and its content. Unfortunately, there are loads of rules surrounding this including: ‘Reciprocal links don’t count’. Links should be one way and from high ranking, traffic generating pages like the home page. If you don’t followthe rules here you are likely to get yourself removed from Google altogether. This is definitively one for the pros. Search Engine Optimisation done correctly can give you a fantastic and cost effective source of leads.
● If you would like to discuss your own requirements or challenges, call Mark Furber or the SEO team on (01604) 781044
