10 Easy Ways To Get On Google's Good Side

Google is #1 simply because they focus on connecting their customers (the searchers) with relevant and high quality results. This article gives you some concrete approaches to helping Google robots realize that your site is more important and should appear higher in search results.

Knowing how search robots “think” may require some expertise in computing science, but a rule of thumb that anyone can use is the question: “Is what I am doing in my page design helping Google do their job well?”

Here is a list of ten things that you can do that are generally accepted as being helpful to your search engine ranking on Google.

1. Lose Weight: The number one problem I find on client home pages is what I cheerfully call bloat. Not only does this dilute the significance of your key word choices, but it means a slower loading page. Google does pay attention to how fast your page loads, and the more bytes you try to stuff into the homepage the worse things will be. A worthwhile goal is to fit 75% of your content into the browser, requiring scrolling to see only the bottom 25%.
2. Link With Balance: Frequently, clients do not set up quantities navigational links that are proportional to the importance of the destination. In other words, a normal site should have a link to its home page, terms of service, and privacy policy on every page. They may not need a link to the return policy, major subsections, and so on everywhere in the interest of reducing visual clutter. Google's Webmaster Tools has a utility that helps you figure out how you're doing with internal linking rates.
3. Be Standards Compliant: Pages that adhere to their doctype declarations and are valid HTML will generally display better than ones that don't, and Google robots know this. The W3C validation service (validator.w3.org) should be the first place you go after you think your page design is finalized, and you should revisit it every time you make changes because if you're like me you'll accidentally add in non-compliant code once in awhile.
4. Use H (Heading) Tags: Google robots love hierarchy almost as much as Google engineers. When you have a page that has an overall subject (H1) followed by one or two sub-sections (H2), Google will be able to mechanistically decide what the important parts of your page are, and use it in search relevance scores. I once doubled a web site's search traffic within 3 months by simply adding H1 tags to the start of each page. If the text is too big or ugly, use CSS to tame it, the Google spider won't know the difference.
5. Get Linked: Yes, I know this is supposed to be “10 Easy Ways,” but getting links coming in is not as hard as you think. You can use a press release service (like prweb) to put links to your site on hundreds to thousands of news sites, blogs and other low to medium quality sites. Getting a link from a site with a high Pagerank can be tough, but there are often ways to do it, from running ads to convincing the webmaster. Sometimes it helps to have an expert involved when you have some specific linking targets.
6. Remember, Flash Doesn't Count: Does your site rely on Adobe Flash? Google's robot squad doesn't know what to do with Flash, so you need to make sure you add text content as an alternative to the Flash, so the search engine has something it can understand to try to figure out what your page is all about.
7. Focus, Daniel-San: Remember that hierarchy comment from a few tips back? Here we are again: Divide your site up by major topic, followed by sub-topics and so on. If you can't conceptualize your site as a tree structure, you are doing yourself no favors where Google is concerned. For a very brief example, if your site sells five major product lines, you should have a home page that points to five pages talking about each line, and each line should link to each product in the line. Each of the lines should have its name in H1 tags, each product should have its name in H1, etc. Try to limit your key words to one major word or phrase per HTML page, with perhaps one other minor word included if needed.
8. Duplication Is Deadly: Way back in the frontier days of the 'net, it was easy to fool search engines into thinking you were important with spam pages, copying the same content over and over to artificially inflate relevance. This same technique now will kill you dead. You may think, “duh.” but it is one of the most common unrecognized problems on sites running on CMS like Drupal, where pages can be reached via a “/node/3” style URL as well as a customized path like “/fishfingers” - make sure that only one (preferably the custom one, with relevant key words in it) actually returns a page, and redirect from any other URL.
9. Use Lists For Navigation: A great tool for making your site understandable to both humans and robots is to use plain HTML lists (ul /li tags) to outline your site's navigation. You can use simple css techniques (see “Suckerfish css menus”) to make these lists into drop down menus, nested collapsing menus and other very practical navigation. Nesting your links makes it really clear what the structure of your site is to a mechanical site indexer like Google.
10. Avoid Bad Outbound Links: If your site has user-contributed content like comments, make sure your software adds nofollow tags to any links placed in the site by user comments. When a comment spammer attacks your site (and they will!) you will not only avoid being marked down as a spam link repository by Google, you will also undermine their ability to use your good rank to boost their junk sites.

These techniques will help you do better in the long run on Google and any other search engine that behaves in a similar way.

Be warned: it can require restructuring your site to implement the more important ones, which can sometimes result in a lull in search engine traffic while the robots re-index your site and re-calculate the importance of everything. You can mitigate this by keeping some non-duplicate content around for a few months, redirecting old pages to their new equivalents, and paying close attention to your logs.

Remember, Google became the best by serving its customers better than anyone else. Help them do their job, and they help you do yours!

Copyright 2010 Matthew Steven, GeniusWeb.com LLC.
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