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31 January 11

How do I get to the top of Google?

As a Web Developer and Designer, the one question I am guaranteed to be asked on a daily basis is “How do I get to the top of Google?”.

Even though this is a completely different skill set to what I usually offer, I do have some experience of SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) and so, in an attempt to prevent me repeating the same answer over and over, here it is for you all to see.

No guarantees

Google’s page ranking formula is, as it should be, a big secret. On top of that it changes regularly, to prevent people from working it out and manipulating it. This means that there is actually no way of guaranteeing that you will get to the top of Google’s search results and even if you do, you are not guaranteed to stay there!

The best thing you can do is to create a well-built and informative website that web users will be pleased to find. Google loves this kind of website, well at least Google’s search formula does.

So basically, optimising your site for Search Engines is less a case of finding out some quick tricks and more a case of building a good website!

I’m a Developer, what can I do?

Any developer worth their salt will already do a lot of things that Google likes, without even thinking about it, but here’s a list anyway. (Apologies if you know all of this already)

Start with the header

Your website’s header isn’t just a load of code added in by Dreamweaver (which you probably shouldn’t be using anyway, but that’s a whole new argument), it holds some very important information, a) for the web browser and b) for search engine robots.

You should always include a DocType, Title, Meta Description, Author, Keywords, Language and Content-Type.

You should also ensure that all CSS styling, Javascript etc. is in external files that are referenced in the document header.

Use positional elements and CSS

There is only one excuse for using the <table> tag in a website, and that is this: “My content is in tabular form”, if you openly admitted to coding with tables at a Web Development conference or in the offices of a reputable Digital Agency, the least you should expect is a verbal slap in the face!

On a similar note, it’s 2011, so you shouldn’t be using <frame>, <b>, <i>, <u> or <font> tags either!

Images should be images!

That means if you’ve got a navigation that uses a beautiful font, you have the following choices:

Use CSS to replace the textual element of the link with an image
Use font-replacement (such as Cufon or Typeface-JS)
Use the @font-face CSS rule

All of these are fine from an SEO standpoint, but really you should now be using @font-face, as it’s supported by over 90% of user’s browsers (including IE6!)

Obviously you will most likely have some images on your site, but unfortunately a search engine robot won’t be able to see it and understand what it is. For this reason, and to allow sight-impaired users to use your website properly, you should ALWAYS include the “alt” and “title” attributes in your <img> tags. These should fully describe the image and, if possible, include keyword phrases.

Get it in order

The order in which you put a web page together is also important. As a search engine robot will use it to find other pages on your site, make sure the navigation is the first, or almost the first thing that appears after the <body> tag.

As well as that you should ensure that your important content appears in your code as early as possible.

Always use header tags (<h1>, <h2> etc.) and paragraph tags for your website copy, and ensure these cascade properly.

A good way to test if you have everything in order is to turn off CSS and reload the page. When the page reloads, it should read like a simple document, with all content in order and all headings making sense and in the right places.

Write valid code

This one should go without saying, but it’s amazing how often I see websites that don’t pass simple validation. Google likes valid code, it’s easier for its robots to read, and therefore easier for Google to index your website properly. You can test the validity of the pages of your website using W3C’s validator tool.

Your website should also meet at least Level A of WCAG 2.0 (The Web Accessibility Initiative’s guidelines for making the web accessible to people with disabilities) , not only because it’s best practice (and, at least in the UK, the law), but also because meeting these guidelines means that all the important information in your site will be readable by search engine robots too.

Avoid Flash

Flash is the nemesis of SEO experts. Although there are ways around it, the biggest problem is that Flash content is not indexable, and will usually all be contained in one page of a site.

If you absolutely must use Flash, then also build HTML-based alternative content which will be served to search engine robots and users without Flash installed.

Never used a “Flash intro page”, as a search engine robot will not navigate past it to read your actual content.

Friendly URLs

URLs are also important to Google and it prefers URLs which are made up of real words, rather than a random string of characters. For instance, it’s obvious what “http://www.cheese.com/cheddar” is about but not as obvious what “http://www.cheese.com/index.php?p=1263s” is about.

If you are using a system that will only allow no friendly URLs, it is possible to use an .htaccess file to rewrite the URL in the browser. More information URL Rewriting

I’m a Copywriter, what can I do?

Writing the copy for a website is a tough enough job as it is, so adding in SEO objectives will only make it more difficult. The least you should do, is make all forms of content relevant to each other. For instance, a heading should reflect the content of the entire page and a subheading should reflect the content of the paragraph(s) below.

If you want to take it to the next level, here are some things to consider during the copywriting process:

Keyword Density

Choose no more than 3 keyword phrases to optimise each page for and try to include these in your copy. Don’t make the mistake of packing your copy with these phrases, Google will spot this and ignore it, or in the worst case, ignore your entire website!

A good benchmark to work to is 7-10% of your copy being keyword phrases.

Keyword Distribution

Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. You chosen keyword phrases should be distributed throughout the content of your website. Make sure they appear in headers, subheaders, links, paragraphs etc.

Try to get your keyword phrases at the beginning of paragraphs, especially the paragraphs at the top of the page.

This table shows the relevancy of different types of content/code to search engines. The relevancy improves as keywords are found in a larger variety of these places.

Content Type	Relevancy to Search Engines
title	Very High
h1	Very High
h2	Medium
h3	Medium-Low
Links	Very High
Emphasis (bold, italic etc.)	Medium-Low
Keywords at the beginning of paragraphs	High
Keywords Meta tag	Medium-Low
Alt Tags	Medium-Low

Content Quality

As inbound links are so important to SEO, your content should inspire other website owners to link to it. If Google’s search engine robots find your website through a link on one other website, that’s quite nice, but if it finds your website 30 times from 30 other websites, that’s even better!

As a rule, your copy should contain a minimum of 250-300 words to ensure it is a) worth reading and b) large enough to contain a good quantity of keyword phrases.

Emphasis

Another nice thing to do is to emphasise a couple of instances of a keyword phrase within a page’s content, using bold or italic text. Don’t emphasise every instance, and try to give a reason for emphasising the phrase, you could even emphasise the entire sentence that the phrase appears in.

Internal linking

Consider linking to other pages on your site through links in the body copy. If you do this, you should link to pages that share a keyword phrase or two, to improve page ranking for both pages.

Keep it fresh

Update your content regularly; there is nothing worse than a website that is stale. This can be achieved by having a news section or a blog.

Help Google find you

All of this stuff will help, but it doesn’t hurt to give Google a bit of a nudge. You can help Google find you in a few ways…

Trusted sites and directories

Although there are over 20 billion websites, Google only trusts two of them; dmoz.org and yell.com. So you should definitely get your site listed on these.

And, while Google doesn’t “trust” them, it is also practical to add your site to some other online directories, if only to improve the number of inbound links to your site.

XML Sitemap

Google Webmaster Tools allows you to upload an XML sitemap, which Google will use to help index your site. The sitemap consists of a list of all the pages on your site, when they were modified, how often they are updated and how important the page is to the site.

Create an XML sitemap and submit it to Google. You can also submit one to the other major search engines.

Get some friends

Inbound links make a massive difference to your website’s ranking, so encouraging people to link to your content is a good idea. You can do these either by exchanging links with other websites, or, even better, creating content that people will instinctively link to.

A Conclusion

Although it’s never guaranteed, there are a lot of things you can do to “Get to the top of Google”, but there’s no quick fix.

If you’re really serious about your website and it’s search ranking, don’t just do the odd thing, do everything you possibly can. Using a combination of all the ideas in this article will help you to reach your ultimate goal… Be top of Google

NB Although this article refers to Google throughout, most, if not all, search engines use similar models to Google and therefore will present similar results.

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