Notes on Google Search Engine Optimisation

Google is a huge multinational advertising company whose business model relies on it returning acurate and useful search results. Trying to trick it is not a good idea. You should be suspicious of anyone offering to get your site a top listing just with a few website optimisations. If you doubt this, read the first sentence again.

There are some essential things you can do, however, which will improve your ranking or at least allow Google to rank you fairly.

Make sure your site is written in valid xhtml. This won't necessarily make a difference, but if your site cannot be correctly spidered, you are sunk before you start.

It is not necessary to submit your site to Google; it is better to have a link to it from another website already listed. As long as Google knows about your site, it will spider (Googlebot) it automatically and find all the pages, so long as the pages are linked to one another. It will also find all the websites to which you provide links. Of course, it will do this in its own time. Patience is a virtue. To see what it has so far indexed, type "site:<your-website-address>" (no spaces) into Google search. You can help the process by submitting XML sitemaps, but this won't improve your ranking.

If anyone tells you that you need to use the right keyword meta-tags, stop listening. Google now ignores these as they were open to abuse. You do need keywords and key-phrases, but they must appear as visible text on your pages. Say you decide that people will search on "sports massage london", then you need to get those words on your pages, preferably two or three times. Don't overdo it, or Google may decide you are "keyword stuffing" and demote you. If you can keep the phrase together, even better. Note that "sports massage london" clearly gives you "sports massage" and "massage london" as well as the individual words.

The most important place to put keywords and phrases are in the webpage title which appears on the title bar or your browser (<title> tag) and in the headers of your page (h1,h2...h6). After that, just weave them into the paragraph text on your pages.

You should try to have a different title for each page (and different headings, etc) otherwise Google will think you've just posted the same content lots of times, which it doesn't like.

Google does still use the description metatag, but only for the summary it returns in searches. This won't improve your ranking, but it may improve your clickthrough rate (the number of people who actually click on your link after seeing it). It can only display about 150 characters, and if it thinks it is no good it will ignore it and just make up its own based on what it finds on your page. If you are not going to provide a meaningful summary, it's best to leave this metatag blank. Again, if you do provide one, make sure it is different on each page.

To improve your ranking, you need to get people to link to you from their websites. When this happens, you inherit their good reputation. Don't use link-farms as you can inherit a bad reputation too. A note here, anchor text should be meaningful. "Sports Massage" is a good link text; "click here" is not. That would be useful for people searching on "click here". Sometimes people try to get backlinks by posting their web addresses in blog comments. This might work, but probably not, as most blogs are now set up to add the tag "no-follow" to these addresses which tells Google not to follow the link when spidering.