10-Point Checklist for High Visibility in Google

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10-Point Checklist for High Visibility in Google

Google is the pre-eminent search engine (SE) with no close competitor. Given that inclusion is free, your Web pages must be in it. We'll show you how to top the Google SERPs, that is, be found at the top of the search engine results pages. These techniques are known as search engine optimization (SEO) and require a small investment of your time.

I took two of my sites to the top of the SERPs in three months, so it can be done. My pages have few competitors: my challenge was mainly to get past false positives such as resumes, job vacancies, articles, and so on. If you are competing with "real" sites that are selling competitive products such as the ones you read about in your spam e-mails, you can get there within a year with some persistence.

Casual Google users use default settings, so your site must get into the top 20 results. Unfortunately, you cannot assume that visitors will use the most appropriate search terms. Real people are unpredictable.

You must understand that SERP positioning is dynamic - what you see depends on no single factor. It depends on the viewer's location, the type of search used (basic, advanced, regional, filtered, and so on), the content of the page, their keyword density, the page rank (PR), the search term (words or phrase), and so on. Therefore, you need to plan your site carefully.

Get a .ca domain if your audience is likely to look for Canadian sites. Use a global, top-level domain (gTLD) such as .com if your business is not local. A unique, topical name such as "dentist-atlanta.com" should rank higher in the SERPs than "dentist.com" or "smithclinic.com" (if the search term is likely to be "dentist in atlanta" or similar).

It is nice but not essential if the web host gives your site a unique IP address, but it is highly advisable to host your site on your own dedicated server. Shared web hosting means that a server could host thousands of web sites, and Google's spiders would be slowed down.

If you already have a Web site, you can find out its IP address using cmd.exe or an MS-DOS prompt, e.g. "ping www.cnn.com" and call up the displayed IP address in the browser. Example: http://64.236.24.12 brings up cnn.com. If you don't see the expected web page, it has a shared IP address.

An ill-planned page title is the Achilles Heel of a Web page. This is the text that appears at the very top of the browser window.

The Title tag text should be brief and readable, avoiding superfluous words and punctuation marks. Begin with the most valuable keywords, e.g. "Root canal specialist dentist clinic, Mayfair, London", not something like "***** Fred Smith, BDS - 5 Stars Dental Clinic *****", or worse, "Welcome to my home page", or "Untitled".

Placing style definitions in a .css (Cascading Style Sheet) file moves the body text close to the top of the document and shrinks the page size. Many Javascript effects can be replaced by CSS. Fast-loading pages are good for both humans and search engine crawlers.

Google ignores the Keywords meta tag for ranking but other SEs use it. An extract from the Description meta tag sometimes appears in the SERP; sometimes you see a snippet from the body text. Moderation and relevance should be your benchmark for placing keywords in these tags.

Get quality incoming links from sites that share your theme. Without referrals, it's near impossible to be visited by Googlebot. Try to get such links from sites with PR3 (Page Rank - see below) or better, not from link farms that are clearly built to boost PR. Make it easy for other sites to use keyword-loaded phrases in their links, say, by offering a cut-and-paste slice of HTML anchor code. Here is an example you can use to link to this page:

Links from lower-ranking peers will not penalise you; they simply won't appear in Google's list of backward links to your page. You cannot control who links to you, but you have control over who you link to.

Add a judicious number of outbound links to topical peers of the same or better calibre. Google likes links to authoritative sites, but don't overdo the external links. Although such sites might not overtly link to your site, their site statistics file might get crawled and constitute a link back to you.

Cloaking hides content from humans and SEs, which is generally a bad practice. Good reasons to cloak include hiding parts of your optimised pages from amateur competitors or to show different pages to different visitors based on their browsers.

Subscriber-only sites also manage to get into SEs. They use a cloaking practice known as "agent name delivery", which is a slab of code that checks whether the visitor is a crawler or a human. Crawlers get to see the whole site, but others are directed to a sign-up form.

The following practices could get your site banned from Google at worst or lower its ranking at best:

Having optimized and submitted your pages to Google, get on with growing your business, because Google takes time to rank you. Work on getting quality, inbound links from high-ranking sites that feature the same subject matter. Increase your content and keep it fresh. Get free or paid listings in Google Adwords, Overture, Yahoo, Open Directory Project (www.dmoz.org), and reputable engines such as MSN, Yahoo!, and Ask Jeeves.

Ash Nallawalla is an experienced Internet marketer. Much of his work involves search engine marketing, which includes pay-per-click advertising and search engine optimization. More information is at http://www.sem911.com/