Get Your Website Seen
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Tip written by: Oliver Beauchemin
Accolade Group of Vermont, LLC – www.accoladegroup.com
Ever since Google became the number one search engine, companies and individuals have been trying to get them to recognize their website. So the experts have been giving website owners advice on how to accomplish this task for a few years. Unfortunately, the advice they are giving has not kept pace with the way Google decides if a website should be included in the search results, on what page of the search results it should appear, or, if the website should be ignored.
Here are a few tactics that have lost the favor they once held by Google and other search engines: links to your website, what comments you make about your website on blogs or forums, keywords.
Whoa! Keywords? They aren’t relevant? This correct. In fact, they haven’t been relevant for a number of years. By keywords we mean the words that are entered into the keywords metatag in the code that displays your website. The keyword metatag is passé. Now don’t go running off to delete all your keyword metatags; some search engines still look at them, just not Google.
So, here’s what does work with Google.
1. The URL of the webpage. If you can, it is helpful if the url of the webpage is closely related to the topic of the webpage. If the page is about cats, a good url would be www.domain.com/cats.html.
2. The Title metatag. In the codebehind your webpage, there is a place for you to give a Title to the page. Do this. Don’t overlook it. This is part of what Google will display if your website appears in the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPS). A good Title metatag would be “This webpage is about the history of cats.” Try to keep your Title metatag no more than 70 characters including spaces.
3. The Description metatag. This is also a most important metatag. What you write here will appear in the description of your webpage if Google decides to show your page in the SERPS. Here is a clear Description metatag: “The history of cats is amazing and you will want to read this with your cat.” About 150 characters including spaces; more characters and Google will display an ellipsis (…) instead of what you wrote.
4. H1 tags. H1 tags are headlines. In the code they look like this:
History of Cats.
The best place for an H1 tag is in a headline, larger font, above a paragraph of text. Think of them as headlines.
5. Content on the page. This is the most important element for having your webpage in the Google search engine. The entire webpage should be on a single topic. Start adding more topics and Google has difficulty determining what the webpage is about.
The content of the webpage should use words that clearly express what the webpage is about. Sound familiar? This is the current definition of KeyWords. Some good keywords for our example might be “cat”, “feline”, “history of cats”, “history of short hair cats”. However, do not overuse the keyword that you want Google to take notice of. Use the word too many times and Google will call it “keyword stuffing” and your page will be penalized. More than seven uses of a word begins to move into the “keyword stuffing” area.
The above tips are not all inclusive of what Google calls “signals” for a webpage. However, they are among the most relevant. Following the guidelines above will not guarantee you will be in the Google results but if you aren’t using them your success rate will be greatly diminished.
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