Small Business Design Resources

Get Your Website Better Positioned in Google for Good Result

With more and more consumers and businesses starting their search for services online, businesses today must have a well designed, easy to navigate, user-friendly website. Small business website design is no longer a luxury – it has become a necessity. If your website is cluttered, slow or difficult to navigate, your web visitors will simply bounce back and move on to your competitors.

An important element of website creation and website design is to make sure that your website is not just nice-looking, but also SEO friendly. You want search engines, and especially the King of search engines Google, to point searchers to your site when they perform a search that is relevant to your business. For example, if you sell custom wedding invitations on your site, you want people who go online and type the keyword “custom wedding invitations” in the Google search box to land on your site. This is only going to happen if your site appears on the 1-3 first pages of search results.

But how do you make it happen? How do you convince Google to place your site high on the search engine result pages (SERPs)?

There are several ways to get your website better positioned in Google. While there are never any guarantees when it comes to search engine optimization, usually employing all of the following methods WILL eventually result in an improvement in your search engine rankings.

You will need to wait patiently, though. Time is a big factor when it comes to Google because older sites are more trusted by Google while new sites are almost always deemed as suspicious.

On-Page SEO

The first step is quite simple. You need to let search engines know what your site is about. If you sell scented soaps, for example, but your site doesn’t mention the term “scented soaps,” there’s no reason why search engines will position your site high on the SERPs for this term, is there? So make sure your title tags and your site’s content (ideally your URL too) include your main keywords. Don’t worry too much about “keyword density” or how many times you should repeat the keyword – just write naturally, but remember to frequently use your main keywords in your writing.

Blog

Adding a blog to your site is a great way to add fresh, optimized content that includes your main keywords. Adding fresh content encourages Google to crawl and index your site more often, which is obviously a good thing. In addition, a website rich in content enables you to reinforce your main keywords. Most ecommerce websites, for example, have very little content, which makes it difficult for search engines to index them correctly. Adding a blog to such a website can make a real difference in terms of how your site will be positioned by Google.

Off-Page SEO

Off page SEO is the links your site receives from other sites. It is an extremely important component of SEO when it comes to Google, because the Google algorithm places a huge importance on a site’s reputation, and the more links you have pointing at your site, especially links from reputable sites, the more reputable it will be as far as Google is concerned, and the better it will be positioned in the SERPs.

There are several ways to get links to your site, which I discuss in my post about link building. Whatever you do, stay away from spammy sites and from paid links (Google has declared a war on paid links and punishes sites who use them) and place an emphasis on getting links naturally by creating quality content and spreading it in social media.

The combination of creating high quality content for your site and engaging in social media creates natural links overtime because it builds relationships with people who have blogs and websites and who might link to your site if they like your content.

Getting your website better positioned in Google takes time – often several months or even longer if your website is brand new. In the meantime, be patient! If you have a high quality, well-designed website and play by the rules, your efforts will eventually pay off.

Quick Tip: Register Your Domain Name for More than 1 Year

If your domain shows that it’s expiring in less then a year, the search engines see your website as not being stable and they may deduct points for SEO. It’s best to register your domain name for more than a year to show the search engines that you have a stable website and that you’re not a temporary spam site.

Quick Tip: Use a Custom Domain Name for Your Blog

When setting up your blog you want to be sure to buy a domain name and a hosting account. Having a blog on a subdomain on one of the free blogging platforms such as wordpress.com or blogger.com (yourblog.wordpress.com or yourblog.blogspot.com) gives all the search engine benefits to that blogging platform. All the hard work that you’re doing in creating great content for your visitors doesn’t help your website ranking for your business if you don’t have your own custom domain.

Optimizing Your Website Content

Your website might be well implemented, have a nice easy flow, attractive color scheme and easy navigation, and your product might be the best gadget ever invented or the best service in the business. But if people can’t find you, they can’t buy from you. It’s that simple.

Search Engine Optimization refers to creating a site that is keyword rich. Keywords are the words that people type into their favorite search engine to find what they are looking for. For example, if your website sells shoes, you will want keywords such as shoes, pumps, high heels, loafers, patent leather, boots etc. More creative keywords or keyphrases might include descriptive phrases such as blue suede shoes, sexy 4 inch heels, pumps that are to die for, and so on. Most people post articles on their website to increase keyword density.

Search Engine Ranking
Think about how you use the internet search engines. Research data shows that the vast majority of people only click on one of the first three website listings in the search engine results. Your objective is to be one of the top three returns in Google, Yahoo, or the other search engines for your primary products. Why? Because these are customers who are already looking for your product, and pre-disposed towards buying it. Think about that. It’s not like putting your advertisement on a billboard along the highway and hoping the right people will see it. Search Engine Optimization is guaranteed by its very nature to reach your intended customer base through your website.

But how does Google decide which listing to put at the top of the page? Search engines use “spiders” or “bots” (short for robots) to constantly search the internet (referred to as crawling ). The spiders read the content on your website, and even follow links on your site to links on other websites. As they go, they build an indexed database from what they find. For sites that have similar content or similar keywords, the search engines will build a ranking scheme. There is no set formula for understanding this because search engine companies keep their special algorithms secret.

Understanding exactly how spiders work, or exactly how the indexed database is built is complicated, and reaching the top 3 returns in a search engine list is a fine art. But there are some guidelines that can make it easier.

• Make sure each page on your website has a featured keyword or keyphrase

• Use the keyword strategically in every paragraph of your content

• Include links on your website to other sites with similar or related products

• Include links to pages on your own site with similar keywords

• Keep content fresh by posting new material regularly. Stale content loses rank.

If you find SEO too daunting, you can always sponsor a result by paying the search engine company to return a link to your website for specific keywords. Sponsored results are usually listed on the right hand side of a search engine return page.

Keys to Search Engine Optimization:

You have built your website and published it to the web; you sit back and wait patiently but your site doesn’t show up in any major search engine. You might start to wonder; why won’t my website show up in a Google search? If you just sit and wait for your website to show up in a search engine such as Google, you might be waiting for weeks. If this is happening to you it’s time to review your search engine optimization strategy. Here are a few key pointers to ensure you are doing all the right things.

Getting your site to the top of the search engines is both an art and a science. Websites use crawlers and “bots” (short for robot) to crawl all the sites on the web. Using a complicated series of proprietary algorithms they assign rankings to web sites based on your site’s keywords. The phrase Search Engine Optimization refers to the art of building a site that ranks high in the search engines. To check your google ranking you can go to http://www.prchecker.info. Your site must be published before it will be ranked and it may take a few weeks after you publish the site before you have a ranking. That’s because it takes some time fort the search engines to find you. There are millions of websites on the internet.

The rank is based on a keyword or key phrase and how relevant that key word or phrase is to your site. So you may rank high in one key word and low in every other. The more narrowly you focus on a single key word or phrase throughout your site, the more likely you are to improve your ranking for that key word or phrase. The objective is to have your entry show up on the first results page for your chosen keyword or key phrase. You don’t need to understand exactly how search engine optimization works in order to get your site to the top, but you do need a few insights. Here are some tips that will help you improve your ranking:

1. Know what key phrases are being searched on
There is no point in building keyword density on words that no-one is searching for. Even if you get to the top of the rankings on that keyword, if no-one is typing it in, they won’t ever find you! A reverse search engine tool will help you optimize on what people enter in the search engines to look for your product. For example, “women’s clothing” is a popular search phrase, whereas very few people search for “blouse with white polka dots” even though it is a valid piece of women’s clothing. So you must find out what people are searching for.

Here are a few Google tools to help you out:
Search-based keyword tool
Google Insights for Search

2. Be relevant
This is perhaps one of the most important concepts to search engine optimization. Your keywords must be relevant to your website. And you must use them throughout your site, including in your web page titles, in your meta-tags, in your article titles and even, if you can, in your domain name itself. If your website sells pet products, and your keyword is “pet” you will be relevant, but if your website sells women’s clothing, and your key word is “polka dots” that won’t be so relevant because it is very narrow, so choice of keywords is very important. Now, if your website only sold items of clothing with polka dots, then polka dots becomes a very significant keyword. Again, you would want to make sure that there is a market for polka dots, by examining the reverse search engine results.

3. Use linking
When the search engines do their crawling, one way they “discover” sites is by following links from other sites. When you first publish your site, even if you have done a good job with search engine optimization, it can take several weeks for your site to show up in the search engines – sometimes three weeks or more. You can reduce this time by using a good linking strategy. Let’s say a web site with a high rank links to your site, then your site will be discovered more quickly than if there are no links pointing to it. It is important to link and be linked by sites that are relevant to your keywords. Linking to lower ranked sites that are relevant to your own is okay too, even though it may not help you as fast, but linking to sites that are not relevant to yours can impact your ranking.

So that’s the science of Search Engine Optimization, now the art comes with practice. There are many tools on the market that allow you to analyze the traffic to your website, analyze keyword density and even analyze the keyword density on your competitor’s site. One of my favorite tools is http://www.websitegrader.com website. So if your website doesn’t show up on the first page of Google at your first attempt, don’t give up.