Search engines

Doing well on the search engines can make a real difference to how successful your website is. Although there are thousands of search engines, in recent years Google has become the dominant tool for searching the web. I seem to remember reading that Google search results account for around 70-80% of all Internet searches. However the stats pan out, if you do well on Google your site gets a lot more attention.

How Can I Rate High on Google?

Google uses a complex algorithm to determine how to rate websites. This is somewhat of a trade secret. From working with websites over the past 7 years I have found some general tips which can help. Click on the tips below for more information.

• Choose your page title carefully

  Your page title is all important to search engines. It is usually the 1st part of every page they read. If you want to do well in a particular area is can not hurt to have this very clearly in your page title. The page title is the bit that appears at the top of your browser window, it appears in your html between the <title>...more

• Think of key phrases

  If your website is all about a certain subject you should mention this subject as often as possible without making the site difficult to read. One way to mention this a lot is to put it in the page title as mentioned previously, but you can also add it to 'alt' tags for your images. If you are not sure what alt tags are we will be...more

• Get sites to link to you

  The number of inbound links can help the way Google sees you. Google gives every page what is known as a 'Page Rank' . This is a score from 0 to 10. If a page links to your page its page rank get inferred to your page. So if you have lots of highly ranked pages linking to your site, your site should in-turn gain a higher page rank...more

• Keep your site search engine friendly

  Search engines like simple html code. What they don't like is stuff they can not read. Framesets, Flash, Shockwave and Java ( not to be confused with Javascript ) can all cause confusion to the search engines. If they can not read your site they have no idea of how to index your pages. In turn this usually means your site does not...more

• Patience goes a long way

  Whenever you deal with search engines waiting becomes the main issue. Google can take anything up to 2 months to first visit your site. It can take even longer to rank any of the pages. So from the outset you have to be patient with the search engines. If you want a quick fix you will have to pay for sponsored links. I will be adding a...more