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Google (and other Search Engine) Dos
 While Google says you should submit your web site to its system, this process will not speed up your appearance in its rankings. The fastest way to appear in the Google system is to register your site, then have it linked to another site already ranked by Google. The higher the rank of the site, the faster your site will be indexed.
- Google truly loves content relevant to the keywords for which you compete. One example of this is www.softwaremarketsolution.com, the online resource directory of this book. Since its pages deal with software marketing and sales, it should come as no surprise the site consistently ranks in Google's top 10 rankings for these and related keywords. Of course, high-quality content must usually be created.
- Google loves books, particularly books with titles that ISBN numbers. It also likes books with titles that include the keywords you are competing for.
- While Google likes incoming relevant links to your site, it also likes outgoing links to relevant site.
- The larger number of content-filled, relevant pages in your site, the better.
- If possible, pick a web site name that incorporates a keyword or phrase for which you compete. If, for instance, you sell business intelligence software, www.businessintelligencesoftware.com will perform well in this keyword category.
Google doesn't pay much attention to links three levels deep or more in a site. Be wary of offers to swap links with pages that have their links "buried" in an obscure corner of their site.
- When linking to improve your link popularity, look for pages with a high page ranking factor, but a low number of outgoing links.
- Use relevant keywords when naming the pages on your site.
- Examine the META tags used by sites that rank high in your keyword category and consider using them on your site.
- Links that use a relevant keyword with the actual URL embedded in the link outperform simple links. Google also likes relevant text placed close to links.
- Most search engines seem to react favorably to putting your keywords into the H1 tag when setting up your keywords on your page. Many basic search engine algorithms use the relative sizes of fonts to figure out what are titles (and relevant titles boost rankings. Please don't use this tidbit as an excuse to create white on white text set in 72 points).
- Spell your keywords correctly and optimize for popular misspellings. Example: softwaremarkting.
- Always use the ALT tag when mounting images on your site and always try to use a keyword in the image description.
- Include your keywords in your page title, within your META tags, within the first 10 words of any descriptive text on your site, in the middle of the page, and at the bottom of the page.
Manually submit your site to the Open Directory Project (http://dmoz.org). Other engines, including Google, like this directory since its entries are first vetted by a human being.
Use a reliable hosting service. If your site is down when the Google bot comes calling, you may lose your ranking.
- Link to your site's entire sub pages from the home page. This does present some design issues but there are unobtrusive ways to do it, often by creating a site map page. This helps a search engine crawl through your entire site.
- Frames have proved troublesome to all the search engines since they were introduced. Most of the experts we talked to strongly suggest you not implement frames on your site if search engine results are crucial to your marketing. Some experts believe you can offset these problems by building a "bridge" to your site by using the HREF tag. One technique using this tag allows a spider to bypass the frameset. You do this by creating a simple non-frames content (site map) page from which all pages on your site are linked by standard hyperlinks and creating a hyperlink in place of this default frameset HTML text saying "That though this site uses frames, if your browser does not support them you can go to the Contents Page from which you can access all the pages of this site." (Yes, that's a mouthful. Welcome to search engine speak.) This creates a route for a web bot or spider to traverse your site and it will appear in the search engine just as though it was not in frames. If you also place a copy of your main page text here it will be indexed as well. We also suggest setting your META tags to "index, follow."
- While this technique can help your listing, it cannot compensate for the fact that many web engines look at your site as a whole and will throw framed pages out of their weighting equations. And if your links reside on framed pages, they may not be properly evaluated by Google.
- Dynamic sites, that is, sites that use a database engine to generate web pages on the fly, have always performed problematically with search engines. Some engines will simply not know what to do with the markup tags these pages contain and will not rank or spider the page. Cold Fusion has been cited by some experts as having particular problems in this regard. Even worse are situations where the URL of a page is also dynamically generated and contains markup tags such as this example:
www.companyname.com/links.asp?cat=2
No engine will rank such a page.
- More subtle problems can also occur with dynamic sites. For instance, a bit of sloppy code can trap a web bot in a loop, causing havoc with your site's performance as well as generating highly misleading log files.
- To ameliorate many of these problems, the experts we spoke to suggest that if your site is going to be dynamic, include a static subset of the relevant pages optimized for easy search and ranking. Make sure to link to these pages from your home or index page.
- Also, please remember that many of these tips also apply to the pay-per-click engines if you're not interested in the very top positions. Once you're in the "no bid" zone of their listings, these engines apply the same types of technologies as the "free" engines, and a well-optimized site will show up higher in their rankings.
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