Everyone wants to maximise the chances of their firms’ website featuring prominently on Google. Michael Heraghty outlines ten tips to help your site get noticed:

1. Decide which phrases to target.
Before you can optimise your site for Google or any search engine, you have to decide what search phrases you want to be found for. Use the free Google Keyword Tool (type ‘Keyword Tool’ into Google) to find out what phrases people have typed into Google recently.

2. Don’t get fixated on being number one for a certain phrase.
Don’t get hung up on targeting the most obvious or most searched for phrases, which will therefore be the most difficult to achieve top spots for, especially in competitive industries.

3. Match target phrases to landing pages.
Look closely at a set of Google search results. You will see that for any particular search query, Google returns a list of pages, not sites. Every page on our site is a potential way in, or ‘landing page’for users – you need to ensure that every page is optimised. Target no more than three.

4. Add more pages.
Since Google finds pages, the more pages in your site, the more chance you have of appearing in Google’s results. Don’t add pages if they make the site look bad or if you can’t maintain them.

5. Make sure that Google can reach each page on your site.
To find out whether Google is able to crawl your site (for inclusion in its search results) type “site:www.yoursitesname.com” into its search bar. The result should be a list of all the pages on your site, including documents such as PDF’s and Word documents. Check whether the number of results is what you expected. If not, Google may be unable to access all of your website. Various technical problems may prevent Google from indexing your pages, such as heavy use of Flash multimedia or images. Whatever the issue, get your web designer to fix it, and allow Google to access your entire site, so that you can get listed.

6. Put your target phrase(s) into your page titles.
The ‘page title’ – the text in the blue bar along the top of the browser – is rarely noticed by users, yet this is the most important place to put your keywords. The page title is also used in Googles search results as the text that links to your page. It’s important to write page titles with the goal of enticing Google searchers to click, and not to simply write lists of keywords. Work your target key phrases into your page title, and write a different page title for each page.

7. Put your target phrase(s) into the page description.
The meta description is a text summary of your web page. It is contained inthe page’s source code; it is not seen by visitors to your page.Google will often display your meta description in its search results, be-neath its link to your page. Include your target phrase in the meta description,and write a description that summarises the page well, and entices users to click. Write a different meta description for each page. Note: do not confuse the meta description tag with meta keywords tag. The meta keywords tag, while not harmful to your SEO efforts, is ignored by Google.

8. Put your target phrase(s) into a heading and regular text on the page.
At this point, your target phrase should be in the page title and themeta description of your landing page. Now, include the same phrase inat least one heading on the page. This is a visible heading on the page, and in the source code will be denoted by a HTML heading tag. Include the phrase in regular text at least once elsewhere on the page. If you have genuine reasons to include the phrase more often than this, that is fine: just try to make sure that you include it at least once in each to improve your chances of getting picked by Google.

9. Get quality, relevant links to your website.
All of the above, count for nothing if you do not have any links to your pages. Acquiring links from others is not easy, however, as website owners have come to understand that links have an SEO value. Nevertheless, you need links from websites with similar themes or containing similar keywords to yours. They must also be websites of good quality – that is, they must be listed reasonably high in Google(first few pages) for at least one or more of the phrases you are targeting. While it is worth exchanging links with quality, relevant websites, Google prefers if you have not had to reciprocate the link.

10. Continue working on your SEO strategy over time.
Sites that perform best in Google are usually those that consider SEO to be an ongoing activity, not just a once off. Actions that you should review continually include reviewing and revising your main page titles and descriptions. Updating content (Google likes sites that are updated regularly) and adding pages to add more keywords(blogs or news sections are a good way to do this.

By Michael Heraghty

First Published in the Sunday Business Post, June 2004. Published again January 2005.

By the time you have finished reading this sentence, more than 10,000 internet users around the globe will have typed a query into Google, and have received a list of relevant results. Such is the popularity — and speed — of the web’s leading search engine.

Website owners understand the value of getting listed in Google’s search results. Some, such as Richard Moyles, MD of Furniture.ie, have come to depend on the traffic it generates.

“Over 70% of our first-time visitors come from furniture-related queries on Google,” Moyles explains. He believes no web marketing strategy can afford to ignore the search engine’s importance. “If you’re not on Google, you’re not on the web.”

Yet few website designers understand how to get traffic from Google. Most simply cross their fingers and hope for the best. The company remains highly secretive about its infamous algorithm — the complex code that determines the relevancy of a web page to a user’s query.

Google’s guardedness has not dissuaded a growing army of opportunists. Attempts to fool the algorithm with deceptive methods are prevalent. The problem of filtering out “search engine spam” is a major headache, even for a company whose typical employee holds a PhD in computer science. In the documentation accompanying its IPO application, Google identified search engine spam as a major risk to the future viability of its technology.

Google has declared war on the spammers. It uses a mixture of human analysis and artificial intelligence to continually revise its algorithm, filtering out spam tricks and penalising offending sites (removing them from its results) when detected.

While achieving a top position in Google’s search results is clearly valuable, then, cheating is not advised. The challenge, for website owners and designers, is to develop an awareness of those techniques that Google rewards and to implement them, without straying “offside”.

Below is a broad list of dos and don’ts that will help improve a site’s performance in Google’s. But the main principles is: treat your visitors with respect, and construct your website around their quest for information.

Google SEO Tips

• Target Appropriate Keywords
  Identify phrases that your would-be visitors are likely to type in, and avoid those that are overly competitive. (It is easier to get a top ten result for “B&B in Skibbereen,” than for the more general query “accommodation in Ireland.”)
• Include The Keywords Within the Content
  To be found for a query on “B&B in Skibbereen,” a web page, as displayed in the browser, must visibly contain those words — probably more than once.
• Make Your Site Usable
  Google rewards sites that are user-friendly. Ensure that your site is well-structured and easily navigable, and that each page downloads speedily. If your site has more than a dozen pages, include a sitemap.
• Make Your Content Information-Rich
  Internet searchers want facts, not marketing fluff. The top results in Google for any given query tend to contain text-heavy sites with lots of pages. Ensure your content is readable, engaging and informative — while peppering it with carefully inserted keyphrases.
• Get Links from Relevant Sites
  Google counts each link to your site as a “vote” for its popularity. Votes from sites that have content that is similar to yours are even more valuable.

Techniques to Avoid

Google considers each of the following techniques to be either user-unfriendly or deceptive. User-unfriendly pages are unlikely to perform well in Google, while deceptive pages may be penalised, or banned entirely from its index.

• Keyword Stuffing
  While it is essential to include your target keywords within the web page, overdoing this creates a poor user experience. Don’t stuff your page with keyphrases; the meaning of the text should clearly depend on each occurrence of the keyword.
• Images in Place of Text

  When words are rendered as graphics on a web page, Google can’t read them (nor, for that matter, can visually impaired users). Too many images can increase file size and slow page download times unnecessarily — factors that can also hinder performance in Google.

• Hidden Keywords
  This is the oldest trick in the search engine spammer’s book — particularly the use of text that is the same colour as the page background, making it “invisible” to the user. Google easily identifies and penalises such efforts.
• Cloaking
  When a website serves different one set of content to its visitors, but another to search engines, this is called “cloaking”. For example, web pages that flash for only a moment, before redirecting or “bouncing” the visitor to a different page, may be regarded as attempts at cloaking.
• Duplicate Content
  Google is scornful of what it calls duplicate content — a page that displays information that is very similar to the information on another web page. Whether duplicate content is the result of plagiarism, or whether each of the duplicate pages is owned by the same organisation, Google disapproves.

Published in the Irish Independent (registration may be required) on December 20, 1999.

Houseofireland.com, one of the country’s leading e-commerce stores, has had to temporarily stop processing orders due to unprecedented demand. Until the New Year, the site is strictly for window e-shoppers, who can still browse the Aran sweaters, Belleek and Waterford crystal.

In keeping with good customer relationship management, the online gift shop is informing all visitors of the situation, which rivals would deem enviable.

“We have been inundated with orders over the last two weeks, having received three times the normal level,” announces a disclaimer on the front of the site.

Roger Galligan, chief executive of House of Ireland — which has bricks-and-mortar outlets in Nassau Street and Dublin Airport — revealed that the rush started around November 5th, when US customers began looking for Thanksgiving gifts.

“By early December — when Christmas shopping traditionally takes off in the States — we were receiving so many orders, it was difficult to cope,” he conceded. Nevertheless, some optimistic shoppers are still placing orders. “In these cases, we email customers to make it quite clear that their presents are not guaranteed to arrive in time for the holidays, especially when seasonal postal delays are taken into account,” Galligan pointed out.

Almost all sales come from Irish America, explaining why prices on the site are quoted in US dollars. “Americans are comfortable with mail order,” he explained. “Geographically, it’s a massive country, so receiving goods from faraway warehouses is quite normal. That’s why the US has adapted so quickly to e-commerce.”

Galligan believes that those trends will soon mould the Irish psyche in their favour. “The potential for shopping over the internet is huge in this country. It won’t be long before we’re ordering pizzas and renting movies this way.”

But the off-and-online merchant is worried that Irish companies are simply waiting for e-commerce to happen, by which time they might well be left behind. “Now is the time to go build your brand online,” he proffered, adding that his company is considering separating its “clicks identity” from its “bricks identity”.

The success of HouseofIreland.com — which began as a homemade internet site back in 1994 — has led to the recent purchase of an extra warehouse, although Galligan hinted that the company is actively seeking a new building, “with twice as much space.”