Search Engine Optimization Tips

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.