I’ve been asked this before, why has my website dropped from the top 10 results in Google to the 50th! In worst cases, a colleague has had first-hand experience recently of a well known and respected business completely banned from Google. Getting themselves re-indexed was a painful and difficult process.
In nearly every single case I can relate the problem back to Google Hacks or “We can put your website in the top 10 Google listings!” I call these offers as “The Emperor’s New Clothes”.
Are the streets paved with gold with these offers? Short term – very short term – probably if you’re lucky, long term, most defiantly, whole-heartedly - no.
Google employs hundreds of developers to look after its search engine and its submissions. They’re very aware of the hacks, tricks, backdoors, sliding doors and redirection sites “SEO optimisers” employ and by a clicking of a button can add penalty points to your URL to drop you lower in the list (did I say click? - this is more like an automated action). In serious cases they can even exclude and ban your URL from re-submission, as I’ve seen recently.
After all, Google is in the business to make money, it makes that money by people finding relevant results using its search engine and selling its associated services. So the better its service is, the more money it makes from the content on your website.
So, what can be done? As all good SEO’s will tell you, Content is the King and Relevance is the Queen. When we develop websites, we always, almost sub-consciously these days, include SEO techniques that haven’t really changed much over years, contrary to what SEO hackers will tell you. If you look at the changes overall in the last 5 or even 10 years, not much has actually changed. The guidelines we use, and this is not an exhaustive list as it can be different per client, are as follows:
- Choose the main search engine you want to target and optimise the site to their submission rules. Did you know people use different search engines to find different types of businesses or services? Once you’ve got one engine targeted, don’t alter it, the others will follow.
- Good HTML design/scripting and following W3C guidelines is essential. Messy HTML scripting leads to bad results.
- Don’t hide content behind dynamic code or bloat the top part of the page internal content with JavaScript functions or .Net ViewState (that still affects a lot of people even today).
- Popularity. Search engine results are like the art of celebrity. The more popular you are, the higher up the listings you appear (more on this later).
- Make the page title (which appears in the title bar at the very top of the page) relevant to the content on the page. Don’t pepper it with keywords, use a grammatically correct sentence and don’t make it too long. When a match is found, this is what your customer is likely to see first.
- Always make the first paragraph on the page outline what the page is about, or at least engage the customer. But make it relevant to your business or page the user will see when they click on the result. As with the title, this is what appears on the results page.
- Popularity. I’ll say it again, as it’s very important.
- Alt Tags. But don’t fill them with keywords, use a clear description of what the image is. Our CMS allows you to do this and you should for DDA / WAG compliance.
- Reciprocal links. Link key phrases or words in your text to other sites that are relevant to your content. But in order for it to work the other site must link back to you and more importantly, both pages have to be relevant. Google is able to do this, to work out what site links to whom and why and matches not just the keywords you’ve highlighted as the link in your text, but also if the text (at least certain parts of it) are relevant to your page content.
- Don’t forget off-line marketing, the traditional tell you clients about you new website in any printed material or newspaper ads. It helps.
- Avoid link sites like the plague (or maybe swine flu), even a fairly fragrant whiff of a link site associated to your site, even inadvertently, can earn you penalty points.
- Don’t cheat, hack or fudge your pages to work. It will eventually backfire.
- Don’t believe a quick SEO fix will give you instant results and avoid “we’ll get your site listing in the top 10” scams – because that is what they are - scams.
Though some of these links are old now, they still ring true today!
- Jay