I attended today a seminar called “Optimizing Your Websites for Google Search” on how to make your site get indexed and rank well on Google. The special part of this seminar is that it was conducted by a Google employee, Adam Lasnik, labelled as “the first search evangelist of Google.” What else is the best way to learn how to rank well in Google than from Google itself!
The seminar was designed for government employees and held in Washington DC. But it did not prevent me from trying to get into the seminar. Boy, was I so happy when they accepted my credit card payment (so well worth the $30 fee)! Turns out, I’m not the only non-government participant who attended. A whole contingent of AOL employees came, as well as some employees of search engine optimization companies in the DC area.
Adam did not disappoint. He is geeky, but very personable. He knows how to work the room. Seminars always bring out the artist in me — I often doodle instead of listening to the speaker — but not this time. My ears were glued to the speaker from beginning to end.
So how can you rank well in Google? Some of Adam’s teachings are basic that everyone who has tried to learn how SEO works should know by now. But he also spent his time debunking some of the myths floating around, some of which we were guilty of here at PowerHomeBiz. Here are the ways you can get indexed and ranked high in Google:
- Basic rule : design a site for the user, not for the search engines.
- Avoid javascript menus – Per Adam, Javascript is “evil” when used as navigation. Or even when used as Javascript dropdowns. Always have text linksand do not rely on graphics or javascript for navigation.
- Keep your links in one page less than 100, and make it very descriptive.
- Keep your outbound links relevant to your site — if your site is about exporting, don’t link to Britney Spears site (an extremely painful mistake we committed at one time when we were pretty generous with our reciprocal linking strategy)
- Don’t ever use frames as Googlebot gets confused as to what really is the content
- Use CSS
- On the question of subdomains vs. subdirectories, nothing really about it but just make sure it makes sense to the users (don’t use subdomains when you only have 1 page of content for that subdomain)
- Key markers of a web page are its title tags, meta description tag and smart anchor text. Keep the title tag descriptive and unique; put site description details in the meta description tag and summary in the title). Stop using “click here” as your anchor text (e.g., “Obtain the latest federal tax forms for 2006” instead of “Click here for 2006 federal tax forms”)
- Size of the webpage matters — keep it under 100K
- If you have dynamic URLs, avoid using “ID= ” as this is viewed as a session ID and Googlebot ignores it. (I’ve seen this happen with 2,000 pages of content in a database not receiving any traffic from Google because of this mistake).
- Flash may look pretty but can be the Google indexing kiss of death. Googlebot does not read flash. If you have to use flash, you need to have thousands of trust sites linking to you to rank high.
- Consider link building as pounding the pavement. Do not ever use automated systems!
- Do reciprocal links ONLY if it makes sense to your users.
- Use 301 redirects to address the problem of canonicalization (the problem of a unique content presented in different ways — http://www.powerhomebiz.com, http://powerhomebiz.com and http://www.powerhomebiz.com/index.htm)
- There is NO universal sandbox; Google does not hold sites in moderation (the myth of the sandbox is when a newly launched website does not rank well or even show up in Google)
More tips tomorrow …
