Tips for Google to list your Web Site

 How did we use to find companies to buy things from before the internet? Now everyone googles. You, of course, want your prospective customers to be able to find your site listing from typing in key word searches.

The dominant players in the search engine market are Google, Yahoo, MSN, and AOL. Google owns a 5% stake in AOL and now AOL search results are supplied by Google’s engine so you are really looking at only three dominant players.

There are two ways to be listed on the Google results page: as a natural listing or as a paid listing. On a paid basis, you can purchase AdWords from Google and depending on how much you are willing to pay for a user to click through to your site, it will display on the right hand side on the first or second page of the results.

Getting ranked near the top of the Natural results list for your set of key words is the holy grail of search engine optimization. Are there any tricks in improving your natural search ranking results? Yes, but know that Google does not publish the secrets of its search engine.

1) Make sure your web site can be “crawled” by the Googlebot. Every second of every hour of every day Google has automated programs that land on web sites and collect words for its index. Google provides a downloadable program that your web developer can run against your site to check the HTML coding to make sure that it meets Google’s standards.

2) Submit your URL and Sitemap to Google.

3) You need to make sure that when you create the page content for your web site that you are working in the most important key words that you believe potential customers may be entering to find your company. These word combinations should be positioned as tightly together as possible, as often as possible, with the verbiage still sounding natural.

4) Write good meta-descriptions (inserted by the web developer) for each page. These are in the form of <META NAME="Description" CONTENT="informative description">

5) Here is the big one. Get as many links to your site from other reputable web sites, the larger the better. These may be links from your vendors’, business partners’, or customers’ web sites. Also try to get links to your site from as many “directories” as possible. For instance, perhaps you belong to a trade group or the Chamber of Commerce that have listings of its members. There are ways to purchase “paid links” from other sites but reportedly Google has gotten wise and worked it into their ranking algorithm to penalize companies that use this technique when they find it.

6) Keywords listed in the meta-tags behind each page are not used for retrieval or ranking by Google and most other search engines. However, they are used by Yahoo and ASK. Yahoo advises to match up the words in the meta-tags with the text on the page.

There are many companies out there that claim to be able to improve your natural results ranking in Google and other search engines. To anyone considering using one, our advice is … buyer beware. There is little reason to use a firm like this for placing paid AdWords.

One of the greatest free tools available is Google Analytics. With this tool you can see how visitors are finding your web site and what they are searching on. Used in conjunction with an AdWords campaign will identify key phrases.