how Google works
Want your website found? Get the system to work for you.
Google, and other search engines, rank your website in four ways:
your site’s content
number of likes on social media
the number and quality of sites that link to yours
your site’s activity.
Score well in each of these and you rank highly on the Google search page.
Start by getting into the Google search results list
Hint one: fill your front page with the sort of text that potential customers search for.
Content, as well as being informative for your readers, needs to be rich in the words that tells Google what the website is about: if you have a pet shop website you need a fair sprinkling of “pet shop”, “dogs”, “puppies”, “cats”, “kittens”, etc, and your location, “Nelson” on your front page.
The front page, the one you want your customers to view first, should have the important words describing what you sell, what services you offer, so when someone Googles “dog collars in Nelson” your page appears in their Google search because those words are on your website’s page. Don’t have “dog” or “collar” on your page, you aren’t going to be found in that search.
Google is no longer interested in keywords, it’s been too easy to scam, instead they index the whole page and having “dog”, “iguana”, “Nelson”, etc, a number of times gets you into into the Google search for those items. So by being indexed your site is now one of the “About 1,650,000 results (0.28 seconds)” that you see at the top of every search page.
But stuffing words just to build up word density doesn’t help your ranking, instead may make it drop. Google, of course, has ways around every known scam.
Just stating what you sell or what service you provide in normal coherent sentences is the way to go, if you don’t have “iguana” on your page you ain’t going to be found when someone searches for one.
Moral here is that your website’s front page should have a whole lot of words on it that Google can index, coherently written for the benefit of your readers. Then you are included, somewhere, in a Google search.
Now you want to know how to increase your ranking, ie, get to where people might see you. Just be warned: this doesn’t happen overnight, months is the timeline here.
Be liked, often
In recent times the number of times you have been spread around the internet by others on social media, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Linkedin, etc, is a good source of working out what is valuable information, and therefore get a higher rating on Google. Popularity in social media gets a higher ranking.
Links from other sites to yours
The more quality links you can have from other sites the higher you rank.
Your website address needs to be added to all the major free website directories, ie, Google, Bing, Google Places and a whole lot more.
Keeping your site active
A website that is constantly being added to is more highly ranked at Google than if it is static and has the benefit that it gives your customers a reason to return to the site.
The obvious method is to have a simple blog on your site, adding about 175 to 300 words on something of interest to your customers every few weeks, announcing a new product, new personnel, a piece of philosophy about the business, etc. Google notices these changes and rates you higher than if you were a static site.
It’s basic business sense: have something useful to say, tell others, tweak it.