Optimising for Google

Achieving high rankings on the Google search engine

Optimising your website for Google is essential to help gain valuable traffic from the web as Google holds the largest share of the search market in many countries, either through its own site or through partners that use its search results. Getting a high ranking on this tool can therefore be worth more traffic than all the other search tools put together.

Not surprisingly, Google optimisation is becoming increasingly competitive as more and more companies realise the importance of getting a high ranking here, but it is also one of the most 'user-friendly' search engines to work with! Google updates frequently, deep indexes many pages from a website, and is also good at ignoring sites that try to 'spam' the listings through the use of unscrupulous techniques.

Submitting a site to Google.

It is free to get your site listed on Google and, as it conducts regular updates, it can take anything from several days to several months for a new site to appear, depending on the links to a site and the structure in place.

Google provides an online submission form where the URL of a site can be submitted, but it can often be better to get a site linked from an existing domain on Google, so that the Googlebot spider will find the site through its travels around the web.

Google will deep index a website, either on the first visit or after several updates, including pages within a frame. It will also index PDF documents hosted on a site.

Factors to consider for high search engine rankings on Google.

Like most search engines, Google will use the content on a website to determine the relevant search term relevance, but it was also the first search tool to use external factors as a key element, thus adding an element that would be harder for spammers to manipulate. This can make it hard for new websites to establish high ranking positions immediately, but it can also create very reliable and relevant results.

Factors to consider to achieve a high ranking include:

• Keywords used within the Title tag
• Page content, position and emphasis of keywords
• The 'theme' of the site, including the number of pages indexed and the use of keywords throughout
• Having a site listed on the Open Directory with a keyword relevant description
• The number of inbound hyperlinks from other relevant and quality websites.

To find out how your website can achieve a high ranking on Google and the other top search engines, contact us now for more information or to request a FREE website assessment to see how well your site currently performs.

A brief history of the Google search engine.

Learn more about getting a high ranking on the other main search engines with our tips for MSN Search optimisation and Yahoo Search optimisation.