Podcast 51: Better Google Listings
Posted in Podcast on: Tuesday, September 26, 2006 by Paul Boag
We all want better listings for our sites on Google, but search engine optimisation often appears to be a dark art and a morally murky area. In this show, we explore the issue and provide some practical advice.
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Google accounts for over 49% of all searches and has one of the most complex and closely guarded search algorithms. It is not surprising therefore that your website ranking on Google can be a subject of much pain and frustration.
Ranking criteria
The exact nature of how Google ranks websites is largely unknown. However, it is generally accepted that the following items are a major contributing factor:
- The age of your domain name
- The amount of content available to the search engines
- The amount of websites linking to your website and their popularity
- The information architecture of your website
- The quality of a page build
- The relevancy to the end user
Page Ranking
A broad-brush indication of your rating is Google’s Page Rank. This numerical value provides some idea of your success in search rankings. There are numerous ways of viewing your page ranking but probably the simplest is to install the Google Toolbar.
Page Indexing
Another important factor in ranking your site is the accessibility of your content to Google. Google can only list your pages if it can access them. You can easily find out how much of your site is indexed by typing the following into Google:
Site:yourDomain.com
This won’t return every page as it will consider some pages duplicates. To see all pages click on the link at the bottom of the results.
Inbound Links
Of course probably the most significant factor in your page ranking, is still inbound links. The quantity and quality of links are crucial in how well your site is rated. You can view how many sites link to you by entering the following into Google:
Link:yourDomain.com
What does Google look at?
So when Google visits your site, what exactly is it looking for? Well, Google pays particular attention to the following elements on your pages:
- The page title
- The body content
- Your meta tags
- Headings
- The naming and destination of links
Of course Google cannot index everything. It struggles with some content and cannot access others at all. Below is a list of the more troublesome elements. Although these elements can be used on a site you should not rely on a search engine being able to fully index them:
- Images
- PDF documents
- Flash
- Multimedia content
SEO Good Practice
Understanding how Google works is one thing, improving your listing is quite another. Below are is a list of good practices I have picked up while researching the show. These should go a long way to helping you improve your sites placement. However, ultimately search engine is a specialist area and you may wish to consider outsourcing this work if you are able.
- Identify a list of keywords to focus on. Keep it short and specific. Trying to ranking highly on lots of broad phrases will prove impossible.
- Endeavour to include keywords in your page URLs. Look at the address for this page. Notice that it repeats the title of the article. Does your site do this or does it have incomprehensible URLs?
- Use Heading Tags and keeping the H1 tag for the page title rather than the title of the site.
- Make sure that every page has real content rather than lists of links. I recommend at least 50 words per page.
- Wherever possible using keywords in your links (both in the body of the page and within navigation).
- Use breadcrumbs through the site.
- Try to keep keyword density at around the 5% mark.
- Separate your content from your design by using CSS based layout.
- Make sure any Javascript you use is unobtrusive and degrades nicely.
- Ensure that meta data (keywords and descriptions) is unique to each page and not generic across the whole site.
- Remember that content only accessible after submitting a form is invisible to Google.
- Wherever possible, link to other content within your own site using consistent link descriptions.
- Ensure all images have an alt attribute (alt tag).
- Make sure your site has a sitemap.
- Look at your competition and analysis what SEO steps they are taking.
Conclusion
Improving your ranking on Google can be a slow and frustrating experience. It is not unusual for a website to take 4 months to be fully listed and even longer if it is a new domain. Even more frustrating is the fact that Google keeps much of its algorithm a closely guarded secret, which means that much of what we know about improving rankings is educated guesswork. Despite that, we cannot ignore Google. They are a dominant force in the marketplace and search engine listings are a vital component of any online marketing strategy.
Also in this show…
Also in this week’s show we review CSS – The Missing Manual, take a look at a standalone version of IE 7 and check out a new automated testing suit. In the news we also see @media go global and have a look at the latest Web standards advice from A List Apart.
28 Comments
Comments are for the discussion of this post. If you have other questions / comments then post them to the forum or send me an email
Wow – got my question answered and then some. Thanks guys! (and for leaving the plug in)
BTW the ladies say my “American accent” is irresistible ;)
I’m having trouble downloading this edition,
anyone else having this problem?
Another excellent podcast.
RE: Google confusing boagworld.com and http://www.boagworld.com or boagworld.co.uk
You can also get around this by using Google Sitemaps – as you can link various domains to one sitemap.
When talking about the Google PageRanking you wasn’t sure if it was up to 9 or 10 – it is 10 if it is the ranking shown in the toolbar, though in the directory it is only 7, and is scaled as seen:
http://pr.efactory.de/e-pagerank-algorithm.shtml
I see it’s Google’s Birthday today I can see why you did a podcast on google ;-)
Of course Colin. It was all carefully planned ;-s
This is an excellent article. The only thing I am not sure of is the Google Toolbar; various articles have stated that the page ranking is not actually that important these days. Would you agree with this?
It is not that pagerank is not important, it is just that it has changed a lot lately.
The google toolbar doesn’t show ACTUAL pagerank. It shows estimated page rank based on the last time they updated (which is about every there months or so). A site might be shown a pagerank of 4 , but it could really be 4.1231344 or 4.87.
Further, there was a time where just getting any link from a high PR site was enough to get you high rankings. Now simply having a link is not as important as the link having the anchor text for the terms you would rank for.
I have two questions regarding your list of SEO best practices:
In regard to the first bullet point about keywords – this question might sound kind of stupid but – what exactly are you supposed to do once you’ve made that list of keywords? Do you just list them in your meta tags?
And in regard to the second bullet point – I often develop sites using asp/php and have always used the query string approach. Is there any resource available that can perhaps explain how to get around this query string issue? So that, for example, I could change ausedcar.com?city=washdc to ausedcar.com/cars-in-washington-dc without having to make static pages for everything?
Thanks! Excellent show as always!
Eric, Google doesn’t use the keywords in the metatags, but if you sneak the words you may find useful into a sentence. For example if I was talking about htaccess, then for the purpose of helping google I would make sure I’ve mentioned Apache in the text.
Good questions Eric,
In regard to the first bullet point about keywords – this question might sound kind of stupid but – what exactly are you supposed to do once you’ve made that list of keywords? Do you just list them in your meta tags?
It’s not a stupiid question at all.
Once you’ve made your list of keywords (really you should be looking at “key phrases”) you should create one page on your site which is optimised for each of them.
For example. If you’re doing a site for a thai food restaurant in York you might have the following key phrases:
Thai food restuarant
Thai food York
York restaurant
Eat thai food
Food from Thailand
Then for each of those key phrases you create a page that’s optimised for them. Which means you include the key phrase:
In the tag
In the tag
Several time sin the first 200 words of content for the page
In the inbound links to that page (especially links from other pages in your site – but also links from other sites if you can help it)
Food from Thailand
And in regard to the second bullet point – I often develop sites using asp/php and have always used the query string approach. Is there any resource available that can perhaps explain how to get around this query string issue? So that, for example, I could change ausedcar.com?city=washdc to ausedcar.com/cars-in-washington-dc without having to make static pages for everything?
You need to use a technique called “mod_rewrite”.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mod_rewrite
hotness! thanks Richard!
BTW – that should have said
In the title tag
In the h1 tag
Paul’s comment machine swallowed my code tag fo some reason.
Thanks for (about) 51 great podcasts.
Could it be that ’site:boagworld.com’ returns only 3 links on Google because seemingly both the content of the meta-description tag, and the first paragraphs are identical throughout all the other 584 pages?
I quote from this very page: “Ensure that meta data (keywords and descriptions) is unique to each page and not generic across the whole site”
This isn’t exactly what they mean when they say “you should practice what you preach” ;)
Fair comment Marcel. Although as I said on the show, I am no expert and had to research up on this before the podcast.
However, I have taken your comments on board and updated the template accordingly. Each entry now has its own meta description.
note that when typing into Google ’site:yourDomain.com’ and ‘link:yourDomain.com’ to use a lowercase s for site, and l for link (unlike what it says above). I thought I was getting nothing!
also worth noting that you should not put a space in
when I told someone that mine got no results when using link: they decided to try it themselves and thought I did have links, that is until it was made clear they’d put a space in it!!
Great Podcast again; I must get round to using Goole Site maps, as I signed up :P
Great podcast guys :)
@Russell
I also have problems with this particular episode as well. Not sure if it’s the same problem as yours.
The show was cut off half way – it ended at 34min 55s.
that’s the problem I’m refering to all right!
You mention using 301 redirects for domains for better SEO (and accessibility), but you guys were unsure of what that meant.
A 301 redirect basically means that the server is doing the forwarding not the user-agent. This is also known as not breaking the back button.
In other words, the header of the HTML document is NOT redirecting (don’t use the refresh metatag), but the web server itself is doing it. That way the user-agent
never knows there was a step inbetween, and many times confuse and/or aggravate the user.
More here:
http://www.w3.org/TR/2006/WD-WCAG20-TECHS-20060427/Overview.html#SVR1
http://www.w3.org/QA/Tips/reback
Many great points made. I especially liked the SEO GOOD Practice list which is a great starting point for anyone.
Nice Work!
Content Heavy
Hi.
I read your recommendation about KD being 5%. In my opinion Google would regard that as keyword stuffing.
Is that an old statement that needs revision, or do you really believe it still to be true?
I get very good results with one keyword use in the title or heading, once in the first 100 characters and once in the last paragraph. Also once more every 500 words.
This gets me first page rankings.
Regards,
Peter
1 year later and the basic fundamentals you list are all still relevant, well done great article.
Ohh Thanks Richards!
Further, there was a time where just getting any link from a high PR site was enough to get you high rankings.
thanks for all comments :)