The 1st Step in Search Engine Optimising Your Site...

Forget the fancy tricks and black-hat approaches, the best way to get on to the search engine ladder and improve your ranking is with lots of regularly updated, great content that your visitor will love.

Let me begin with a quick history lesson...

You may remember (back in the dark ages of the Internet) you would type in an innocuous search like “dvd player” and be inundated with, shall I say, less than savoury websites in the results. This was because of a simple technique web designers were using which was to ‘spam’ the page with keywords.  So, when you looked at the code that made up the page you would see “dvd player” listed fifty times. This was because the search engines were largely basing their results on the number of times a keyword repeated itself as a guide to how relevant the page was. It was just carte blanch for every unscrupulous website owner to force their way into listings that simply weren’t relevant.

Things needed to be done and the Search Engines reacted by introducing (over the next few years) all kinds of criteria to determine the true relevance of pages because their entire business is based on the user getting what they expect. It was the perceived absence of relevance that killed off HotBot, Excite, and to a degree, Yahoo. It’s also what jettisoned Google to becoming the most popular website on the planet.

Now a lot is written about how Google ranks sites and yet very little is truly known. Naturally, they don’t want us to know – that would be fatal. As soon as technologists know the inner workings they’ll find and exploit the loopholes and we’ll be back to square one.

So, where do you begin if you want to get a decent ranking in Google?

I think that it has pretty much been accepted these days that if you want to get to the top of Google (and let’s face it everybody does) then produce highly relevant copy and lots of it. That’s your starting point. Forget magic bullet solutions and ignore the promises of companies who “guarantee” positions. (In fact, that’s your signal to run like hell!)

So, that’s the bad news – and here it is again – write lots of relevant copy!

The good news is the more content on your site, the more Google will raise your quality score, the higher your ranking.  Remember if you have just a few pages Google will regard you as a limited resource because your browser isn’t going to get great information from your site as there’s not much to get!

Think of your website as a planet. The bigger the planet the more gravity it will have and the more traffic it will attract. If your website is the size of a coffee cup you’re not going to attract much attention but if you’re the size of the Moon you’ll get noticed!

The reality is that whilst there are techniques and approaches you can take to enhance your postion that is incremental compared to having a site packed with lots of great content which will be of real help to your browser.

Now, go forth and write…

You may also want to take a look at Google's guidelines for Search Engine Optimising your website.