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Optimising your web pages for Google is essential to gain traffic from the web as it holds the largest share of the search engine market, at around 60-70%. Getting a high ranking on Google is worth more traffic than all the other search engines put together. It is free to get your site listed on Google, but it can take anything from several days to several months for a new site to appear. Google provides an online submission form where the URL of a site can be submitted. Google also provides a sitemaps program. It is best 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's ranking works largely by counting the links to your web sites as “votes” for that site as well as keywords and site popularity.
Start thinking about search engine optimisation before you design the site
Use site text content that is machine readable - do not use graphics for text. Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. The Google crawler does not recognise text contained in images.
Do not use flash. The Google crawler does not recognise Flash images and the Flash text
Do not just get your home page sorted, all the pages need the same attention to detail
Use a robots.txt file to limit the rovings of search engine robots.
Use a favicon.ico icon to identify your site
Do not frames - if you must use them then put some hypertext links in the frameset using the <noframes> tag
Dynamic pages have no content to be picked up so ensure that if you have dynamic pages that the information is found elsewhere.
Ensure you have no broken links
Include all your chosen keywords as phrases within the copy of each page. Use keywords in the page title. The keywords need to appear several times on the page. Do not expect google to identify your keywords - you need to help it. Keyword Cloud
Consider the position and emphasis of keywords within your content
Create a defined 'theme' for the site, including the number of pages indexed and the use of keywords throughout
Use ALT Tags for all images.
W3C compliancy can help with good HTML code
Make use of Formatting Highlight hot keywords with Strong h1 and emphasis
Seek a listing on the Open Directory with a keyword relevant description
Use the Google guidlines
Register site with DMOZ and Yahoo! (This is a unique directory model that uses a wide network of volunteer editors. ODP (or DMOZ) was acquired by Netscape soon after its launch in 1998 and the directory is made available on an open license arrangement to provide supplementary listings to many search sites, including Lycos, AltaVista, HotBot and AOL Search.
A listing on this directory can take a long time to achieve, depending on the popularity of a section, the availability of a subject editor and the backlog of submissions. More recently this problem has become worse as the importance of an ODP listing for rankings within Google has increased the volume of submissions to the site, which in turn has put more pressure on the dwindling number of editors.)
Reciprocate links with similar sites
Join Web Rings
Use CSS2 for preference
Use target words in anchors
Get a relevant url name
Ensure your pages are fully optimised.
Have lots of content especially on your homepage.
Have a fast loading page
Get google to be the search link on your site
Build in quality links to your site ( from high ranking other sites) min 50!
Have lots of pages. The more pages the more content. Google looks at the content.
Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links.
Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.
Have a site map with links to the important parts of your site. If the site map is larger than 100 or so links, break the site map into separate pages.
Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.
Make sure your web server supports the If-Modified-Since HTTP header. This feature will allow your web server to tell Google whether your content has changed since it last crawled your web site.
Google Sitemaps Keyword cloud Search Engine rankings Google Rankings robots.txt analysis tool SiteMapsPal
Background reading article on the Google Search Engine