 Web
Page Optimization for Google
Who Does Google Service?
 Google
provides primary search engine results
to Alexa, paid results to Ask
Jeeves, Teoma & Hot Bot as well as primary & paid
results to AOL, Netscape & Go.com. Google also receives
directory results from DMOZ. As of 2/18/04 Google updated
it's index to 4.23 billion web pages.
Google Past, Present
and Future
Regardless of how anxious or excited you
are to see that the Google bot has visited you site and hopefully
your rankings increase, your job is far from over. We're going
to forget about one word for now.. Florida (dating ourselves
now aren't we?) Let us disregard any crazy optimization or
de-optimization ideas and focus on traditional Google web
page optimization techniques.
What does Google look
for?
Keywords Anyone?
Keywords yes keywords. Starting to see a relevant
topic on web page optimization? Much like Inktomi Google
loves keywords, but the keyword density of your page can
make or break you. Too little or too many can hurt you. There
is no magic number, but significant weight is placed on the
first 25 words but the more content you have, the better
off you are.
Your going to want to concentrate
your Google Web Page Optimization efforts
on getting the following:
- Keywords in the URL
- Keywords in the Title Tag (4-10 words)
- Keywords in the Description and Keywords Tag (although
Google may not take them into consideration.. use them anyway
to optimize "across the board")
- Keywords in ALT Tags
- Keywords in the body (remember keyword rich original content)
- Keywords in Links (links to your web page using your keywords)
i.e. (Web
Page Optimization by MOMC)
- Update pages and add new content often
Choosing a URL
We can use the URL of this site as a great example when considering
a Google friendly URL. This site is about Web
Page Optimization, hence the URL: www.web-page-optimization.com.
The URL could have easily been a flashy company name that
looked cool or sounded interesting, but www.web-page-optimization.com
get's the point across to the user and to Google.
Title and Meta Tags
Even though Google doesn't really take into effect your meta
tags it does weigh heavily on the title tag. But that doesn't
mean you should ignore them (there are other engines out
there). Jill Whalen just published a great article called
"Title
Tags, Meta Descriptions and Keywords" over
at Search Engine Guide. It's a great read and even a valued
refresher on the topic.
Getting Listed
Google states that it will find your web page regardless
if you do not submit to them (they only offer free submission)
but it can't hurt to try to speed things up. Googlebot will
follow all the links in your site so make sure all your pages
are linked and only submit your homepage.
 Click
here to submit your URL to Google for FREE
Google also doesn't like dead-end sites. Get
text links to your site and from your site to others, you
want to increase the web and not make your web page a dark
corner.
There is a great tool called SpyderTrax from
Darrin Ward that allows you to see when the google bot has
visited your web page.
Click
here for more information on SpyderTrax
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