Raw 03 - November 2008 - (Page 26)

Dominating Google It’s safe to say that every business person grapples with the problem of getting into a top position on the Google search engine. Google typically wins a majority of percentage share when it comes to users searching for products or services on the Internet. With the advent of web 2.0 and social media this percentage is slowly diluting, but Google is still the No1 source when it comes to the battle of the search engines. When it comes to getting your business a web presence there are a whole host of considerations when it comes to Google indexing algorithm and positioning your website in their results. Make sure your website has an XML sitemap and submit it to Google.. http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/login This will help them index your website correctly The Key to 2. LSI Latent semantic analysis (LSA), without wanting to get too geeky, refers to similar phrases and references on your website. Search engines also use this to rank a website’s “worthyness.” So on a gardening website the Search engine’s would look for references to watering cans, plants, flowers etc to determine that it is in fact a website about gardening. 3. Your Domain and Hosting You may notice a lot of search engine results have old websites hanging around in the top positions. It is true Google consider the age of the domain when ranking, but also how long it is registered for – so buy your domain for as many years as you can. Google will also rank your site depending on where it is hosted, so if you are a UK business it might be preferable to host in the UK. 1. The Website Your website itself needs to be correctly optimised and this is the first place your web designer needs to start. Well structured silo navigation, correctly coded accessible webpages in XHTML/CSS to basic web standards, well written and error free copy, meta tags and descriptions, page names, XML sitemaps and H1 tags - all of these elements will help your positioning. These should also be standard considerations for your web designer when building your website, if they’re not – get a new one. So what does all this mean? Silos are the sub folders where different categories and pages fall into, so a section on Laptops would come under the Computers category, obviously, but this should be structured on your server as such. XHTML/CSS is the code that creates your pages. CSS layouts work better because they keep the juicy content, that search engines love, on the web page away from the code that positions and structures your website. Meta tags and descriptions are a part of the code for each page and although not nearly as important as they used to be, make sure it is in there with different descriptions and keywords for each page depending on the content. H1 tags are the most important part of the page when it comes to the content, this defines the title of the page. H2 and H3 tags are definations for sub titles and should also be used. So if you are a gardening tools company and your targeted keyword phrase is ‘Gardening Tools Oxford’ then that should be a page title inside an H1 tag on one of your pages. Jerry Holliday and Les Heywood run Code 9, a design agency collaboration of freelance designers and web developers with extensive knowledge of their fields including business branding, web development and online marketing. Jerry has been building websites since 1998, working for Yell Ltd before going it alone. He then teamed up with Les Heywood who had been working in the industry for eight years and Code 9 was established in 2005 - offering a competitive one-stop solution for small and medium sized businesses looking to go online 26 millionimpossible.com http://www.code9.co.uk http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/login http://www.millionimpossible.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Raw 03 - November 2008

Raw 03 - November 2008 Contents Bradley Chapman Rachael Elnaugh Linda Klassen-Brown Heidi Weir Mark Asquith Emma Thompson Chris Wright

Raw 03 - November 2008

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