I Want My Website on Google Page One (part one)

Every time I meet with a new client this is often the first answer to my introductory question "What can I do for you?".  Recently I spoke with a realtor who was recommended to me and she wanted to be on page one of Google when someone typed in "Staten Island Real Estate". 

I thought to myself, "yes, you and a thousand other real estate agencies in New York."  All kidding aside, getting on page one is possible but it's neither guaranteed or a one-time fix.  Page one placement is reserved for websites with quality content that attracts visitors and that creates links to your website.  If you are not committed to building a competitive website then your chances of a page one ranking are very slim.

The business of search engine optimization (SEO) is a growing field, its growth covered by a recent article on the CNN business portal entitled "How to Scale Mt. Google".   There are many people claiming quick fixes for a fee and most of these are a sham.  As with any new technology or service, do your homework before spending your money. Your website may be the lifeblood of your business so don't throw such an important resource to someone who can't handle the ball and get it in the end zone.

Free Website Diagnostic Tools

Websites that offer free diagnostic tools are a good start in identifying the current SEO health of your website.  A website called www.seochat.com has a number of easy to use tools on their homepage; left navigation bar.  I am not recommending the SEO services they offer on their website, but their free tools are great for novices.  These free tools can check your META tags, spelling error and links that point to your website.  Again, if you know what I'm talking about have fun otherwise hire a consultant that can help explain the health of your website design from a SEO perspective.

Even if you don't understand how or why SEO works I recommend doing a diagnostic on your site to see the scope of the work ahead of you.  You can pay to have an SEO report prepared or if you are comfortable with SEO terminology, you can run a series of free testing tools on your website.

Once you have a diagnostic report(s) on hand, you should arrange your feedback into categories such as:

1. Programming problems
2. Content problems
3. Linking problems

I. Website Programming Errors Effect SERP

Search Engine Results Pages (SERP) are the results that Google and Yahoo list for a search phrase. Our goal is to get on page one or two for the search phrases that apply to your business. So let's first tackle the topic of how sloppy HTML programming may effect SERP.  HTML errors are "behind the scenes" on your website pages and can be invisible until you check them with this handy tool.

HTML programming errors are easily identified by http://validator.w3.org/ a free web tool that checks to see if your website programmer used standardized coding.  It is believed that clean HTML coding streamlines the way in which web bots scan your website.  As web programming standards evolve there is a belief that those sites who conform to known standards will be scored higher. 

As a practical point, HTML errors make your website more prone to display problems on different browsers and operating systems, like Apple Safari and Firefox.  Clean STRICT HTML coding is a great standard to set for any new website projects.  HTML programming errors identified by this free tool should be fixed by your web programmer in conjunction with advice from an SEO consultant. 

The  SEO consultant's viewpoint is important because there are many ways to fix these errors and a SEO friendly solution should be advised.  As a side note, most good website designers are not trained in search engine optimization so you will most likely need two skill sets involved in fixing website programming errors.

Quick Indexing Sanity Check

There are cases where the HTML code is error free but your website is invisible in Google and Yahoo SERP.  One possible cause is having a website designed entirely in flash with no readable text for the search engines to index. To find if this applies to your website, go to Yahoo and type the "site" command in the search box to see how many pages it has indexed for your website.  The command syntax is shown below; replace "yourwebsite.com" with your URL.

link:www.yourwebsite.com

If your pages appear in the SERP with unique page titles and page descriptions then on the surface this situation may not apply to you.  However, if you know you have 20 pages on your website and only your home page is indexed you have some major design problems to address.

II. Content Problems Effect SERP

The second most common problem is content on a website that is stale, static or incomplete.  It is common to see websites that have very basic information on a company as if the programmer was in a rush to get the job done.  If your website has 6-10 basic pages (i.e.. Contact Us, About Us, Directions, etc) with 1-3 paragraphs of text per page, you can forget about being ranked on page one. These out of the box templates are nothing more than an electronic business card that know one will find without knowing your website address. 

Good content for your business is compelling reading about your goods and services and the value consumers receive by doing business with your company.  Content should be good enough for a visitor to recommend some of your pages to article search engines like www.digg.com or http://del.icio.us   Your content pages should include important keywords and search phrases used by web surfers.  Your content pages need to be original material NOT copied from other websites.  Copied text will hurt your search engine score and may ban your pages altogether from being indexed.

For example, if you own an Infiniti car dealership and you are taking orders for the new 2008 Infiniti EX35, you should have an entire page dedicated to the car on your website.  You should write original text describing it's features, mention any advances in technology, third party reviews and why a consumer should buy the 2008 Infiniti EX35 car from you.  If the product or service can generate significant traffic on its own, you may also want to consider creating a micro website or sub domain like was done for the 2008 Infiniti G37 Coupe. The Infiniti micro website has a strong URL that with good content added has strong organic search rankings.

Listing the basic information on the car and links to the Infiniti manufacturer's site for more information will do nothing to help your rankings.  Remember, each page on your website should be valued "real estate"  that should have meaningful information, photos, links and keywords.

 

There are no Quick Fixes  for websites that have been neglected for a long period of time.  Depending on your specific situation, it can take many months  to correct website problems and have all the pages re-indexed.  Anyone claiming page one rankings in a short period of time is probably a scam and your page one result will not be for a keyword you actually want.

Good content should be a combination of inside writing and outside consultants.  Insider employee writers are often too close to a product or solution to write effectively to consumers. Your web content developers should be working hand-in-hand with your SEO consultant.  Once again, there are many ways to write about a topic but your SEO consultant can guide the process and reeducate the writers to think with strategic keywords and phrases when developing new content.

End of Part One

Brian Pasch

Part Two of this article will focus on linking problems, external and internal, and their effects on SERP. I will also include some common sense steps for moving forward with you first SEO project.  So click on the hyperlink to read part two.

 If you have any questions, send me a note at:  brian@seonj.com