Supporting Technology

Get Your Website Noticed!

By the time you finish reading this sentence, more than 10,000 internet users worldwide will have typed a query into Google and received a list of relevant results!

85% of internet traffic is directed through a search engine, the vast majority of this is through Google. This means that failing to attract search engines will mean you are missing out on custom and your users are unable to find you online.
This means you need to understand how they work and what they are looking for in order to maximise your potential custom by being easy to find online.

DO:

Keywords

Identify phrases that your would-be visitors are likely to type in, and avoid those that are overly competitive. (It is easier to get a top ten result for “B&B in Skibbereen,” than for the more general query “accommodation in Ireland.”)

To be found through a query on “B&B in Skibbereen'‘, a web page, as displayed in the browser, must visibly contain those words, preferably more than once.

Dare to be BOLD

Use bold text on some of your keywords on each page, the words that best define your organisation. GoogleBots like bold because it emphasizes the importance of your keywords. Don't the whole page - just your key phrases and important words.

Usability

Google highly ranks sites that are user-friendly and accessible. Ensure that your site is well-structured and easily navigatable, and that each page downloads speedily. If your site contains more then 12 pages create a site map.

Information-rich

Internet searchers want facts, not marketing fluff. The top results in Google for any given query tend to contain text-heavy sites with lots of pages. Ensure your content is readable, engaging and informative.

Get linked

Google counts each link to your site as a “vote'‘ for its popularity. Votes from sites that have content that is similar to yours are even more valuable.

Titles for links

Give your links a title too! Not only does this help visually impaired surfers know where you are sending them, but also some search engines apply this to their relevancy for a page.

Don't

Google considers the following techniques to be either user-unfriendly or deceptive.

User-unfriendly pages are unlikely to perform well in Google, while deceptive pages may be penalised or banned entirely from its index.

Keyword stuffing

While it is essential to include your target keywords within the web page, overdoing it creates a poor user experience. Don't stuff your page with key phrases; the meaning of the text should clearly depend on each occurrence of the keyword.

Images

When words are rendered as graphics on a web page, Google cannot read them (nor, for that matter, can visually-impaired users).

Too many images can increase file size and slow page download times unnecessarily - factors that can also hinder performance in Google.

Hidden keywords

This is the oldest trick in the search engine spammer's book - particularly the use of text that is the same colour as the page background, making it “invisible'‘ to the user. Google easily identifies and penalises such efforts.

Cloaking

When a website delivers one set of content to its visitors but another to search engines, this is called “cloaking'‘.

For example, web pages that flash for only a moment, before redirecting or “bouncing'‘ the visitor to a different page, may be regarded as attempts at cloaking.

Duplicate content

Google is scornful of what it calls duplicate content - a page that displays information that is very similar to the information on another web page.

Whether duplicate content is the result of plagiarism, or whether each of the duplicate pages is owned by the same organisation, Google disapproves.