Blog Relations

It’s amazing how many sites just aren’t visible to search engines. view the site without pictures, and there is nothing there. Here are our tips for making your site visible to search engines

1. Avoid putting any text into pictures or flash (apart from masthead).
2. Meta Tags. There are only two meta-tags that matter: Title and Description. These appear in Google search results:
   
   

   Search result uses title and description

• Your pages should have a descriptive title. So if your name is Joe Blogs you might want to add a few words describing what you do. If where you are located matters, add that too: “Joe Blogs: Paddington’s Pain-Free Dentist”.
• Google can scan your text to generate its own description for each page: if you write one yourself, keep it under 25 words.
3. Avoid URLs that are made of numbers and symbols. Try to get a URL for your site that contains one or two key words (eg http://Quickindiancooking.com.
4. Submit a sitemap to Google and to other search engines. WordPress has a plugin that can do this for you.
5. Once you have submitted a sitemap, sign up for Google Webmaster tools – this will give you more information about how Google sees your site.
6. Never copy content from other sites such as Wikipedia – your content must be unique or Google will consign you to the Outer Hebrides.
7. Use Google Analytics to analyze your traffic and where it is coming from.
8. Avoid duplicate content on your own pages (and similar e titles for pages).
9. Use good headlines
10. Keep your site well structured – search engines like good structure.
11. Link to your most important content from the home page
12. Keep your most important content at a high level in the structure – not three levels down.
13. Don’t fill up your site with affiliate marketing
14. Never hide any text on your page.
15. Write alternative text (alt text) for images.
16. Link out to top quality and highly relevant sites. Never exchange links spammy sites and be very wary of anyone who approaches you with a link swapping idea.
17. Submit your site to high quality directories such as http://www.dmoz.org/about.html
18. Ultimately what will drive you up Google are high quality sites that link to you – and that will depend very much on your content and your social networking skills.
19. Have patience – Google takes its time to rate you.

Further Reading

Google Webmaster Guidlines
SEO Book - by Search Guru Aaron Wall
Search Engine Journal