You work six months on your ‘perfect’ site. You spend a lot of money on good designers, make it look nice on a smartphone. And then the big day comes, houston, we have liftoff! For it is just after three months later that you realize your site just sits there in a corner wheepin’ because google won’t put it on number one. I too learned it the hard way, and went on a secret mission to make my site score better in Google. Here are 7 quick-wins I’ve encountered on my mission to take over the world (with my tiny fancy site)…
Shock!? We all know it’s not an easy job to fill in all the meta descriptions and keywords on each single page, but let me tell you, it’s worth it. Things like WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, Sitecore and other Content Management Systems do this for you, but it’s better to have a look. Make sure that they map with your content. Google first reads your website and tries to understand it, and then it uses keywords and descriptions to validate what it think your site is all about. So use them wisely.
Duplicate Content is kinda the same as waterboarding your site. If you have multiple domain names such as mydomain.com and www.mydomain.com or even myfancydomain.com with all the same content, Google sees it as duplicate content. And Google finds duplicate content very naughty. So how do you solve this? Redirect your aliasses tot one domain you use, or tell google they’re the same in Google Webmaster Tools.
Yes content, this is maybe even the stuff that will give you the most lift. Start a blog, or write news, or simply keep your site up-to-date. And do it with a fixed frequency. Google knows when you update your site. When you systematically place blog every saturday morning, after a couple of weeks, Google will automatically index your site again Saturday afternoon. It will also value your site higher than your evil competitor who only changes his site when the sun shines at 3 AM.
Everybody wants to be loved, Google does as well. Show your affection to google by registering your site on the Google Webmaster Tools, implement a Google Analytics, create a page on Google+ for your company and post the links to your fancy blog on Google+. Google will hug you back and rewards you with precious Pagerank Points.
Once a day/week/month, your site gets a visit from a search bot. It’s kinda like the mail man dropping by to bring you the news and ask if there’s something to gossip about. Just as you do to your mail man, give them a warm welcome. Instead of giving them a shot, give them an updated Robots.txt file, telling them where to look for gossip.
Let Google know where the honey is. Build an XML Sitemap and put it on Google Webmaster Tools. Now Google knows which pages your site has and where to look for content. Keep the sitemap up-to-date and search indexing will increase.
Want to know what’s wrong with your website? Try Woorank, a free site review tool that tells you why Google thinks your site is naughty. It will also give you direct quick-wins to work on for your site. Have fun on the first page next week…
Then you’re in for a treat! Visit Tom Devos's personal blog, which offers many more hours of excellent reading material!
