How to Catch Google’s Eyes with Your Website?

Does the topic sound too hackneyed and much played out for you? Never mind, sometimes old wine tastes better in a new bottle. Moreover, there are so many issues that are involved with this, while each one is as important as the other that you can hardly afford to miss any of them.Nevertheless, here is your checklist.

• Content
• Domain, Titles, and URL
• Layout and Navigation
• Keeping it simple
• Meta Tags and robots.txt
• E-mail

Now, let’s dig deeper and get fully familiarized with each of these.

Content:

Always create new and original content. Search engines will rank your website according to the relevancy of content found on your site. Obviously, this can never be achieved by using a copied content. However, there are quite a number of ways to keep your content original as also of high quality. While providing the relevant information through newsletters or RSS, you would not only be able to attract more visitors but also keep your old clients interested in what you are planning to offer them. Secondly, try to update your content every couple of months, as otherwise users will start losing interest in your website. What’s more, as you change, adopt or introduce new theme in your content, the search engine spiders will crawl through your content more often and place you on the top SERPs.

Domain, Titles, and URL:

Before doing anything with your web page, you surely need to select a domain name for it. But while doing so, make sure that it has not been taken by someone else. Also, try to select a name that is easy to remember, easy to spell and is relatively short. If, however, you find it difficult to sort things out, you may visit the WHOIS database, which is a searchable list of every single domain presently registered in the world.

So far as Page Title is concerned, try to keep it as short as possible, say 5 to 6 words. However, it may be good idea to use words that a potential visitor is likely to search for, and above all, it should be comprehensible for all. Moreover, as most search engines use the title of your web page during displaying your site in their search results, putting keywords into the title of each of your pages would prove ideal. But remember, the title should never exceed 70 characters at the maximum.

As for the URL – more precisely about the position of keywords in the URL, Google’s Matt Cutts have provided quite a clear picture. When asked, “Does the order of the words in the URL make an impact on one’s ranking at Google, Matt was quick to remark that one should not obsess about the order of the words, adding that keywords in the URL does help a bit.

Layout and Navigation:

It goes without saying that the ease of use of a website is mostly influenced by the navigational scheme of the site which may include the use of graphics and content layout. A visitor will leave post haste if he/she becomes unable to navigate through your website, while studies reveal that the typical view time (when first visiting the page) before leaving is 2 to 4 seconds at the maximum. Needless to say, they, within that short span of time, due to inadequate navigational facilities, have failed to locate objects for which they had reached the site and have, therefore left in disgust. However, this could be resolved by incorporating the following practices.

•  Using Navigation Elements Consistently
• Providing Layout of Navigation Scheme on web pages
• Keeping Group Navigational Elements together
• Using clear and descriptive Titles for Navigation Elements
• Providing top-level site navigation for all pages
• Using text-based Navigation, if possible
• Using graphical Navigation elements

Keeping it Simple:

In other words, follow the KISS (Keep it simple stupid) principle while emphasizing on the other issues, such as:

•  Do not make the visitor scroll: By keeping all the important (as well as eye-catching) information on the first viewable page.Keep the headers small: This will prevent distraction.
• Check up with different monitors and browsers: As people may not have the same browser, it may be worthwhile checking up whether your web page looks effective on all computers and monitors.
• Test with other devices: Since a lot of other computing devices have now appeared on the scene, such as smartphones, iPhones, Tablets, etc, you need to check and see that your website is compatible with these or not.

Meta Tags and Robots.txt:

Even though most search engines no longer rely only on Meta Tags, there are quite a good many that use these tags. However, it may be worthwhile following some of the General Meta Tags Rules that is provided below.

• Like all other HTML code, any website’s Meta Tags can be displayed. View the sourceof some of your competitors’ web pages to get ideas.
• Search engines use no more than the first four lines of the description and keywords meta tags. Do not enter more than four lines of text, it is not used and could cause your site to be delisted.
• Post the description and keywords of information that is on the page. Visitors tricked into visiting your page will not stay and this form of deceit can cause your entire site to be blocked by search engines.
• Because of abuse, search engines like Google, no longer look at the keywords Meta tags.

E-Mail:

You need to respond to e-mails as quickly as possible in order to maintain your online prominence. Also, if you find your inbox flooded with visitors’ mail, send out a message that you are responding to them individually and this may take some time.