10-Point Google Ranking Checklist for Webmasters

by Ash Nallawalla

Few will disagree that Google is the definitive search engine (SE) with no close competitor. Given that inclusion is free, your Web pages must be in it. We'll show you how to hit the Google SERPs, that is, be seen at the top of the search engine results pages. These techniques are known as search engine optimisation (SEO) and require a small investment of your time.

I took two of my sites to the top of the SERPs in three months, so it can be done. This article lists techniques that worked for me. My pages have few competitors: my challenge was mainly to get past false positives such as resumes, job vacancies, articles, and so on. If you are competing with "real" sites that are selling competitive products such as the ones you read about in your spam e-mails, you can get there within a year with some persistence.

Goal

Casual Google users use default settings, so your site must get into the first two SERPs or top 20 results. Unfortunately, you cannot assume that visitors will use the most appropriate search terms. Real people are unpredictable.

 

 

You must understand that SERP positioning is dynamic - what you see depends on no single factor. It depends on the viewer's location, the type of search used (basic, advanced, regional, filtered, and so on), the content of the page, their keyword density, the page rank (PR), the search term (words or phrase), and so on. Therefore, you have to polish many facets of your site.

Indexing Process

Google is a fast-moving entity. It changes its proprietary ranking algorithms constantly to better serve the end user and to thwart any shady SEO practices. Submitting your brand new site to Google is not enough. Its robot crawler, "Googlebot" traverses the Web, link by link, site by site, and finds new links. Your site, therefore, needs to be introduced to Googlebot by an indexed site. A "deep" crawl is run as a distributed process to avoid previously crawled links.

Fresh tag

Don't be too excited by the "Freshbot Effect" (or "Everflux"), which is a temporary placement in the top SERPs for a few days. More important, don't panic when your pages disappear from the SERPs for many days. Google sees if you can attract visitors and takes that into consideration. It calculates your long-term positioning after a deep crawl but it will perform several Freshbot crawls throughout the month. It can take 3-4 months for your positioning to settle down. If you have been writing, updating, and submitting new pages regularly, Googlebot will be a regular visitor.

The crawler is now showing signs of a continuous, combined, fresh and deep crawl, so it has been dubbed "Deepfreshbot".

Caution

If your SEO tactics genuinely benefit your audience without resorting to dirty tricks, go for it. You should be safe, provided you understand Google policy and keep up with SEO alerts from other Google-watchers. Conversely, unexpected removal from the index or a demotion in the SERPs could ruin your business if that is your only source of visitors.

Ten-Point Checklist

1. Domain Name and Server

Get a .uk domain if your audience is likely to look for British sites. Use a global, top-level domain (gTLD) such as .com if your business is not local. A unique, topical name such as "dentist-atlanta.com" should rank higher in the SERPs than "dentist.com" or "smithclinic.com" (if the search term is likely to be "dentist in atlanta" or similar).

It is nice but not essential if the web host gives your site a unique IP address. Virtually hosted sites often share a common IP address; Google does not ban sites by virtue of their sharing an IP address with a misbehaving site, but some other engine just might, one day.

If you are buying an existing domain, check its provenance, say, by visiting the Internet Archive, which keeps snapshots of many sites over the years. Was your domain in some other industry, and is it still listed inappropriately?

If you already have a Web site, you can find out its IP address using cmd.exe or an MS-DOS prompt, e.g. "ping www.apcmag.com" and call up the displayed IP address in the browser. Example: http://203.18.241.20 brings up apcmag.com. If you don't see the expected web page, it has a shared IP address.

 

2. Page Title

An ill-planned page title is the Achilles Heel of a Web page. This is the text that appears at the very top of the browser window.

The Title tag text should be brief and readable, avoiding superfluous words and punctuation marks. Begin with the most valuable keywords, e.g. "Root canal specialist dentist clinic, Mayfair, London", not something like "***** Fred Bloggs, BDS - 5 Stars Dental Clinic *****", or worse, "Welcome to my home page", or even worse, "Untitled".

Keep watching the logs and learn from them; modify your content if you find that users consistently use a different sequence of search words. For example, if most of your users look for "Dentist Darwin" and your page Title tag says "Darwin dentist" and it ranks low in the SERP, you could be losing some customers who won't call up the second or later pages. Change the opening page to "Dentist Darwin" and leave another page as-is, in case others use that sequence of words.

3. Style Sheet

Placing style definitions in a .css (Cascading Style Sheet) file moves the body text close to the top of the document and shrinks the page size. Many Javascript effects can be replaced by CSS. Fast-loading pages are good for both humans and search engine crawlers.

4. Meta Tags

Google ignores the Keywords meta tag for ranking but other SEs use it. An extract from the Description meta tag sometimes appears in the SERP; sometimes you see a snippet from the body text. Moderation and relevance should be your benchmark for placing keywords in these tags.

5. Page Content

• Quality content is rewarded by top placement in the SERPs. Brett Tabke of Webmasterworld recommends building "theme pyramids", where the directory structure follows a particular theme within your site. For example, if you sell new cars, used cars, and car service, you would have three branches, each containing pages relevant to that theme.
• Links to popular causes, memorial ribbons, HTML validation, page counters, etc. could distract visitors to other sites.
• Optimise images and keep the page size low.
• Place key phrases towards the top of pages and in heading tags such as <H1>. Don't get hung up on a single keyword for the whole site. Pick different ones for different pages so that you have more ways to be found. Optimise for the search terms used by your paying customers, if you can identify them, not casual visitors.
• Consider (this depends on the size and nature of your business) placing noncommercial pages such as staff pages, personal hobbies, genealogy and so on at a secondary level but not linked from the entry page. Some of my ranking success comes from hosting my hobby pages below my commercial site, because I cannot justify buying a domain for each of my interests. I legitimately link them to my resume, which has a link to my business site. This enables free placement of the secondary pages in otherwise for-fee directories.

6. Links and Folders

• Link a site map from the home page so that crawlers can find the rest of your pages.
• Link each page to the home page and to others in its logical group (but not to every other page in the site). The anchor text should use key phrases and words.
• Use keywords for folders, image names and Alt text but don't overdo it. e.g. /hamilton/lawyer/divorce.htm, <img src="/perth/plumber/perth-plumber.jpg" alt="Perth plumber">

7. Neighbourhood Watch

Get quality incoming links from sites that share your theme. Without referrals, it's near impossible to be visited by Googlebot. Try to get such links from sites with PR3 (Page Rank - see below) or better, not from link farms that are clearly built to boost PR. Make it easy for other sites to use keyword-loaded phrases in their links, say, by offering a cut-and-paste slice of HTML anchor code. Here is an example you can use to link to this page:

<a href="/">Google Optimization Tips</a>

Links from lower-ranking peers will not penalise you; they simply won't appear in Google's list of backward links to your page. You cannot control who links to you, but you have control over who you link to.

Add a judicious number of outbound links to topical peers of the same or better calibre. Google likes links to authoritative sites, but don't overdo the external links. Although such sites might not overtly link to your site, their site statistics file might get crawled and constitute a link back to you.

8. Cloaking

Cloaking hides content from humans and SEs, which is generally a bad practice. Good reasons to cloak include hiding parts of your optimised pages from amateur competitors or to show different pages to different visitors based on their browsers.

Subscriber-only sites also manage to get into SEs. They use a cloaking practice known as "agent name delivery", which is a slab of code that checks whether the visitor is a crawler or a human. Crawlers get to see the whole site, but others are directed to a sign-up form.

9. Avoidable Practices

The following practices could get your site banned from Google at worst or lower its ranking at best:

• Gimmicks. Pointless Javascript effects such as cursor trails and transitions do nothing for your viewers but place a lot of code above your body text. You want your content close to the top of the page.
• Bad HTML code. Novice hand-coders might copy some HTML tags without understanding their meaning. One webmaster used the robot directive <INDEX, NOFOLLOW> and wondered why his site was not fully in Google in spite of Googlebot visits and good incoming links. He was asking to be indexed, but for his links not to be followed.
• Multiple sites with duplicated content, e.g. www.example.net.au and www.example.com.au hosted on the same server or different ones, as this is considered spamming. Use a permanent redirect on all secondary sites to point to the main domain.
• Multiple copies of the same page. This is typically an entry or "doorway" page optmised for different keywords to lure different people, e.g. crackz.htm, serials.htm, passwords.htm, and so on.
• Hidden content. This can be repetitive text on the same colour background or a layer with coordinates that are off the visible page. It begs the question why the author does not put this effort into creating visible text.
• Flash-Only pages. A solution is a user agent entry check that displays Flash to enabled browsers, but plain HTML to crawlers and other human visitors.
• Frames. Googlebot will crawl links in the Noframes text, but not ones in the framed pages. Other SEs might not crawl frames, so it is better to use tables and more so to use CSS. If you must use frames, ensure that you use the correct Doctype declaration for frames. (Added: There are reports that Google can now crawl links in frames.)
• Submission software or service. They could submit your site to thousands of unknown SEs. You will get a lot of spam, abuse, and possible inclusion in link farms that will ruin your reputation in Google's eyes. After all, can you name more than five major SEs?
• Session IDs. Sites that require session IDs from crawlers will get poor visibility because the previous session will have expired by the time Googlebot returns.
• Over-optimisation. [Update 11/2003] Many sites that followed a strict "SEO formula" found that they could not be found at the top of the SERPs, or in the index at all. There is speculation that such tactics cause the sites to be filtered out of the search results.

10. Patience

Having optimised and submitted your pages to Google, get on with growing your business, for Google takes time to rank you. Work on getting quality, inbound links from high-ranking sites that feature the same subject matter. Increase your content and keep it fresh. Get free or paid listings in Google Adwords, Overture, Yahoo, Open Directory Project (www.dmoz.org), and reputable engines such as AltaVista.com, Scrubtheweb.com, Alltheweb.com and Teoma.com.

SEO can be fun and profitable, but don't make it an obsession.

About the Author

The author is an experienced Internet marketing consultant with clients in several countries. Much of his work involves search engine marketing, which includes pay-per-click advertising and search engine optimisation. More information is at his blog at http://www.netmagellan.com/ .

Page Rank and SERPs

Google Page Rank (PR) is an arbitrary "link popularity" scale that affects your position in the SERPs but in itself is not a guarantor of that position. A simplified view can be seen by installing the Google Toolbar and visiting a site. A more detailed explanation is at www.searchnerd.com/pagerank. PR0 means you have been penalised (or have a PR less than 1); PR6 and above is worthy of pride. Linking to sites that use shady SEO practices will lower your PR. A grey PR bar means that the page is not indexed or has been removed from Google.

Think of each page on your site as having one vote that gets shared by all linked pages. A high PR page carries more weight in its votes, not just relative to other sites but to pages below it. Link thoughtfully.

[Update - Sept 2004: The displayed PageRank is getting more and more unreliable. Many people have stopped using the Google toolbar so that they are not distracted by an apparently low PR value.]

SEO Resources at Google

• Keyword research tool
• Webmaster Guidelines

An early version of this article was printed in edited form in APC magazine (Australia) June 2003. It is a little out of date now. A 12-part series on SEO has appeared at the APC Magazine site since August 2008 and now covers other online marketing topics.

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