Getting Your Site Ready for Google

Google is known as the search engine that is most widely used by Internet surfers and the like. Because of this, most webmasters are concerned about optimizing their websites to be able to get a high ranking in Google along with two other engines, namely Yahoo and MSN.

There are several ways that one can optimize a website to attain the best results for Google. This article will tackle that in detail.

Arranging Your Website’s Structure and Content

Your website design structure plays a vital role in SEO because of the way that search engines index it for ranking. This is related to the way that search engine spiders read content.

For example, spiders give a higher priority to codes that are found in higher positions within the main HTML code itself. For example, if you place navigation codes like headers before your main content, this results in a higher priority for your header code than for your main content. In a nutshell, parts of the code that serves little or no purpose for the optimization of the page should be placed in the bottom of the code, and those that are important should be placed higher within the HTML code.

The purpose is to let the spiders crawl and see the optimized content first, so that it will gain more priority in the indexing. The content is the part that matters, after all.

Coming up With SEO-friendly content

As you could see in the previous section, the content is intended to be given the most priority in SEO. Optimizing a site means that you come up with content that would satisfy a search engine’s criteria for a high rank, which is in your end goal for all your efforts.

The first criterion is keyword density. This is measured by the number of times that a keyword appears on your page. Optimal density is around 3% to 5% of the total number of words the content body contains. So, if you had a 1000-word article, you would have to repeat the primary keyword at least 3% and at most 5% of 1000. This is how Google looks at your page and judge its relevance to the search term. Its spiders count the occurrences of the keyword within the page being crawled.

The way that you format your content is also important to your SEO efforts. Formatted content actually receives greater weight from the search engine. Examples of formatting are keywords that are in boldface, in italics or in anchor text. This is because these formatted words serve to highlight the important part of the content for the visitor, so that they would find easily the information that they are searching for.

Last, but not the least, the pages on your site must revolve around a central theme. This is done by making individual pages centered around a specific topic, which is related to the site’s theme as a whole. This is the ultimate goal in your content SEO efforts. Like mentioned earlier, it is your content that will make or break your site’s success.
Procuring Links for your Website

Inbound links are also important for the search engines. This is because Google’s PageRank algorithms calculate the PR value for a site by counting the number of links that point to it. The whole affair is like a ballot during elections. Each inbound link is considered a vote of support for the site, and these votes are tallied to come up with the PR value.

That said, you probably now know the importance of being able to build a number of links for your site. One process is known as link baiting. You can do so using your blog. To do this you must post content about topics that you’re sure people would follow and refer others to by posting inbound links to your blog, which post a link pointing to your site.

Link building is another method of procuring votes of support for your site. One way to do this is to submit articles to article directories. These directories allow you to include a link to your site in the bottom of your articles, which counts as a vote of support when it is seen by search engine spiders.

Other ways of doing this is to post links to your blogs or website in social networking/bookmarking sites like Digg.com. These sites give your sites a chance to be viewed by many people and linked to. These sites are considered reliable and important by search engines, so any link from them carries a great value for the calculation of your final PR value.