Basics of making your site Google friendly

Written on the 29th of September 2009

Here's some reasons your website needs to be Google friendly:

• There are more than 300 million searches performed online every day, with around 90% of Australasian searches on Google
• 86% of your customers search online when looking for a business, service or product
• Businesses that are maximising Google are getting more than 65% of their traffic from search engines

As you can see, it's important that your website is designed with search engines as well as customers in mind. SEO can be time-consuming and expensive for a small business, but there are actually a lot of great free things you can do to your site internally to get it ready for search engines, plus plenty of free directories to get listed on. Here are our top free tips for making your website Google friendly:

• Fresh content - The more content you write, the more often Google will index your site and potentially increase its ranking. Write regular blogs and articles that are rich with your most important keywords.
• Meta description - This appears in the code of your website and search engines use it to determine what your page is about, and also to display in the search results for that particular page. Keep it to around 160 characters, use your keywords, and make sure it has a call to action.
• Image ALT text - Add your keywords into the text descriptions for your images that appear in the website code to show Google what the page is about. To do this in The Web Console, just go to the image properties and type into the 'Alternative Text' field.
• Page names - The name of your page as it appears in your menu and in your URL is one of the most important places for keywords. Be creative about the way you name pages for best results but keep them short so they fit in your menu.
• Page titles - The title that appears in the top bar of your browser is a prime position for keywords. Add the relevant keywords for that page into the Page Title field in The Web Console to optimise the page.
• Internal linking - Within your website content, place lots of links from one page to another, eg. the words 'website design' links to the website design page. This makes it easy for Google's crawlers to navigate your site, plus using keywords in the link copy helps add to the keyword strength of your pages.
• Dynamic XML sitemap - Google needs to be able to see an XML sitemap of your website, which is a page with text links to every page on your site. This needs to be dynamic so it updates automatically when you change pages. Every Bloomtools website has a dynamic XML sitemap.
• Google Maps Listing - It's free to add your business to Google Maps and it can get your business straight to the top of the listings for your industry and location. Plus if your site is new, it will help Google index it sooner so you appear in the search results.
• Online directories - Also add your website to as many free directories as you can find to help Google find your site sooner. Start off with the general ones like www.hotfrog.com.au and www.truelocal.com.au (or www.hotfrog.co.nz and www.finda.co.nz for Kiwi sites) then search online for industry and location specific ones.

Implementing the above strategies to your website could potentially help your site appear higher in the listings, so it's worth taking the time to apply this to your current website. If you are in a competitive industry, you will probably need to combine the above internal factors with a search engine optimisation program to increase the external backlinks to your site.