How to get on the front page of Google (Part 2)

Tuesday, 23 March 2010 09:33

In the previous post in this series, we listed the search optimisation 'basics' as the place to start your search optimisation efforts.

Yeah, then (or rather now) what?

So you do all those things already...What can you do that other people might not be doing? The people that have read 'Get to the top of Google in half and hour' or 'Three ways to a #1 spot" ?

1. About those other bits

Let's just revisit the last item from the previous 'basics' list.

Use:

• custom error pages
• a directory structure (and file names) that included keywords
• textual navigation (not graphical)
• flat file structures
• a site map
• clean, valid code
• permanent (301) vs temp (302) redirects. 
• internal links.

And some extras:

• use robots.txt file to control how search bots crawl your site
• an HTML web page with no images should be under 150 KB (according to Bing).

Why are we recommending these?

Because this collection represents a bunch of things that many people don't do (even if their SEO expert recommends it) 

I don't know why, but it's possibly because some are put in place or controlled by technology.   Believe it or not, some big content management systems have constraints that make these things harder.

Or it could be that your IT team, developers or CMS vendor doesn't understand how important search results are, how competitive your market is and that these things make a difference.

Recommendation number one

Make sure your relationship with your IT guy/girl/team or web developer is great.

Then you can have a discussion about them putting these 'other' bits in place. 

Make it clear that you need their expertise and how it contributes to the success of your business.

If you are using an outsourced/hosted technical solution, you may need to put the hard word on the provider!

Next in the series: Location based search