Your website attracts two kinds of visitors: 1. real people looking for a product or service and 2. search robots wanting to index your pages and rank the information they contain so that they may serve up the right content in response to a search.
Knowing just how Google finds information on your web pages will help you to make sure you provide the right content for search engines as well as human visitors. This will give you the best chance of ranking well in the search results.
5 areas of your website that the search engines explore:
1. The first port of call for a search robot is your robots.txt file. They do this to check if you are giving permission for search robots to view your site and if so whether any areas are off-limits. If you are not sure where to find this or what should be in it, then best to contact your web developer. Altering it when you are not an expert can be costly!
2. Once the robots find they are allowed to view your content they look at your meta title. This is NOT the title that human visitors see on your page. It is in the head of your page in the underlying html within the <title> tag.
Google takes notice of the first 65 characters. This is what will be served up in the search results (SERPS) as the title with a link.
Google reads EVERY page title and wants to find each one is unique.
This is considered to be a very important area for SEO. Google is looking for keywords to help it to classify your page.
3. Next, the search robots read your meta description.
This is another tag in the underlying code of the header of your web page, this time in the <description> tag. At one time Google used this for ranking your page, but it no longer does. This means that you should write this for your human visitors who are reading the search results. If you make this like a mini-advert you can encourage people to click on your result in the list rather than someone elses.
Every page should have its own compelling description (it’s free advertising when it’s read in the search results after all!). Don’t be afraid to use “calls to action” to encourage contact.
You should use no more that 160 characters for a description and it is wise to include keywords in it simply because if there are words in your description which match the search words, Google makes these bold in your listing, therefore drawing attention to them.
You can see your title and description tags by viewing the page source for your website. (Right click on the page and choose “View Page Source” ).
NB: if you make changes to the title and description tags, the change in the search results will not be in real time. You will have to wait for Google to visit your site again and re-index the pages.
4. Google indexes your images.
It is important to understand that Goggle CANNOT see what your images are. The search robots can only “read” words. You must therefore tell them what your images are so they can index them correctly. You should do that in two ways.
Firstly, when you upload an image to your site, make sure you give it a file name that reflects what the image is. A file name like img1234.jpg tells the search engines nothing! Far better to give it a file name such as nike-black-trainers.jpg.
The second place to add information for images is the “alt tag“. The alt tag is meant to be replacement text for missing images, but Google also uses it to work out what the picture shows. This is therefore a great place to add keywords so Google knows that anyone searching that keyword would be insterested to see your image.
If you add an alt tag, this is what the search engines see:
<img src=”http://www.yourwebsite.co.uk/nike-black-trainers.jpg” alt=”Nike Tanjun Black“>
5. Finally, Google looks at the content on your page. This is the REALLY IMPORTANT bit!
Google will index every word on your website and the more text content that you have on your pages, the better. The content on each page needs to be well-written and informative and to target ONE topic. The more topics you tackle on a page, the more you will water DOWN the ranking of that page. Search engines want to serve up the best results to match a search and they are getting very clever at doing it. No longer are they fooled by pages stuffed with keywords because they recognise that real people won’t want to read the content.
The other thing to understand about Google is it LOVES new content. The more often you add new content to your site, the more often it will send its Googlebot to index your pages. That’s why keeping a business blog and posting regular content can be a great idea.
