If you have a website or your thinking of putting up a website, ask yourself, how are people going to find it? I don’t mean typing the name of your site into google and having it come up. What I’m talking about is typing in “cameras” for example, and having your site, “Joes Camera Shop” came up first. A website is not like a classified ad. In reality it just sits there waiting for you to tell people about it. But wouldn’t you rather have new customers because a person searches “outdoor furniture” in Google and out pops R&M Pool & Patios. So how does that happen and what does it take?
I think most people build sites in hopes of building traffic, which leads to new customers and or sales of products. It’s easy to think that when you type in a word or phrase that Google “goes out” and searches the entire web. What really happens is Google looks for your item in its own database. Think of it as a Library. If you go to the librarian and ask for a book on cameras, she looks in her database and shows you what’s in the library. But if it’s not in the library it’s not going to be found. So for your website to be found it has to be in Googles “library”.
Before we go any further I want to share my story. In 1998 I had my first site built. Of course it was a hit with family and friends. So I sat back and waited for all my new clients to come rolling in. The new clients never came. It turns out that even though I submitted my site to Google, and other search engines, they new little to nothing about what was on my site. Google had no knowledge of what business I was in or what kind of work I did. Over time the site just become a glorified brochure. Now in 2007 I still have the site up just to show people what went wrong. (www.moscamusic.com)
Many things affect what Google knows and doesn’t know about your site. To start with, after you submit your website to Google and other search engines, Google will index your site into it’s database. Google reads your site and puts in the “library” so to speak. To do this, Google sends a little robot called a spider to read, categorize, and compare your site so that it can be part of the Google database, or “library”. In many cases the Google spider can’t read the site content do to poor site construction and the use of text placed on images. Just because you see things on the screen, doesn’t mean the Google spider can. Also note that even some of the newer, cooler web designs, like Flash, can’t be read at all.
If you have an existing site (and it doesn’t have to be old to have problems), getting it to the top of a Google search should definitely be something your working towards. So make sure Google can read it. If you’re in the planning stages of a new site, Make sure to use text for text and not images with text on them. With a text rich site, Google will be able index your content, enabling Google to properly understand what your site’s about. The more Google understands, the better your chances of ranking high in a broad phrase search.
Using images on a site allows the designer to really make thing artistic and cool, but without plain old text, Google will never know the extent of your expertise and knowledge. You need them both. Make sure if you use words on graphic images that you include the same words in text format somewhere else on the page. Its what the spider sees that matters to search engines.
With some simple comparative analysis you’ll begin to see more ways to get your site ranked high on the Google raider.
by Pat Mosca
Internet Marketing
