PART II - Optimizing Your Website

This section deals with those aspects and elements of your website that should be optimized for Google in order to increase relevancy. You want to maximize how relevant your site and pages are to a given search query for a given search phrase (keywords).

In addition to optimizing your site for Google, you should also strive to incorporate some best practices into your website design and structure. For additional information on general website design principles, see Appendix A - Web Site Design Do’s and Don’ts.

Before we begin, make sure you don’t overlook the obvious:

Your website must contain high-quality, useful, timely content that people will actually want to read.

It is amazing how often this statement is ignored. You should spend more time creating useful and relevant content, and less time on fancy graphics, gratuitous animations, or Flash – especially on your home page. Remember that Google uses automated software to analyze the text on your site. This means it will ignore graphics and other multimedia elements on your site - and often your customer will too.

Think of site optimization as a long-term investment in your site “infrastructure. Once your site is optimized, it stays optimized and keeps its ranking over time (but not forever – you still need to update your site on a regular basis). This means free traffic over time. Compare that with paid advertising (such as an Overture pay-per-click campaign) where the minute you stop paying for your ads, your traffic goes away – it is a recurring expense.

As this section builds on the previous chapter, it is highly recommended that you complete the tasks described in Chapter 3 - Determining Your Best Keywords first, if you haven’t already.