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 4
Structuring your Site Correctly
This chapter discusses the general structure of a website – folder structure, file
names, domain names, page count, and how content should be placed on pages.
Structure by Theme and Topic
The general subject or category of your website dictates it’s
theme
. Loosely stated,
the theme of your website is generally your Primary Keyword Phrase, as determined
by your earlier efforts using WordTracker, discussed in
Chapter 3 - Determining Your
Best Keywords
.
For example, if your site sells
baby diapers
and other infant products and services
online, the theme of your site would probably be
infant care,
so every page of your
site needs to include
infant care
(if that is the best phrase as determined by
WordTracker of course). You would also have pages that discuss specific or more
refined variations, like baby diapers, on your theme.
Tip:
Ideally, your site
is
only about one major subject or category. If you have more
than one major subject for your site, say, for example, you sell baby diapers AND
garage door openers, you should strongly consider creating multiple sites, one per
subject.
The main idea is to separate content onto different pages by topic (keyword phrase)
within your site. As another example, suppose that a site sells
house plans
online
and that is the theme of the site (it’s Primary Keyword Phrase). This site also sells
country house plans
,
garage plans
, and
duplex plans
, and let’s say for this example
that each page of the site mentions all three plan types.
However, what is each page's specific topic? The different plan types have been
mentioned on multiple pages, so each page contains the keywords
country house
plans
,
garage plans
, and
duplex plans
. None of the three plan types would be
strongly relevant on any of these pages for Google.
The correct way to structure this site is to have one page that discusses
only
country
house plans
, another page that discusses
only
garage plans
, and a third page that
discusses
only
duplex plans
. Each page is now strongly relevant for one keyword
phrase. No “dilution” occurs in any of the pages, and each page should subsequently
fair better in the rankings for its particular keyword phrase. This is important.

Google Secrets – How to Get a Top 10 Ranking…
Next, you would add links on each page so that
garage plan
pages link
only
to other
garage plan
pages,
duplex plan
pages link
only
to
duplex plan
pages, and so forth.
By using the applicable keyword phrase in the
link text
(the clickable part of the link),
you can also help strengthen the
importance
of each page. We’ll discuss in greater
detail how to link pages correctly between pages in “Chapter 6 – Linking Your Pages
Correctly”.
So, to properly structure a site that offers different products, services, or content
categories, you should split the content onto different pages. In the end, you ideally
want a single topic, or keyword phrase, applied per page.
Create Lots of Short Pages
Websites with lots of pages in general rank better than sites with just a few pages, all
other things being equal. It is better to have a 50-page site with short pages than a 5-
page site with long, flowing pages.
Each page should however contain a
minimum of about 200 visible words of text to maximize relevance with
Google.
Short pages also are indexed faster and download faster. Studies show you lose
10% of your visitors for every second it takes your page to download and display in
their browser. Much beyond 5 seconds and you might as well forget it – people will
click elsewhere. This is important to keep in mind.
Also, you need pages with
real content
– don’t create just a lot of “fluff” pages that
are standard fair anyway – About Us page, Contact Us page, etc.
Keep your web pages simple from a coding standpoint. Try to avoid gratuitous
animations, junk graphics, large imagemaps, JavaScript, or anything else that may
get in the way of Google or, more importantly, of your customers getting the
message you are trying to get across on your site.
Also be sure and break up your pages using

,

, and

heads, and
include your keywords in these heads. Not only will it help visitors read your pages
more quickly by providing visual separators on the page, it will give your pages more
relevance with Google.
Strive to have only one topic per page, and then to optimize that page for that
particular topic (keyword phrase). Write content by hand, don’t be lured into using
software programs that use “templates” for generating web pages. In general, your
pages will look cookie-cutter and Google
may
consider them as duplicate pages.
www.google-secrets.com Copyright 2003-2004 Dan Sisson.
All rights reserved.
Google Secrets – How to Get a Top 10 Ranking… page 30 of 112
Caution
:
Don’t create pages that are all identical or nearly so. Google may
consider them to be spam or duplicates and your page (or site) may be penalized.
Pages full of high quality, unique, keyword-rich content are a must. Be careful if you
both HTML and PDF versions of the same content. Google will index both.
To prevent this, create a robots.txt file and place it in the main (root) directory on
your server. A robots.txt file specifies which directories and file types to exclude from
crawling. If your PDF files are duplicates of your HTML files, put all the PDF files in a
different directory and specify that this directory by excluded from crawling. For more
information on creating a robots.txt file, see
http://www.searchengineworld.com/robots/robots_tutorial.htm
.
Here is a sample website with pages you should consider for your site:
•
Home page
•
Your main product, service, or content pages (this is the meat of your site)
•
FAQ page(s) (Frequently Asked Questions)
•
Sitemap page (links to each page on your site)
•
About Us page
•
Contact Us page
•
Related Links page(s) (discussed later)
•
Link to Us page (discussed later)
•
Testimonials page
•
Copyright, Disclaimers, Privacy Policy page
•
Ordering page
Lastly, adding more pages to your site is one of two ways of increasing your site’s
total PageRank (PR) value. PR is assigned on a per page basis, but can be
channeled or distributed amongst pages of your site. This important concept will be
discussed later on.
Don’t Nest Your Pages
When Google crawls your site, it typically starts at the home page and then follows
each link on the page to all your other pages. Google finds your home page in turn
from following a link on another website that points to your site.
Generally speaking, Google seems to attach more importance to files that are closer
to the root folder on your server - the folder on your Web server where the home
page file is located. Bear in mind however that some web designers may create
multiple folders on the server for ease in maintaining lots of files.
www.google-secrets.com Copyright 2003-2004 Dan Sisson.
All rights reserved.
Google Secrets – How to Get a Top 10 Ranking… page 31 of 112
It is believed that Google assigns pages located in other folders a lower score than
pages located in the root folder. In general, Google doesn’t like to index sites that are
more than about two folder levels deep. Ideally, all pages should live in the same
folder as your home page or at most be one level deep.
Don’t Bloat Your Pages With Code
Google generally has a time limit that it sets to crawl sites. If you have a large site,
Google may not have time to crawl all pages during the first or second passes. This
problem can be minimized if you keep the code of your web pages lean and clean.
This also makes your pages download faster, which improves the visitor experience.
Studies show that you lose 10% of your visitors for every second it takes your page
to load. After about 5 seconds, you might as well forget it – most people will have left
your site. Remember there is a still a large percentage of people who still use dial-up
modems – particularly outside of the US. This will not change anytime soon, despite
the hype over broadband.
This means try not to have more code than visible content (text) on your page.
Frequently web pages are comprised of 80% or even 90% JavaScript code and style
code (hard-coded font information or inline style blocks). Right-click a web page and
then click
View Source
– you will be amazed at the amount of code present.
Although Google ignores such code, it still takes time for it to wade through to find
your content.
Put your JavaScript code in a separate (.JS) file and link to it from the
section of each applicable web page, as follows:

In addition, create a stylesheet file (.CSS) file and link to it also.

Keywords in Your Domain Name
Although by itself not a real important factor, Google currently does look to see if
your keywords are used in the actual domain name of your site.
www.google-secrets.com Copyright 2003-2004 Dan Sisson.
All rights reserved.
Google Secrets – How to Get a Top 10 Ranking… page 32 of 112
Given that you can register domain names for as cheap as $6.95 per year (see
Hostway.com for details), it might make sense to register your Primary Keyword
Phrase for use as the domain name of your website. If the .com version of a domain
name is taken, try the .net version or the .cc version. It doesn’t matter to Google.
When registering a domain name, separate each word in the domain name with a
hyphen, otherwise Google will not be able to recognize the phrase and will think it is
a single (usually nonexistent) word. Here is the correct format to use for domain
names:
http://www.p
rimary-keyword-phrase
.com
As a general rule of thumb, don’t use more than two hyphens, it looks spammy and
Google may take a closer look at your site for other possible issues.
Note:
Don’t go overboard with this – by itself, it is not an important factor. There IS
something to be said about having a branded, easily recognizable name that
coincides with your business name however. This is more of a suggestion to include
a keyword or two in your branded domain name. For example, if your business name
is Blue Moose Web, register and use www.bluemoose-web-design.com instead of
www.best-web-design.com.

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