I’ve recently started delivering training to small groups of website owners about how to take their websites to Number One on Google. Here’s the presentation slides that I have been using:
I was reading a competitor bookstore’s online newsletter the other day and it gave me an idea for a post. The newsletter went on and on and on. I scrolled, scrolled, scrolled down through the content and found myself deleting the email before reaching the bottom.
It’s not that the content was bad – it was actually really good (and it gave me some ideas for our own Boomerang Books Bulletin). It’s just that I didn’t have the time or the inclination to take it all in.
There’s a lesson in that for netpreneurs.
People’s attention spans are short these days. We have so many things impacting on our time - so many distractions, competing priorities, and the ever-increasing demands of everyday life. We just don’t have the time to read through a lengthy web page or email newsletter. And when we do have the time, we can’t possibly take in all that information, because our mind is full of so many other things!
So for our human visitors/newsletter subscribers, the advice is to employ the KISS principle - keep it simple, stupid!
There’s also another important consideration when reviewing the length of our web pages - will Google index all of the content if it is too long? Like most people in modern society, the Google indexing robots are busy little bees. They will only spend a certain amount of time on your website before moving on to the next site. If each page of your website contains a thesis, then much of the page content won’t be indexed, which means that your site won’t achieve its traffic potential from the search engines.
With that in mind, here are some tips for good page content:
- Keep each page or newsletter to 200-300 words maximum per page.
- If your content is more than 200-300 words, span it over multiple pages, but offer a ‘print version’ that contains the entire text (it’s painful having to print articles that span over multiple pages)
- Use bullet points, prominent headings, white space, 1.5 line spacing and short paragraphs to break up the content and enable the reader to ’scan’ your content. It’s proven that most people scan, rather than read.
- Include keyword combinations that you want to rank highly for in Google and other search engines, but make sure that they appear ‘naturally’ within the text (ie. when read, the text should read naturally)
- Put your best content ‘above the fold’ so that every visitor can see it – ie. it is visible once the page has loaded, without the necessity to scroll down to reveal the content.
- Cross-link to other appropriate pages on your website so that your visitors can find other content quickly and easily. Use contextual links (links within the body text, like this one!) to provide natural pathways throughout your website.
Of course, I am aware of the irony – this article appears on a blog page that scrolls and scrolls and scrolls. A consequence of using Wordpress, although I am sure that it could be configured differently…
It is important to know which pages the search engines have indexed on your site. Not only does it allow you to tweak your TITLE tags, page copy and metadata, but it also gives you an indication of how your search engine optimisation efforts are going over time and how good your competitors are at SEO too.
To see how many of your pages are indexed in Google, type the following into Google Search:
site:your URL
A search using site:www.boomerangbooks.com returns 7510 results. My competitors, Dymocks, have over 149,000 results, so I have some work to do.
As you can see, it’s also a useful tool for checking up on your competitors.
Here are some other operators that you can use in Google to obtain information about your listings:
Google is the king of the search engines. So when Google offers you a set of webmaster tools to assist you with your listings in Google, you would be silly not to use them, wouldn’t you?
With Google Webmaster Central and Webmaster Tools you can learn how Google ranks websites, how to submit all of your content to Google and how to improve traffic to your site.
Webmaster Central can be found at http://www.google.com/webmasters/. There are a bunch of excellent resources for every webmaster on this page.
Google’s Webmaster Tools can be found at Webmaster Central. These tools can assist you with statistics, diagnostics and management of Google’s indexing of your website, including sitemap submission and reporting.
To get started you will need to specify your website URL and then verify that you are the owner of that site (you will be required to add some code or a file to your website for recognition by Google). From there, you can diagnose how well your site is being indexed by Google, view statistics, learn which sites link to yours, get information about keywords used to find your site, specify sitemaps, and generate a robots.txt indexing file.
Sitemaps are relatively new to the web world. These are XML files that reside on the top level of your domain and which contain a listing of all pages in your site. These files make life easier for Google’s indexing spiders because they tell the spiders where to look and what to index. They are definitely worth setting up and there are a number of tools that can assist you to do so. Try XML Sitemaps Generator, a server based generator that can be set up to auto-run periodically on your host.
Similarly, the robots.txt file sits at the top level of your website and directs Google’s spiders to indexable content. Google has a robots.txt generator tool here – https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/robotsgen.
And while we’re on the topic of search engine submission…
Google is the big daddy of all the search engines and it is almost imperative that you are listed in Google to be successful. Well over half of the traffic to my websites originate from Google.
To add your URL to Google, visit:
http://www.google.com.au/addurl
Be aware that it can take some time for your website to be spidered and for your site to appear in the search engine results.
The Open Directory Project (http://www.dmoz.org) is one of the most important search directories on the internet. Many of the other search engines give greater weight to websites that appear on the DMOZ site – that’s because DMOZ apply stringent criteria to all sites that aspire to become part of their directory and it’s bloody tough to get into!
It is important that you try – here are the instructions:
Yahoo! is one of the world’s biggest search engines and it is important that your site is listed here. In terms of importance, it ranks just behind Google, and slightly in front of MSN.
To suggest a site:
