Google SEO Training - Understanding Your Website’s Visitors

Google offers many services to help you create and share exceptional content with your users as well as better understand your website and competitors in your market space. Sometimes, your site could improve with just a bit more pizazz or with additional activity.

Google’s Services

You’ll want to check out Google Services such as:

• YouTube - Use for video sharing
• Picasa - Use for organizing and editing digital photos
• SketchUp - Use to create, modify and share 3D models.
• Calendar - Use for events listings. Calendar can be commented on by its users and the calendar can be viewed from many locations.
• Maps and Earth - Use for directions to your business and annotated tours.
• Blogger - Use for the latest announcements relating to your website, business or industry.

And with all the fabulous content on our site, understanding your visitors’ interaction with that content is key. There are two free tools that Google offers that can help you see how your site is currently performing with your visitors and how a few variations might enhance it’s over all performance.

Google Analytics

Google analytics provides helpful information on where your visitors come from, how they interact with your site and how often they are performing actions you want such as purchasing one of your products or subscribing to your news letter.

Google Website Optimizer

And while Google Analytics lets you have a look on how your site has performed, Website Optimizer helps you to test out different variations and combinations of content on your site so that you can see which version will be best for your visitors.

Google Trends

It makes sense to spend a fair amount of time improving your website, but it’s also essential to pay close attention to your market space and what your competitors are up to. Google can definitely help you with the job. You can use Google Trends to compare the prevalence of news articles and searches for different keywords and for discerning which product garners more attention or which issue excites more of your visitors.

Google Reader

Google Reader allows you to stay current on the latest articles that interest you without having to jump around from site to site by following specific topics or keywords from popular newspapers, blog posts or even your favorite video websites.

Google Alert

Google Alert provides yet another way to track what is important to you as well as keep you ahead of the marketing game. Within minutes of being published, you can receive links from informative blog entries, news articles or other web pages that mention your name, your company’s or any other phrase that you choose.

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Google SEO Training - All About Webmaster Central

Webmasters have a lot to consider when structuring a website. To help you make your site more powerful, narrow down problems as well as learn from other webmasters, there’s an entire area of Google built specifically for webmasters.

Google Webmaster Central offers a comprehensive set of tools, the official webmaster blog, discussion group and help center that offers information in over 24 languages. And best of all, it’s totally free.

Google Webmaster Tools

You’ll want to get your site registered with Google Webmaster Tools. It only takes a few minutes to sign up and verify that you’re the owner of the website. Once you’ve signed up, it can take up to a few days before you can actually see detailed site statistics for your website. This will allow you to get Google’s view of your site and then diagnose any potential problems.

You’ll be able to see how Google crawls and indexes your site as well as learn about any problems that Google may be having in accessing the site. You will be able to see how the site is preforming and learn which queries are driving traffic to your website and what position the site is showing in for those specific search queries.

Taking Action With Google Webmaster Tools

By submitting an XML sitemap, Google will be able to understand what pages you have on your website as well as how frequently they are getting updated. Google Webmaster Tools will not only give you information, they enable you to take action and improve the quality of your site.

you can tell Google if you want the www or non www version of our website listed in search result. You can ask Google to crawl your site at a different rate. If you want to get rid of an outdated site link that is showing for your site, you can do that there a well.

Google Webmaster Guidelines

The Google Webmaster Tools area also gives you the opportunity to let Google know about sites that are in violation of the Google Webmaster Guidelines and they take these reports very seriously. Google may not take action on every site reported, but they do however, use the reports to improve the quality of the search results.

If your own website has been negatively impacted due to a violation of the Google Webmaster Guidelines, you can simply fix the problem on our site, file a reconsideration request and someone from Google’s search quality team will then evaluate your request and take the appropriate action.

Google Webmaster Central Blog

After setting up you Google Webmaster Tools account, you will want to get an even broader and timely set of information for webmasters by reading the Google Webmaster Central Blog. You can find announcements of new webmaster tools, helpful information on site accessibility, indexing, crawling and a lot more. You’ll also find the blog is in multiple languages, which addresses many of the questions webmasters frequently ask.

Google Help Center

You can even search for more in depth information in the Google Help Center. There are hundreds of webmaster focused guidelines, tips, getting started guides and definitions in over 20 languages. There may be times that you just can’t find the exact information you’re looking for in the Tools, Blog or Help Center.

Google Webmaster Help Groups

You’ll also want to check out the Google Webmaster Help Groups where you’ll find discussions on topics such as indexing, crawling, etc. The groups are available in over 12 languages and include tips and suggestions from other webmasters around the world. All of this can be found at Google Webmaster Central .

Google SEO Training - Page Ranking

Webmasters typically want their pages to rank higher in Google’s search results. Pages get listed in the search results based on relevance and importance. A page is considered relevant if it matches both the interest of the user and the query, which is relevant to the phrase that’s typed into Google.

How Google Determines The Importance of Each Page

Because there are so many web pages out there and for many queries there are literally millions of relevant pages, Google has to narrow it all down and prioritize results. And this is done by determining the importance of each page. Google’s original algorithm set that determines page importance was termed page rank. However, it is now only one of over two hundred elements that goes into how pages get ranked by Google. It does however, still have a major role in page rank.

Google Page Rank

The quantity as well as the quality of pages that link to the page (relevant to what the page is about) is what the each individual page’s score will be based on. Attempting to buy and sell page links is a violation of the Google Webmaster Guidelines and will potentially harm your site’s page rank and presence in Google. The best way to increase your site’s page rank is to create quality content, participate in relevant online communities and acquire quality links through natural measures. If you do sell or buy online advertising, you will want to make sure those links don’t pass page rank by using a no follow tag.

Page Rank Fluctuations

As Google periodically updates it’s index, rankings will fluctuate. Sometimes they will fluctuate a little and sometimes quite a lot and it can happen for various reasons. The fact is, the web is constantly changing. The changes in your site in combination with the content and constant link updates around the web can affect your website’s presence in Google. In some cases, a site can fall to a lower ranking because Google determines that it is in violation of the Google Webmaster Guidelines. Many times, violations are caused by someone who previously worked on your website or could even be caused by a hacker who’s added covert links to some of your pages.

Thinking Like Your Users

Think like your users and provide quality content for them rather than focusing your content for the search engines. You want to treat search engine bots just like other users, never sending them different content. You also want to carefully consider how your users are likely to search for this content. If you have a product, for example, that has a nick-name or acronym that is more popularly known for that, then that’s what users are likely to search on. And you will want to make sure that text visibly appears on your relevant pages.

As you interest users with the content and links on your site, make sure that they’re not disappointed in what they actually find. You’ll want to regularly check to make sure that all of the links on the pages are still pointing to relevant resources and that they reflect well on you and your business.

Google SEO Training - Accessibility & Duplicate Content

You want to make sure that the appropriate content on your site is accessible to users and to Google. You want both Googlebot and your users, including those using screen readers and mobile devices to be able to easily navigate from page-to-page and enjoy the core content throughout your website.

Accessability for Googlebot

It’s important to make your site accessible so that it’s a good experience for your users as well as to help Google understand your pages and list more of them. Therefore, it’s key that you understand what Googlebot can and can’t do.

HTML and other document types that consist primarily of text are fairly straight forward for Googlebot. However, music, images and video are a bit harder for it to understand. Dynamic pages are also more of a challenge for Googlebot, which are pages with frequently changing content. You can see your site pretty much the way Google sees it by viewing it in a text browser like Links or in another browser with JavaScript, images and Flash turned off.

Helping Googlebot Understand Your Site’s Pages

There are a few things you can do to assist Google in understanding the images on your site. You can do this by annotating your images in Alt Text and in plain visible text near your image. Your visible comment before or after the image can be what ever you choose, but it’s best to stay with with the straight forward version for the Alt Text. You can also use descriptive file names to help google understand as well as for users who want to download your images.

By describing your images in these ways, you are giving Google a better understanding of your images as well as improving your chances for them showing up for relevant queries and for Google Image Search. Along with images, many web experts like to incorporate rich media or interactive aspects into their website using technologies like Ajax or Flash. And though they can provide a pleasant experience for users, Googlebot may have trouble finding or following links on these types of sites.

For example, textual content for Flash can be stored as images, which makes it difficult for Google to get the words let alone understand the meaning of the pages. With careful planning however, websites that incorporate media rich elements and dynamic content can still remain accessible to both users and googlebot. You may want to consider in the structure of your site, that these elements be extras and have your website’s core information and navigation in plain text for googlebot as well as for users without Flash.

Letting People Know What Your Site’s About

After you have ensured that your site is both findable and accessible, make sure you are not providing weak content with dull and uninspired introductions. You’ll want to think of the titles and descriptions on your pages as an opportunity for advertising what your site is all about. You have just a few words to clue people in on what each page is about as well as convince them that it’s worth their time to visit.

The title tag of your pages is what’s likely to be displayed when Google displays the page in it’s search results. It will also be what people typically see on their web browser as well as on the various social networking sights. For this reason, it’s key to have a descriptive and to-the-point title for each page.

Google may pull from several different sources for snip-it descriptions in search listings, including meta descriptions. You will want to make sure that your meta descriptions are carefully thought out and drafted for each page of your site.

Duplicate Content

Duplicate content is when you find copies of your pages either indexed from your site and either with or without your permission on other sites For example, Your editorial ends up indexed on one of your site’s topic pages, on a syndicated partner’s page or on your monthly archives page. In a situation such as this, there are specific steps you can take to help Google determine which is the best copy to display in the search results.

With duplicate content on your own site, the best plan of action is simply to minimize the duplication from the gate. You can use use 301 redirects to forward visitors to the preferred page, consistently link to the preferred version and list it in place of other versions in your XML sitemap. And last but not least, if you find someone plagiarizing your site and you want it removed from Google search results, you can file a DMCA take down request.

Google SEO Training How Googlebot Finds Your Site

Once you’ve finished building an amazing website and are now ready to have it indexed in Google, you’ll want to make sure that Google knows about your site’s pages. Chances are good that Google may already know of your pages if at least one other quality website has included a relevant link to your your site on their site. Of course, acquiring such links is a great way for Google to learn about your website and pages.

XML Sitemaps

So that people know about all of your pages, you can submit what’s called an XML sitemap. Whether your site is brand new or has been around for awhile, it’s highly recommended that you create an XML sitemap, which helps Google and the other search engines to better understand the pages on your site and find them.

These can be very useful for sites that are:

• Dynamically driven
• Have a large amount of new and updated pages
• Have few incoming links

You can create a general XML sitemap in just minutes as well as XML sitemaps for other uses such as videos. Keep in mind that this isn’t the same as an HTML site map or one that is user visible. HTML sitemaps can compliment XML site maps and help people quickly find and easily navigate to the content that’s deep within the pages of your site.

Pages You Don’t Want Indexed

More than likely, there will be some pages that you don’t want Google to be able to access. For example, you may not want Google’s automated page fetching robot called Googlebot to access documents that contain private information or pages that you are not ready to show to the world yet.

In these types of situations, you can use use one of two reliable methods for blocking Google’s access from being able to obtain specific content. You can use a disallow line in the robots.text file or use a no index meta tag on each of the pages that you don’t want indexed.