Triune Designs Blog: Web Design, Development, & Marketing

My good friend, and excellent Charlotte, NC realtor, John Paul Soto and I were talking a few nights ago. A good discussion came up about how to get listed higher in Google’s rankings for various search terms. This conversation echoed many I have had with our clients over the years. In fact, I would probably rate this concern as our number one small business web marketing question.

Since it is always such a big question for small business owners I thought I might use a few blog posts to give you Google’s own advice for improving your own search engine rankings.

First, the what not to do. This will help you know where Google draws the line so you know what is recommended and what is not.

Your Own Litmus Test

Google provides a few rules of thumb to help you if you are ever left wondering what is right and what is wrong. Ask yourself these three guiding questions:

1. [Do you] feel comfortable explaining what you’ve done to a website that competes with you?
2. Does this help [your] users?
3. Would [you] do this if search engines didn’t exist?

The Recommendations

Here are some suggestions on what to avoid:

Google’s General Guidelines

• Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines. Don’t deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as “cloaking.”
• Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings.
• Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or “bad neighborhoods” on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.
• Don’t use unauthorized computer programs to submit pages, check rankings, etc. Such programs consume computing resources and violate our Terms of Service. Google does not recommend the use of products such as WebPosition Gold™ that send automatic or programmatic queries to Google.

From Google’s webmaster guidelines

Google’s Specific Guidelines

• Avoid hidden text or hidden links.
• Don’t use cloaking or sneaky redirects.
• Don’t load pages with irrelevant keywords.
• Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.
• Avoid “doorway” pages created just for search engines, or other “cookie cutter” approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.

From Google’s webmaster guidelines

Check back later to read about Google’s recommendations for what you can do to help improve your rankings.

The “do not cross the line” photo is courtesy of Rob Gallop on Flickr