It's been a few years since my last article on getting your site noticed on Google,
Tips on Improving Your Google Search Engine Ranking.
The
situation hasn't changed much, and the article is still relevant today.
However, over these years I have learned a couple more things
about what to do and what not to do on your website with regards to your
site's placement on the search engine results.
Hidden Text
Everyone knows that search engines (not just Google, but probably every
one of them) frown on hidden text. Some people use hidden text to stuff
keywords on their pages so that when people type those words on the
search engine, your site will show, even though your page does not have
any
visible sign of those words.
I have never believed in hiding my keywords in hidden text or any of
those cloak and dagger stuff, and hence I don't practise such things.
Imagine my surprise, when one day, a few years back, I suddenly found my
pages on thefreecountry.com
receiving a Page Rank of 0 because of hidden text on the page. (See my other
article on Google Page Rank if you don't know what Page Rank is.)
No, I did not compromise on my principles or anything like that. I did
not try any underhand tactics to stuff keywords, etc. The reason is more
prosaic.
At that time, I had partially converted thefreecountry.com to use CSS
for its site design instead of the traditional <font> and
<table>tags.
In those years, there were still a few people using the old Netscape 4
which did not support CSS correctly. To accomodate those people, I tried
to make
my site degrade gracefully when it detected an old browser being used. I
also put a message that contained the following text:
This page uses Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to control its appearance.
Since CSS is poorly supported on old browsers like Netscape 4.X, you may
notice
numerous oddities in the appearance of the page. However, you should
still be able to read the information and navigate using the links.
This text was enclosed in a box that was hidden from view if you were
using a modern browser, but visible if you used Netscape 4. I used the
usual methods of getting different browsers to load different
stylesheets as mentioned in my article
How to Use Different CSS Style Sheets For Different Browsers
(and How to Hide CSS Code from Older Browsers).
Unfortunately, Google's spider detected that some text was hidden, and
not realizing that it was also visible in other cases,
automatically assumed I was employing some sort of skulduggery to get
those keywords into its index. It then penalized my site accordingly.
When I realized that my attempt to help my visitors was going to cost my
site's position in the search engine results, I immediately pulled the
message, and its accompanying CSS, from the site. Visitors using old
browsers would still be able to use the site, but they would not receive
any friendly
explanation.
Although the days of Netscape 4 are long gone, the lessons learnt from
that incident are still useful today. Undoubtedly many of you will not
even dream of
using keyword stuffing in hidden text and the like. However, as I found
out from the above incident, Google's search engine robot is far from
intelligent, and its hidden text detection algorithm can bite legitimate
webmasters too. If it even senses hidden text, even for an
innocuous purpose like mine, your site is history.
Some ways in which you might inadvertently use hidden text (possibly
without knowing, if you use third-party scripts) include the use of
drop-down menus for site navigation and browser-specific tips for users
(like in my case above). I'm fairly certain that the Google programmers
keep
refining their engine so that the more common use of CSS to hide text
for harmless purposes like navigation menus (and so on)
are recognized as benign, but if you are about to use hidden text for
some fancy design gimmick on your page, you might want to test it out on
some
obscure page on your site to see if the Google robot chokes on it. After
all, always remember your site's life depends on a robot, not a human.
It
may be obvious to you and other humans that the code is harmless,
designed for some acceptable purpose, but a computer program can only
follow a
set of preprogrammed rules.
Note that neither the navigation menu created by my
Free CSS Navigation Menu Button Wizard
nor the one created by the Free Drop Down
Navigation Menu Wizard uses hidden text for the various menu items (or anything else for that matter), so don't worry.
They are straightforward menus that do not use any trickery to accomplish their jobs.
Getting Your Link to Appear on the First Page of the Search Engine Results
I get many queries everyday from new webmasters reading
thesitewizard.com, asking me how they can get the link to their site to
be shown on the first page
of the Google search engine results. In fact, for some of them, getting
their site to appear anywhere in the first few pages of Google's results
would
already be a victory.
If you are in a hurry to get your site noticed, and have a budget
allocated for your site's search engine promotion, one instant way to
get to the
first page of Google's results page is to buy advertisements (called
Google Adwords) on your keywords. Before you summarily dismiss this,
read
everything I have to say first.
Google's Adwords actually operates according to your budget - that is,
you can spend according to what you can afford. It also allows you to
place
the adverts on precisely the keywords you would have wanted for your
site in the search engine results. Unlike the normal search engine
indexing procedure
however, here you control the exact keyword which will trigger your
site's advertisement and its prominence. Of course it comes with a
price.
But if you're doing a business, this is often the surefire way to get
people to see your site in relation to something that they are searching
for.
Many new webmasters I deal with don't consider this as a viable option,
because it involves cash-outlay. I agree that if you are merely running a
personal
site or a hobby site that does not receive an income, advertising this
way is probably out of the question. You should then work on applying
the usual
search engine promotion tips
to your website and hope for the best in the long run.
However, if your site is a business site that yields an income, you
might want to calculate the costs and benefits to see if you might
actually earn more
this way. Treat your expenditure on the advertisements like all other
business expenditure and calculate your return on investment (ROI). If
you spend
(say) 50 cents per click on your advertisement, and every 100 clicks
gets you one person who spends $100 on your site, you would have made a
profit of
$50 every hundred clicks. This is income that you would not otherwise
have made had you not advertised. Of course, as in all things, it's
possible to
go overboard and spend more than you earn. You might want to consider
setting aside an budget for a month or two as an experiment, and adjust
as you
go along to see if this approach increases your profits.
Conclusion
Google is now, arguably, the most important search engine around.
Knowing what you should not do and still survive Google, as well as
learning shortcuts to
getting an instantaneous good placement on Google's search engine
results page, is now a very important part of website promotion.
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