Why Google Indexing requires a complex blend of skills

Author: John Fowler

If it was easy, everybody would be doing it. Getting a company’s name and

products, or services, onto the first page of a genuine Google search isn’t a

trivial piece of work. In fact, there are four distinct skills that a search

engine optimiser needs to possess. Most people possess one or maybe two of these

skills, very rarely do people posses all four. In truth, to get to all four,

people who are good at two of these need to actively develop the other skills.

Now, if you are running your own business, do you really have the time to do

this? Is this the best use of your time?

Specifically the four skills needed for SEO work are: Web Design – producing a visually attractive page HTML coding - developing Search Engine friendly coding that sits behind the web

design Copy writing – producing the actual readable text on the page Marketing – what are the actual searches that are being used, what key words

actually get more business for your company?

Many website designers produce more and more eye-catching designs with animations

and clever rollover buttons hoping to entice the people onto their sites. This

is the first big mistake; using designs like these will actually decrease your

chances of a high Google rating. Yes, that’s right; all that money you have paid

for the website design could be wasted because no-one will ever find your site.

The reason for this is that before you get people to your site you need to get

the spiderbots to like your site. Spiderbots are pieces of software used by the

search engine companies to trawl the Internet looking at all the websites, and

then having reviewed the sites, they use complex algorithms to rank the sites.

Some of the complex techniques used by web designers cannot be trawled by

spiderbots. They come to your site, look at the HTML code and exit stage right,

without even bothering to rank your site. So, you will not be found on any

meaningful search.

I am amazed how many times I look at websites and I immediately know they are a

waste of money. The trouble is that both the web designers and the company that

paid the money really do not want to know this. In fact, I have stopped playing

the messenger of bad news (too many shootings!); I now work round the problem.

So, optimising a website to be Google friendly is often a compromise between a

visually attractive site and an easy to find site.

The second skill is that of optimising the actual HTML code to be spiderbot

friendly. I put this as different to the web design because you really do need

to be “down and dirty” in the code rather than using an editor like FrontPage,

which is OK for website design. This skill takes lots of time and experience to

develop, and just when you think you have cracked it, the search engine companies

change the algorithms used to calculate how high your site will appear in the

search results.

This is no place for even the most enthusiastic amateur. Results need to be

constantly monitored, pieces of code added or removed, and a check kept on what

the competition are doing. Many people who design their own website feel they

will get searched because it looks good, and totally miss out this step. Without

a strong technical understanding of how spiderbots work, you will always struggle

to get your company on the first results page in Google.

Thirdly, I suggested that copy writing is a skill in its own right. This is the

writing of the actual text that people coming to your site will read. The

Googlebot and other spiderbots like Inktomi, love text – but only when written

well in proper English. Some people try to stuff their site with keywords, while

others put white writing on white space (so spiderbots can see it but humans

cannot).

Spiderbots are very sophisticated and not only will not fall for these tricks,

they may actively penalise your site – in Google terms, this is sandboxing.

Google takes new sites and “naughty” sites and effectively sin-bins them for 3-6

months, you can still be found but not until results page 14 – really useful! As

well as good English, the spiderbots are also reading the HTML code, so the copy

writer also needs an appreciation of the interplay between the two. My

recommendation for anyone copy writing their own site is to write normal,

well-constructed English sentences that can be read by machine and human alike.

The final skill is marketing, after all this is what we are doing – marketing you

site and hence company and products/services on the Web. The key here is to set

the site up to be accessible to the searches that will provide most business to

you. I have seen many sites that can be found as you key in the company name.

Others that can be found by keying in “Accountant Manchester North-West England”,

which is great, except no-one ever actually does that search. So the marketing

skill requires knowledge of a company’s business, what they are really trying to

sell and an understanding of what actual searches may provide dividends.

I hope you will see that professional Search Engine Optimisation companies need

more than a bit of web design to improve your business. Make sure anyone you

choose for SEO work can cover all the bases.

About the author: John Fowler trained as a Mathematican and has worked in the IT industry for over 30 years, much of the time in sales related functions. He now spends his time between being a partner in SEO Gurus and as a sales and management trainer for ICT companies. John can be contacted via http://seogurus.co.uk