How do I succeed on Google?

In targetting your website at Search Engines, Google is commonly seen as the most important one in which to succeed.

Others include Altavista, Yahoo, Lycos, Fastweb, and Hotbot. On top of these there also a further collection of specialist search engines and portals which may be of relevance depending on the particular website being marketed, and it's actual subject topic.

Generally speaking, websites which are successful on Google are almost guaranteed to be similarly successful on the other mainstream search engines. This, on top of the fact that Google is currently the most popular Search facility, makes aiming a design at achieving success on Google as highly sensible, if not compulsory.

There are several key rules to gaining high rankings on Google, namely:

There is no substitute for extensive amounts of subject matter on each of the main pages of the website.

When linking your site to others make sure that each external site does have similar subject matter and that it has a reciprocal back to your own site.

When selecting the content for your meta tags always ensure that each has similar content to each other, and, where possible, to the actual content of the page.

Vary the title page from one page to another. By altering the keywords used in the Title Tags and perhaps re-ordering them, a website will considerably broaden its success across diffrerent keyword searches. Some websites fail by keeping their title tag format too consisttent, varying only their keyword amd description sufficiently. Google always sees the Title Tag content as paramount to how its indexes each page. Failure to vary title tags wil also lead to searches coming up with several pages of the site at once, which represents wasted opportunities.

When using links always consider the fact that their prominence on the page will aid the ratings given to the pages linked to, as will the frequency of links to each page, and the frequency of pages linked up to each page.

Attempting to 'fudge' search engines with bunches of keywords on hidden sections of pages or individual keyword-heavy gateway pages can often be successful.
However, Google is often seen as the 'cleverest' of search engines and frowns upon pages that it deems are trying to fool it. Thus success here will take longer and requires a closer eye on the progress of each page after submitting.

When setting Alt Tags it is very important to consider your website and the type of visitors that you expect to receive. Generally we would recommend that Alt Tags are used as a further tool to pushing your website up the search listings.
This would be achieved by filling them full of keywords and phrases in a similar way to the meta tags. However, an important point to consider is that certain users such as the disabled rely on Alt Tags as an aid to navigating the site, where normal means may not be sufficient. Filling them with anything other than relevant names may confuse them.

When submitting it is always important to pay considerable attention to the index page (first page of the website) and try to have as many pages linking off of it as possible.

An excellent way of ensuring that Google spiders as many of your pages as possible is by providing a sitemap. Make sure it is linked to from a prominent part of the homepage via a simple tex link.

As mentioned previously large amounts of page content are very important in gaining high rankings on Google. Furthermore, simply filling pages full of blurb will not be successful. The content needs to consistently contain the keywords and phrases at which you are aiming the meta and alt tags. This should convince the Google robots that the page really is meta tagged accurately and not simply tampered with to boost rankings artificially.

If you require further technical and more general advice on how to make your site 'Google-friendly' you should visit the webmaster advice section on the Google website.

It is also very important to avoid paying too much attention to search engines at the expense of your own design. Remember that bringing people to your website is all well and good, but if your actual website loses its required impact then it's all pointless.