Optimizing for Google

Google is the most popular search engine on the internet. If you wish to generate visitors to your website using search engines, Google is the search engine to concentrate on. All of the techniques used to optimize a website for the Google search engine also apply to other search engines, such as MSN and Yahoo. If you follow these Google optimization techniques you can improve your websites position in Google searches, and therefore generate more visitors to your website.

On page SEO

On page SEO is the optimizing of the contetns and parameters of each webpage of your website. By optimizing a web page Google can better identify the topic and contents of the webpage. The better optmized a webpage is, the higher in search engines results the page will appear. The content of the page is also one of the most important factors, so optimize the page once you have written then content of the page. Read more about on page SEO.

Off page SEO

Off page SEO is the process of increasing a webpages importance, by using factors not on the webpage itself. The optimiation generally consists if gaining more backlinks for the webpage. By performing good off page SEO for your key webpages you can improve a webpages position in Google search engine results. Read more about off page SEO.

Keyword research and choice

Success with the Google search engine requires careful consideration of a websites topic and the keywords of the topic to concentrate on. Typically a website that deals with a single topic, rather than several or many, will enjoy better success with keyword searches for the topic. Choosing the right keywords within the topic will maximise a websites success with search engine searches. It is important to carry out extensive topic and keyword research before you start to write and optimize your content. Read more about topic and keyword research and optimizing your pages for keywords.

Content

To Google the most important factor of a webpage is its content. Only pages with good quality and quantity of content will appear in search engine results. This is because search engine users are looking for information, and information is found in content. Before carrying out any on or off page SEO you must research and write good content for the page. Content is king with Google, get this right and optimization is a lot easier. Read more about why content is king, how to source content for your website and building content rich websites.

Google's guidelines

Google publishes their own guidelines to creating web pages , which we discuss further.