One of the most common queries we get is ‘when will my site show up in Google?’ Fair enough too – with a massive 67% of the search engine market share, getting your site in Google should be a top priority once you’ve got it live…

We all use Google because in most cases the search results are good - we can quickly find  what we’re searching for. That is the key to Google’s success – they take your search term and compare it to the billions of webpages they have indexed from the web and return a set of results it considers to be closest to your query.

Early on in the piece you have 2 stages to getting your site to show up. The first, is to get indexed (stored) in Google’s system in the first instance, the second – have those indexed pages well tricked up to make Google want to show them as high as possible in the results page when people search for a website in your industry.

Get Indexed.

Getting indexed is pretty easy – Google’s process of taking snapshots of all the internet’s webpages is called ‘crawling’ and it crawls by following links (a link is anything that you click to navigate to another website or webpage). So, if a webpage has zero links to it then Google will probably never find it. So get linked to from an already crawled site and it’s only a matter of time – allow 1 – 4+ weeks to see your site available in Google’s results pages. Once you're indexed, the journey begins...

Having Healthy Pages.

Having healthy pages has two primary benefits: firstly, people will want to visit your page(s) – a good quality page promotes sharing – and so, the next natural stage in this process is that people will begin to share your page(s) by linking to them from their own. For example – let's say Tracy has a great regular blog for first time mums and recently she was lucky enough to have a prominent nappy manufacturer link to her page from their website, huge kudos to Tracy considering a large corporation is essentially ‘voting’ for Tracy’s fairly obscure website. This linking system – called inbound links – is what Google then uses to determine a page’s popularity – and naturally if Google can see a page is popular then it must be what the people want and so it’s more likely to put that page up the top. Google’s popularity system is commonly referred to as ‘PageRank’ – and PageRank is, for the large part, generated by getting good quality inbound links to your website.

Making Great Pages

So you get great links by having great pages and when it comes to quality on-page optimisation of your website, there are a few vital parts that you should be considering the most. The top 3 are:

• Keywords |  NOT the META tag. Forget the keywords meta tag, Google no longer uses it. Keywords are words that people are using to find people like you. They should be properly researched and grouped to give your pages ‘themes’ that have focus. With all our clients, we undergo keyword research to determine best keywords to match their websites' pages.
• Title Tag |  Displays in the browser window, as the title of a Google search result and is one of the most potent tags on a page- keep it to about 65 characters and ensure it has your top-level keywords in it!
• Description Tag  | The piece of text that shows up in a Google search. Try to keep this to under 150 characters to avoid Google chopping it off, and ensure it’s relevant to the page and uses your top-level keywords.
• Great Content  | Ultimately, the thing (hopefully) buying from you and your site is not a robot but a real live person – so make sure you have an engaging and simple to use site, that is easy to use, fast to load, presents well and does whatever it’s supposed to do without any unnececssary clutter. Try to create new and fresh content or be updating your site to ensure it doesn’t go stale where Google’s concerned.

While there’s plenty more to the above – hopefully this should clarify the basics in your mind so you can understand the underlying foundations of what makes a site perform well in Google, and work to increase your chances of a top-level rank in the future. Good luck - and be sure to contact us with any queries you might have for your website.