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07.20.07
SEO For Google In Five "Easy" Steps
 By
Dave Davies
A few years ago I wrote the article Ten Steps To Higher Search Engine Positioning. The article was well received due to the breakdown of the core requirements for ranking a website being reduced into simple steps.
Well today we're going to break it down into 5 steps. Is it even easier to rank a website today than it was a few years ago? More straight forward? Yes. Less time consuming? Not a chance.
As our company provides guaranteed SEO services for our clients, two things are necessary:
1. We need to know that our tactics work
2. We need to maximize efficiency so we're not having to charge our clients unreasonably high rates
And so we've developed processes by which we can attain maximum results in the least amount of time through carefully developed stages. While we are interested in all the major engines, it is of course Google that we spend the lion's share of our time studying (having never heard a client say, "I don't care about Google, just get me ranking on Ask.com.") Here are the steps we use to optimize websites (including our own) for Google.
Step One: Website Structure
The structure of your website affects the way search engine spiders see your site and thus, affects your rankings. I'm going to assume from the get-go that your site is in a position to be spidered and the internal links followed (i.e. none of the content is hidden due to poor development). This does not mean that the structure is optimized.
The way the code appears on your page affects the way the search engines prioritize specific content. For example, if your navigation appears higher in the code of your web page than the content then it is given a higher priority. The goal then is to make the core sections of your page appear higher in the code than the portions that are not critical to the optimization of each page. Generally the content area of your page contains the majority of the keywords and is more easily optimized and tweaked. For this reason, you will want the content of your page to appear higher in the code. This is especially true if you have image-based navigation.
The methods for doing this differ depending on how your site was initially built. If your website was built using tableless design practices (ideal) then the matter is "simple". Now, I can't get into all the details here as this is a huge area unto itself. There are many great sites, articles and forums on CSS that get into this area of structural optimization in detail and where you will find many helpful forum members willing to help out and answer questions. Or of course you could hire a professional developer who already knows how to do this in which case it will take a fraction of the time. This will depend on your resources, time and of course - whether you're a do-it-yourselfer simply interested in learning another web development skill.
If learning a new development skill appeals to you, here are some useful resources you'll want to check out:
· CSS Zengarden
· DezWozHere
· Designing Without Tables Using CSS
If your website is designed using tables the solution is actually much easier though less ideal. As Beanstalk's Mary Davies wrote about in her article on Table Structures, with table-based designs the issue is resolved by simply structuring the cell layout in such a manner that the spiders "read" the content before the navigation and/or other, less easily optimized portions on your page. Knowing that a picture is worth a thousand words I'll resurrect the one used by Mary to illustrate how this is done.
Read the Rest of the Article.
About the Author:
Dave Davies is the CEO of Beanstalk Search Engine Positioning, Inc. One of the few SEO firms to offer guaranteed optimization services. Visit their site for a free SEO & web design review and their blog to keep updated on the latest going on in the search engine world.
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