So, you have a good website and web design for your website or you have just launched a new website for your business and now you're eager to generate more sales leads. Your web designer has given you all these ideas about putting quality content out there so you can attract viewers to the site.
But before you start creating the content, you need to stop a minute and think what that means. While your web designer may be an expert at aesthetics, he/she may not necessarily know your business and your customers as well as you do.
Sure, in order to attract customers to your site, you need to provide them with engaging content, but one other point plays an important role in drawing visitors to a site: your site must also be "Google friendly". If either of these essential ingredients are missing, your website will not be as huge a success!
Befriending Google
In some cases, web design that's "Google unfriendly" can be even worse than not having a website at all. That's because when you don't have a site there's no risk of being penalised by Google. That risk is very real when your website runs afoul of Google's "rules".
Here are a few tips on how to get more website visitors - the Google friendly way!
1) Give Them What They Want
Ask your website designer to help you create content of the highest quality for each and every page on the site; but more so on the home page and landing pages, because that's the window into your website world. The more engaged visitors feel with your content when they arrive on your website, the more they will continue to visit it, as well as spread the word about it within their circle of friends and family. More visitors will lead to even more visitors. It's the snowball effect.
2) Number of Google Friendly Links
A website targeting Ireland and Irish consumers with uniquely Irish content, is likely to attract other website owners, with similar interests, to link to your site. Give thought to the words that you use to build your content.
Ask your web design expert to research whether those words are typically what users will use when searching for your content. If your site achieves a SME (Subject Matter Expert) status, it will attract other website/blog owners attention, and they will link to it. The more quality links you have from other websites, the higher your website will rank as "Google friendly".
3) Quality of Your Google Friendly Links
When another web site owner or web designer links to your site, Google interprets that link as a "vote of confidence" in your site's content, thereby triggering Google to award your website a higher rank. However, in order to be Google-friendly, those links to your site should be of a high quality. Sites of dubious nature, that link to your site, can have an inverse impact on your site's ranking.
To maintain your Google-friendly status, ask your web design team to periodically check to ensure that only respectable sites are linking to yours. You can disassociate your self with bad inlinks with the Disavow tool - https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/disavow-links-main
4) Natural Links
It is quite natural for the website design for cloth suppliers in Ireland to include links to websites of other fashion retailers. However, Google would consider it rather unnatural for clothiers to link to, for example, gambling sites, or sites selling property.
Similarly, when a web designer creates links on a web page that provide additional information about the topic on the current page, it would be construed as natural. But linking to content that's totally unrelated, maybe even spam, is considered unnatural. So make sure your links and backlinks are generally natural.
If you want your website to be construed as Google-friendly, then your web design should include only natural links. Google considers any links designed to "fool" its page ranking algorithm as unnatural. Websites with unnatural links are penalised heavily.
5) Accessible Content
Your web designer should keep accessibility in mind during the entire web design process. To be Google-friendly, the site must not only be accessible for humans, but also to Google's crawlers, creepers, spiders and BOTs. A good text browser, like Lynx, can help when examining a site's use of Frames, Cookies, DHTML, JavaScript and Flash.
If these features aren't easily decipherable or accessible by your text browser, then Google's spiders will find them challenging to crawl through. Any content that's not accessible by the Crawler will not be appropriately ranked to easily draw in visitors. Also think about your mobile device visitors – what kind of web experience do they get?
6) Don't Use Content Hiding/Cloaking Technology
Any web design that uses "hidden" pages or "cloaked" content is bound to be seen as unfriendly by Google. A web designer might think that building "crawler only" content is a great way to get page ranking pushed higher.
Not true! Google's algorithms are extremely intelligent, and can quickly sniff through these tactics. If your website design targets Ireland and Irish visitors, then those pages must all be seen by your Irish visitors. Hidden pages have ulterior motives attached to them, and Google will penalise you for using them.
7) Google Friendly Images
If you use images as part of your web design, and you should, then refrain from using them as a means to highlight/display key content (Brand Names, Company Names, Product Names etc.).
Google's crawlers are unable to recognise or read text embedded as graphics, and that will cost you page ranking points if you were presuming that Google will be able to ready your words that are displayed using images rather than raw page text. Ask your web design team to use "Alt Tags" or the "Alternate Text" feature of images to define key text messages associated with photos. Those can readily be crawled and contribute to your page rank.
Let Common Sense Prevail
Using these few common sense approaches to website design can go a long way in making your website Google friendly, and when Google is friends with your website, it will reward it through higher SERP (Search Engine Result Page) rankings. The higher up you appear in the SERPs, the more visitors you are going to attract. If you have any questions about your web content and getting more sales through your website give us a call or email for a chat.
