I sometimes wonder about all this “Google Secrets” stuff. Every other e-mail stuffing into my inbox seems to be on about beating Google, cheating Google, using Google…. Do they ever stop to think that perhaps if they played the game according to Google’s rules, life might just be a whole lot easier.
I’m often flummoxed by the lengths to which folks will go to try and ‘cheat’, when if they only expended half as much effort in doing it legally, they could probably achieve the same, (if not better) results and probably in half the time. Maybe it’s a symptom of the world we live in nowadays? Who knows?
The fact is that Google shares pretty much most of her ‘secrets’ anyway. You don’t need to hire an expensive SEO consultant to tell you what you should be doing. Google has produced her very own SEO Starter Guide and it’s a breeze to understand, no matter how new or technically challenged you may be. In it, laid bare for the whole world to see, are Google’s ‘Top Ten SEO Tips‘.
- Make sure each page has it’s own unique title - this lets everyone (including Google) know what the page is about. So page 1, page 2, … doesn’t really count. If you have a page about ‘red cars’ then that is what the title should say. ‘Blue cars’ should have their own page title.
- Provide a ‘meta description‘ – this just expands on your title. A couple of sentences (160 characters max) summarising the content on the page.
- Useful ‘urls’ – again, this is like your titles. Page 1 doesn’t tell anybody anything useful, and neither does a url that says ‘mysite.com/somefolder/1239/47.html
- Easy navigation – exactly what it says. Make your content easy for folks to find or they’ll go looking for it someplace else.
- Quality Content – make it easy to read and understand, and keep it focused on your chosen keywords (remember the title tag?). If you’ve titled a page ‘red cars’ make sure the content relates to red cars and not blue ones.
- Anchor Text – when providing a ‘clickable’ link, let your reader know what to expect at the other end. ‘Click Here’ doesn’t help as much as ‘red car prices.’
- Header tags – make sure you use these correctly. The size of the font helps to tell not only Google, but also your readers what is the really important stuff on the page. The bigger the font, the more weight you are giving to it’s importance.
- Don’t forget about optimising the images on your site. Yet again, Google advises providing alt text and using descriptive file names instead of just ‘image.jpg’.
- Robots.txt – I recently had cause to discover just how important this little file is so don’t underestimate it’s importance in helping the search engines identify which parts of your site to crawl, and which parts to leave alone.
- Using the ‘nofollow‘ attribute. Great if you don’t want to share any of your hard earned page rank. Or if you’re linking to a site that perhaps doesn’t have the best reputation in the world, and you want to preserve your own reputation. However, if that’s the case why are you linking to it in the first place?
So what’s the deal about Google having secrets? Maybe it’s just that some folks think these little steps are too much like hard work, so instead they’ll invest huge amounts of time, energy and money into trying to discover what the real ‘secrets’ are. Sheesh. Talk about making life difficult for yourself.
It doesn’t matter what sort of website you’re building. Whether you want a huge authority niche site, or a couple of pages selling your business opportunity or product, if you follow Google’s SEO starter guide, you’ll be well on the way to getting higher search engine listings, while everyone else is still running around trying to figure out the ‘easy way‘.
Whether you like it or not, Google is the one who is probably going to send you visitors (or not) and ask yourself why the hell would she do that if you’re not prepared to play by her rules. If you came into my home, I’d expect you to abide by my rules. And if I came into yours, I’d fully expect to abide by your rules.
Now you can argue till the cows come home about all the so called Google Secrets, but you’re really just wasting time. And that time could be better spent on taking a few basic SEO measures which will boost your rankings (and hence your earnings) a damn site quicker. 
