Episode #78
The preamble: I’m the computer techie guy in the house and have minimal knowlege about web programming so I am posing the question on her behalf. My wife has a website that was created by a student of hers for free. (teentourtheatre.com) It was created very fast and cheaply as the programmer used the minimum tools to get the site functional. However it runs fine as it is a html site and requires very little to do what it needs to do. The question! : What does her site need to have to help her show up in the first positions in Google? According to Google there are things she can do (without paying Google) to optimize her site when it is searched. Right now when she types in the exact name of the company it doesn’t even come up. Thanks very much, you guys have a great show and a very talented team.
Steve, Pierrefonds, QC
The first thing you need to do is to make sure that Google is indexing your site. There’s a place on the “About Google” link where you can submit your website to their index.
To get your site categorized properly, you need to make sure that your top page is very specific about what you do — put actual CONTENT in the first 1500 characters in your page that explains clearly what you do…that will help the web-crawling spider programs understand better what your site is about, and to help distinguish it from other pages that may be similar. Also be sure to give your page a very clear title. It also helps to register your page for more than one year; that way Google can be more sure that you’ll be around for longer.
There aren’t any special tricks that you can use to get your websites into the number position on Google besides having a lot of legitimate websites link back to your webpage — in fact Google doesn’t take kindly to your trying to game the system by creating fake websites linking to your page…in fact trying to trick Google into thinking your page is more popular than it really is might actually get you banned from their index.