Getting results from Google (Search Engine Optimization)

Getting the best possible placement in search engine results is a common request from Main Street Sites customers.

There are several factors to consider here. First, we'll assume Google is your target search engine (given that they get 80% of the traffic, that makes sense).

Getting your search results to appear at the top of the page is a combination of your Google Page Rank and the extent to which the content on your site matches the keywords being searched.  These elements are described below.

You can also pursue paid placement of your site in Google's search results.  Please visit Google directly if you want to explore Google's Adwords program.

Getting noticed

The first thing you must do is to get indexed by Google. Google will not find your site automatically. You need to have a link on the internet to your site to be indexed by Google's "webcrawlers" (these are programs that search the internet for pages to add to their index).  Once another site is linking to you it shouldn't take more than a day or so for you go show up in Google's results (assuming that the site linking to you is indexed already).

You can also submit your site to Google directly and ask to be indexed.  Here is the link for manual submission to Google.

Google Page Rank

Being indexed is the first step, but it doesn't help you rise in the list of results.

The first thing to work on here is your page rank  This is Google's measure of your site's importance. Google ranks all web pages on a scale of 1-10.  This ranking is primarly based on how many websites link to you, and the quality of those sites.  The more highly-regarded the sites, the more impact a link will have on your page rank.

To see your page rank, you can install the Google Toolbar (go to toolbar.google.com to install this tool) and then visit your site.  Below is the home page of the New York Times site when this toolbar bar is used.  Note the page rank of the New York Times home page is 8/10.  Most small business sites are in the 2-5 range.

The only way to increase your page rank is to have more sites link to you.  Community directories are a good place to start for this.  You can also ask other small business owners to link to you (they will most likely ask you to put a link back to their site on your site).

Keyword Optimization

Deciding which keywords are important to you is a critical step in improving your position in Google's results.   Improving your page rank gives an overall boost to your position, but improving your keyword optimization gives you a specific boost (but only for the search terms that you are targeting).  By definition, you can't optimize a web page for lots of keywords.  You can however, create separate webpages and optimize each one for a different set of keywords. 

Premium website users (and Online Registration users) can use the Page Vault to create multiple pages on their Main Streets Sites websites.  Remember though - you'll need to create links to these pages for Google to find them.

For example:

If you are promoting music lessons in Springfield, Massachusetts, you might be interested in making sure you will place well for a search like "music lessons springfield".  To do this, make sure this phrase appears multiple times on your home page. It should definitely appear in the first sentence, and should also appear in the page title. 

Even better, when you're asking other people to link to you, ask them to put these keywords into the text they will use for the link.  In other words, they would add a link like this: Click here for great music lessons in Springfield. 

If you are also promoting birthday parties in Sprinfield, you can do the same thing again, but this time create a second page on your site that is optimized for the keywords "birthday party springfield."  You can create as many optimized pages as you like in this way.  However, you'll need to promote each one if you want it to score well in Google search results.

You may find it best to pick a particular target set of keywords to begin with, and track your progress over time.

Disclaimer: Google does not choose to reveal how they calculate page rank or how they arrange seach results. These techniques are based on generally available information as to how a site should be optimized for the best possible results.

To learn more

Here is Google's take on this topic