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Many of you are concerned with ranking well in Google searches. The "science" of making this happen is termed "SEO" by the industry -- Search Engine Optimization. I put the word science in quotes, because I feel this is still as much art as it is science. Google doesn't tell us how their algorithm ranks search results, and with good reason -- as soon as they would publish this, everyone would scramble to find ways to beat the algorithm. Google doesn't want that, they want to give you really useful search results, not results where those that figured out how to scam the algorithm win.

But that doesn't mean that we don't know how to get websites to rank highly in Google searches. There are several simple principles that will lead to good rankings.

Your content is really important. If your site is about buying wine, then make sure that the text used on the pages of your site focus on that. This sounds kind of obvious, but it's important since Google looks at all the text on your website's pages in order to figure out what the focus of the site is. Too many different subjects or topics can weaken your Google ranking for all of them.

Focus on 3-5 keyword phrases. Try to find 3-5 phrases that are the phrases a user would search for in Google to find your website. We can then focus on making sure these phrases are used heavily within the text of your webiste. I can also add them to special HTML tags that aren't visible but that are seen by Google.

Mobile is important. Google is now including the "mobile-friendliness" of websites in the formula they use to rank search results. This means that when a user is searching Google from a mobile phone, websites that are mobile-friendly will rank higher than sites that are not mobile-friendly (all other things being equal). If your website does not display well on mobile phones, your google ranking will suffer.

Here is a good, short, article that will also give you a good summary of these principles. This article is written for web designers, so it's a bit more technical that what I have written.

Making your website rank well with search engines like Google is something we have been helping our clients with for 15 years. It's really not rocket science. Using these simple principles above will get you 90% of the way there. We don't even charge extra for this service because it is so simple to do. If you're concerned about your Google ranking, be sure to contact us so we can chat about a strategy.
 

Steve Wehr