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Getting your website to appear in Google
When it comes to getting your website to appear in the Google search results there are literally thousands of contributing factors, but there are a number of things you can do to improve your chances of ranking well inside google.
- Add your site to google. Once your site has been developed, you can ask google to come and scan the content by submitting the URL here: http://www.google.com.au/addurl/
Google will generally find your site without doing this, but it can speed the process up a little. - Go to Advanced Tools / Search Optimisation and change the META content and the page titles. Make sure the META description is an acurate summary of the content on your page. By default, the page title of your website is 'Main Page' - it is vital that you change this to a keyword rich, relevant phase such as "Melbourne based wedding photography - Mary Smith". Around 6 words for your page title is ideal.
- Text content. The more text you can add to your website the better. This is what google is really interested in, so add some custom pages and also text next to each piece if appropriate. Ensure any text you add contains relevant keywords.
- Links. Google places a high emphasis on 'inbound links' when determining the importance of a website. Each time someone links to you, this is considered a 'vote' by google who will then love you that little bit more. Try to gather as many inbound links as possible by being an active participant on blogs and other social networks, and also 'swap links' with businesses that compliment yours. For example, if you are a wedding photographer and there is a particular reception center where you shoot a lot of weddings, you might suggest to the people that run the reception center that they put a link to you on their website, and you put a link to them on yours. This kind of link swapping is not as effective as it was a few years ago, but it certainly doesn't hurt provided the website you are swapping the link with is in a similar category as yours (ie weddings).
- Site Display Options. If you subscribe to the Full version of Online Galleries, go to Design Options / Site Display Options and select the option that will display the Flash version by default and automatically redirect users who do not have the flash plugin to an HTML version. Google is getting better at scanning content inside Flash movies, but it will still be happier scanning the html version (which contains the same content anyway), so selecting this option will send google off to the html version. Online Galleries has been developed in a way that means if a user clicks a link in the google results that takes them to the HTML version, the system will automatically redirect them to the relevant page inside the flash version - so you get the best of both worlds!
- Patience. Achieving good search engine results can take months of effort, depending on how competitive the keywords are that you are targetting. If you are the Full version of Online Galleries, link your site to Google Analytics and the Google Webmaster tools so you can analyse your traffic and see where you can improve your search engine optimisation efforts. See this tutorial for more info on this.
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