Citrus Skies

Adventures in Google-land

23 May 2006

As any website owner will know, its often tempting to check up on how your site is performing with the major search engines. The results can bring dismay when you can’t find your site at all or joy when you discover you’ve moved up a whole three places.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is often viewed as a “dark art”, filled with many ethical grey areas. We all know that there’s no magic formula for topping the search engine charts (and you should avoid any company that tries to tell you otherwise) but there are certain steps we can take to help the process along.

• Structure your site with clean, simple (X)HTML
• Add rich content that will be as meaningful to humans as (you hope) it will be to the search engines.
• Update your site content regularly.
• Obtain links to your site from sites that are relevant to your content.
• Be patient and be prepared to wait in the sandbox if your site is brand new.

Hmmm patience, that can be a tricky one.

Even if you follow these simple steps, there are still many potholes along the way for the weary search engine adventurer to stumble into.

A few weeks ago, I signed up for the Google Sitemaps program, mostly to satisfy my own curiosity regarding how it worked. I’ve found that Google already knows about the majority, if not all, of the pages on this site (thank you, semantic XHTML), but its the other gems of information that have intrigued and, sometimes, concerned me.

For example, I discovered that the list of common (i.e. indexed) words for CitrusSkies.co.uk included neither “web” nor “site” – pretty major omissions for a web design studio’s own website. I checked and re-checked the site content, confirming that both words appeared several times on the home page alone. Only when I resorted to performing a keyword density check did I discover that the problem might actually be using those two words too often.

By simply describing the work of Citrus Skies, the site had probably been deemed guilty of “keyword stuffing”, considered as a spamming technique by the search engines. No one knows (or no one is telling) exactly when “keyword-rich text” becomes “keyword-stuffed text”, but some suggest that no single keyword should exceed 7% of the total word count on a page. With “web” and “site” weighing in at 12% and 9% of the Citrus Skies home page word count respectively, this would appear to be the cause of their omission from Google.

In an attempt to resolve the problem, I’ve replaced several occurrences of the two words “web site” with the single word “website”. Will it be enough to get these words out of Google-land jail? I don’t know yet, but thanks to the Sitemap program, I can keep an eye on my indexed keywords to find out.

Meanwhile, over on MSN, Citrus Skies tops the search rankings, but not for anything even remotely related to web design. Instead its for ‘gomez how we operate lyrics’ thanks to a single article I wrote about a new album I’d bought. Bizarre.

Article Tags: optimise, patience, search, web, website, search engines