So Google Can't Find Your Website...

It's amazing how many times people have contacted us and complained that their current website isn't showing up in Google results. It usually doesn't take very long to figure out why.

Now Search Engine Optimization (SEO), a service we happen to offer, is an extremely involved process. For many keywords and phrases, it requires a great deal of strategic code manipulation to get to the top, and constant adjustment to stay there. However, there are some basic rules to keep in mind when developing your site to ensure that Google has the best chance of finding you:

1. Use real text. You'd be amazed how many times companies bury the text of their sites within Flash animations or graphic files. These may look pretty, and you have more control over font selection and layout, but search engines cannot read them. Needless to say, that's a huge problem.

2. Keep it short and simple. Pick just a few keywords/phrases to optimize for on each page of your site (ideally one or two) and sprinkle those words as liberally as you can throughout your page copy and meta tags (see #3 below). If you try to optimize for 50 different words on a single page, you'll completely dilute your relevance when the search engines crawl the site.

3. Match your meta tags. Every page should have a title, keywords and description in the "head" content of the code. These are called meta tags, and they should match each other as closely as possible.

4. Upload an XML sitemap for every domain. A sitemap is simply a document that lists the pages on your site that are available for crawling. You can visit this site to easily create a sitemap based on your site, then submit them to Google and Yahoo! (you'll need accounts with both).

There you have it, four simple (and free) tools that will help to increase your visibility on the web and drive more traffic to your site. It certainly won't replace an SEO professional, but it's a pretty good start. Happy optimizing!