Using Google's Services to Market your Website

Why Google marketing? There has been a lot written on line about how website owners should not be over-dependant upon Google for their search engine rankings. We live in a changing world where just a few years ago there were several search engines competing for pole position, and just a few years before that you were more or less guaranteed to be visible online just by having decent website content and passable onsite optimisation. There is, in short, no guarantee that Google will always have the control it does now over search engine traffic and the means by which visitors find your website. However, Google also provides a good range of facilities to help you with marketing your website online, and it makes good sense to make use of these.

Google has gone to a great deal of effort to provide opportunities for marketing your business online, and not all of these rely on paid advertising such as Pay Per Click, or require you to invest in expensive backlinking campaigns in order to get good organic rankings. In fact, there is a lot you can do to help yourself before you need the services of professional search engine marketers.

Google Images

Harnessing Google Images is a great way to attract extra traffic to your site.

For organic search, Google finds the images by the context of the web page, by the name of the image itself and thirdly by the information found in the alt attribute, so these are what you need to work on in order to push your web site up in the organic rankings on Google Images. Link building to your images page or gallery page will also help.

To get your images ranking well on Google Images for your major keyphrases, you need to make sure that you name your images descriptively, using the principle 'say what you see'. Also, make your alt attributes descriptive and ensure that you have no empty alt attributes in any of the image tags on your site. Be specific, as general terms will be of less help to you. Any text found near the image also counts.

You can also extend your range by targeting different images for different key phrases. Don't try to squeeze all your keyphrases into one image since this will attenuate your success for each individual key phrase. The same goes for being over descriptive. You need to be concise.

Don't expect immediate results - Google images are only updated irregularly. Some sources reckon every two months, others say its more like six months.

Google Images don't have a paid for listing section in the way that organic search results for webpages have a corresponding PPC section. In fact, Google doesn't provide paid-for advertising for images due to copyright issues, which would cause it all sort of legal complications if it were to charge for displaying images.

The only way to submit images to Google Images, is to submit the webpages themselves. It is however, possible to get an image removed from Google Images by providing instructions for the bots in robot.txt.

Google Images also has a volunteer programme (Google Image Labeler) which it is worth being aware of. Volunteers are paired into groups of two and provided with random images catalogued on Google Images and are asked to provide relevant key phrases/tags to describe them. The idea behind this is that, these volunteers will help Google build up relevant key words by which these images can be found. It is possible to put your site forward for this service; although you might well be better off describing your images yourself, using the image name and alt attribute, rather than letting an anonymous third party take control of it.

Google Local Business Center

Google Local Business Center is one of the best sources of advertising available to you if you are selling your products and services locally; and what's even better, it costs nothing. You don't necessarily need to pay for a listing on PPC (Pay-Per-Click) advertising, if you harness the power of advertising on Google Local Business Center. So long as not too many of your competitors are using it, advertising here will get you right to the top of the front page of Google Web for your key words in your area.

You should be aware that your results will usually, but not always appear on Google UK (the Web) rather than Google UK (pages from the UK); however, this is still a great way of generating extra traffic, and if competitors in neighbouring towns and cities aren't using it, you even stand a chance of ranking there. Results are ordered geographically from the epicentre of the location searched for e.g. for a search on software training Nottingham', companies closest to Nottingham city centre will get in first and only the first 10 get on the main results page. With a little practice; however, it is possible to beat websites for companies based closer to the geographical centre than your own even if you are out of town and have lots of competitors closer than yourself.

Once you submit your details, you will need to wait anywhere between four to six weeks for the listing to appear, and it may take a little longer if you verify your contact details by mail rather than over the phone.

XML Sitemaps

When marketing your website it is important that as much of your content as possible is catalogued by the search engines, as it all counts, to some extent, to the total number of search terms that prospects might find you by. In order to do this you need to make sure that all of your web pages are being looked at. To ensure that you get fully indexed by Google you can create an XML sitemap and submit it to Google Webmaster Tools. This will provide the search engine with a recordx of every web page on your site, so that the search engine will then be able to come round and look at them all when the web site is spidered.

Sometimes search engines have trouble finding your individual pages without a little help like this. For instance, some scripting conventions used in .asp or .php sites (regularly ecommerce sites) can render many pages invisible to the search engines. Submitting an XML site map will help compensate for this.

As an aside, Yahoo will let you submit web pages individually to the search engine which can be a big help. It is not possibly to submit long, messy URLs, however, so this can be a limiting factor for some web sites.

You can create an XML site map here: http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/

Google UK marketing

If you are marketing your website in the UK alone, then you really do need to be Google aware from day one. If you buy a .com domain name you may have a little difficulty getting onto the Google UK Data Center straight away, so it is usually preferable to by a .co.uk domain name to start off with. However, if you have bought a .com domain name and you are not appearing on the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS) for Google UK, there are a couple of things you can do.

1. Make sure that your address details are on the site and clearly state that you are based in the UK. It is preferable to get an address line on every page if you can. Remember that many English place names are also the place names of towns and cities in other countries as well, so you need to be specific here. Google goes on the information you provide.
   
   
2. Get 'UK' into your title tag on at least one page
   
   
3. Use UK English spelling conventions e.g. “search engine opimisation” rather than “search engine optimization”, “colour” rather than “color” and so forth.
   
   
4. Submit your website to Google UK. It can take a while for data to migrate across to the Google UK data center when you do this, so don't despair if this doesn't happen over night.
   
   

Contact an SEO consultant in Leeds

E: info@foursquareinnovations.co.uk
T: 0844 493 3699

Related information about SEO:

SEO: an integrated approach (presentation opens in a new window)

SEO information and help

Internet marketing tips - onsite SEO (downloadable pdf opens in a new Window)