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In Part 1 of this series we talked about the importance of achieving a high ranking for your Web site in the various search engines and directories on the Internet. In Part 2 of this series we began to describe how to optimize your Web site to achieve a high ranking on the Internet's number one search engine, http://www.google.com. This article continues to describe optimizing your Web site for Google.
Links into your site from other sites AND links out to other sites
 Google will consider your site more important, and give it a higher PageRank (PR) (their measure of how important your page is) if there are other major sites that link to your site. Actually, the more related sites that you can get to link to your site the better, although you want to be sure that in the link text from other sites, your keywords are used prominently as follows:
<A HREF="http://www.princess-hospital-winnipeg.org/index.html">Princess Hospital Winnipeg </A>
It is very important to get your site listed in both YAHOO! (http://www.yahoo.com) and Open Directory (http://www.dmoz.org), both of which Google considers very important in the PageRank portion of their algorithm.
YAHOO! Offers a free submit service for non-commercial sites. First you must search their site for keywords or regional areas related to your organization, to find the directory you think your Web site belongs in. In the case of the fictitious Princess Hospital located in Winnipeg Manitoba, I did a search at http://www.yahoo.com on the word Manitoba and then on the word Health and clicked on Care Providers, which resulted in the following directory.
http://dir.yahoo.com/Regional/Countries/ Canada/Provinces_and_Territories/Manitoba/Health/Care_Providers/
I would then click the "Suggest a Site" button at the top right of that page, and use the Standard Submission form for noncommercial sites.
In the case of Open Directory, (which has lately become very difficult to get listed in due to slow response times) you must also search for the directory you think your site should be located in, by doing a search on keywords related to your organization. For Princess Hospital Winnipeg, I searched http://www.dmoz.org for the word Manitoba, and then on the word Health, which resulted in the following directory being shown:
http://dmoz.org/Health/Medicine/Facilities/Hospitals/North_America/Canada/Manitoba/
At the top of the screen on this page, you would click on "add URL", and follow the directions for submitting your site. Note: It has recently become difficult to get a response from Open Directory when trying to get a site listed in their directory, but the time is worth it.
It is important that you have a good description of your site prepared before submitting to YAHOO! and Open Directory.
TIP: YAHOO! Can be sticky about their listing requirements. Make sure you have your physical street address and contact information on every page of your Web site if possible.
Additional factors to consider when optimizing for Google
META Description tag
Although Google does not consider the words that appear inside the META description tag in its ranking algorithm, it may still use a portion of what appears in this tag as part of your listing that appears in the actual search engine listing. Therefore it is important that you have a good META description tag. For example:
<meta name="description" content="Princess Hospital Winnipeg - one of the premier cancer care and cancer research facilities in Canada.">
Google may or may not use your description tag as part of your search engine listing. It may pull your site description from a variety of sources on your page including body text containing keywords, heading text, the first ALT tag (used for a text description of an image) on your page, the copyright information on your page, or even your navigation bar.
Make sure you include your keywords and description in the first ALT tag on your page, high in your body text, and make sure to use your keywords in your META description tag.
TIP: While Google no longer uses the META Keyword tag as part of its ranking algorithm, there may be other small engines that do. For that reason, you should include this tag following the META Description tag on your Web pages. For example, on the Princess Hospital Winnipeg page, we use the following META keyword tag:
<meta name="keywords" content="Princess Hospital Winnipeg, cancer care, cancer research, planned giving, princess hospital winnipeg planned giving program, princess hospital Winnipeg">
Images and ALT Tags
If possible, try to name at least one of the images on your Web page with your keywords, and describe the image using an ALT tag, with your keywords included in the description, as follows:
<img src="http://www.plannedlegacy.com/seo/princess-hospital-winnipeg.jpg" width="300" height="276" align="right" alt="Princess Hospital Winnipeg - cancer care and cancer research hospital.">
Keywords in URL
If many cases you will see Web sites with domain names and URLs that seemingly have nothing to do with their organizations name or type. In the case of our fictitious Princess Hospital Winnipeg, it could very easily have had a URL such as PHW.org. While this is easy to remember, it does help in Google to have a keyword rich URL such as Princess-Hospital-Winnipeg.org.
Google will recognize keywords in a URL if they are separated by dashes. While this is not always practical, you should try and name your subsidiary pages with keywords related to the page topic, such as cancer-care.html.
A URL such as http://www.princess-hospital-winnipeg.org/cancer-care.html would probably rank very well on Google for a search on "cancer care in Winnipeg", assuming the other basic SEO had been applied to the page.
Submitting To Google
After you have optimized your Web site for Google, submit it at the following URL:
http://www.google.com/addurl.html
TIP: Google also indexes PDF and DOC files. If you have files on your Web site in these formats, which would be of value to your visitors, make sure to use your keywords in these files and submit them to Google.
Google indexes once a month, so depending on your time of submission, it will take them anywhere between 48 hours to 4 weeks for your site to show up in their index.
In Summary
• Include your keywords in your title tags
• Include your keywords in your heading tags
• Include your keywords high in your content
• Try for a keyword density of between 5-20%
• Name at least one image on your page using your keywords
• Include your keyword rich description in the image ALT tag
• Include your keywords in the link text of your pages
• Submit your site to YAHOO! And Open Directory
• Solicit links from sites and make sure they use your keywords in their link text (if your keywords are your organization name)
• Make a page that contains links out to other related sites
• Submit your page to Google!
Look at the source code for our fictional Princess Winnipeg Hospital page if you need more help with the above. It is located at:
http://www.plannedlegacy.com/seo/princess-hospital-winnipeg.html
IMPORTANT NOTE: Search Engines change their ranking algorithms on a regular basis.
Google recently adjusted their ranking algorithm with regards to links into your site. It appears they are penalizing Web sites that have their exact product-related keywords in the link text of too many sites that link to them. You should take this into account if you are trying to rank your page higher for specific keywords and ask those sites that link to you to adjust the text in the link to your site accordingly.
If you are only trying to rank your page higher for your actual organization name, we find it hard to believe, and doubtful, that Google would penalize you for having your organization name in the link text of links into your site.
Additional Resources
Google Information for Webmasters
http://www.google.com/webmasters/index.html
This information comes straight from Google itself and is a must read for anyone want to get their pages ranked in Google.
WebmasterWorld Google News Forum
http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum3/
This forum features the most up-to-date discussions on everything related to Google. Webmaster World also features some of the best search engine and online marketing discussions on the Web.
SearchEngineWatch.com
http://searchenginewatch.com/resources/article.php/2156511
An excellent collection of links to articles on Search Engine Optimization.
SEOChat Online Keyword Density Analyzer
http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/keyword-density/
A Free tool for analyzing the keyword density of your Web pages.
CSE HTML Validator Lite
http://www.htmlvalidator.com/lite/
CSE HTML Validator Lite is a FREE HTML editor and basic HTML syntax checker for Microsoft Windows. It includes a free spell checker, displays no banner ads, and doesn't install "spyware"!
This article appears courtesy of CharityChannel. It originally appeared in the CharityChannel E-Philanthropy & Technology Review Newsletter.
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