You may well have received emails offering to get your website onto the first page of Google for your chosen keywords. 

It sounds attractive but what business benefits would it give? 

If you have ever analysed your sites web stats in detail you will have noticed the very wide range of search terms that have been used by visitors to find your site. 

Often the most popular search term is your business name but then there may be hundreds or thousands of search terms that have given the site one or more visitors.  In fact, for some sites most of the visitors come from search terms that have only been used once or twice that that month. 

Even the most popular term might only give you 5 or 10% of the total number of hits. 

Consider some examples.  Will someone going on holiday search on ‘holiday’ or ‘vacation’ or ‘weekend break’ or ‘getaway’ or ‘honeymoon’ or perhaps they will search on the accommodation they require: ‘hotel’ or ‘apartment’ or ‘villa’.  Alternatively they may focus on the type of holiday: ‘adventure’, ‘golf’, ‘white water rafting’ or the less energetic ‘city break’ or ‘beach’!

And then location: is it ‘Spain’ or ‘Costa Blanca’ or ‘Alicante’ or ’somewhere near Benidorm’ or ‘Mediterranean’ or the more vague ‘within an hours drive of Alicante airport’? 

Therefore it is important that the site is optimised for a wide range of keywords.

When you review your site’s performance you should be able to find the site appearing on the first page of the search engines for many search terms not just a single keyword or phrase. 

If you are using Google Adwords or other Pay per Click (PPC) advertising, the effect is less pronounced but similar.  This is because the less effective keywords and phrases are switched off and therefore the traffic is channelled to fewer keywords.  For example, for one client recently we generated 1200 clicks from 63 keywords, with the most popular keyword accounting for just 14% of the clicks. 

If we had just focussed on the best keyword/key phrase we would have lost 86% of the site’s visitors.

In summary, for most websites there is unlikely to be a magic keyword or phrase that will generate large numbers of vistors.  

People using the search engines use a huge variety of ways to express what they are looking for and the more of these options your site can respond to the more visitors it will generate.

Internet Explorer, Firefox and other browsers can be very tolerant of programming errors in your website. 

And when you make an error it is easy to see when the browser doesn’t like it. 

However, Google and the other search engines use proprietary software to analyse web content and do not tell you when they don’t understand your website. 

This can lead to pages or sections of pages being ignored by the search engines and you are none the wiser. 

In their Webmaster Guidelines, Google advise webmasters to check that their HTML is valid.  Failure to do this can lead to poor rankings without any clear pointer to the source of the problem. 

We have recently seen a number of sites that were only partially indexed by the search engines and where the code contained numerous HTML errors.  Fixing the errors quickly improved the results. 

You can check your code at http://validator.w3.org/ - remember to check the whole site not just the home page. 

Ensuring that the HTML code on your website is valid is a essential step to achieving good rankings for the search engines.

We have had a surprising number of cases recently where the view that Google had of a website didn’t match the site owner’s view.  We will give you some examples and then a easy test that you can try on your own site. 

These situations can be split into several classes:

• Google could only see a single page.  Google could see the home page but the rest of the site was thought to belong to another domain.  This can happen when a redirect or forwarding of a site is set up incorrectly. 
• Google can see a lot of the site but not all of it.  Sometimes sections of a site can be invisible to the search engines if they cannot be reached through normal HTML links.  This can be a problem if you use Javascript drop down menus. 
• The search engines find content on the site that the owner didn’t know existed.    In one case a business had split in two and switched to using two domain names on the same server.  However the content became muddled and visitors to one site were seeing pages from both sites.  This confused the visitors and the site statistics.  Visitors to one of the sites were being logged to the other. 
• Sites get misused without the knowledge of the owner.  A small business found that the forum it ran for its customers had been loaded with spam messages and the site was now associated with adult sites. 

It is a good idea to check what pages Google has indexed for your site to see if there are more or less than you expect. 

This check is easy.  Go to Google and click on Advanced Search. 

Then enter your domain name (without the www) in the ‘Search within a site or domain:’ box and leave all other boxes empty.  Click on ‘Advanced Search’ and Google will display a list of all the pages from your site that are in its index. 

Don’t worry if the total is not exactly right - pages that Google considered unimportant may not be included and if you have dynamically generated pages they may appear twice with different search terms. 

However if when you look through the list there are pages you expect to find but can’t or there are pages you don’t recognise then further investigation may be warranted.  Contact us if you would like further assistance.