Page 1 on Google? by Mark  Allen

I am a retired web designer. I still keep ‘my hand in’ by keeping up to date with pro bono sites, and a few that I am interested in. Almost all my sites get on to page one of GoogleUK, some are number one on page one! How can this be done without paying someone loads of money every month? Read on for some simple, but I am sure you will find, most effective tips.

1. The first tip is very simple, get whatever you think might use as a search term in your domain name. This why many photographers use theirnamephotography.com. The same approach applies to any web site, say you want to sell fluffy widgets in the UK, then you would try and get that into the domain name, fluffywidegtsuk for example. As RB members are more likely to want a name like ‘joe bloggs photography’, I will use this as an example. But clearly the same approach will work for whatever you want to promote.

2. The second tip builds on the first and can seriously boost your rankings without falling fowl of search engine spamming rules. Rename every image to include joebloggsphotography, that is every photo, image element, etc.

3. Many web sites use spacer or shim gifs, rename them joebloggsphotographyshim or joebloggsphotographyspacer.gif

4. HTML offers you the facility to include alt and title statements on every image, again rename them all to include joebloggsphotography.

5. If you have a large existing site doing all this will take time and it may the case of ‘if I was going there I wouldn’t have started from here’ sort of thing. The quickest way to update an existing site along this method is to use Dreamweaver.

6. Dreamweaver allows for a template to cover – usually, the top, sides and bottom of the page and the middle or centre bit is what makes every page different. Every time you update your template, Dreamweaver updates every page on the site, in seconds. I would never build a website without using a template.

7. If in Dreamweaver your website is managed as a ‘site’, then from Dreamweaver you just rename the image files, one by one, and every time you do this the image is renamed (by Dreamweaver) in every page on the current site. This is a very speedy way of changing the names of files and means that if you find that if your work has not had the result (with the search engines) that you expected, then you can try again with a different key word.

8. Last Tip, Google offer a range of webmaster tools, they are free and easy to use. For example setting up a google site map with increase the speed that google collects info from your site.

I hope this helps…