Tag Archives: website

Advertising Your Website

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To increase traffic and to learn about Google’s advertising services, I became an AdWords advertiser. I designed simple text ads, chose queries and keywords the ads should match, and specified the maximum we were willing to spend on an advertising campaign. Google charges us only when someone clicks on one of our ads.

AdWords contributes greatly to Google’s bottom line, i.e., it’s profits. Google offers many resources to educate website owners about AdWords. Rather than developing tutorial material on AdWords, which is likely to get outdated when Google enhances AdWords capabilities and features, I encourage you to learn from Google’s material and those of third parties.

We increased the effectiveness of our advertising by following wonderful suggestions from Perry Marshall’s free 5-day course and from his Definitive Guide to Google AdWords, which you can learn about at www.perrymarshall.com/google/. We tested lots of ads targeted on many different queries and keywords until we found ones that got favorable responses from users, i.e., the ads that users clicked on. And Google has rewarded us by overrunning our ads, i.e., showing some of them from time to time at no cost to us.

Keep your website up.

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If your website is not accessible for an extended period of time, Google may reduce the ranking of your site.

Give away content.

I publish Google Guide under a Creative Commons License to enable others to copy, distribute, and make derivative works, as long as they give Nancy Blachman credit and link to Google Guide.

If most of your site’s content is commercial — e.g., pages about your business — consider adding other pages with useful information for the public. For example, if you sell bicycles, include pages or a blog about bicycle paths, bicycle gear, or with tips on bicycling. Publicize these and encourage others to link to them.

Translate your website into foreign languages.

If you don’t know a foreign language, find others that do. Erik Hoy, a librarian, emailed me asking if he could use some material from Google Guide on Copenhagen Main Library’s website. I suggested that he translate the whole thing into Danish, which he did.

Search Google for your website.

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Instead of entering your URL into your browser, search Google for your site. Google is more apt to improve the ranking of a site that users seek and visit than one that gets no traffic from Google.

When I first made this site publicly available, Google Guide wasn’t in the first 100 sites on searches for [ Google guide ]. Thanks to the sites that linked to Google Guide and users who clicked on Google Guide in their search results, Google Guide is in the top ten results for many queries that relate to the content of the site. Being listed so highly on Google has improved the traffic flow to Google Guide.

Note: For the top ranked site, Google sometimes includes useful links from within that site.

clip image002 Search Google for your website.

Avoid devious tactics to improve your ranking.

If Google suspects that you are trying to deceive it web crawler and thus its users by including hidden text, misleading or repeated words, pages that don’t match your sites description, deceptive redirects, duplicate site or pages, or other disingenuous tactics, then Google may delist your site from its index.

And finally…

In addition to considering the number of links to your page and the ranking of the linking page, to compute a page’s PageRank, Google considers hundreds of factors including

  • how fast a site is gaining links
  • how long the links persist
  • when your site acquired the links
  • the click through rate (CTR) of Google’s search results, cached pages, favorites on the Google Toolbar
  • the stickiness of your site (i.e., the effectiveness of your site in retaining individual users)

These factors and many others are described in the article “Great Site Ranking in Google The Secret’s Out” on Buzzle.com.

Google periodically changes how it calculates a page’s importance, thereby resulting in shifts in rankings, known as a Google Dance. Google Guide’s placement in Google’s search results sometimes changes when Google modifies or enhances their indexing algorithms.

I don’t try to keep up with the latest search engine optimization tricks. Instead I strive to make searching Google easier by educating users about Google services, capabilities, and features. When I am successful, sites link to Google Guide pages and increase their ranks and importance to Google.