Many website owners are, to put it mildly, "concerned" about their website's placement with
search engines, particularly with the industry leader, Google.  Yet websites are increasingly
designed to fly in the face of Google's publicly-stated guidelines.

"When will I be number one on Google?"

Here's how to tell if your website designer is lying to you.  When you ask the above question,
your designer should answer, "I don't know," "who knows?," or even "beats me."  Answers
leading in other directions, such as dates or time estimates, are lies.

The truth is that even Google may not know.  They use an elaborate 100-point system for
analyzing websites and bestowing search rank.  Although Google freely posts "Webmaster
Guidelines" on their website, much of their advice isn't heeded in current design trends.


Submit your website to Google

One such guideline is that new websites may submit their URL to Google for inclusion into the
Google database.  No one can pay for placement on Google's search results, so this free
submission is the only way to go.


Content first, special effects second

Also on Google's mind is the fact that "fancy features" such as flash are unreadable by
Google's crawler, which searches the web for inclusion into Google's database.  If most
of your site's content appears as part of a flash presentation, then most of your site's content
is invisible to Google.  Incredibly, many websites today are designed entirely in flash,
excluding themselves from search engines and visitors lacking flash in order to avoid internet
advertising.

Search engines also cannot read pictures, even if the pictures contain plenty of words.
Pictures should be used to augment a website's pages, with normal text on the page delivering
the content.

Pictures, special effects and flash should help tell the story, not tell all of it.

The gig is up

The best insight into the mind of Google requires a journey, way back to 2004.  "The Way You
Move" by Outkast is tearing up the charts, and Google has quietly redesigned their search
engine.  Websites that for years enjoyed top rankings have now vanished from search results.
Scores of web designers and "search engine optimizer" practitioners do not know what hit them.

What hit them, in a nutshell, was this: Google introduced a new algorithm that ignored
websites using search engine tricks.

Still in use by some, such tricks include: repeating keywords in order to gain "relevance" in the
search engine's eyes; using invisible text (white text on white background) for the same reason;
and exchanging links, both visible and invisible, with other webmasters solely to boost ratings.
Google's current algorithm weeds out sites using these tactics, returning the most relevant
results while excluding "optimized" results.

This milestone in internet history sent website designers and owners scrambling for substance
for their websites instead of smoke and mirrors.  Thanks to Google's efforts, good web designers
now fill their websites with the only trick that always works: quality content.



-Copyright Web Pens, 2005