One tip I would recommend for anyone wanting to increase their visibility in the search engines is to read Google’s webmasters guidelines. This is an overlooked resource as it gives a wealth of good information and guidelines to follow when optimising your website. This information describes how Google actually indexes your pages and offers tips on the best practices.

If you have heard of a new technique and you’re wondering  if Google takes it into account then this is a good place to start. For example there is a lot of buzz going around about the “nofollow “tag and a lot of people are wondering when they should use it. If you go to http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769 you will find out what Google thinks of this technique and how best to use it.

Google Sitemaps

Another good Google resource is Google sitemaps. When you set up an account you can submit a sitemap.xml. A sitemap.xml is a list of all your webpage’s within your website and contains information on when it was last updated etc. This will help Google index your website quicker. This tool also gives you lots of information on your website. It gives information on how many links are pointing to your website, far more exact than typing in site: www.yourdomain.com. Other information it holds are what your top keyphrases are and crawl rates. If you haven’t done so already I would really recommend you submit a sitemap to Google.

This may sound like basic stuff but you would be surprised by the amount of people who say they know SEO who haven’t even read the guidelines. So to get your website of to the best start I would recommend doing the above. If you’re thinking of hiring an SEO company, I would quote Google on this; “THE EARLIER THE BETTER”.
Author:

Kevin Gallagher

SEO Manager for Moovin On Up

Website Design and Ecommerce Solutions