Influence Your Site's Ranking In Search Results

There are other small things you can do to make sure your site is going to rank well in Google's search engine without getting too technical or needing to hire a search engine optimization (SEO) specialist.

These basic practises include:

  • Create useful page titles. Make sure that your title is useful, descriptive, and relevant to the actual page itself.
  • Use informative URLs. The URL (web address) of a page appears below the title, with words from the user's query in bold. Your URLs should be simple and human readable. Which do you find more informative://example.com/products/shoes/high_heels/pumps.html or //example.com/product_id=123458?
  • Provide relevant page descriptions. The descriptive text under the URL is usually taken from the description meta tag on the page. Descriptions should be different and unique to each area of your site. See the attached document for more information.
  • Manage your sitelinks. Sitelinks (sub-links to individual pages on your site) are meant to help users navigate your site. Sitelinks are automatically generated. This means that you can't specify a sitelink, but you can use Webmaster Tools to ask Google to demote sitelinks you don't like.
  • Add your business to Google Places - if you have a physical location - to help Google display location information in results.