Google Hacks, 2nd Edition

Clean Up for a Google Visit

Before you submit your site to Google, make sure that you’ve cleaned it up to make the most of your indexing.

You clean up your house when you have important guests over, right? If you want visitors, Google’s crawler is one of the most important guests that your site will ever have. A high Google ranking can lead to incredible numbers of referrals, both from Google’s main site and from sites that have search powered by Google.

To make the most of your listing, step back and look at your site. By making some adjustments, you can make your site both more Google-friendly and more visitor-friendly.

• If you must use a splash page, have a text link from it.

  If I had a dollar for every time I went to the front page of a site and saw no way to navigate besides a Flash movie, I’d be able to nap for a living. Google doesn’t index Flash files, so unless you have some kind of text link on your splash page (a “Skip This Movie” link, for example, that leads into the heart of your site), you’re not giving Google’s crawler anything to work with. You’re also making it difficult for surfers who don’t have Flash or are visually impaired.

• Make sure your internal links work.

  Sounds like a no-brainer, doesn’t it? Make sure your internal page links work so the Google crawler can get to all your site’s pages. You’ll also want to make sure that your visitors can navigate.

• Check your title tags.

  There are few things sadder than getting a page of search results and finding “Insert ...