Recently I had the pleasure of speaking to a local small business association here in Minnesota about social media, internet marketing, brand presence, and the like.  It was a short 30 minute appearance – not much time to delve into all things social media.  So I didn’t dive in full-bore, but instead spoke about several matters I thought most important to a small business owner intending to just now explore the marketing opportunities social media  provides.

As a means to shy away from a drab charts and graphs presentation (sorry marketing friends – we love ‘em, but others?), I dug into a bit of my past; to a time when I was a young classicist studying Roman culture at the University of Minnesota.  Through analogy I juxtaposed aspects of Rome alongside modern day internet and social media objects and laid a framework for answering the simple sounding question “how do I figure out what to do” when venturing into social media marketing as a small business owner?

More work needs to be done on the overall analogy, and I intend to flesh it out even more in months to come.  Yet one portion of my presentation seemed to perk people’s interest more than any other, and that was a portion that focused on 10 ways to please Google.  This referring specifically to the “Googlebot,” or that software that visits a website and plays a strong role in how the website gets seen, indexed and visited by searchers the world over.

Below are the “10 ways” small business owners can please Googlebot initially.  These recommendations come from my own experience and the list is certainly not exhaustive.  Furthermore, this list is not a sort of dogmatic script sprung for the industry of social media marketing or search engine optimization.  It is my own, and hopefully now yours too. I will begin here with the first 5 “ways” and publish the other five in another post during the coming week.

1. Make certain your website is indexed

Imagine you walk into a library looking for a book on a shelf and it is not there.  You approach a clerk and ask “is this book in your system”?  The clerk checks their index and assures you that “no, the book isn’t to be found here.”  A similar scenario can occur with Google, but in this case, if your book (read – website) isn’t on their shelf, well that isn’t their fault.  Is your website indexed so Google and others can find it more easily?

To check if your website is indexed, visit:
http://www.indexedbygoogle.com
To submit your website to Google for eventual indexing, visit:
http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl

2. Your website should have many inbound links, and preferably these should be high quality ones.

Google wants to deliver their web searchers a quality user experience by directing them to sites with quality content.  A primary way Google calculates this is based upon how many inbound links from other websites a site in question has.  Think of it as a sort of referral program – the more positive referrals (i.e. quality inbound links) a website has, the more Google thinks that website is reputable and upstanding on the web.  If Google thinks a site is reputable, then it is more likely to grant it better search results.

In the future I will write more about the differences between good links, poor links, editorial links, garbage links, no-follow links, and the like.  One heck of a taxonomic tree can be constructed!

3. Your website should have meaningful web copy, and one should avoid too many uses of unfriendly web languages that inhibit search… such as flash!

Several years ago many people were approaching website development and content creation differently.  some of these folks were trying to cram keywords into their web copy to manipulate search engine results, while others were devising hyperinteractive websites that fired-off like a jackpotted Sizzling Sevens slot machine.  In the case of the former, Google and other search engines wised up, altering their search algorithms and demanding that website owners create relevant and meaningful content.  In the case of the latter, website owners found out that search engines are only able to operate effectively in a text based environment, and that by using certain web languages (or tricks) that were not primarily text based, their website could actually suffer in search results.

Today it is still important to have a few keywords on each web page on a website, however, having meaningful content to drive traffic and increase the possibility of content sharing online is far more important than keyword cramming or other parlor tricks.  Googlebot and othr search bots know this and are encouraging the creation of meaningful content.  Using flash on a website is still fun and can add to the user experience of your website, but it must be used with discretion and the proper search engine friendly texts alongside it.

4. Your website should have Google Webmaster Tools and Analytics hooked up

First things first – a point of clarification.  Google Webmaster Tools and Analytics do not, on their own, increase a website’s search ranking in Google, Yahoo, or any other engine.  What they do is provide data to the webmaster that can then be used to better optimize a website.  Both of these Google services are available free of charge.  You’ll need to also sign up for a free Google (gmail) account if you don’t already have one.  The URL addresses for these two services are found at:

Google Webmaster Tools: www.google.com/webmasters/tools/
Google Analytics: www.google.com/analytics/

Here is a short list of the kinds of data one can gain about a website from this combined force:

• Data pertaining to internal and external links
• Data about errors occurring within the website infrastructure that are detrimental to a searchbot’s process
• Data about where your visitors are arriving from
• Data about how many of your web pages are indexed (approx.)
• Data about the traffic flow within your website
• Data about your most popular content and how people are finding it
• Data about your strongest keyword showings in search (relative)

By using the data these tools provide and then acting upon that data through the creation, modification and dissolution of content, keywords, and website infrastructure – you can create a happier relationship with Google.

5. Submit a sitemap to Google

Sitemaps are files that outline the structural makeup of your website, individually listing the different pages often in a hierarchical fashion.  By submitting a sitemap to Google, you are essentially placing a list of pages to crawl right in front of its face (figuratively speaking, of course).  Sound like a pretty good thing to do?  You bet it is, and it is also easy to accomplish.

A sitemap can be easily submitted to Google using Webmaster Tools (yet another reason to sign up!).  Just visit http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ to quickly create your sitemap file online, then log into your Webmaster Tools account and submit the sitemap file.