Google® Business Solutions All-in-One For Dummies®

Chapter 5. Creating a Search-Friendly Site

In This Chapter

• Selecting the best, most effective keywords for your site

• Distributing keywords on your site

• Understanding how these keywords affect your site's structure

• Creating a working draft of your site

The advantages of publishing a site on the Web fall into certain categories: flexibility, the ability to make changes easily, and the opportunity to equalize the presence of little guys versus the established Goliaths.

Making your Web site search-friendly somewhat goes against these advantages. Search-friendliness is about stability, consistency, and building up a place in the Web's system of links over time.

Why is this? In online and in real business, the hardest thing to fake is authenticity. And putting in the time and effort to garner a lot of links to your site from other, well-trafficked sites gives you the surest sign of authenticity out there. ("Putting in time and effort" is exactly what the get-rich–quick types who try to trick Google and other search engines don't want to do, which is why Google always looks for signs of real time and effort at the expense of technical tricks.)

Unfortunately, there's only one opportunity to be first. The Web has developed in layers, and sites that got there early all seem to link to each other, and many of them attract a great deal of traffic. It's extremely difficult for recent sites trying to win significant link traffic on well-established topics — especially technology topics relating to the ...