Tips and tricks for better SEO...

Matthew ‘Chewy’ Trewhella, New Business Development Manager for Google

'In the past it was often difficult for small organisations or charities to be heard but the Internet has levelled the playing field. With over 3 trillion pages on the web today, it's become crucial for anyone running a charity to make sure their content is discoverable and well referenced.'

'Standard tools like Webmaster Central, robots.txt, and meta tags, readily available to any webmaster, can help charities make their sites easier to find online. Rich and differentiated content is also key to make a site more engaging to users, and creates multiple links and entry points to a site, increasing it's visibility and traffic.'

Matthew, quoted above, gave a masterclass in improving the SEO of your website through keywords and correct page coding, covering a range of topics including:

• An introduction to Google Search: crawling, indexing and ranking
• How ranking works and what affects ranking
• Understand paid-for search, pay-per-click advertising and how to use these alongside naturally boosting your rankings
• How to monitor and measure success, and what to do with that information

Here are just some of the many essential facts that emerged:

• Make sure your content is easy to share
• A clean url without parameters is more likely to be clicked by a user
• Make sure each page can be linked to from at least one other page
• Can your site’s pages be found by Google? Make sure content isn’t hidden behind log-in forms (Google’s bots can’t get to them)
• Is your content useful? Make sure it stands out from the trillions of other web pages out there
• It’s all about the words on your page – make sure they match what keywords your users might be searching for
• The more links you have to your site the better, but make sure the words in the hyperlink are right, not just ‘click here’. The number of links you have to your pages goes towards calculating page rank – think of it as votes by web users
• Speed counts, so make your page load faster
• Use Google Analytics to pinpoint which keywords are driving traffic and which of your pages are working
• Read all your copy again and ensure it makes maximum use of SEO keywords!
• Finally, check out Google’s Webmaster Central – a help centre that’ll answer all your questions and provide some very handy tools.

Courtesy of Matthew ‘Chewy’ Trewhella

Chewy is a New Business Development Manager at Google. His job is to make technical things accessible and relevant to non-technical people. He is particularly knowledgeable about Google's APIs and webmaster programmes. He's has a BEng in Software Engineering, and he's been with Google since November 2005. When he's not at work, he likes to play the banjo and sleep.

If you liked this, check out Chewy’s tips from a past event