I’ve designed a few sites in my day. It was only yesterday that I was reminiscing with a friend about the days of editing HTML in Notepad! Things have changed a lot since then.

Years ago, I’m talking late 90′s here, search engines used to index sites based on meta tags that were put in to a websites header. This obviously was open for abuse whereby people that had a teddy hospital would put non related tags in their HTML headers so that their site would show up regardless of the search strings that a user would enter. The internet of those days was a lawless wild west type of place!

Then a small company from California tried their hand at indexing websites to return relevant results and as a result Google was born. Google revolutionised the way we search for content online and as a result they revolutionised web design.

This article is going to try to explain the best practises for getting a good rating on Google (known as Search Engine Optimisation or SEO)

1. Try to create relevant original content on your website. If you have a website that is dedicated to D.I.Y then write articles on D.I.Y. Keep an online diary of projects that you’ve been working on and the pitfalls that you encountered and how you overcame them.

2. Trade links with like minded websites. If you keep a blog on your website then link to relevant articles that people using your website will enjoy or find useful. Building up relevant incoming and outgoing links can be a slow laboursome task but with some persistance you will get there.

3. Keep your content fresh. An ideal website is one that engages the readers interest almost immediately. People will stop returning to your site if after one or two visits they don’t see any new content. In this day and age where online access is so readily available you need to keep up-to-date. A great way to do this is to link your website to your Twitter feed or Facebook or to create a forum whereby your readers keep the content of your site fresh for you.

4. Create articles that are descriptive and not too generic. This is common sense. If you have a D.I.Y. shop in Dublin, Ireland then there is no point in creating a page or article that just says D.I.Y. Shop. This search term will bring back results for D.I.Y. shops right across the world. To get good results you will need to be specific such as D.I.Y. Shop, Crumlin, Dublin, Ireland. Unless you are a global supplier of D.I.Y. equipment you will want to rank higher on local searches than global ones.

5. List your website on local buy and sell websites. The best way to do this is to enter a search term in Google that you would like to be listed on. Check the first 10 results. Are there any online directories listed on that first page? If so then why not advertise with those sites that way even if your site doesn’t show up on the first page of a search at least your website will be listed if a potential client clicks into an online directory.

6. List your site with Google places. This is a really good way to get your website listed higher on Google. I designed a website that was on the second page of a Google search. When I added the business to Google places it turned up as the first result on page one. It wasn’t a link to the website but it was the first result of the first result (which was a Google places search result)

7. Harness the power of Twitter and Facebook. This is not an easy thing to do but if you can configure your website to automatically update your Facebook pages and Twitter pages at least that way your followers know that there is fresh content on your site.

8. This is probably the most important lesson that I can give … be patient! Unless you have an endless supply of money to spend on advertising you might find that you will spend months of your time and will have very little to show for it. If this is the case try to analyse your methods and tweak them until you find something that works for you.

They are probably the best tips that I can give for anyone that is building a website and trying to get it to rank on Google (or any other search engine)