Think about it, how many pages of search results do you look through before you're done?  Surveys show that it's usually 1-3 pages or about 30 site results!  That means if your site is not in the top 30 or better yet the top 10, you're not going to be seen.  Google has kindly made life easier by providing the tools and tutorials developers need to design better web sites, making full use of these can boost your web traffic.

This guide assumes you are familiar with HTML and website design in general.

Google uses a system known as googlebot that trawls through the web looking at websites and their content.  It makes or builds an index of your site and its wording.   If you're a hosting company no doubt you will have the words "web hosting" many times over.  Googlebot sees this and realizes that you have more importance than an event hosting company WHEN people search for "website hosting".

What are some of the important elements google will look for when deciding on a sites importance?

TITLE and META tags are very important.  Take a look at the source of your web page and see what your META tags say.  Look at the "Description" and at the "Keywords" in particular.  These are what google see!  Bad descriptions of your site or listing keywords not related to your site will get you ranked low.  Using common keywords to improve your rankings like "sex" will NOT work!  Google has formulaes in place for determining the true content of your site and doing such things will only get you a deliberately lower ranking from them.  However using a good choice of keywords will boost your sites ranking.  Take a look at this pages META tags:

<meta name="keywords" content="database design,database,website hosting,south africa, ...
  <meta name="title" content="Google Secrets - Toxzen.co.za" />
  <meta name="author" content="Toxzen Administrator" />
  <meta name="description" content="Website design and hosting, software application ...
<meta name="generator" content="Joomla! 1.5 - Open Source Content Management" />

With regard to the tags this too is an important tag and some thought should go into it.  It also something the googlebot will look to for importance.

More guides soon...