Understanding how Google views your website is the first stage of being able to encourage Google to look on your website more favourably. Here’s simple thing you can do right now that will give you a profound insight into this.
- Got to your website’s Home Page
- Right click with your mouse and choose “View Source”.
That’s it. That’s how Google views your website.
Not very pretty is it? (Unless you are a geeky programmer of course!).
Google will never appreciate the aesthetic beauty of your website’s stunning design that makes visitors to your website gasp in awe. You might be even think that is just as well as you know you website has got pixelated images that are more reminiscent of Minecraft than Getty!
Anyway, no matter how lovely or bland your website is to your other visitors, how it looks is of absolutely no importance to Google. Just like other blind visitors to your website, Google has to make sense of your website in a different way. You will be delighted to know, of course, that there are things you can do that will help Google make sense of what it reads.
Here is an easy one, tag your images.
Google can’t see that the photo you took of your lovely new office is actually a photo of your lovely new office unless you tell it! An image from your phone will probably have a helpful name like img_45342334.jpg which of course is meaningless. However, if you change the Alt and Description Tag of this image in the back end of your website to something like “Interior shot of ABC Company Office”, it tells Google and any other blind visitor what that photo actually is. This keeps Google happy because it knows what the image actually is and this will help your rankings.
Here’s another thing you can do. Add both your company name and phone number to the Description Tag, as that is what will be displayed on Google Images. Millions of people use Google Images every day. If your image appears in a Google Search with your phone number, you might just get a spur of the moment call. All for the sake of a few seconds work which you only have to do once for each image!
If you don’t know how to do this, there are a ton of You Tube videos that will show you how. Every website builder, from Weebly to Wicks to Squarespace to WordPress, to name a few, can do this and yet, 99.9% of people don’t bother .
Resolve to be the 0.1% who do actually do it. It will keep Google and other blind visitors to your website happy!
There are so many things that you can do to help Google look on your website more favourably but, rather than get overwhelmed by them all, start with something simple like this.
Our guest Blogger is Clive Loseby from Access by Design and Run your own Website
Telephone 01243 776399