“So can you make sure that my new website appears in Google’s search results, on the first page?” It’s what clients tend to ask. They seem to think that one picks up the phone to have a little chat with Google to see if they can be persuaded to bump the site’s classification up a bit. No can do.

Nevertheless, there are ways and means to help Google classify your site properly – and higher. In the old days, it was commonplace to add a bunch of keywords in the META tags of a site in order for search engines to believe that the site was relevant to a lot of searches (the inclusion of porn-related keyword being a much-practised solution). Nowadays, however, Google all but complete ignores keywords. It’s better to leave out the META keywords altogether, since including irrelevant keywords will damage your reputation with Google rather than improve it.

In lieu of keywords, Google checks the actual content of your site (we’ll get to that in depth in a moment). It also checks the number of sites that link to yours (so-called backlinks). This number isn’t something you can improve overnight. Some social engineering is necessary to get other webmasters to link to your site. Link trading is commonplace: you link to my site, I link to yours. This is the most powerful way to get your site noticed by Google. Read more