What Would Google Do_ - Jeff Jarvis [21]
What’s good for big companies such as About.com is good for any small company or organization—or person. We all want to be found on Google. We all want Googlejuice. Customers now expect any information in the world to be available with one click. So every restaurant should have its menu, specials, hours, address, and more online. On a recent vacation, researching restaurants for the family, I went only to places that had web sites; I figured the others just didn’t care enough. Not having an up-to-date web presence that Google can crawl and search and then present to users is like not having a phone number or a sign over the door. Today, that’s particularly so because it’s so easy to be on the web. The age of the geeky web priesthood is over. That restaurant can post its specials every day with a free weblog tool such as Blogger—which comes from Google. It can attract customers by buying ads on sites shown to people in the area—with Google. It can list itself on Google Maps and buy ads there, too.
The same can be said of you as an individual. You need a search presence. Your résumé should be online, because you never know when a job might come by. When you sell your house or car or golf clubs, you’ll want them to be where they can be searched and found. As we’ll discuss at the end of the book, without a Google shadow, old friends (and girlfriends and boyfriends) will never find you. Today, if you can’t be found in Google, you might as well not exist.
How can you be sure to be found on Google? A new industry has emerged around just that need. Convention floors are filled with search-engine optimization companies promising to help you get to the promised land: the essential first page of search results for a topic relevant to what you do. Plenty of books and consultants can take you through all the technical details of searchability. I don’t pretend to be a wizard of SEO, but there are a number of simple and obvious rules for how to think of your internet presence.
Make sure every possible bit of information that anyone could want to know about you is on the web, searchable by Google.
Construct information on pages so it can be understood by machine and man. In a word, be clear. If you’re a dentist, say you’re a dentist, not a smile doctor. Use the word “dentist” in the title of the page, the headline, and the beginning of what you write—make it so obvious even a computer couldn’t be confused. This also means that when human beings come to the page, they’ll know what you do. Clarity is always beneficial.
Don’t use fancy technology to make the content on your page dance and sing. Google won’t recognize much of it (and readers will be irritated). Keep it simple.
Don’t bury your content inside fancy content management systems that stow it away in databases Google can’t get to.
Give everything you publish a permanent address—a permalink—so it can attract and accumulate more traffic and links and so Google has a place to which it can reliably send the people looking for you.
Create separate pages for separate topics. If you’re a restaurant, have a menu page and a directions page so, when I go searching for “Jeff’s Chop House menu,” Google can send me straight to your menu page.
If there’s any possible reason why anyone elsewhere on the web would want to link to you, make it easy for them to do so. If there are sites and bloggers writing about restaurants in