A good start to optimizing your site for Google search

In addition to participating in the AdSense network, you may also be interested in having your site ranked in organic Google search. In this post, I'll highlight some important points for search optimization. While there's no a magic formula to make your site show up first on a search results page, there are some good practices when it comes to links, design, content, and the structure of your site.

First of all, as a reminder, Google organic search and AdSense are independent of each other. Displaying AdSense ads on a site won't change the ranking of the site in Google search in any way. So it follows that sites containing AdSense ads don't receive special treatment in Google search.

Ranking in Google search is based on many different algorithms, and optimization for search is a long, continuous process. For these reasons, and because the techniques might violate our guidelines, we recommend avoiding any techniques that claim to optimize your ranking very quickly or radically. If you have concerns or questions, you can consult other webmasters on a number of forums, including Google's official forum for webmaster-related issues.

We encourage you to monitor the quality of your site's backlinks -- links from any site directing to your site. To increase your site's popularity, check if other sites that discuss similar topics or have a similar reader base are aware your site exists.

Outgoing links are also important and should comply with our guidelines. When you create a link to another site, we recommend first asking yourself: "Is this link going to be useful for my visitors?" or "Is this link likely to be clicked by my visitors?". Don't participate in link schemes or buy/sell links that pass PageRank, as it is against our guidelines and may hurt your site's performance in our search results.

Here are some tips for structuring your site:

• Your pages should have a clear hierarchy and relevant internal links. We also recommend creating a Sitemap and using Google's Webmaster Tools. These tools are useful, user-friendly and will provide information such as where your backlinks come from or which queries visitors used to reach your site.
  
• Use <title> tags that are explicit and useful for the user. For example, avoid a title like "Homepage" or "Welcome to my site".
  
• For images, use ALT attributes to describe appropriately what the image is about. We've recently created a quick and useful YouTube video to further explain this topic:
  
  
  

Also, adding original and compelling content on a regular basis may help Google crawl your pages regularly. It can have the added benefit of attracting links to your pages too.

Finally, design your site with your users in mind, and be patient and consistent in your efforts. To attract quality backlinks and develop your optimization strategy, it's important to keep a clear structure for your pages and regularly add organic content.

Posted by Ambroise Fensterbank - Search Quality Evaluator