JOHN HARRIS offers a few tips to make your website more visible to Google.

For many businesses, a smart website is a more important marketing tool than traditional directory advertising.

A few years back, when I wanted to find a tradesperson or buy firewood, I’d let my fingers do the walking through the venerable Yellow Pages and phone a few likely prospects.

Today, my fingers still do the walking, but now on a keyboard, using the Google search engine to track down a shortlist of likely suppliers.

If a tradey or wood merchant is not online, then I’m unlikely to buy from them.

Speed and convenience are the two main reasons for moving from offline directories to online search. Google also overcomes the head-scratching quandary of working out where the Yellow Pages files an obscure vendor.

The significance of search engine marketing came to mind last week when I received the June report from online researcher Hitwise www.hitwise.com . According to this report, Google was the search engine of choice for 87.81 per cent of Australians in June, followed by MSN (i.e. Microsoft) Search on 6.72 per cent with Yahoo in third at 3.92 per cent.

The Hitwise report claims search engines were responsible for contributing a significant portion of website visitors for key industry groups in Australia: Rates ranged from over 20 per cent for Sports industry websites to nearly 40 per cent for Health and Medical sector sites.

Based on that, between two and four out of 10 website visitors are finding that site with a search engine – principally Google.

So what can you do to make it easy for Google to find your website and index it prominently?

One option is to hire a search engine marketing company to optimise your website and actively promote it to Google and the other major search engines. While this has a cost attached, it may benefit your business if you attract a big chunk of trade through your site.

However, if you collect customers only on an ad hoc basis, following a few basic rules can make your website both easier for Google to index and more relevant to searching customers.

Firstly, anticipate the three or four words that a potential customer will enter into a search engine and use them liberally through the text on your website. This helps Google to index words from your website that are relevant to your customers.

Secondly, use pages titles that are descriptive of your business e.g. “concrete supplies Adelaide” rather than default generic names like Home, Products, Services etc. Again, this prioritises these terms for the search engines.

A third point is to change content on your website regularly, even if it is just your company news page. Changing content encourages search engines to interrogate your site more frequently, which helps to gain prominence for your site.

Keeping your site simple can also prove a benefit in search engine marketing. Flash and graphics-based technologies look pretty, but are more complicated for search engines to index relevantly than plain old HTML code.

Finally, don’t rest on your laurels. The Internet is constantly changing and websites regularly jostle with each other for priority of place on the Google top of the pops.

Keep an eye on your site’s position and, if you’re not happy with it, follow a few of these simple steps to see if it makes a difference.

If that doesn’t work use Google to find a search engine marketing consultant: Unfortunately, I couldn’t figure where they are listed in the 2008 Yellow Pages.

John Harris is managing director of Impress Media Australia www.impress.com.au

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