On the morning of June 10th, as I made my way up the HYATT hotel in Toronto, the gleaming list of industry experts conducting seminars and workshops created an unexplainable drool that fostered my Internet marketing appetite. In my opinion it was time to be part of a conference greater than the G20 Summit, the annual Search Engine Strategies conference. Through this conference was an opportunity to greet and meet directly with the Google staff responsible for making many business owners their fortunes.

As this valuable session started, a handful of industry experts were on one corner and a stampede of mind numbing questions on the other converging in to one magical question that was on every ones mind:

“How can my website get top Google positioning?”

To explain this better, we were told a little bit on how Google works. In a nutshell, Google modifies their algorithm hundreds of times over the course of the year, the level of competition on Google is doubling every few months, and that by year 2020 with the rate of progression in communication technology it is expected that the amount of content on the Internet is going to DOUBLE every 3 days. Certainly a massive jaw dropping prediction that shocked the hall with silence. After all, the amount of content posted on YouTube in 24 hours is more than 3 years of television broadcasting of CBC, CTV and Global combined. Google has recently prepared themselves by upgrading their entire infrastructure to support indexing such massive content growth online.

Once we were given a breakdown of the competitive challenges in relation to web content, the ego of “experts” in the hall was at ground zero and no one really felt like an expert anymore. The silence was proof of that, yet the main question still remained to be answered. Considering the variables and the ever-changing online environment, not one person knows a definite answer to guarantee number 1 positioning. On the other hand, there are countless strategies that can be employed to gain higher positioning effectively.

The bottom line is: How do you make your website worthy enough to get Google’s attention?

There are 10 key points you can get started with, for the purpose of this article I will include 5 of the 10 key points that you can do internally to your site to get some traction online:

Plan your website around your target market: The content, design, functionality and overall usability of the website must be focused to your target market. For this you need to “think like your site visitor”.

Write content the right way: Often we visit websites that have very little content, or too much content. The goal is to write content that makes good sense to the visitor and avoid clutter. Google does not look beyond 800 to 1000 words of content per page, however I would recommend that you choose your words wisely and do not exceed over 500 words per page for the sake of avoiding clutter for the site user. On the other hand, try not to have less than 250 words for a page that you would like to be ranked well for Google.

Focus on quality design and programming: Starting in the next month or two, Google will be modifying their algorithm to also check for website speed and will add that component as part of their ranking criteria. Be careful when using Flash, in fact if you have to use Flash, use it only in minimal amounts and avoid large image files that increase loading speeds. To make your design sexy for Google, do not use older development techniques and incorporate newer programming technologies.

Optimize your website for Search Engines: Take in to account how search engines will look at your website and work with the content of the website to add relevant keywords. WARNING: Do not over do this process. Spamming keywords in content or code can do more harm than good.

Manage your website well and as frequently as you can: Google loves sites that are up to date. I would recommend incorporating a blog tool that structures content properly and allows you to do updates easily.

With that, I am out of words for this Business View article page. I hope that you put these words to action and implement some of these strategies.