I created a website for the McGill MD PhD program and now I need to make it Google-able. How do I do that? Do I have lots of words within my page or do I need to have lots of links leading to my website to make it so that the engine will list me prominently?
Have places that can already be found on google link to your website. There isn’t a whole lot else to do, you can toss some keywords in your metadata though I don’t think those actually get looked at anymore. You can pay for guaranteed inclusion at some search engines, but not google. I assume running some google ads on there would help, but eh.
Google almost solely depends on pages that link to you and how they’re already ranked. So that’s your best bet.
Get the university website to link to you
If you don’t mind us seeing the page, you could even link it here!
Create the whole thing in Flash.
… no, don’t. You need to have good textual content on your site. That’s what gets Google to see your site as legit and not just a bullshit click revenue generator.
For actual popularity though, links from high-ranking pages are key, like the others said. If you want to see how you’re faring, you can install the Google Toolbar and you’ll be able to see what your page rank is. Building rank does take time, be patient. If you have a complex site, you can upload an XML site map to make sure the bot crawls all your pages.
You can build up page rank even if you don’t have a lot of inbound links, though. It just takes more time, and you don’t get as much of a rank boost that way.
Once you’ve got some decent rank, you can start tailoring your content to focus on certain phrases that you want people to find you by.
Kero: if you can tell me how to do that in English, I’ll be more than happy to do it.
The site is :
Which part did you want me to explain?
Also, the site looks fairly simple, so you probably don’t need a site map.
I’ve always designed my websites to be very simple. I’ve made a couple over the years and its allowed people to pick up after me after I’ve left.
I was referring to your post overall.
Okay, now I’m not an SEO (Search Engine Optimization) expert, but here’s what I understand, based on seminars I’ve been to, and experience in the workplace:
Your goal is to make certain pages on your site appear in Google search results. Ordering in search result pages is determined by two things:
- The content on the page
- That page’s “rank” in Google’s system
Number 1 has been true of search engines since the beginning of time. Common words are less important than uncommon words. You’re not going to appear very high in search results if someone looks for “md phd program”, because there’s way too much competition.
However, I just did a search for “welcome to the McGill MD-PhD program website” without the quotes and you’re the #1 result. If people search for very specific phrases that you have on your site, then you do better on the results page.
“Rank” is Google’s opinion of how good your stuff is. It is NOT the same as your order in the search results page, though they are connected. High rank moves you up on the results. Rank is a number between 0 and 10 that estimates how content-rich your site is. You don’t have different ranks for different search phases. One page = one rank.
Rank is on a per-page basis, not for the whole site. However, if your main index page has high rank, your sub-pages benefit too. This works because when pages with high rank link to other pages, those other pages get a rank boost. In other words, you get rank because other pages link to yours.
You can install Google Toolbar (http://toolbar.google.com/) into your browser, which has a feature that shows you the rank of the page you’re on. It also has some other features, some nice, some kind of annoying, so you might want to install it on a browser you never use. I use Firefox, but I have the Toolbar installed on IE, for instance.
Using the Toolbar, I see that McGill’s main page has a rank of 8 (out of 10). This is really really good. For comparison, UCLA’s main page has a 9, and Bank of America has a 7.
Getting better rank for your site should be easy. Get McGill’s department of medicine - or whoever is “above you” on the totem pole to link to you. McGill must have a head webmaster, and I’m sure they can help you out better than I can. They’re obviously doing something right there.
Sorry for the long-windedness, but I think I succeeded in eschewing the technical jargon, if nothing else. 