In addition to the information contained in my article, improving your search engine ranking on Google, this article, covering some more tips and suggestions on your websites Google search engine results placement, will assist your website in acheiving top search engine rankings.

Hidden Text

All webmasters know that none of the search engines like hidden text.  Some people use hidden text to stuff keywords into there content to achieve top search engine rankings, in the hope that when someone searches for that particular keyword, thier page will come up, even though the keywords in question are not visible on the page.

As discussed in a previous article on creating search engine friendly websites, I have never been interested in using these black hat SEO tricks to attain a better Google search engine results placement.  As you can imagine, it took me by surprise when one day a couple of years ago, I noticed that one of my older websites was not ranking as well as it should.  More investigation revealed that my page had dropped from a Pagerank of 4 to a Pagerank of 0, due to hidden text.

Here is what had happened... As I mentioned, it was an old site and in an attempt to get top search engine rankings I had recently converted it to CSS.  There were still a few people using older browsers to surf the Internet that did not support CSS correctly, like Netscape 4, I discovered this after doing my HTML and CSS validation.  To assist these people, I created a text box at the top of each page, advising the browser that the site now used CSS and to view it properly, I recommended they use a CSS compatible browser.  Now that is all fine, the search engines had no problem with that, but what I did next, they did not like one little bit.  I thought I'd be clever and only have my text box display when the website was accessed using an old non CSS compatible browser, unfortunately, Googles spider saw this and thought I was trying to pull the wool over thier eyes and penalised my website for containing hidden text.

Although all browsers now support the use of CSS, there is still a valuable lesson to be learnt.  The hidden text portion of Googles algorithm is not able to detect why the text might be hidden and react accordingly.  As far as it is concerned, if it finds hidden text it penalises you in your Google search engine results placement.

Getting your link to appear on the First page of the search engines

I receive numerous emails from readers who want to know how to acheive top search engine rankings and have there website link appear on the first page of Googles search results.  If you need to get your website noticed in a hurry and have budget for your websites promotion, I would use Google Adwords, paid advertising on various keywords related to your product or service.

The great thing about paid advertising and your Google search engine results placement is that you can get your website to the first page of Google almost instantaneously and you set your advertising spend upfront.  Your adverts are only triggered for the keywords and keyphrases you choose, ensuring that it is your target market that will see your advert.

While many webmasters are reluctant to use Google Adwords, because of the financial consideration, I believe that you need to do a return on investment (ROI) excersise before ditching paid advertising, especially if your website is an income generating website.  Lets assume that every 50th visitor to your site bought a product costing R500, if you were running Adwords at 50 cents per click, your advertising spend to generate 1 buyer (50 visitors) would be 50 X 50 cents, or R25, as a percentage, thats 0.5% of the product cost, this is certainly an investment I would make if I needed to ensure top search engine rankings quickly.