By Michael Heraghty

By the time you have finished reading this sentence, more than 10,000 internet users around the globe will have typed a query into Google, and received a list of relevant results. Such is the popularity - and speed - of the web's leading search engine.

Website owners understand the value of getting listed in Google's search results. Some, such as Richard Moyles, managing director of Furniture.ie, have come to depend on the traffic it generates.

"Over 70 per cent of our first-time visitors come from furniture-related queries on Google," Moyles said.

He believes that no web marketing strategy can afford to ignore the search engine's importance.

"If you're not on Google, you're not on the web," he said.

Yet few website designers understand how to get traffic from Google. Most simply cross their fingers and hope for the best. The company remains highly secretive about its famous algorithm,the complex code that determines the relevancy of a web page to a user's query.

Google's guardedness has not dissuaded a growing army of opportunists. Attempts to fool the algorithm with deceptive methods are prevalent. The problem of filtering out "search engine spam" is a major headache, even for a company whose typical employee holds a PhD in computer science.

In the documentation accompanying its IPO application, Google identified search engine spam as a major risk to the future viability of its technology. Google has declared war on the spammers. It uses a mixture of human analysis and artificial intelligence to continually revise its algorithm, filtering out spam tricks and penalising offending sites (removing them from its results) when detected.

While achieving a top position in Google's search results is clearly valuable, cheating is not recommended. The challenge for website owners and designers is to develop an awareness of the techniques that Google rewards and to implement them, without straying "offside".

Below is a broad list of dos and don'ts that will help improve a site's performance in Google. But the main principles are: treat your visitors with respect, and construct your website around their quest for information.

Google findability tips

Target appropriate keywords

Identify phrases that your would-be visitors are likely to type in, and avoid those that are overly competitive. It is easier to get a top ten result for "B&B in Skibbereen" than for the more general query "Accommodation in Ireland".

You should also include the keywords within the content. To be found for a query on "B&B", the meaning of the text should clearly depend on each occurrence of the keyword.

Images instead of text

When words are rendered as graphics on a web page, Google can't read them (nor, for that matter, can visually impaired users). Too many images can increase file size and slow page download times, factors that also hinder performance in Google.

Hidden keywords

This is the oldest trick in the spammer's book - particularly the use of text that is the same colour as the page background, making it `invisible' to the user. Google easily identifies and penalises such efforts.

Cloaking

When a website serves one set of content to its visitors, but another to search engines, it is called "cloaking". For example, pages that flash for only a moment, before redirecting or "bouncing" the visitor to a different page, may be seen as attempts at cloaking.

Duplicate content

Google is scornful of what it calls duplicate content - a page that displays information that is very similar to the information on another web page. Whether duplicate content is the result of plagiarism, or whether the duplicate pages are owned by the same organisation, Google disapproves.

Michael Heraghty is managing director of Mediajunk and author of Website Findability: How to Get Traffic from Google and Other Search Engines, available via his website, http://www.heraghty.net