GOOGLING is now a universally recognised verb. For a business, getting ranked highly on Google is very important.

Most users won’t stray past page two or three of search results, so to get ranked on page one could mean the difference between a lot of web traffic and obscurity.

Having said that, it’s sometimes a fine art to get your site ranking highly in search engine results, consequently there are now many Search Engine Optimisation companies promising to get you to the top of Google rankings.

Before spending money, try these tips.

As broadband speeds have increased and users have become much more internet savvy, you have only a few seconds to impress the user to stay on your website.

Once users have found your site, can they find the information they require quickly and easily?

Content should dictate your site’s design, not the other way around.

Determine the focal point of your homepage, when it first loads up, where are your eyes drawn to? Within a few seconds potential customers should be able to take in your company name and a brief idea of what products or services you offer. How quickly do your pages load?

Flash animation dramatically slows down a sites impact. Make sure your page titles contain relevant information and you use good keywords and phrases in your page content and META tags.

Avoid flooding your site with text and listing lots of keywords which can hinder a site’s performance. If your site was written in the past few years, it should by now conform to Web Standards.

These are a set of guidelines put together by the World Wide Web Consortium aiming to get developers and web users to stick to core principles and components that improve the way the web works.

With the internet being accessible over multiple platforms, and also the competition in the web browser market with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, fighting against Mozilla Firefox, Safari and the recently- launched Google Chrome, your site needs to look and function correctly across all these platforms.

This is so that users have a positive experience viewing your site anywhere.

Web standards also champion optimisation for users with impairments, who may not be able to read small text, have trouble distinguishing colours, or for the blind, who have the option of using a text only browser like Lynx, which literally reads out the text on the page, which means the basic HTML & CSS that the page is built with needs to be clean and organised.

By Kevin McLean

■ Kevin McLean is director of Northgate Systems, of Stanhope, County Durham.