The day after my website was created and up for the general public to view I did what most people do. I looked for my site using a search on Google. To my surprise my website was already there! In less than 24 hours my website was appearing on the first page!
Certainly a lot of thought, research, and learning have gone into finding the right keywords and making sure the site is optimized, but it wasn’t my front page that popped up in the listings.
It wasn’t one of the pages I expected to see on the first page of the Google search results. I had not actually expected that page to come up at all.
So I started pondering what that particular page had that none of my other pages have. It really stumped me. Then it dawned on me. I was looking at it the wrong way around. It isn’t what the page has that makes it stand out; it is what it doesn’t have.
This is going to come as quite a shock to the over-the-top, wingding, fancy-scripting web designers. The page that made it to the front of the Google line-up doesn’t use CSS for styling. The Google front-runner doesn’t use Javascript. There are no images on the page.
Here comes the shock to the SEO experts. It has no back links from sites with high page ranks.
It is just a plain text-filled page. And therein lays the secret. Yes, optimized keywords are essential to reaching the audience who are looking for you, but simplicity of style in your web page is even more important if you want to get indexed by Google quickly. That plain page caught Google’s attention and as a result the rest of my site was appearing within another day or so.
If there’s anything in this article that you don’t understand like SEO, page rank, or back links just send me an email and I’ll be happy to explain them to you.
Darla M
