You may or may not be aware that Google has a free course that teaches you how to create a successful website, helping you to achieve a number of important aims:

Identify your audience

Google gives plenty of useful advice on identifying your audience. These are the people you want to visit your site and at whom your content is aimed.

A useful tip from Google is to gather a test audience. This can be a focus group, or simply friends and family. Ask the test group about their experience. Is the website easy to navigate? What feature or information is missing?

High quality content

The course is particularly helpful on identifying the elements that make up good content. Google identifies the four content factors as:

• Useful and informative – Give as much information about your business as you can. Details such as opening hours, which department to contact and how to get to your location are beneficial.

• More valuable and useful than other sites – See what your competition is saying and aim to provide better content.

• High quality – Write elegant, clear content aimed at achieving a good user experience rather than just appealing to the search engines.

• Engaging – The site design and images can engage your visitors. Allow visitors to interact with you through comment areas, and regularly update content to encourage repeat visits.

Make sure your site is seen by Google

You want your site to be picked up by the search engine so that visitors find you when they search using particular keywords. The Google course does not go into this in detail, but it does have a useful guide called How Search Works.

Though Google does not publish exactly how it ranks websites, it has extensive resources available that, if followed, will ensure that Google likes your site.

John Murray

John is every inch the wordsmith and loves a game of Scrabble above all else. With experience writing for newspapers, John’s time at university was spent studying Creative Writing – something which comes across in his love of the pun.