SEO and The Google Guidelines

By John D Ross


Following the Google guidelines will help Google find, index and rank your website. We have prepared a checklist to the guidelines necessary for SEO success.

When your website is completed and online:

- Seek relevant links from websites that have similar content to yours.
- Submit your website to Google at http://www.google.com/addurl.html
- Open a Google Account, add your website and then submit the sitemap.xml (you can make an xml sitemap for free at sitemapdoc.com)
- Submit your site to relevant directories such as dmoz.org (the Open Directory Project) and other major search engines such as Yahoo and MSN. If your website is about a specific topic, then submit it to industry-specific search engines.

Designing Your Website

Website Navigation :

- ensure your website has a clear hierarchy and text links, not image links.
- every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.
- have an HTML sitemap with links that point to all pages of your site. If your sitemap has more than 100 links, break the sitemap into separate pages.

Website Content :

- aim to create a useful, information / content rich website
- write pages that clearly and accurately describe the content of your page
- research the words visitors would use to find your website pages and include those words within the content. Do not guess what search words they are using as you will very often be wrong. Research the keywords for free here
http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion/
- use text instead of images to display names, content and links. The Google crawler does not recognize text contained in images
- ensure that your TITLE tag and ALT tags are descriptive and accurate and not simply keyword-stuffed
- check your website for broken links and ensure you are using correct HTML
- keep the links on any page to less than 100 links

Checking Your Website - Technical Considerations

Use a text browser such as Lynx to examine your website because most search engine spiders see your site much as Lynx would.

If you include features such as javascript, cookies, session IDs, frames, DHTML, or Flash and these keep you from seeing all of your website in the Lynx browser, then search engine spiders will have trouble seeing them also and will have trouble crawling your website.

Ensure your hosting provider supports the HTTP header If-Modified-Since. This allows the web server to tell the Google crawler if your content has changed or not since it last crawled your website.

Have a robots.txt file on your website. This file will tell the Google crawler which directories (folders) can or cannot be crawled and indexed. Use your robots.txt to stop the crawling of search results pages and any auto-generated pages that do not add value for visitors coming from Google. To learn how to write a robots.txt file go to:
http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/faq.html

Quality Guidelines

Webmasters who spend time upholding the spirit of the basic principles detailed below will provide a much better user-experience for visitors and this is what will help your website.

The Basic Principles of Quality Web Pages

- make your website pages for users, not for the search engines.
- ensure your content is original and relevant to the topic of the page.
- avoid tricks intended to improve the search engine ranking of your website.
- always ask yourself, when you are about to implement something new: "Does this help my visitors?"

The Do's and Do Not's of Quality Web Pages

- do not load pages with irrelevant keywords
- do not create multiple pages, subdomains, or websites with what is basically duplicate content
- do not use hidden text or hidden links
- do not use cloaking or sneaky redirects
- do not create "doorway" pages just for search engines, or use other cookie cutter approaches such as affiliate programs with very little or no original content.
- DO provide unique and relevant content that gives users a reason to visit your website again and again.

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