Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization Section Quick Jump

Search Engine Optimization Sections Design and Content Guidelines Technical Guidelines Quality Guidelines Basic Quality Principles Specific Quality Guidelines Google's Sandbox

Design and Content Guidelines

Paying attention to these design and content guidelines will go a long way towards writing your website in such a way as to enable Google to easily index and rank your pages. These guidelines are mostly things that you, as a web developer, should be doing anyway to meet modern standards compliant HTML/XHTML.

Do the simple things that any good web developer should be doing anyway, and wait for your website to steadily climb up the rankings. You will be surprised at how quickly your google ranking will come good simply by building your website technically correctly.

• Use technically correct and valid HTML/XHTML.
• Make sure your website has a clear structural hierarchy.
• Meet modern W3C standards.
• Remove or correct all broken links.
• Use text instead of images to display important content or links.
• Use the 'alt' attribute to include descriptive text about your images.
• Make sure that your <title></title> elements are descriptive and accurate.
• Use the <h1></h1> ~ <h6></h6> header tags properly.
• Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number, i.e. fewer than 100.
• Get other related websites to add links from their website to yours.
• Get your website included in online directories to source links to your website.
• Include a site map on your website.
• Create and submit a Google sitemap.
• Test your website in different browsers to make sure that it renders correctly.
• Provide unique and relevant content to give users reasons to visit your website first.
• Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and include those words in your pages.

Technical Guidelines

Lynx
Use a text browser such as Lynx to examine your site, because most search engine spiders see your site much as Lynx would. If features such as Javascript, cookies, session IDs, frames, DHTML, or Flash keep you from seeing all of your site in a text browser, then search engine spiders may have trouble crawling your site.

robots.txt
Make use of a robots.txt file on your web server. This file tells crawlers which directories can or cannot be crawled. Make sure it is current for your site, so that you don't accidentally block the Googlebot crawler. You can test your robots.txt file to make sure you're using it correctly with the robots.txt analysis tool available in Google Webmaster Tools. Use robots.txt to prevent crawling of search results pages or other auto-generated pages that don't add value for users coming from search engines.

Content Management Systems
If you use a Content Management System (CRM), make sure that it creates pages and links that search engines can crawl.

Quality Guidelines

The following quality guidelines, basic and specific, cover the most common forms of deceptive or manipulative behaviour that Google may respond negatively to.

Webmasters who spend their energies upholding the spirit of the basic principles of web development will provide a much better user experience, and subsequently enjoy better ranking than those who spend their time looking for loopholes they can exploit to trick or mislead search engine bots.

Quality Guidelines - Basic Quality Principles

Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines. Don't deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users. This is commonly referred to as 'cloaking'.

Don't participate in link schemes designed to increase your site's ranking. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or 'bad neighborhoods' on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.

Don't use unauthorized computer programs to submit pages as they will count against you in Google's ranking algorithm.

Quality Guidelines - Specific Quality Guidelines

Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings:

• Do not use hidden text.
• Do not use hidden links.
• Do not use cloaking or sneaky redirects.
• Do not send automated queries to Google.
• Do not load pages with irrelevant keywords.
• Do not use your site name in the <title></title> tag.
• Do not use 'stop words' in Meta titles, Meta keywords, header tags or links.
• Do not create multiple pages, sub-domains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.

Google's Sandbox

Be aware that Google seems to have a probationary period where new sites, even if indexed, will not necessarily appear in search results immediately. You may have to wait a period of 90 - 120 days after your website is launched to see it appear in Google results at its full potential. The Google Sandbox is not a recognized algorithm by Google. It is just a phrase used to describe the effect often seen with new websites that have only recently been found by Google.