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
http://www.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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