How can I create a Google-friendly site?
Give visitors something worth visiting your site for
Provide
unique content that is worth reading, viewing or listening to and
update it regularly. The days of jiggery pokkery with meta tags and
invisible keywords are over. Google cares about real content just as we
do, so invest in the content of your site and ensure it is informative,
well put together and interesting. Your core products and services will
always have a number of other closely related topics so write about
them and demonstrate your knowledge and experience. Avoid "doorway"
pages created just for search engines, or other "cookie cutter"
approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original
content.
Make sure your web server supports the
If-Modified-Since HTTP header. This feature allows your web server to
tell Google whether your content has changed since we last crawled your
site. Supporting this feature saves you bandwidth and overhead.
Make sure that other sites link to yours
If you deliver unique and useful content then other sites will link to
yours often without request and Google attaches a lot of importance to
inbound links. However, it attaches little or no importance to inbound
links which are the result of link exchange schemes or link farms. The
best kind of inbound link your site wants is from another site with a
good PageRank and not from a 'Links' page.
Make your site accessible
Make sure you use plain jane text links for your navigation - no fancy
javaScript or Flash menus as spiders may have trouble crawling them.
Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.
Google can index dynamic pages and contrary to the popular myth can index pages with '?' in the URL.
However, the emphasis here is on the 'can', not 'will'. They actually
recommend creating static duplicates of dynamic pages but you have to
add the URLs of dynamic pages to your robots.txt file to ensure they
aren't treated as duplicates. So basically don't assume they are being
indexed and don't assume they aren't. Excellent.
Make use
of the robots.txt file on your web server. This file tells crawlers
which directories can or cannot be crawled. Make sure it's current for
your site so that you don't accidentally block the Googlebot crawler.
Visit http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/faq.html
to learn how to instruct robots when they visit your site. You can test
your robots.txt file to make sure you're using it correctly with the robots.txt analysis tool available in Google Site maps.
Allow
search bots to crawl your sites without session IDs or arguments that
track their path through the site. If your site is graphics heavy
provide relevant alt text for graphics and include some body copy. Also
check for broken links and incorrect HTML.
If your
company buys a content management system, make sure that the system can
export your content so that search engine spiders can crawl your site.
Don't try and be clever
Any
attempts at keyword stuffing or serving up one page for a crawler and
another for visitors run the risk of getting your site ignored
altogether. The effort expended on that would be better directed at
putting decent content on the site. Create pages for users not search
engines. Watch out for cowboy 'Search Engine Optimisers' - you can tell
them a mile away as they say things like ' top 10 guaranteed!'. I'm #1
on a number of search strings but nobody would ever type them into a
search box. They can also get your site involved with link spammers and
areas of the web that are best left well alone. Keep the links on a
given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100).
Don't create duplicate pages
Don't create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially
duplicate content. If you do have separate text only or printer
friendly versions of pages then hide them from the Googlebot in your
robots.txt file. If you want to make a printer friendly page then it's
easier to create a style sheet for printers as on this page using
<link href="css/print.css" rel="stylesheet" media="print"
type="text/css">.
Keywords
Think
about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that
your site actually includes those words within it.
- Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links.
- Offer
a site map to your users with links that point to the important parts
of your site. If the site map is larger than 100 or so links, you may
want to break the site map into separate pages.
Don't annoy Google
- Don't send automated queries to Google.
- Don't
use unauthorized computer programs to submit pages, check rankings,
etc. Google doesn't like it and it's not a good idea to annoy a search
engine if you want high rankings on it.
When your site is ready
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