Search Engine Optimization - Guidelines - Google
Google
Google has three pages of guidelines
- Webmaster guidelines
- Quality guidelines
- Design and technical guidelines
Key suggestions include
- Have other relevant sites link to yours.
- Submit it to Google at http://www.google.com/addurl.html.
- Submit a sitemap as part of our Google Sitemaps (Beta) project.
- Make sure all the sites that should know about your pages are aware your site is online.
- Submit your site to relevant directories
- Make pages for users, not for search engines.
- Don't deceive your users
- Don't present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as "cloaking."
- Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings.
- Don't participate in link schemes designed to increase your site's ranking or PageRank.
- 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, check rankings, etc.
- Google does not recommend the use of products such as WebPosition Gold that send automatic or programmatic queries to Google.
- Avoid hidden text or hidden links.
- Don't employ cloaking or sneaky redirects.
- Don't send automated queries to Google.
- Don't load pages with irrelevant words.
- Don't create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.
- Don't create pages that install viruses, trojans, or other badware.
- Avoid "doorway" pages created just for search engines
- Avoid other "cookie cutter" approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.
- Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links.
- Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.
- Offer a site map to your users with links that point to the important parts of your site.
- Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.
- Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it.
- Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links.
- The Google crawler doesn't recognize text contained in images.
- Make sure that your TITLE and ALT tags are descriptive and accurate.
- Check for broken links and correct HTML.
- If you decide to use dynamic pages be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages.
- It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few.
- Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100).
- Use a text browser such as Lynx to examine your site, because most search engine spiders see your site much as Lynx would.
- If fancy 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.
- Allow search bots to crawl your sites without session IDs or arguments that track their path through the site.
- Make sure your web server supports the If-Modified-Since HTTP header.
- Make use of the robots.txt file on your web server.
- 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 use "&id=" as a parameter in your URLs, as we don't include these
pages in our index.