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Google website optimization tips for top 10 ranking. Guaranteed :: Webmaster Guidelines
Following these guidelines will help Google find, index, and rank your site, which is the best way to ensure you'll be included in Google's results. Even if you choose not to implement any of these suggestions, we strongly encourage you to pay very close attention to the "Quality Guidelines," which outline some of the illicit practices that may lead to a site being removed entirely from the Google index.
Once a site has been removed, it will no longer show up in results on Google.com or on any of Google's partner sites.
Design and Content Guidelines:
» 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.
» If the site map is larger than 100 or so links, you may want to break the site map into separate pages. |
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» 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 (i.e., the URL contains a '?'
character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls
dynamic pages as well as static pages.
» Keep
the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than
100).
Technical Guidelines:
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
ID's, 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 ID's or arguments
that track their path through the site. These techniques are
useful for tracking individual user behavior, but the access
pattern of bots is entirely different.
«•» Using
these techniques may result in incomplete indexing of your
site, as bots may not be able to eliminate URLs that look
different but actually point to the same page.
«•»
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 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 for a FAQ answering
questions regarding robots and how to control them when they
visit your site.
«•» 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.
When your site is ready:
Once your site is online, submit it to Google at http://www.google.com/addurl.html.
«•»
Make sure all the sites that should know about your pages
are aware your site is online.
«•» Submit
your site to relevant directories such as the Open Directory
Project and Yahoo!.
«•»
Periodically review Google's webmaster section
for more information.
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Quality Guidelines - Basic principles:
» Make
pages for users, not for search engines.
» Don't
deceive your users, or present different content to search
engines than you display to users.
» Avoid
tricks intended to improve search engine rankings.
» A good
rule of thumb is whether you'd feel comfortable explaining
what you've done to a website that competes with you.
» Another
useful test is to ask, "Does this help my users? Would
I do this if search engines didn't exist?"
» Don't
participate in link schemes designed to increase your site's
ranking or PageRank.
» 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.
Quality Guidelines - Specific recommendations:
»
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.
»
Avoid "doorway" pages created just for
search engines, or other "cookie cutter" approaches
such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.
These quality guidelines cover the most common forms of deceptive
or manipulative behavior, but Google may respond negatively
to other misleading practices not listed here, (e.g. tricking
users by registering misspellings of well-known web sites).
It's not safe to assume that just because a specific deceptive
technique isn't included on this page, Google approves of
it.
Webmasters who spend their energies upholding the spirit
of the basic principles listed above will provide a much better
user experience and subsequently enjoy better ranking than
those who spend their time looking for loopholes they can
exploit.
©2002 Google.
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