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There’s no way around it – Google is the head honcho of the search engine world. If we want our websites to show up in the search results (and stay there) we need to acknowledge Google’s webmaster guidelines. While we may not follow these guidelines to the T, it’s clear that following Google’s suggested best practices will mean a healthier life-cycle for our sites.
Google breaks down their guidelines into three main sections: Design and Content Guidelines, Technical Guidelines, and Quality Guidelines. Let’s take a look at what Google wants from each category.
Design and Content Guidelines
- Easy to Navigate
- Provide useful, relevant content
- Keep the number of links on each page to a reasonable number
- Include appropriate keywords in your content
Technical Guidelines
- Test your site to be sure it displays correctly in different browsers.
- Optimize your site speed and performance
- Regularly monitor your site’s performance
- Allow search spiders to crawl your sites without session IDs
Quality Guidelines
- Don’t try to trick your users or the web with cloaking (presenting different content to the search engines than you users).
- Avoid tricks to improve search rankings.
- Don’t take part in link schemes
Specific Quality Guidelines
- Avoid hidden text and links
- Don’t use cloaking
- Don’t create multiple pages or sub-domains with duplicate content
- Don’t fill your content with irrelevant keywords
Overall, Google wants websites to provide unique, useful and relevant information on sites that are easy to use – the end goal being happy searchers. This was verified with their recent Panda update which focused on increasing the exposure of sites with quality content. As we always say here at Astonish Results, quality content is king.
