Google has just said how SEO should be done
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On November 13th 2008, Google released a search engine optimization starter guide, which was primarily for Google teams but found that it would be helpful to webmasters especially those who are just new in the field. However they do not guarantee that your website will be ranked number 1 by implementing the said techniques or they have unearthed any hidden secrets but they provide information that will make it easy for your site to be crawled and/or indexed.
Search engine optimization is all about making small modifications to your website, however this may seem not to have some effect but if combined with other methods, some noticeable change is bound to be detected in user’s experience and search engine rankings.
You as a webmaster should first and always base your decision on what is best for the visitors in your website keeping in mind that there are a lot of users of information out there that are looking for your content. Putting too much effort on specific tweaks to gain ranking in the organic results of search engines may not deliver the desired results. SEO is about having your site's best foot forward when it comes to search engine rankings.
This is what you should be doing:-
1. Page titles – they should be unique and accurate
This is what tells the search engine and the user what your website is all about. It should be placed within the <head> title tag in your HTML document. If your website is returned in the search results, the title tag is the one that is shown in the first line of the result.
Some of the good practices when it comes to page titles includes:-
- Describes the page content accurately – the title should give an idea of what is to be expected in the content. Avoid “Untitled” page titles and titles with no relation to the content.
- Title tag should be unique to every page – Since each page may have different topics, it is better to have unique pages titles.
· Brief but descriptive titles – titles should be brief but also carry some weight. Avoid stuffing keywords and very long titles.
2. “Description” Meta-tags – this is what tells Google and other search engines what the website is all about. This is where you can put some short sentences describing your website. Like the title tag it is also available within the <head> tag in a HTML document. Adding this description is a good description especially to all pages when Google cannot find a good selection of text to use in the snippets.
Some of the good practices when it comes to meta-tag description include:-
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- Accurately summarizing the content in the page – it should be informative and attracts the visitor to view your page. Avoid
- Use unique meta-tag for each page – if your website has fewer pages that you can put meta tags, do so since it helps the user and Google especially when a search result may bring back a number of pages from your domain. If your website contains millions of pages, it might not be feasible to write meta tags for all the pages however you can generate meta-tags based on the each page content. Avoid: using single meta-tag across all pages in your website or a group of pages for that matter.
- Work on the structure of your URLs - Having descriptive categories and filenames for the content on your website will not only help your site more to be organized, but it could also lead to better crawling of your documents search engines. Also, it can create easier, “friendlier" URLs for those that want to link to your content. Visitors mostly shy off from long and cryptic URLs. Some of good practices when it come to structuring of URLs are:
· Use words in URL – URLs with words are more relevant to search engines and visitors since they are easier to remember and probably link to them. Avoid: using long URL with such things as session variables, choosing default/assigned pages like “page1.html”, using excessive and repetition of keywords unnecessarily
· Have simple directory structure – have a structure that is easy to access by your visitors. Let the directory be more correlated to the content in it. Avoid: deep nesting of directories “dir1/dir2/dir3….” And using directory that is not related to the content in it.
· Provide unique URL for each document – if you are having multiple URL pointing to the same document, set up a redirecting link from non-preferred URL to the preferred one. Avoid: having sub-domain and root directory link to the same content, mixing non-www. with www. URLs in the internal structure and capitalizing some parts of the URL or wholly since most visitors expects them in lower case.
- Make you site easy to navigate – this is not only relevant to search engines but also visitors are able to find content that they are looking for easily and fast. Since all websites have a homepage, and unless your site has a handful pages you should have a plan on how to get visitors from homepage to specific content that they are looking for. Have a sitemap that will help the visitors if they are stuck, although it is also used by search engine during the crawl, it is primarily aimed for the visitors.Some of good practices when it comes to site navigations:-
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- Natural flowing hierarchy – make is easy for users to move from general content to specific content. Use internal linking advantage but do it when it’s sensible. Avoid: creating complex web links e.g. linking every page to all others in the website, going overboard in slicing your content i.e. before a visitor gets to the content needed there must be around 20 or more clicks.
- Use text links for navigation –text links are the most preferred when it comes to navigation from one section or page to the other since they give search engine a better understanding of your website. Avoid: having linking primarily on drop-down menus, animations and pictures,
- Use “breadcrumb” navigation – this is a row of internal links of a website that are mostly displayed at the top or bottom of the page and shows the current position of the visitor at a particular time. e.g. “Home>Article1>Article1a” etc.
- Have a HTML sitemap and XML sitemap file – a sitemap will provide the link to all pages within the website or the most important pages if you have many. The XML sitemap will ensure that search engine discover the pages in your website. AVOID: Sitemap with broken links and having to link unorganized pages e.g. by subject.
- Put into consideration when a user removes part of your URL – this is looking into what would happen if a visitor type’s part of the address, will it give a 404 page (page not found) or will it show the content of that directory?
- Useful 404 page – have an error page that will redirect users to useful pages like homepage if your visitor types the URL wrongly and/or the link is broken. Avoid: the 404 page is not indexed by the search engine, providing vague information like “Error page not found” and using the 404 page that is not consistent with the rest of the page in terms of design and style.
- Offer quality content and services – giving users quality content and services will lead a buzz in word of mouth, social networks, emails and other methods. This is going to increase your reputation from both Google and users and this will not come without the good content. Some of the good content practices include:-
· Easy to read text – readers enjoys reading flowing content that is easy to read. Avoid: ungrammatical and spelling mistakes in your content and embedding text images for contextual text which is not readable by the search engines.
· Stay organized in your topic -ensure that the content is logically organized and users are able to find what they are looking for. Avoid: just dumping chunks of information that is without heading, section and layout.
· Language –use language that your user expects or might search. Put yourself in their feet both advanced users as well as the newbies. You can find more help with the Keyword tool that is provided by Google Adwords.
· Fresh and unique content –new and informative content will not only keep your visitors longer but bring more around. Avoid: rehashing or copying content from users and having duplicate or near duplicate content within your site.
· Write for your users and not search engines -avoid thinking so much about keywords when writing content but focus on the users. Avoid: unnecessary keywords in your websites, deceiving users by having some text hidden within the website and having block of text that is not useful to users.
- Anchor text – have good anchor text that related to your website. They tell something to users and Google what the website on the other site is all about. Links may be internal pr external. Some of good practices when it comes to anchor text include:-
· Have descriptive text – it should provide a basic idea of what the page on the other side is all about.
· Write concise text – the text should straight-forward and to the point and should not be very long.
· Ease to spot – the anchor text should be easy to spot and distinguishable from the other text.
· Internal anchor text – this will ease the navigation to the pages within your website and Google will be able to navigate within your website easily.
- Header tags – the header tags usually denoted by <most important - h1….h6 – least important> having organized header tags usually show the users how the information flows within the website hence easier navigation. Some good practices when it comes to header tags include:-
· Take some time to plan - just like any other method of writing, take some time to plan on how you want your website to look how you can place the header tags appropriately. Avoid: placing header tags that is not useful to structure and content of the page, using header tags where <em> and <strong> would have been more appropriate and erratically moving of header tag from one size to the other.
· Unnecessary use of header tags – use header tags where they are appropriate and sensible.
- Optimize use of images – images in your content may seem useless but by using the “alt” tags you you can optimize them to take advantage of. The attribute is mostly useful if the user cannot see the image or the browser does not support them and a screen reader is used, the attribute provide information about the picture. Some good practices when it comes to images are:-
· Use brief but descriptive filenames and alt text – like any other method, filenames and alt text (using ASCII language) are more useful if they are short and precise.
· Supply alt text when using images as links
· Store images in their own directory
· Use commonly supported file formats - use file types like JPEG, GIF, BMP etc
- Make use of “Robots.txt” – this file tells search engine where to crawl and where not to. If you want to stop some of the pages within your website from being crawled since maybe they have information that is not relevant to users, you do that in the robot.txt file. Google webmaster tools has a very user friendly robot.txt generator, you can get one there. Some of good practices when using robot.txt include:-
· Have other methods for secure content – have more secure methods like having a password protection using .htaccess encryption for your sensitive content.
- Beware of “nofollow” for links - if the value of the "rel" attribute of a link is set to "nofollow" this will tell Google that some links on your site should not be followed or pass your page's reputation to the pages they are linked to. If you are exchanging link to a site that you do not trust and you do not want to pass your reputation to them, use nofollow. E.g. <a href = “http://www.hghjg.com” rel=”nofollow”> Spammer </a>. this is helpful to prevent you from linking to spammy website which would come back to harm you. Usually it is more useful to pages where you have guest books, forums, blogs etc.
- Promote your website in a good way –
· Blogging – write about new content that you have added to your site is highly rewarding.
· Offline promotion – this involves promoting your website outside e.g. business letterhead, newsletters, business cards, brochures, posters and even T-shirts.
· Know about social media sites – sites that revolve around user interaction have been able to match interested groups of people with relevant content.
· Be a member of a local business center – this will ease your business access to customers e.g. Google Local business center.
· Reach out to related sites – having communication to those sites will open up new ideas and opportunities to all the parties.
- Webmaster tools – most search engine including Google usually provide webmaster tools that provides the interaction between the webmaster and he search engine. This is useful in that the webmaster can be able to get necessary information to their websites. Here are some of the things that Google webmaster tools provide:-
· see which parts of a site Googlebot had problems crawling
· upload an XML Sitemap file
· analyze and generate robots.txt files
· remove URLs already crawled by Googlebot
· specify the preferred domain
· identify issues with title and description meta tags
· understand the top searches used to reach a site
· get a glimpse at how Googlebot sees pages
· remove unwanted sitelinks that Google may use in results
· receive notification of quality guideline violations and file for a site reconsideration
Yahoo sites Explorer and Microsoft Live search webmaster tool are also other types of webmaster tools.
- Web Analytics services - web analytics programs like the Google analytics gives you details view of your traffic trends about your website. You can be able to know how your visitors are behaving when and accessing your website. Google analytics tools lets you:-
· Know most popular content on your website.
· Know the impacts of optimization on your website
· Sources of traffic and visitors within your website.
Lastly, Google provides another tool called “Google Website Optimizer” that allows you to experiment to find out what on-page factors will provide the best conversion for your visitors. “Google Trifecta” is a video showing how website optimizer and Analytics can go a long way in optimizing your website.
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Comments
Thank you for the comment. Am always glad to share anything useful at hubpages!
The biggest factor in search engine optimization is ranking well on a good keyword, which can bring you online queries. Bringing traffic to the website is toughest part in seo and requires constant hardwork.
I agree with you karmadir that SEO is a tough and an ongoing process.
pariprashneno says:
13 months ago
oh amwass2002, what a great info have you shared with us here! It will surely help all who will read this hubpage.
Though presently I don't have or create any website of my own but it will help me too.
My best wishes to you and hope to have more useful info from you again in hubpages.