How To Make Your Website Google Friendly

This is a guest post by Adesoji Adegbulu of AdesojiAdegbulu.com.

There are many websites out there that Google would not have any relationship with. What happens to these websites is that they won’t be found on Google search results.

It is very important that your website be listed among Google’s search results. This is because so many web users uses Google search engine to conduct most of their searches. If you want your website to be seen among the search results, you need to make your website Google’s friendly.

In a few minutes, I will be showing you guidelines on how to make your website Google Friendly. Following these guidelines will help Google find, index, and rank your site.

If you choose not to make your website Google friendly, your site will be removed entirely from the Google index or otherwise penalized. If a site is penalized, it may no longer show up in results on Google.com or on any of Google’s partner sites.

Design And Content

1. In designing your website, make sure you give a proper hierarchy of tags and text links. Every page on your website should be reachable from at least one static text link.

2. Add a sitemap on your website for your users. The sitemap must have links that point to the important parts of your website. A sitemap with extremely large number of links is not advisable. You should break the sitemap into multiple pages. (If you have a big blog, having a sitemap in .gz format is really advisable — Typhoon)

3. Use a reasonable number of links on any page of your website.

4. Ensure that your website’s content is useful and information-rich.

5. Optimize your website for search engines. This you can do by conducting a research for the words users would type on Google.com to find your pages. Once you get those keywords, always include them in your website’s content.

6. Use more text instead of more images to display important names, content, or pages on your website. The Google crawler that puts website on Google search results does not recognize text contained in images. In cases where you cannot do without using images, consider using the “Title” element or “ALT” attribute to describe what the image is all about. Make sure that they are descriptive and accurate.

7. Avoid broken links and correct all links on your website that goes nowhere. If a link is not available, do not include it on your website site. If you must include it, let your users know that it is coming soon.

8. Do not use dynamic URLs (i.e. the URL containing a “?” character). It is not every search engine spider that crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages.

According to Google, the following technical details needs to be followed in order to make your website Google friendly.

• 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. 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. You can test your robots.txt file to make sure you’re using it correctly with the robots.txt analysis tool available in Google Webmaster Tools.

• If your company buys a content management system, make sure that the system creates pages and links that search engines can crawl.

• Use robots.txt to prevent crawling of search results pages or other auto-generated pages that don’t add much value for users coming from search engines.

• Monitor your site’s performance and optimize load times. Google’s goal is to provide users with the most relevant results and a great user experience. Fast sites increase user satisfaction and improve the overall quality of the web (especially for those users with slow Internet connections), and we hope that as webmasters improve their sites, the overall speed of the web will improve.

Google strongly recommends that all webmasters regularly monitor site performance using Page Speed, YSlow or WebPagetest.

If you are wordpress blogger, then you may like reading – “How To Speed Up WordPress Blog In 3 Simple Steps“

In addition to the above mentioned, there are quality guidelines you need to follow in order not to have your website banned from Google. It is better to be safe than sorry when it comes to Google listing your website on their search engine.

These quality guidelines covers the most common forms of deceptive or manipulative behavior, but Google may respond negatively to other misleading practices such as tricking users by registering misspellings of well-known websites. It’s not safe to assume that just because a specific deceptive technique isn’t included here, Google approves of it.

Webmasters who spend their energies upholding the spirit of the basic principles will provide a much better user experience and subsequently enjoy better ranking than those who spend their time looking for loopholes they can exploit.

If you believe that another site is abusing Google’s quality guidelines, please report that site. Google prefers developing scalable and automated solutions to problems, so they attempt to minimize hand-to-hand spam fighting. The spam reports they receive are used to create scalable algorithms that recognize and block future spam attempts.

• Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines. Don’t deceive your users or 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. 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. 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. Such programs consume computing resources and violate Google’s Terms of Service. Google does not recommend the use of products such as WebPosition Gold™ that send automatic or programmatic queries to Google.

Conclusion

In conclusion, do all that you can to make your website Google friendly. Google’s terms are the only thing you need to rank high on Google’s search engine. You should read Google’s Recommended Practices for Website Owners so that you know more about Google’s term in ranking your website high on her search engine.

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