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.
Top 10 Search Terms:
• google friendly website • how to make your website google friendly • how to make website google friendly • how to make google friendly website • how to make your site google friendly • make website google friendly • how to make a google friendly website
It is really a difficult task for most webmasters to make their sites Google friendly because there are many factors you need to consider.
Of course, thank s for your detailed tips here.
This is well researched Adesoji. Just want to ask something though, is ok to disallow bots crawling “/search/”? some says it does cause some duplicate content issues or something like that.
Anyway, thanks for the great tips you have laid here 🙂
Regards,
Jason
Great article with some good tips. I have been looking for some direction and detail on duplicate content, and can’t find much in the way of information. Not sure if duplicate content fits in the Google friendly category but I suspect Google will index fewer pages if it finds a lot of duplicate content. Hopefully someone can point to a good resource for explaining how to minimize dup content issues.
Something that many SEO experts do not take into account is that we have to think first on our users. Think like users. How would I feel when reading this content? How will I be when you see the page? What will my reaction? I find what I want? The answer to these questions is itself a synonym for that we are offering what they need.
It really is difficult to accommodate all views, but the fact is that we must be very careful with our items. Course, tips to improve the design, usability make it, do not use colors that scared and uncomfortable, and so on. Nice tips, greetings.
another important thing you should remind rookie bloggers/webmasters:
dont ever give up so easily when you start your website.
keep linking, keep doing article marketing, keep adding content.
do this for a few months and you will see satisfying results in a few months.
Please never give up making links but keep adding content.
beware of information overload, if you want to try multiple systems, focus on one for a few weeks then the next weeks for another system, and so on.
and number one: dont procrastinate.
While online tutoring and freelance writing are my main sources of income as of now, Blogging is something I can do effortlessly and really enjoy doing. As for most bloggers, Google is my main source of highly targeted traffic. In fact I find it hard to believe people pay for traffic through ads, when they should be buying traffic through SEOed articles and blogs!
great extensive comprehensive post ,my friend.
but i have to as, you mentioned “Use a reasonable number of links on any page of your website.”. may i know within what range will it be classified as reasonable? =)
speaking of which, making your website google friendly is fairly different from SEO to which you would like to have your websites placed on a strategic position in Google.
For this i believe both SEO and making your website Google friendly has to coherently come together.
i believe that as long as you stick onto doing that what seem logical, meaning no ‘infiltrations’ , using malicious programs as such to enhance your google ranking, there shouldn’t be much to worry. I believe as long as you providing true value and content, ranking + exposure will soon come onto your way.
=) cheers
I agree with Kervin Vergara. If you think like a user, your site will end up being user-friendly. Google rankings are very important because if the site cannot be found on Google, then there won’t be much traffic.
xml sitemaps are always very helpful. Google’s webmaster tools give a ton of information on some of the important aspects they are looking for as well as regular updates on backlinks, errors, load time and many other helpful areas.
Using a reasonable amount of links is good advice that is not often said. If the page is too busy with anything, then it loses its attractiveness to viewers very quickly.