Webmaster Guidelines - Breakdown For Search Engine Optimisation
1.) Preparing your website.
The first thing that you should do is ensure Google is aware that your site exists, you can do this by submitting your URL http://www.google.com/addurl.html, Then you need to help Google find all your content, Submitting your sitemap via Google Webmaster Tools is quick and easy and helps towards all of your pages being indexed. You can generate a sitemap by using http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/
2.)Design and Content
You should ensure you site can be found from internal linking, Google states that every page must be reachable from a static text link, This can be done via a sitemap in the footer of your template. Offer a sitemap page which links to every page within your site, Google will also look for something named sitemap.html or similar.
Create quality content that reflects what you are trying to optimise for, you cannot perform well in any search engine if you key phrases are not mentioned within the site. Use HTML formats to emphasis your key words.
Check for broken links and make the usability as easy as possible. Domain URL’s should be as search engine friendly as possible and DB queries do not perform as well as static html extensions. i.e. services.html.
Keep links to a minimum, Google states that less than a 100 is reasonable.
3.) Technical Guidelines
Make sure your site is as readable for the search engine spider as possible, you can use Lynx to see what your site looks like to a search engine. This is worth doing if you have frames, cookies, fancy functionality such as flash and javascript.
Make use of the robots.txt to tell Google’s spider which pages, directories and content it should or should not index. You can find more information about this here: http://www.robotstxt.org/faq.html.
Test your site in multiple browsers so that your site is accessible to wide range of users.
4.) Quality Control
Do’s:
Make pages for users and not search engines, write copy naturally, not for search engine optimisation and do not cloak any information. Avoid link building schemes to increase your PR, build links honestly through link baiting and social networks.
Don’ts:
Avoid hiding text or links, do not cloak or use re-directs. Don’t use software to query Google and don’t create pages that are irrelevant to your main content. Avoid duplicate content, meaning don not create multiple sites or sub domains with the same content on.
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