Google Guidelines: Steps to a Google-friendly site
I just tapped into a gold mine – and I want to share it with you.
If you are a website owner, manager, webmaster, or author, you will be very interested in this article from Google’s own guidelines. Literally, this article is for anyone who cares about how many people read their content online. It’s their guidance on How to Make Your Site Google Friendly.
Google openly publishes its SEO and search guidelines. If you have content that you want to promote, you want others to read, and you want to expand your reach, then dig into this info – from Google’s own content – on how to create a website that Google loves:
Visitors are Hungry – What Are You Feeding Them?
Provide high-quality content on your pages, especially your homepage. This is the single most important thing to do. If your pages contain useful information, their content will attract many visitors and entice webmasters to link to your site. In creating a helpful, information-rich site, write pages that clearly and accurately describe your topic. Think about the words users would type to find your pages and include those words on your site.
Vote by Backlink – Google’s Guidelines
Links help our crawlers find your site and can give your site greater visibility in our search results. Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote by page A for page B. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important.”
Natural v. Unnatural Link Building – BE CAREFUL!
Google’s algorithms are adept at distinguishing natural links from unnatural links. Natural links to your site develop as part of the dynamic nature of the web when other sites find your content valuable and think it would be helpful for their visitors. Unnatural links to your site are placed there specifically to make your site look more popular to search engines. Some of these types of links (such as link schemes and doorway pages) are covered in our Webmaster Guidelines.
Only natural links are useful for the indexing and ranking of your site.
Make your site easily accessible
- Build your site with a logical link structure. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.
- Use a text browser, such as Lynx, to examine your site. Most spiders see your site much as Lynx would.
- If features such as JavaScript, cookies, session IDs, frames, DHTML, or Macromedia Flash keep you from seeing your entire site in a text browser, then spiders may have trouble crawling it.
Things to avoid
- Don’t fill your page with lists of keywords, attempt to “cloak” pages, or put up “crawler only” pages.
- If your site contains pages, links, or text that you don’t intend visitors to see, Google considers those links and pages deceptive and may ignore your site.
- Don’t feel obligated to purchase a search engine optimization service. Some companies employ deceptive tactics in an attempt to fool search engines. Sites affiliated with such companies could be banned from our index.
- Don’t use images to display important names, content, or links.
- Don’t create multiple copies of a page under different URLs.
Google Guidelines
If you’re not already reading Google content, I hope this will encourage you to spend time on Google dot com.
Everything you could ever possibly want to learn about search engines, searching, SEO, and a plethora of related topics is at your fingertips.
If you spend just a few minutes everyday, in no time at all you will be an expert. I’m thinking about starting a newsletter to share more of these Google insights.
Are you interested? Click on my contact page and send me a comment – let me know you’d like to subscribe. Here’s to YOU showing up on Google PAGE ONE!
About Lisa M. Chapman:
Lisa Chapman helps company leaders define, plan and achieve their goals, both online and offline. After 25+ years as an entrepreneur, she is now a business and marketing consultant, business planning consultant and social media consultant. Online, she works with clients to establish and enhance their online brand, attract their target market, and convert online traffic into revenues. Her digital course, Azon Fat Cats, teaching entrepreneurs how to sell private label products on Amazon FBA, will launch in 2018. Email: Lisa (at) LisaChapman (dot) com. Her book, The WebPowered Entrepreneur – A Step-by-Step Guide is available at: