Google Guidelines: Steps to a Google-friendly site

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.