SEO Expert Summarizes Google's Guidelines for Better Search Engine Rankings.

It has been more than a year that have been optimizing sites (worked on more than 50 websites including some fortune 500 companies) for better user experience and search engine performance. There have been countless experiments and tweaks that I have tried and all of them have worked, as I always took care that under any circumstances my site is neither fooling the user or the search engine.

For the past few days I was trying to document all the points that a SEO expert should be aware of, before he starts optimizing a site. Below I have mentioned points important from Google’s perspective. I personally believe, you get it right on Google and things will fall in place for other search engines.

There are many sites that give tips and tricks for improving rankings on Google. However, I have found the following resources exceptionally important and they happen to be from Google itself.

Most of the other sites were just trying to re-invent, the same points described in the documents below.

The content on following three URL must be read and memorized by every SEO expert.

URL 1: Webmaster guidelines- http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769&topic=15260

URL 2: Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide - http://www.google.com/webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf

URL 3: Creating a Google-friendly sites - http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/topic.py?topic=8522

1. Summarizing the Webmaster Guidelines:

The Webmaster Guidelines consist of guideline for Design and content, Technical aspect and Quality of the website.

The Design and content guidelines suggest the following:

1. A site should have a clear hierarchy and text links.


2. Create a Sitemap.


3. Make sure that <title> elements and alt attributes are descriptive and accurate.


4. Avoid dynamic URLs, Broken links and excessive links on a single page (fewer than 100)
   
   

The Technical guidelines suggest:

1. Use a text browser such as Lynx to examine your site, because most search engine spiders see your site much as Lynx would. A helpful add-on on Mozilla Firefox would be: Yellowpipe Lynx Viewer Tool URL: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1944


2. Allow search bots to crawl your sites without session IDs or arguments that track their path through the site.
   

The Quality Guidelines suggest:

1. 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.


2. Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines.


3. Avoid all the Black Hat SEO techniques, such as hidden text or hidden links, cloaking or sneaky redirects, automated queries to Google, load pages with irrelevant keywords, etc.
   
   

2. Summarizing the search engine Optimization Starter Guide:

This document informs us about the best practices to be followed while optimizing the SEO elements of a website.

Some basic and important SEO Guidelines from the document are:

• For Page Titles: make them unique, accurate and descriptive for all the pages of the website.


• For Meta Description tag: Accurately summarize the page's content and also make them unique for each page.


• For URL’s structure: Use words (keywords) in URL’s, Create a simple directory structure and provide one version of a URL to reach a document to avoid duplicate content.


• For Easier Site Navigation: Use text for linking, breadcrumb navigation, use an HTML sitemap page and a custom 404 page.


• For search engine friendly content: Create fresh and unique content, stay organized around the topic and write easy-to-read text.


• For anchor text: Write short but descriptive text and use it for internal links.


• For heading tags: Use headings carefully across the page. Use the main points and sub-points (usually our keywords) of the content on the page as the heading tags.


• For image optimization: Use descriptive filenames and alt text, store images in a single directory and Use commonly supported filet types.


• For Robots.txt: Use methods other that robots.txt to hide your confidential information.
  
  

3. Summarizing the guidelines on creating Google friendly website:

This section of the Google Webmaster’s Help gives links to all the documentation covering all the factors important from search engine as well as user perspective.

Few of the very important topics on http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/topic.py?topic=8522 are as follows:

• General guidelines


• Site Management


• Site Design and Content


• Potential Problems

With this I have tried to summarize the aspect important for Google. I will continue this study and keep everyone posted on any new updates that I come across.

I would also like to thank Namrata Yadav for all her help in compiling this information.