Google's guidelines explained

Following Google's Webmaster guidelines will increase your position in search engine results. This article expands those guidelines.

When your site is ready:

Have other relevant sites link to yours

Each link from a website, to your website, is considered a vote. The more votes your website has, the more important it is considered by search engines. See the importance of backlinks.

Submit it to Google at http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl

Once you have submitted your site to Google, it will be indexed and included in search engines results. However, a quicker way of getting your new website in the Google index is to add a link from a website already in the Google index, to your new website. The Google spider will follow the link and include your new website for inclusion in the index.

Submit a Sitemap as part of our Google webmaster tools. Google Sitemaps uses your sitemap to learn about the structure of your site and to increase our coverage of your webpages.

By submitting a sitemap to Google, the Google spider will find and index all of your website pages more quickly. If you already have a sitemap page, which is navigable from the homepage, the Google spider will index all of your pages anyway.

Make sure all the sites that should know about your pages are aware your site is online

Notify any websites with a similar or related topic to your website. Ask them to link to your website. Offer to link back to them. Reciprocal linking to topic related sites is a good idea.

Submit your site to relevant directories such as the Open Directory Project and Yahoo!, as well as to other industry-specific expert sites

Submitting your website to web directories as in important part of promoting your website, and the start of a SEO campaign. The ODP and Yahoo are important web directories, and a great place to start submitting.

Design and content guidelines

Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link

A well planned hierarchy will help visitors and search engines explore your website. Avoid image links; text links are easier to follow and give more weight to the keywords used in the anchor text. Ensure every page, that you want indexed, is reachable from a text link, ideally on the sitemap, or sub-sitemap pages.

Offer a site map to your users with links that point to the important parts of your site. If the site map is larger than 100 or so links, you may want to break the site map into separate pages

A sitemap is important for users and search engines to explore your website fully. Always add a sitemap. If the website is small (less than 100 pages) add a link from the sitemap to each page. If your website has more than 100 pages, add separate sub-sitemap pages. One for each section of your website. The sitemap should then link to each sub-sitemap page.

Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content

Content is the most important factor for information websites. It will attract and satisfy the greatest number of visitors. The more content a website has, the greater the number of visitors it will attract. The higher the quality of the content, the greater the organic SEO effect will be, and the greater the long term success of the website will be. The better described a page is (by using titles and headings, see below) the better a search engine will index the page, and the better the position of the page in search engine results.

Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it

Choosing the correct keywords to use on a page will greatly improve a webpages position within search engine results. Keyword optimizing a page will bring that page the best results.

Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. The Google crawler doesn't recognize text contained in images

Always use text. It may sound obvious, but many websites use images to display simple blocks of text. This is normally done to use a specific font, which cannot be displayed using HTML. Search engine spiders cannot read images, therefore the words in the image are not considered part of the page. Only use images for photos, maps, etc. Always use HTML to display text and links.

Make sure that your TITLE and ALT tags are descriptive and accurate

Many HTML elements, such as links and images, have TITLE and ALT tags. Include your keywords in these tags, to reinforce the keyword density. Don't overdo it though, as this may attract a penalty.

Check for broken links and correct HTML

Broken links are a bad thing on a webpage. Search engines consider the page to not be current, or un-maintained it if finds many broken links. Use a link check tool regularly to identify, and remove broken links. Poorly or incorrectly formatted HTML can prevent search engine spiders, and human visitors, from reading content, and following links. Check your web pages with a HTML validation tool.

If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a "?" character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few

Dynamic pages can help manage and build the quantity of content in a website. However, some search engines cannot index complicated dynamic URLs. Keep the parameter names and values short. Don't be put off from using dynamic URLs, then can be of great help.

Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100)

If a page has more than 100 links, search engine spiders may not follow all of the links. Most webpages will not have more than a few links. However, as a website grows it is possible for sitemaps and summary pages to eventually have more than 100 links. Planning your sitemap is important.

Technical guidelines

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.

Search engine spiders only see text. They cannot see the contents of JavaScript, frames, DHTML or Flash. If you avoid these types of elements you wont have any problems. If you do use them, use a browser such as Lynx and see what a search engine spider can see. What content will the spider miss from your pages? Carefully consider the downside to elements such as Flash, before using them.

Quality guidelines - basic principles

Make pages 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."

Always produce your content, and promote your site to your visitors, not search engines. Only visitors will make a website successful, not search engines alone. If you make changes for SEO purposes, ensure these changes do not de-value the visitors experience. Don't ever deliver different content for search engines than you would for users (cloaking). Search engines will identify this and penalise the website.

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?"

Avoid all SEO tricks. Search engines know all of the tricks. If you use tricks, your website will get a penalty. Only use good basic SEO techniques. Don't cheat.

Don't participate in link schemes designed to increase your site's ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or "bad neighbourhoods" on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links

Link exchange schemes are old news. Search engines know what they are, and all of those who participate. Those that do participate are penalised. Simple. These schemes are considered 'bad neighbourhoods', as are other sites already penalised by Google. If you link to a bad neighbourhood, Google thinks you are part of the scheme. Carefully consider to whom you link.

Don't use unauthorized computer programs to submit pages, check rankings, etc. Such programs consume computing resources and violate our Terms of Service. Google does not recommend the use of products such as WebPosition Gold™ that send automatic or programmatic queries to Google.

There is no need to submit pages to Google. To get a new website indexed, get a link from a website that is already in Google's index. Soon the new website will be indexed. Don't rush it. You cannot rush Google, if you try, they might penalise you before you make it to the index. If you want to add a new webpage to Google, from an already indexed site, just link to the new page from the website homepage. Google will soon index the new page. Again, you can't rush it.

There are tools available to check your websites position in search engine results. They are useful for determining the success of your SEO campaign. Chose which tools you use carefully. Web based tools are more friendly to search engines that Windows, or desktop based applications.

Quality guidelines - specific guidelines

Avoid hidden text or hidden links

In the past, many SEOs would add hidden text, stuffed with keywords, to a page. It was hoped that this would increase the keyword density on the page. As with all tricks, the search engines identify and penalise such approaches. Using CSS to hide text may also attract a penalty. Using HTML comments is fine, but these are completely ignored by search engines, so don't bother keyword stuffing these either.

Don't employ cloaking or sneaky redirects

Cloaking (delivering different content for users and search engines) does no good for a website, and will attract penalties. Sneaky redirects are also penalised by search engines. Valid redirects are acceptable, but consider them carefully.

Don't send automated queries to Google

Using unauthorized programs to check rankings, submit pages, etc violates Google's terms of service. Check the tools section for tools that will give you benefit without attracting a penalty.

Don't load pages with irrelevant words

Choose the keywords for your page carefully. Concentrate on those keywords. Adding irrelevant keywords, or lists of keywords will reduce the value of the keywords on that page.

Don't create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content

Sites with duplicate content attract penalties from search engines. Original content should only appear on one website. If the content is found on other websites, the search engine will consider one website to be copying another, and penalise accordingly. Don't duplicate your website in the hope of getting more visitors. Don't add pages with similar content to other pages, in the hope of boosting content quantity.

Don't create pages that install viruses, trojans, or other badware

Search engines know all of the tricks, and will definitely issue penalties for sites seen to be doing any harm to visitors.

Avoid "doorway" pages created just for search engines, or other "cookie cutter" approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content

Search engines know all about doorway pages, and will penalise for using them. Cookie cutter sites offer no value to visitors, and will not be index or may be penalised.

If your site participates in an affiliate program, make sure that your site adds value. Provide unique and relevant content that gives users a reason to visit your site first

Adding an affiliate program to a website can add benefit to the users, by allowing them to buy products related to the topic of the website. Amazon has long been one of the biggest affiliate partners. Many webmasters, thinking it is easy to make money from a website by adding affiliate programs to content thin websites. Search engines don't consider this as 'adding value' to a website, and can penalise for such. Many webmasters use content from their affiliate partners. Imagine a book review website, with links to Amazon allowing visitors to buy the books. If the book reviews simple use the reviews and information from the Amazon website, the book review website offers no value to the visitors. It may well therefore attract a penalty. Always use original content.