SEO

Design and content guidelines

1. Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link
2. Have a site map 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
3. Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.
4. Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it.
5. Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. The Google crawler doesn’t recognize text contained in images.
6. Make sure that your <title> elements and alt attributes are descriptive and accurate.
7. Check for broken links and correct HTML.
8. 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.
9. Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100).

Technical guidelines

1. Allow search bots to crawl your sites without session IDs or arguments that track their path through the site. These techniques are useful for tracking individual user behavior, but the access pattern of bots is entirely different. Using these techniques may result in incomplete indexing of your site, as bots may not be able to eliminate URLs that look different but actually point to the same page.
2. Make sure your web server supports the If-Modified-Since HTTP header. This feature allows your web server to tell Google whether your content has changed since we last crawled your site. Supporting this feature saves you bandwidth and overhead.
3. Make use of the robots.txt file on your web server. This file tells crawlers which directories can or cannot be crawled. Make sure it’s current for your site so that you don’t accidentally block the Googlebot crawler.
4. If your company buys a content management system, make sure that the system can export your content so that search engine spiders can crawl your site.
5. Use robots.txt to prevent crawling of search results pages or other auto-generated pages that don’t add much value for users coming from search engines. Also keep in mind that when you block robots it’s a tip for hackers that you have useful info in that session.
6. Test your site to make sure that it appears correctly in different browsers.

Quality guidelines – basic principles

1. Make pages primarily 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.”
2. 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?”
3. Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or “bad neighborhoods” on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.
4. Don’t use unauthorized computer programs to submit pages, check rankings, etc. Such programs consume computing resources and violate the Google Terms of Service. Google does not recommend the use of products such as WebPosition Gold™ that send automatic or programmatic queries to Google.

Quality guidelines – specific guidelines

1. Avoid hidden text or hidden links.
2. Don’t use cloaking or sneaky redirects.
3. Don’t send automated queries to Google.
4. Don’t load pages with irrelevant keywords.
5. Don’t create multiple pages, sub domains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.
6. Don’t create pages with malicious behavior, such as phishing or installing viruses, trojans, or other badware.
7. Avoid “doorway” pages created just for search engines, or other “cookie cutter” approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.
8. 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.