Google publish useful information on how to make your website friendly to Google web spiders (also known as crawlers or robots), even if you ignore the advice please refer to their quality guidelines. Anyone into Internet Marketing or with a Home Business should be aware of Google’s guidelines.
Design and Content Guidelines
- Make sure you site has a clear hierarchy; pages that just float with no obvious link do not work well. Every page needs to be reachable from a static text link e.g. in HTML homepage where the word homepage is the text link. The spider needs to find you pages by following text links. Remember to give all your images an “Alt” tag, this tag is descriptive text that loads even if the image does not.
- Put a site map on your website, this helps users to understand how your pages link together. It, also, helps users to find their way around your site.
- Do not go overboard with links on any one page, too many and it starts to look like Spam rather than useful content.
- Google love information rich sites, this is why people are advised to keep adding useful content. Stuff that is just repeated all over the place will just look bad.
- Do some research on keywords to find out what people are searching for that is relevant to your website. If you are selling “Garden Spades” are people typing in “Digging Spades”, “Cheap Spades”, “Stainless Steel Spades” etc.; once you know what people are typing in to search Google make sure those words are included on your web page, but again don’t just fill up with Keywords the content still needs to make sense.
- Do not put important text information in an image, it may look great from a visual point of view but spiders cannot see images. As stated earlier supply “Alt” tags to ensure the spider can read some information about the image.
- Check for broken links and that there are no HTML errors. Broken links will annoy humans as well as spiders, so check that all the links in your website function as expected. Check your HTML at the W3C validator website (found by searching for W3C Validator in your web browser) by putting in your website URL to have it validated, if you get errors they will need to be corrected.
- If dynamic web pages are used on your website (i.e. the URL contains a “?” character) then be careful how many variables you use because spiders do not like looking at lots of variables in case they get caught in a loop. The other thing to do is to include static page equivalents in your site map but be careful of duplication of titles and other content.
- When using images give the files useful names such as “black-kitten.jpg” rather than “Image001.jpg”. As stated before use “Alt” tags to describe the image but do not stuff it full of keywords that may be perceived as Spam.
Following these guidelines will help your site to rank better and will; also, improve the experience of your site users. There is nothing worse than sites full of nonsense text and links that do not work.
