Quality Website Guidelines | Google Webmaster

How do you know when your site is a-okay? Let’s take a look at what the mecca of the internet has to say.....Google Webmasters. Today we will look at the 3 different aspects the infamous Webmasters evaluate: Design and Layout, Technicality and Quality. Please keep in mind that the instructions to keep a quality and optimized site can be highly detailed. With the risk of one post turning into a novel we have limited to only the basics. As always there will be more to come.

Website Design and Layout

Navigation - Every website has a different way of guiding their users. Make sure your website navigation is easy, clear and concise. Here are a few tips provided from Google Webmasters:

• Linkage! Make sure every main and essential page has a minimum of one available link and clear route.
• Site Map. When all else fails your users and the search engines need a site map. This is a great way to show the search engine how vast and detailed your website is and also help your users find what they are looking for.
• Do not over link any certain page.

Content - Your content plays a huge role in who arrives at your website and what actually happens on your site. Whether you are looking to convert and increase sales, generate more contacts to increase clientele, create a new email list for marketing purposes or whatever, your content determines what occurs.

• Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your purpose and content.
• Think about the words users would type when searching for your website, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it. (This is the first step toward Search Engine Optimization)
• Use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. The Google crawler doesn't recognize text contained in images. If you must use images for textual content, consider using the "ALT" attribute to include a few words of descriptive text.
• Make sure that your elements and ALT attributes are descriptive and and keyword rich.
• Check for broken links and correct HTML.

Website Technicality

Userability - This may not be a word, but it should be. Online today the look and feel, the content, the prices of your products are all useless if your visitors cannot view the site correctly or if the site takes an longer than our 30 second attention span can take. The follow is some great advice and tips from Google Webmasters to keep in mind:

• 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.
• 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.
• Test your site to make sure that it appears correctly in different browsers.
• Monitor your site's performance and optimize load times. Every search engines goal is to provide users with the most relevant results and a great user experience.

Quality Assurance

The Basics - Every website and business online would benefit from adhering to following basics. Much of these are a given, but with businesses struggling to achieve profit the illegitimate practices can seem enticing. Stay away from them!

• 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."
• 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?"
• 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.
• Don't use unauthorized computer programs to submit pages, check rankings, etc. Such programs consume computing resources and violate Google’s Terms of Service.

Specific Guidelines - There are some very specific and direct guidelines provided for what you should not do. Google is big on quality content, quality marketing techniques, and honest online business practices. It will always be in your interest to follow these directives.

• Avoid hidden text or hidden links.
• Don't use cloaking or sneaky redirects.
• Don't send automated queries to Google.
• Don't load pages with irrelevant keywords.
• Don't create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.
• Don't create pages with malicious behavior, such as phishing or installing viruses, trojans, or other badware.
• Avoid "doorway" pages created just for search engines, or other "cookie cutter" approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.
• 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.