Skilled search engine optimizers must use an approach to their
craft much like a charming young man has to woo a fair maiden
to win her affection (forgive the analogy, but try to follow
it for the purpose of developing a clearer understanding.)
The young man must be extremely patient. The best results
take time to see. He must be gentle and persuasive. He must
say the sweet things that the search engine … I mean
fair maiden ;) … loves to hear, being careful not to
say too much or too little. He must demonstrate honor, integrity,
and never use deceitful tactics. Using deceitful tactics may
seem to be effective at first with the fair maiden, but if
and when the young man is caught in his deceit, there are
terrible consequences. If nothing else, his seemingly good
results will only be short lived. He mustn’t be tempted
to take short cuts. He is trying to win the favor of the fair
maiden, not only for a brief moment, but for a lifetime!
All of this applies to SEO’s and search engines as
well. If this all sounds like a game to you, in a way it is,
but I prefer to think of it as a challenge … an art.
The feeling you get when you finally see those long awaited
results are ever so sweet. It is really worth it. Don’t
be intimidated by any of this. It isn’t really that
hard if you follow the path I will lay out before you.
The "Rules" According to Google:
Webmaster Guidelines
Following these guidelines will help Google find, index,
and rank your site. Even if you choose not to implement any
of these suggestions, we strongly encourage you to pay very
close attention to the "Quality Guidelines," which
outline some of the illicit practices that may lead to a site
being removed entirely from the Google index. Once a site
has been removed, it will no longer show up in results on
Google.com or on any of Google's partner sites.
* Design, content, and technical guidelines
* Quality guidelines
When your site is ready:
* Have other relevant sites link to yours.
* Submit it to Google at http://www.google.com/addurl.html.
* 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.
* Make sure all the sites that should know about your pages
are aware your site is online.
* Submit your site to relevant directories such as the Open
Directory Project and Yahoo!, as well as to other industry-specific
expert sites.
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.
* 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.
* Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages
that clearly and accurately describe your content.
* Think about the words users would type to find your pages,
and make sure that your site actually includes those words
within it.
* Try to use text instead of images to display important names,
content, or links. The Google crawler doesn't recognize text
contained in images.
* Make sure that your TITLE and ALT tags are descriptive and
accurate.
* Check for broken links and correct HTML.
* 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.
* Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer
than 100).
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.
* 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.
* 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.
* 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. Visit http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/faq.html
to learn how to instruct robots when they visit your site.
You can test your robots.txt file to make sure you're using
it correctly with the robots.txt analysis tool available in
Google Sitemaps.
* 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.
Quality guidelines
These quality guidelines cover the most common forms
of deceptive or manipulative behavior, but Google may respond
negatively to other misleading practices not listed here (e.g.
tricking users by registering misspellings of well-known websites).
It's not safe to assume that just because a specific deceptive
technique isn't included on this page, Google approves of
it. 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.
If you believe that another site is abusing Google's
quality guidelines, please report that site at http://www.
google.com/contact/spamreport.html. Google prefers developing
scalable and automated solutions to problems, so we attempt
to minimize hand-to-hand spam fighting. The spam reports we
receive are used to create scalable algorithms that recognize
and block future spam attempts.
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."
* 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 our 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
* Avoid hidden text or hidden links.
* Don't employ cloaking or sneaky redirects.
* Don't send automated queries to Google.
* Don't load pages with irrelevant words.
* Don't create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with
substantially duplicate content.
* Don't create pages that install 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.
If a site doesn't meet our quality guidelines, it may
be blocked from the index. If you determine that your site
doesn't meet these guidelines, you can modify your site so
that it does and request reinclusion.
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