Accessibility, Usability & Compliance
Accessibility, Usability & Compliance
How to make your Web site work for you. 2nd April - Liverpool.
This is a summary of what Google actually say themselves about achieving good rankings.
Author: Phil Smears
Date added: 5th February 2007
Provide unique content that is worth reading, viewing or listening to and update it regularly. The days of jiggery pokkery with meta tags and invisible keywords are over. Google cares about real content just as we do, so invest in the content of your site and ensure it is informative, well put together and interesting. Your core products and services will always have a number of other closely related topics so write about them and demonstrate your knowledge and experience. Avoid "doorway" pages created just for search engines, or other "cookie cutter" approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.
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.
If you deliver unique and useful content then other sites will link to yours often without request and Google attaches a lot of importance to inbound links. However, it attaches little or no importance to inbound links which are the result of link exchange schemes or link farms. The best kind of inbound link your site wants is from another site with a good PageRank and not from a 'Links' page.
Make sure you use plain jane text links for your navigation - no fancy javaScript or Flash menus as spiders may have trouble crawling them. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link. Google can index dynamic pages and contrary to the popular myth can index pages with '?' in the URL. However, the emphasis here is on the 'can', not 'will'. They actually recommend creating static duplicates of dynamic pages but you have to add the URLs of dynamic pages to your robots.txt file to ensure they aren't treated as duplicates. So basically don't assume they are being indexed and don't assume they aren't. Excellent.
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 Site maps.
Allow search bots to crawl your sites without session IDs or arguments that track their path through the site. If your site is graphics heavy provide relevant alt text for graphics and include some body copy. Also check for broken links and incorrect HTML.
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.
Any attempts at keyword stuffing or serving up one page for a crawler and another for visitors run the risk of getting your site ignored altogether. The effort expended on that would be better directed at putting decent content on the site. Create pages for users not search engines. Watch out for cowboy 'Search Engine Optimisers' - you can tell them a mile away as they say things like ' top 10 guaranteed!'. I'm #1 on a number of search strings but nobody would ever type them into a search box. They can also get your site involved with link spammers and areas of the web that are best left well alone. Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100).
Don't create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content. If you do have separate text only or printer friendly versions of pages then hide them from the Googlebot in your robots.txt file. If you want to make a printer friendly page then it's easier to create a style sheet for printers as on this page using <link href="css/print.css" rel="stylesheet" media="print" type="text/css">.
Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it.