Top 10 Google Tips
Over the past decade, I’ve spent many hours explaining how (and why) you need to build websites the way Google wants them designed.
Here’s a great summary from Website Magazine (follow this link for full article and great graphics)…
1. URL Structure Optimization: Often times, out of the box CMS platforms deliver URLs chock full of unnecessary parameters and irrelevant characters. URL structure is incredibly important to the crawlability and relevance of your website.
2. Page Speed Optimization: An important part of Google’s ranking algorithm is the speed at which your Web pages load.
3. Internal Link Optimization: PageRank is what powers a Web page’s Google rankings. The more PageRank a Web page has, the better opportunity it has to return in Google’s search results. Web pages pass PageRank to the other internal pages they link to (PageRank filtration). The amount of PageRank that passes from a page to pages it links to shrinks with each additional link.
4. JavaScript Optimization: Search engine spiders have a difficult time crawling and navigating JavaScript code. Though engines are getting better at executing JS, they’re not great at it. In fact, JavaScript often blocks search engines from crawling important content and links. If your website is heavy in JavaScript functionality, ensure you’re coding it in an unobstructed way. Otherwise, provide search engines with other avenues of accessing content.
5. Get Rid of Spider Traps: It’s commonplace for sites to enable pop-ups for assets like images, printable page versions, etc… and not provide a link back to the website. This causes a problem with search engines, because it traps them in the pop-up without the ability to navigate to any other content. Additionally, search engines will return pop-up pages in search results which provide a bad customer experience upon click-through.
6. Schema Mark-Up Optimization: In 2011: Google, Yahoo and Bing collaborated to create new HTML code that would better help them understand the Web. This mark-up is called Schema.org. There is a variety of different schemas you can implement to help search engines recognize your products, services and content. As search engines continue to move to a more semantic approach to the Web, it’s vital that you get Schema.org mark-up on your Web pages.
7. User-Experience Optimization: The more usable your website is to humans, the more appealing it will be to search engines. Google has also included user experience as a signal in its Panda algorithm filter. It’s important to make sure you’re treating your website visitors and search engine spiders with respect and provide a quality experience.
8. Content/Code Prominence Optimization: On e-commerce sites, you’ll often find that an assortment of products is listed in categorical and sub-categorical pages. And below the products live a block or blocks of marketing content. While this is good for humans, it’s not so much for search engines. Content that lives at the bottom of a page is seen as less important by search engines, so it’s important that content be as close to the top of the page is possible.
9. Include Appropriate HTML Elements in Web Page Templates: Search engines use HTML elements to understand the context and relevance of Web page content. Including the appropriate HTML elements on your Web page templates will give your content optimization a major boost in relevance.
10. Google Webmaster Tools: Last but not least. Make sure you create a Google Webmaster Tools account for your Website. This will allow Google to communicate directly to you about any issues it finds on your site.
Article by Adam Dince. More than 14 years of experience in online marketing and Web presence management and is the Director of Earned Media at Deluxe.
