Advanced SEO Tips

Yesterdays post, SEO Design & Content Guidelines from Google, gave you some basic SEO tips that Google provides on it’s help pages. In today’s post I’ll give a break down of some more Google SEO guidelines but this time of some slightly more advanced SEO.

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• 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 your entire site in a text browser , then chances are that the search engine spiders may have trouble crawling/seeing your site as well.
• Allow search bots to crawl your site without session IDs or arguments that track their path through the site. These techniques are useful for tracking individual user behaviour, but the access pattern of bots is entirely different. Using these techniques may result in incomplete indexing of your site, as bots may or 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 it 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 search engine crawler. Go to http://www.robotstxt.org/faq.html to learn how to instruct robots when they visit your site.
• Make sure that your content management system creates pages and links that search engines can crawl.
• Use robots.txt to prevent crawling of search results pages to other auto-generated pages that don’t add much value for users coming from search engines.
• Test your site to make sure that it appears correctly in different browsers.

So far in this series of posts we’ve covered How Google Ranks Your Site, SEO Basics, and SEO Design & Content Guidelines.  This post gives you some more advanced SEO insights to consider during the design & development stage of your website. In the next post I’ll discuss SEO quality guidelines basic & advanced.