SEO Guide from Google

As I mentioned yesterday in SEO Basics a search engine optimization strategy should always be considered when you start to design & build your website. Getting off to the right start using good SEO techniques will save you a lot of time and heartache down the road.  The Google SEO guide has plenty of information dedicated to the proper design of websites and how to perform search engine optimization for best results but unless you know where to look and are familiar with the jargon it can be a bit daunting. So to make things a little easier I have broken the Google SEO & website guidelines down for quick reference.

Design & Content Guidelines from Google

• 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 doesnt 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 <title> elements and ALT attributes 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.
• Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100).

Google has several other guidelines related to site content and good SEO which we will be discussing over the next few days.