• Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines. Don’t deceive 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?”
• Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s rankings or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or “bad neighbourhoods” 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 the Terms of Service of search engines. Google does not recommend the use of products such as WebPosition Gold™ that send automatic or programmatic queries to Google.

All of the topics covered in our latest series of post can be found in the Help Pages of Google but they can sometimes be a hard read if you are not familiar with the terminology. If you would like to read our previous post explaining Google SEO guidelines check out:

• SEO Basics
• SEO Design & Content Guidelines
• SEO Advanced

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.

What is the first step of  basic SEO?

For most web site owners search engine optimization is an after thought when their website is built but as mentioned today by Brett Yount, the program manager at Bing Webmaster Center:

“Clean code can help quite a bit in indexing on all the Search Engines. If you are just starting out, I suggest finding a W3C compliant template.”

Basically what Brett is saying here is that even if you are following SEO best practices you’ll still be fighting an uphill battle if your website is not W3C compliant. So when you’re selecting a web design firm make sure you specify that your finished site must be W3C compliant.

Some clients come to us utterly frustrated with the lack of progress their site is making in the search engine rankings. So before you start to invest time in an SEO campaign that is built on poor foundations check to see if you have the basics right first!

The easiest way to check if your website is W3C compliant is to go to http://validator.w3.org/ enter your site name and see what result is returned. Ideally you should get something back like this, webscience W3C. If your site returns errors than this may be an answer as why your site hasn’t been performing as you expected.