A fact of business: Customers expect companies to have and maintain
a web site on the Internet. Choosing and creating a web presence that reflects your company's attitude
and professionalism isn't as simple as putting an ad in the Yellow Pages.
It takes careful planning and implementation to create the right look
and feel that you and your company can be proud of. ITS helps make
that a reality.
Don't Be Fooled
The world wide web is a sea full of sharks and predators looking for a quick buck from the uninformed. But to have your site properly indexed by search engines such as Google, Yahoo! and others, there are basic guidelines to follow that DO NOT entail tricks or deceptions.
But think about it, Google spends millions on R&D with an army of geeks trying to stay one step ahead of such practices; more likely your tricks will backfire and you'll just end up being penalized or even removed from indexes entirely. |
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It's All About Content and Links
Largely, it comes down to "honesty is the best policy" - but doesn't it always? If you make sure that the content of your site reflects what you do and the products or services your business offers, you really can't go wrong. Try to imagine what a customer would type in if they were looking for you on line and build content based on that. The next big thing to do is to try to get as many other sites as possible to link TO your site. Links to your site are a HUGE factor in how well your site ranks. That's one of the key factors in "search engine optimization".
The following are some guidelines directly from Google's "Webmaster Tools" - info' straight from the horse's mouth so to speak. I'd take their advice any day over some larrikin wanting your money and promising you a top listing with his box of tricks...
Quality guidelines - basic principles
- Make pages for users, not for search engines. Don't deceive your 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? Would I do this if search engines didn't exist?"
- Don't participate in link schemes designed to increase your site's ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or "bad neighborhoods" 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 Google's Terms of Service. Google does not recommend the use of products such as WebPosition Gold™ that send automatic or programmatic queries to Google.
Quality guidelines - specific guidelines
- Avoid hidden text or hidden links.
- Don't employ cloaking or sneaky redirects.
- Don't send automated queries to Google.
- Don't load pages with irrelevant words.
- Don't create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.
- Don't create pages that install viruses, trojans, or other badware.
- Avoid "doorway" pages created just for search engines, or other "cookie cutter" approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.
- If your site participates in an affiliate program, make sure that your site adds value. Provide unique and relevant content that gives users a reason to visit your site first.
If a site doesn't meet Google's quality guidelines, it may be blocked from the index. If you determine that your site doesn't meet these guidelines, you can modify your site so that it does and request reinclusion.
Design and content guidelines
- 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 doesn't recognize text contained in images.
- Make sure that your TITLE and ALT tags 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. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few.
- Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100).
Other resources on this web site:
Search Engine Optimization
Affiliates Link Page |
