 |
 General Rules and Guidelines of the Major Search Engines
By Douglas A. Goddard
July 08, 2006
The primary mission of a search engine is to index websites and categorize them according to content and relevancy. Being that there exists some rather stiff competition between search engine companies, each and every one has a set of norms that dictates what is considered acceptable and what is not considered acceptable for indexing.
For that reason, a SEO strategy MUST adhere to ethical standards and not engage in techniques that tend to degrade the quality of search engine results for Internet users everywhere. But at the same time there are many techniques for improving positioning and indexability in the various search engines. Below is a list of aspects to consider in your quest to optimize your rank and in the process generate more e-commerce sales or leads.
Structural Advice
• Double check that the HTML code in your entire website has closed tags and that all of the links function. Broken links can make it to where the search engines do not index all of your pages properly. In some cases a search robot may decide to stop indexing because of broken links. This is one of the largest problems we find with bad ranking websites.
Most HTML editors have code checking functions to help publish an error free web page.
• In the event you should decide to move one of the pages, maintain the original URL intact and have it forward visitors to the new webpage.
• Insure that the search engines are able to sent their search bots into your site with ease by setting up a robots.txt file. You can control to last detail how search crawl your site by programming it to allow web crawlers to index certain files and folders and block them from other parts of your site.
• Avoid reconfiguring your URLS frequently. A simple URL is easier for the search bots to crawl and for people to type. An easy to remember URL is more easily used as a link from another site due to the fact that it is easy for people to remember.
• Examine your website with a text browser to get a feel for how a search engine spider would view your site. If other features such as Flash, JavaScript, cookies, frames, etc obstruct your ability to see all of your site, the search engines will probably have a difficult time in indexing your pages.
Content is King
A website that has useful and informative content will be more likely to attract visitors and induce them into returning.
• When you compose your page text try to utilize the words that users might plug in as search queries in their search for the information on your site.
• Spelling, Be sure to not only spell-check your site but have a third parity read through an check grammar. Writing copy for a website is not the same as for print, books, magazines and newspapers. We will be adding more about copy writing to this page at a latter time.
• The text on an HTML page should not exceed 180 kilobytes.
• Facilitate navigation through your website by providing a static text link for every page.
• Text in an image is not indexable; if you want important information to be indexed on a search query, make sure it is placed outside of all images, including your company logo. ALT tags for images can help but will not replace the strength of live viewable text on your site.
• A site map is much like a roadmap or driving directions, except its purpose is served by enabling the search spiders to locate all of your pages and encounter links that are embedded in menus, list boxes, and other similar website components not readable by search engines.
READ MORE »
• The site hierarchy should always be maintained as such that every page should have a distance of only one to three clicks from the home page. On larger sites this might pose a problem, but we always warn our clients to give the users of their site a clear path to all content.
Unethical Search Engine Optimization Techniques
The practices described below not only annoy web surfers that encounter them, they are prohibited by all the major search engines and can result in your site being banned from their indices. Please be considerate and do not add to the disarray that already exists thanks to fraudulent SEO schemes.
• Keyword spamming: Artificially inflating a page's keyword density by packing irrelevant words. This includes creating exceptionally large image ALT tags that people will more than likely never see..
• Visitors to your website should be able to read your text. Hiding text or links by making them the same color as the background or by using a no view tag is detectable by the search engines and in some cases will lower your rank or possibly ban your site all together.
• Making link farms to give the appearance that there are more links to your website. This is very widely used by black hat SEO companies.
• Creating doorway pages specifically designed for search engines.
Will changing my hosting company or IP address affect my search engine ranking?
Changing your hosting company or IP address won't affect your website ranking or your seo strategy as long as you migrate you site to a different IP address using the following guidelines:
• Load all of the files of your present website to your new IP address.
• Change your name-servers so that they point to the new DNS servers or your new IP address.
• Upon seeing that all of the major search engines have spidered your website it will be safe to take down your website on your old server.
Updated November 11, 2006
|
E-Commerce Definitions
A glossary of terms used in e-commerce.
READ MORE »
|
 |
|
Graphic Design Tips
A glossary of terms used in copy for print and web.
READ MORE »
|
|
|
Web Design Tips
We are often asked what colors should be utilized in a site's design. Here is some information on what colors mean to the human brain.
READ MORE »
|
|
|
SEO Tips
The internet is full of chatter about SEO schemes. However one should be aware of the cardinal errors that can jeopardize their websites placement.
READ MORE »
|
|
|
Sitemaps
Create a sitemap file in XML format to help the search engines do their job and view your website completely.
READ MORE »
|
|
|
|
