Thoughts On Google’s Design & Content Guidelines

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that Google is one of the very best resources for webmasters online. After all, their entire stated mission is to organize the world’s information on the internet. Unfortunately, in the SEO world, their advice is too often overlooked or ignored. So, let’s take a minute to consider each of their guidelines on design and content.

“Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.”

It seems to me that very few website owners spend enough time thinking about site architecture, layout, and organization. This is especially true in the realm of small business owners. Whether it’s because more and more business owners opt for turnkey website solutions, or because they just don’t know any better, the overwhelming majority of sites that I come across would do better to spend some time on site layout, internal linking structure, and organization.

If search engines can’t find your pages, they won’t even get into the index, let alone, appear in search results.

“Offer a site map to your users with links that point to the important parts of your site. If the site map has an extremely large number of links, you may want to break the site map into multiple pages.”

People often talk about whether or not and how to include site maps. My advice, if Google recommends a site map, have a site map.

“Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number.”

This is a great one. Between link exchanges, resource pages, and blog roll links, people generally put way too many links on their web pages. If you find you have a large quantity of useful links on your site, break up those pages into multiple pages. Preferably, by topical relevance.

If you’re including these links for some sort of SEO benefit, well, this post probably won’t help you much.

“Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.”

90% of your web marketing should be focused on content development. Unfortunately, there are too many websites that simply ignore the importance of content quality and opt for large amounts of light weight content. If you’re pumping out large quantities of light weight content to feed search engines, you’re likely going to learn about something called Panda…

“Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it.”

And don’t only think about users that are shopping for you. There are a variety of audiences that might find your pages online. Think about all the ways that people use search engines and write for them.

“Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. The Google crawler doesn’t 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.”

Better yet, use both. Describe images on your website with relevant text. And of course, follow best practices for optimizing images and other forms of web content.

“Make sure that your elements and ALT attributes are descriptive and accurate.”

Hopefully you’re using some type of content management system to help you organize and publish web content. If you are, it’s likely that the content management system will help you with things like title tags and other on-page optimization issues. If not, you should definitely check out how title elements are being displayed. They’re one of the strongest on-page signals that search engines look for to determine what your web pages are about.

“Check for broken links and correct HTML.”

Hoepfully, you’re not creating a lot of pages to nowhere. If you’re worried about this, set up Google Webmaster Tools so that you can monitor and fix broken links as Google finds them.

“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.”

This is another area where using a content management system can help you out. If you download and install WordPress from WordPress.org, make sure you check their information on creating pretty permalinks.

“Review our recommended best practices for images and video.”

Don’t get lazy with your images and videos. Many webmasters that work hard to make sure that their text content is properly optimized either ignore or over look best practices for optimizing images and video. This is a major lost opportunity.