Start SEO by Following Guidelines

What constitutes good SEO practices? What do you need to do to make sure you are properly ranked and indexed by Google? What practices should you avoid to make sure you don't incur the Wrath of the Search Engine? (Which could consist in penalties if not outright removal from the index.)

Often one can see a trend in which search engine optimization personnel develop tactics that are adversarial to the search engines, as if you have to struggle against them or trick them in order to achieve good rankings.

This is, in fact, untrue. The reason is because the livelihood of a search engine depends on its ability to deliver relevant content. If you have valid, useful, and relevant content on your site, the search engines actually want you to reach the top.

To this end, Google has posted a number of webmaster guidelines to help companies get their SEO processes on track. But despite the inclusion of these guidelines, many companies either miss them or gamble on the idea that trying to fool Google will be effective.

The guidelines laid out by Google are fairly simple to follow, and are divided into three sections. These are design/content, technical, and quality guidelines.

To begin with, you have to make sure your site is ready for your SEO measures. This means submitting it to Google (or other search engines). It's a strange step to forget, and you can get crawled without it - as long as other sites link to you - but some people have been known to miss it. It is such a simple step, though, you just need to get it done. You should also submit a site map because this helps the search engine understand the structure and layout of your site. And this means you'll have a better chance of making sure Google sees your whole site.

For design and content guidelines, the recommend that you create a site with a clear architecture or hierarchy that employs good text links. The content that you include should also be clear and informative. Always keep in mind the keywords your customers might use to find your product or service, and then be sure to include them in the content. If at all possible, you should use text instead of graphics of words, since Google still can't read a picture.

Keep the mechanics well oiled. This means making sure there are no broken links, and the title tags or alt tags are useful and descriptive. There is also best practices in HTML, and you should follow them carefully.

The technical guidelines are, well, a little more technical. Make sure that you actually allow the bots to crawl your site, and allow them to do it without session IDs or arguments. You should also use the If-Modified-Since HTTP header. This tells Google whether or not you've changed your content since the last time you were crawled. You should also make proper use of the robots.txt file, so you can keep the bots out of sections of your site that don't really add much value.

The quality guidelines cover a lot more specific dos and don'ts. You should always build your pages for your customers first, and then employ SEO tactics for the search engines second. You should never, ever employ cloaking tricks, i.e. feeding the search engines something different than what you serve to a customer.

They go on to say that you should avoid using hidden text or hidden links, and you shouldn't create reams of duplicate content. Don't create pages that have malicious intent, and doorway pages that are auto generated and have no value to a visitor.

By following simple guidelines like this, and, above all, always providing valid and valuable content, your SEO practices can help you reach the top of the search engine ladder.

Andy Eliason is a writer at Main10, Inc, a Utah SEO company. If you'd like to learn more about using SEO in your marketing campaigns, visit their site today.