Every SEO expert has their own set of rules as to how they believe Google ranks websites.

These rules tend to vary slightly from one another most of the time. But what does Google tell us? Fortunately, they gave us all the guidelines we need. This article will examine these guidelines in depth.

Make a Site With a Clear Hierarchy and Text Links. Every Page Should Be Reachable From at Least One Static Text Link.

Your website’s navigation is the foundation of your entire website. It binds all the pages together into a common theme and provides a clear vision to your website visitors. Straightforward navigation is essential for search engine spiders.

Spiders want to find as many pages on your website as possible. However, if your navigation is confusing, or worse, incomplete, spiders will not discover your entire website. It is also important to remember that search engines learn what a page is about, in part, by the text on that page.

In this regard, the anchor text you use in your navigation can help you rank better for your targeted keywords. This is why Google also strongly recommends using text links on your website.

Offer a Site Map to Your Users With Links That Point to the Important Parts of Your Site.

If the Site Map contains more than 100 Links, You May Want to break it into Separate Pages.

Having a sitemap is crucial. When a spider visits your website, one of the first things it will look for is a file called a sitemap. Search engine spiders have millïons of pages to see in a very short amount of time; they want to work as efficiently as possible.

A sitemap will allow the spider to determine which pages are most important to your visitors and, therefore, the most important to the search engines.

Even if you don’t have a sitemap, you can still get your pages indexed by Google if you have a solid navigation system. Placing a sitemap on your website will make life easier for the spider, which is something you should strive for. See WC3 compliance.

Create a Useful, Information-Rich Site, and Write Pages That Clearly and Accurately Describe Your Content.

You’ve undoubtedly heard everyone say that content is king. However, it is important to note that not just any content is king—unique content is king.
Undoubtedly, you have heard experts touting hundreds of sources for free content, from RSS to free reprint articles. Although RSS and free reprint articles can be beneficial for your website, nothing will ever replace content that you or your company develops.

It is said that nearly half of all searches performed on a daily basis include a combination of words that have never been searched on before. If users are searching using unique combinations of words, what are the search engines looking for?

Of course, RSS and free reprint articles are helpful, especially if the information in the articles or feed is pertinent to the subject matter of your website. You should not be afraid to use free reprint articles or RSS feeds (in fact, you probably should use them), but you should also ensure that your site has a significant amount of unique content. Add images to Display Important Names.

Content, or Links. The Google Crawler Doesn’t Recognize Text Contained in Images.

This is a critical point that many, many website owners tend to ignore. They miss great opportunities to place high-impact opportunity spots within their website.

Instead, they place an image in that spot solely for aesthetic purposes. Fortunately, the web and most browsers have adopted CSS. With CSS, you can format the style of your links and present important text stylishly. You can also show an image to your visitors while keeping important text in your code for the search engines. Ensure that your title and alt tags are descriptive and Accurate.

The title tag is the most critical part of SEO that you can optimize.

The title tag is included in the head portion of every HTML page. The tag is intended to tell visitors and search engines what the subject of that specific page is. Many website owners make mistakes with their title tags. Many times, they’ll stuff the title with a list of keywords. Other times, they will not change the title from page to page. All of these things will hurt your rankings and drive the search engines away from your website.

A reasonable title tag should be relatively short and highly descriptive.

It should contain your most important keywords for that page, and it should make sense to a human reader. If you use images on your website, you should always include an alt tag. When choosing your alt tags, try to be both descriptive and brief. Alt tags are not an opportunïty to stuff your page with yoopportunïty keywords. Search engines are smart enough to know when a website owner is trying to take advantage of image alt tags.

Of course, using CSS, it is possible to design a good-looking website without using any images.

Check for broken links and Correct HTML.

This is a simple step but extremely important. It goes back to the concept of making life easier for search engine spiders. If a spider comes across a website with broken links, it may think that your website is incomplete. Worse yet, it may consider your website not worth visiting because it wastes the spider’s resources.

Fortunately, several link checkers are available. See link checker.

Correct HTML can be a little more difficult, especially with an HTML editor such as FrontPage and similar HTML editors.

If you are unfamiliar with a website, however, you should take the time and effort to ensure it is written in valid HTML. This will make it easier for a spider to determine what your site is really about.
To validate your website, visit the World Wide Web Consortium’s HTML Validator. If your HTML contains mistakes, the validator will identify them and tell you how to correct them.
Once you have validated your website, you may also place the Consortium’s image link directly on it.

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 Or Static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them small.

The larger a website gets, the greater the need for it to get a content management system.

If you own a shopping-based website with dynamically generated content pages, you should be aware of the implications for search engines. Form-based websites often use query strings. Below is an example of a query string:
http://www.somesite.com/index.php?query_string=this-is-the-query-string

Query strings can use a wide range of characters, which makes it difficult for search engines to spider your website. They are able to spider sites with simple query strings. However, it is generally not a good idea to do so.

You can easily change your website’s URLs to be search-friendly by using search-friendly Apache Mod_Rewrite. Using Mod_Rewrite, you can turn a URL from looking like this:
http://www.somesite.com/index.php?query_string=2932&name=some+name
to this: http://www.somesite.com/2932/some-name.html

Conclusion

Most SEO experts have their own set of rules for ranking well in search engines. If you travel from one SEO to another, you will find that they differ slightly in what they believe should be emphasized in your SEO strategy. Even though they may have their differences, the most basic and essential aspects of quality SEO are the same.

Post excerpts from Mark Daoust