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Website Etiquette for Google
Filed Under (Uncategorized) by dan123 on 02-09-2010
Here’s the best SEO tip ever from an Austin SEO Company
- when you think about it, SEO is like dating etiquette guidelines for how your website stands a better chance of getting noticed by Google and the other search engines.
Let’s face it – we want Google to marry our websites and yet Google wants to date us and practically everyone else on the face of the internet. So while Google will date whomever it wants to there are things within our power to make an consequence on to increase our site’s chances.
Hygiene
Hygiene is significant – just like in the offline world. While we can’t actually give our website a shower or teach it to shave or cut its hair to look nice, there is such as thing as digital hygiene.
- You want your content to be clean – stay away from adult content OK if you want to stand a chance for positive organic search engine results.
- Build a site that loads quickly and easily. First impressions mean a lot even in the Google bot world. If your site takes too long to load for Google – they aren’t going to let you near their customers. How long would you wait for a site to load? Use that as a guide for your own site.
- Make sure you don’t have HTML errors – these errors aren’t going to be visual errors necessarily, but they can be seen by Google. You can run your site through an HTML checker to find if you have any and where they are. You can even Google for the term “html checker” and find several to test.
- Test your links at the start and periodically to ensure they are working. Broken links are seen by Google and they don’t like them.
Be Friendly
Make it easy for Google to access your site. If you’re doing a lot of flash development on your site – especially the first page – there’s nothing for the search engines to READ. They need WORDS. So if you discount this point expect for Google to not give you the time of day Regardless of how amazing your site looks, without words, Google can not see you clearly and will move onto the next site.
Be Yourself
Like in real life – if you are being yourself you may not have a 1000000 friends but the ones you have will really be your friends.
So being yourself in terms of your website is knowing what you are about and then being that. Know your keywords – don’t try to make every page or the home page of your site reveal the entire purpose of your life, site or business. You need to think in terms of one maybe two terms a page and optimize your page and its content for that keyword.
Yes, it will help you to focus on adding pages and or posts that speak to that one or two search terms and be clear.
Google LOVES the clarity and simplicity of that. If you use so many terms on a single page Google thinks the first one is the most important but when it sees the second one it adds a little weight onto that one and same thing to the next one. Pretty soon NONE of your keywords has enough weight for Google to “take you to met the parents” on Page 1.
Your Friends
At some point when you’ve been dating long enough, you might introduce your friends to your date. In terms of Google, your website’s friends are other sites that link from their site to yours.
Now you don’t introduce all your friends right away in the offline world and that’s true in the online world of Google as well. In fact, if you were to suddenly have 1000’s of links to a new site , Google would be highly mistrust. So if you’ve been around for a long time Google is has seen you around and that makes sense to Google and you won’t spook anyone. But if you’re brand new and you know everybody? Not likely unless you were doing something to trick the system. And then Google will stop returning your calls and putting your site further back in the search results.
What’s interesting about Google is that it actually cares about the quality of those other sites. Google wants you to have friends because it means they aren’t your only connection to the outside world. Google can relax a little – that you’re not just dating Google for the rankings.
So find out who Google likes and make friends with them.
Google loves active social sites – its a bit like dating a high maintenance date – they want you to look good to them at all times and go dancing every night.
You or rather your website needs to stay in shape, be interesting, be its own person and know that if you’re cheating Google will dump you on the dance floor.
