Everybody has an opinion about Search Engine Optimization.
Some say it’s critical to get your keywords in just the right places on your site.
Others say it’s about “off site” criteria like inbound links and writing lots of articles and posts on other sites.
But the fact is it’s all just opinions. No one really knows what the Search Engines use to rate a website. It’s all educated guesses.
Even Site Build It’s Analyze It! is just an opinion and should never be taken as gospel. It’s an excellent opinion, and all the successful sites that have come from using SBI! are the proof. But I’ve seen too many folks getting hung up because their page did not pass AI! for some small thing that may not even matter. There are more important things to spend your time doing.
I always try to get other opinions before I waste a lot of time doing things that are outside of the 80-20 rule. I’m just too busy. That’s why it helps to look around for and get information on the Big Picture of SEO so you know where to spend your time.
And what if that opinion was straight from the horses mouth?
What if Google told you exactly what it was looking for in a site?
Now that’s some information with credibility.
Well that’s just what Google does on it’s Webmaster Guidelines page.
Here’s some of what they have to say…
- Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.
- Offer a site map to your users with links that point to the important parts of your site. If the site map is larger than 100 or so links, you may want to break the site map into separate pages.
- Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.
- Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it.
- Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. The Google crawler doesn’t recognize text contained in images.
- Make sure that your <title> elements and alt attributes are descriptive and accurate.
- Check for broken links and correct HTML.
- 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.
- Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100).
Now doesn’t that help?
And here’s the quote from the site that I think is most important…
“Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines.”
Now I think that pretty much puts it all in perspective. It’s all about your visitors.
Next, we’ll take each of these bullet points one-by-one and discuss what they mean.
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