What are Google Guidelines for Web Design?
Website Designing is a very important factor for any web design company or professional company. While designing a website, it is essential to follow Google guidelines which gives benefit to your web site in search engines for top search engine ranking (SERP). For any web designer it is necessary to be familiar with Webmaster Guidelines by Google. If you ignore to follow them, you may suddenly find your site penalized for using incorrect techniques.
Once your website is ready and hosted, you just need to follow some simple steps to make your website known to the search engines.
There are following guidelines prepared by Google, need to consider while designing a website:
Google’s Design and Content Guidelines for Web Design
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Design a user friendly website with easy navigation, text links and clear hierarchy which will help users to surf your site with fewer clicks. Keep atleast a single static text link to reach any page in the site. It increases viewer’s interest in your site and maintain interest to revisit.
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Always prepare sitemap of your site. As sitemap contains all (link) information of your website, it helps in easy navigation and finds information quickly. It is considered as a guide of your site for visitors and Search Engines. If you have a wide website and your sitemap contains more than 100 links than it is advisable to split sitemap in more than one page.
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Do not keep more than 100 links per page.
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Make sure, the content of your site is appropriate to your product or services. Write clear and specific details for each web page. It is essential to write SEO copy writing to get good listing in SERP. Search engine always looks for new information and fresh content.
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Include keywords and Key Phrases related to your product. Use the words which are used maximum by surfer to find your product. Use different keyword for each page relevant to the page content.
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In all pages use descriptive and perfect Title; ALT and META tags related to page content.
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For important keywords use text instead of images as Google crawler does not recognize text contained in images.
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Remove all broken links.
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Validate your pages using HTML validator for correct HTML syntax, these rules will help to show your site identical in any browser.
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Be careful while design dynamic sites, be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages.
Google’s Technical Guidelines for Web Design
Once thorough with design and content guideline, you need to check your website technically. Using technical guide you can check whether your site is SEO friendly or not.
- Use Lynx or other text browser to check your web site. It is important to examine sites in text browser because search engine spiders understand only text. If fancy features such as JavaScript, cookies, session IDs, frames, DHTML, or Flash keep you from seeing your entire site in a text browser, then search engine spiders will have trouble crawling your site.
- Dynamic pages use Session IDs and arguments in URL. Allow search bots to crawl your websites without session IDs or arguments that track their path through the site. These techniques are useful for tracking individual user behavior, but the access pattern of bots is entirely different. Using these techniques may result in incomplete indexing of your site, as bots may not be able to eliminate URLs that look different but actually point to the same page.
- The web server in which your site hosted, make sure your web server supports the If-Modified-since HTTP header. This feature allows your web server to tell Google whether your content has changed since we last crawled your site. Supporting this feature saves you bandwidth and overhead.
- Use of robots.txt is another important task for Search Engines. The robots.txt tells crawlers which directories can or cannot be crawled. Make sure it's current for your site so that you don't accidentally block the Googlebot crawler. For more information about robots.txt, Visit http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/faq.html to learn how to instruct robots when they visit your site. You can test your robots.txt file to make sure you are using it correctly with the robots.txt analysis tool available in Google webmaster tools.
- If you are using Content Management System (CMS), check that your CMS allows to export content so that search engine spiders can crawl your site.
Google’s Quality Guidelines for Web Design
Google has created rules and regulations to make sites more accessible and justify factual sites. The basic principle of Quality Guideline is to make website for users and not for search engines only. It only warns not to use any tricky or spam techniques or unethical SEO methods to get quick ranking.
There are two types of Quality guidelines:
Basic Principles of Quality Guidelines
- Avoid using cloaking methods. In clocking method content are different to search engines than display to users.
- Do not use tricks just to increase ranking in SERP.
- Do not link your site to any unknown sites. It is very important because if the site which you link is black listed than your site is also be considered as spam. Also avoid participating in link schemes designed to increase site’s ranking or Page Rank.
- If you are not familiar with web submitting tools software, try to avoid it as there are many unauthorized software which might harm your site. Such programs consume computing resources and violate Google’s Terms of Service.
Specific Quality Guidelines
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Do not use hidden text or hidden links.
Hidden text are text that can not be seen by the visitor, hidden text is creating invisible text by making the font color similar to the background color. Hidden text is created for the purpose of adding keywords or key phrases for the search engines, SERP and rankings. Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) are also used to create hidden text using it’s built in features that can hide your text.
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Avoid use of cloaking or sneaky redirects.
Cloaking is delivering pages designed for the search engines while providing people with different results. It is a technique wherein the content presented to the search engine is different from what is presented on the user. Today, cloaking is abused because it is used to trick search engine users. Sneaky redirection means when a user click on a page and he got redirected to another page.
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Don't create multiple pages, sub domains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.
Following techniques are consider as spam by search engines
- Page with Duplicate contents
- Mirror Sites – Two different sites with same content but different domains
- Sub domains – Generating Duplicate page using sub domains
- Redirect page to other domains
These techniques give instant results but expect to be banned when you get caught.
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Don't create pages that install viruses, Trojans, or other Badware.
Knowingly or unknowingly uploaded pages with virus or generate virus such as Trojan or malware will consider as spam by search engines.
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Avoid "doorway" pages created just for search engines or other "cookie cutter" approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.
Doorway pages are created to divert traffic to another page for specific keywords. Doorway pages are designed for search engines only and it is advisable to avoid because the visitors do not benefit from this practice as search engine consider it as spam.
- If your site participates in an affiliate program, make sure that your site adds value. Provide unique and relevant content that gives users a reason to visit your site first.
Avoid participate on link schemes designed just to increase Page Rank, don’t exchange links with sites that are run by spammers, link farms, adult sites and game or gambling sites. Avoid establishing link with sites with no or little content and made to increase rankings.
Use of ethical SEO methods will definitely help to increase your website ranking. If a web designer follows Google guidelines for designing website it will give long term benefit. By using webmaster guidelines you can design user friendly web site as well as search engine friendly website.
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