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SEO series part 2 – Design and content guidelines from Google
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In recent years Google has offered “guidelines” to webmasters to help them better rank the websites they design. It is a full time job to keep up with the guidelines’ continual changes but a good web designer should make it a priority in order to better serve his or her clients. Google currently organizes its recommendations into three distinct sections which we will be reviewing over the next three weeks.

=1= Design and content guidelines
=2= Technical guidelines
=3= Quality guidelines
In today’s blog post we will be reviewing the ten design and content guidelines.

=1= Make sure that your site has a clear organization on how the pages link to each other. It makes easier for the bots to crawl the entire site but also makes it user-friendly for your visitors. Multi-level drop down menus in the navigation bar are quite practical if you have lots of pages.

=2= Google is recommending to have a site map page for your users on which you display links that point to the important sections of your site. At BWC, we recommend you name this page sitemap.php (or .html or .asp depending of the code used to build your site). That means that site map pages for visitors are back in favor with Google.

=3= Google’s third recommendation is to keep the links on any page to a manageable number. As you can imagine, displaying 100 links on one single page is simply too much for humans and bots alike.

=4= Content is still a priority for all search engines since delivering quality rich content is the essence of what they do. Continue to develop and post unique, quality and keyword empowered copy writing throughout your entire website.

=5= Including the keywords you want a specific page to be found for is still crucial for Internet indexation. Before you start writing your text, make sure you know what the SEO goal is for this page and include the keywords as well as words with similar meaning.

=6= Search engine crawlers are similar to software and do not read nor understand the meaning of an image. That means that important text should be in the form of actual HTML text not just in a graphic. Having text in images is fine but make sure the text is written elsewhere on the page.

=7= Remember to use alt tags and title tags for all of your images and make sure the tags you use actually relate to the image. Google is smart and will know if you are keyword stuffing.

=8= Using correct code (HTML, PHP, JavaScript, etc.) is very important to Google and other search engine companies. Even broken or outdated code can display a nice website but you will be penalized nonetheless. Also check and repair any broken links.

=9= Larger websites and eCommerce or membership websites often contain what we call dynamic pages. For instance their URL may have an ID number or special characters. Make sure your web designer made these dynamic pages SEO friendly. Example: www.test.com/?ID1234 is not as good for SEO as www.test.com/santa-rosa-shoe-company

=10= Google also offer suggestions for handling images, video and rich snippets. Those too should be including in your SEO practices for your website.

We invite you to watch our 15 min-video below which explain in details the first 5 recommendations of the Design and Content Guidelines from Google.



seo guidelines 2016
 

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