SEO series part 4 – Technical guidelines from Google
By The BWC Team
We spent the past two weeks reviewing the 10 recommendations offered by Google itself to ensure top ranking for your website. In this post and video, we cover part 2 of the 3 part-guidelines from Google. Today we chat about the technical guidelines. Though they can be intimidating, they are nonetheless extremely important to optimizing your website.
=1= Google recommends to allow all of your site’s files to be crawled. By this they mean to not add any code to block them. This is true not just for your images but also the style sheets, JavaScript files, and other types of files your website uses. Ask your coder if this is the case or not for your website.
=2= Preferably search engines want a website to not use code that track their robots’ path on the website. The technique is normally used for tracking the movements of website visitor but their bot does not like it. If you want a good tracking system, use Google Analytics, after all it is a product from Google.
=3= If you are concerned about the amount of bandwidth the search engine bots may use up on your website, your webmaster can use code which informs the bots when was the site last changed.
=4= You may not be familiar with the term robots.txt file but your webmaster should. It tells the search engine bots which files should or should not be crawled. If possible, allow Google to crawl all of the files unless there is a very specific reason why you would want it banned from a file.
=5= Sometime your online advertising efforts like AdSense can hurt the organic optimization of your website when they blocked the crawler from reviewing a file on which the ad may be placed. Again this is handled by the robots.txt file so make your webmaster reviews that file.
=6= Most websites have a CMS (content management system) which enables the site owner to make changes without any knowledge of coding. These are great but again make sure that the pages generated by the CMS do not have anything in place that would prevent the crawling of search engine bots.
=7= Their 7th guideline is about using the robots.txt file to prevent crawling of webpages which have no value for actual people. We know it seems contradictory to their 4th recommendations but it is nonetheless what Google suggests. We think they are more thinking of web page that are part duplication of others and possibly generated by an automated system.
=8= Browsers will render websites differently. It is an on-going struggles for web designers. This is especially true for Internet Explorer and Safari. Always make sure your site works well on all major browsers which are: Firefox/Mozilla, Chrome, Internet Explorer, Safari and now the brand new replacement for Internet Explorer “Microsoft Edge”.
=9= Website load time speed is an important factor for both your visitors (especially those on mobile devices) but also for Google. The fastest you can make your site download the more “good points” you will receive from Google for your website’s indexation.
=10= Google’s 10 guideline is an actual list of links that helps webmasters analyze the speed and performance of a website. These links are also available for site owners and they are:
Remember that these guidelines can be technical and complicated for non web designers but nonetheless if you are a site owner and have interest in the optimization of your website, you should inform yourself so that you can better communicate with your online marketer or webmaster.
We invite you now to watch our 15 min-video below in which our CEO Virginie explains in “simple” words the Technical Guidelines from Google.
Questions about this subject?
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