How to Build Better Customer Experiences
Google has made significant changes to the content on their Webmaster Guidelines documentation.
This documentation and the guidelines contained within are of vital importance to any webmasters or people constructing and maintaining websites and when learning all about SEO best practices and hints for do’s and don’ts.
Google has updated the general guidelines document expanding the crucial area of how to help Google find your web pages. Also how to give better ideas on what the pages are about and how to attract visitors beneficially. The quality guidelines section has not been updated.
General Guidelines[vc_row][vc_column width=”1/1″][vc_empty_space height=”30px”]
Help Google Find Your Pages
- Ensure all pages can be found by a link from another page, the referring link should include text or images that are relevant to the target pages.
- Provide a sitemap file with links to the most important pages on your site.
- Limit number of links.
- Ensure your web server supports the if-modified-since HTTP header, this feature tells Google if your content has changed since last crawled.
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Ways to help Google find your site
- Submit it to google at http://www.google.com/submityourcontent/.
- Submit a sitemap using Google Search Console.
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Help Google Understand Your Pages
- Create an information rich site, and write pages that clearly represent what information is contained.
- Think about visitor words that could be used to find your site.
- Design the site to have a clear conceptual page hierarchy.
- When using a content management system ensure that it creates pages that engines can crawl.These techniques are useful for tracking individual user behaviour.
- Allow search bots to crawl your site without session ID’s or URL parameters that track their path through the site.
- Make your site’s important content visible by default.
- Make efforts to ensure advertisement links do not affect search engine rankings
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Help Visitors Use Your Pages
- Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content or links.
- Ensure all links go to live pages, use valid HTML.
- Optimise page loading times, users love fast sites and they also help the overall quality of the web.
- Design your site for whatever medium might be used; tablets, desktop’s and smartphones.
- Ensure your site appears correctly in different browsers.
- Secure your site’s connections with HTTPS.
- Ensure that you have pages that are useful to visually impaired users.
There were no changes made to the Quality Guidelines even though Google class this part as of vital importance to be kept abreast of.
Although Google were at pains to advertise that these changes had been made to their guidelines none of them are dramatic or particularly mind-blowing.
Google has gone through a lot of trouble expanding on their guidelines, showing more examples, links to resources and reorganising the list to coincide with what is most important and useful to the end user.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/2″][vc_column_text]Google has also recently revamped their Webmaster portal section and this may be a continuation of all those efforts.
There have been many changes that Google have made to their guidelines and some of the most important ones have been:
- Update – “Low Quality Guest Blog Posts”
- Update – “To Warn About Blocking CSS & Javascript Files”
- Update – “Details Webmaster Guidelines”
- Update – “Details On Rich Snippet Abuse”
- Update – “Documentation & Guidelines On Moving A Site”
- Update – “Link Scheme Webmaster Guidelines”
- Expands – “Webmaster Documentation Around Reconsideration Requests”
Google will continue to adjust and recommend changes to their guidelines as more progressive Web techniques and content are produced. It is highly recommended that they are kept abreast of.
It is fair to say that Google’s best practices is fluid and likely to change in the near future. If you would like assistance with any form of digital marketing then contact our friendly team today![/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]
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