Guidelines
Webmasters and search engine optimizers often search for ways to get their site better indexed and improve their rankings. You can scour SEO forums, read books and talk to other webmasters. But often, one of the most valuable ranking resources is forgotten: the search engines themselves.
All three major crawlers – Google, MSN (Windows Live) and Yahoo – offer comprehensive, webmaster-friendly help sections on optimizing your site. Before looking for SEO help elsewhere, make sure you got the basics down by following the rules of the game.
Our four-part article summarizes what search engines expect from sites overall and gives details on each of the major crawlers. We suggest you review this information before advancing to other techniques.
What Search Engines Want
Yahoo, Google and MSN may differ in their requirements for web sites, but there are some things all three search engines have in common. These are the most fundamental elements of a search-engine-friendly site:
- Links
All major crawlers would like to see other relevant sites link to yours. At the same time, all three discourage the use of link farms and irrelevant link exchange programs. - Information and content
Search engines would like to see content-rich sites that are created for people, not search engines. This means no doorway pages, cloaking, stuffing text with irrelevant terms and so on. Instead, create a site that your users and potential clients will find valuable. Search engines will follow. - Dynamic pages
Don’t use over-complicated URL structures. Long URLs with different parameters are harder for search engines to index. In case of Google, they may be buried in the supplemental index (backup database). - Static text links
Search engines follow more pages by crawling your web site. To make this process easier, make sure that all pages are connected with a static text link. You can achieve this by employing a good navigational structure and creating a site map. - Keywords
Use descriptive, relevant keywords throughout your web site (without over-doing it). Search engines differ in what tags they index, so we recommend an approach that addresses every potential tag. Use your keywords in the text of your web site, in the HTML title, meta description and keyword tags and in the ALT tags. - Robots.txt
Google, MSN and Yahoo encourage all webmasters to make use of the robots.txt file. This helps search engines know which parts of your web site should or should not be indexed and which search engines have the permission to do so. - HTML
To make it easier for the crawlers and for your users, use well-formed HTML on your pages. You can use W3C’s Markup Validation Service to check your pages for errors. - Spam
Not surprisingly, search engines don’t want the sites in their index to use any spam optimization techniques. Examples of “black hat SEO” include using irrelevant keywords on your pages, creating doorway pages, cloaking, participating in link farms and so on.
