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If you are optimizing your website to appear on the first page of Google it will help to know what Google is actually looking for. This gives a general, overall, picture of the activities you need to carry out, or have your mind on in order for your website to actually work better in the search engine organization stakes.
The ten tips which follow are the backbone of every good SEO strategy:
1. The more relevant links you have, the more pages of your site will be indexed – This is a relatively new approach. The number of pages of a website in Google’s Index were thought to be the direct result of site structure and search engine marketing and limitations in Google’s indexing speed but Google now uses a site’s PageRank (PR) to decide how many pages to index. It’s important to remember, here, two things: First, Google uses a Pagerank algorithm which is different to the one displayed publicly and this one is calculated and refreshed on a daily basis. Second, Google does not have an indexing cap. If your pages have many outside links leading in to them then your website will be indexed properly.
2. Slow servers can cause problems – You probably suspected this one. Your hosting is the foundation upon which you build your website presence. A shaky server means that downtime will seriously hamper indexing of your pages and 404 (page not found) messages will cause your site to be downgraded in Google’s index. If your server has a bad guarantee uptime or is generally slow then your website has issues.
3. Duplicate content can cause problems – as Google’s apostle of search, Matt Cutts, said in a recent interview: "Imagine we crawl three pages from a site, and then we discover that the two other pages were duplicates of the third page. We'll drop two out of the three pages and keep only one, and that’s why it looks like it has less good content."
Duplicate content will cause indexing issues which will also cause you to lose PageRank (PR). Matt Cutts also indicated that if you link from one page to a duplicate page, you can mess up your PageRank. Google also tries to pass the PageRank and other link signals from the duplicate pages to the original page. If you use the rel=canonical tag on your web pages then the pages needn't be exact duplicates but they should be conceptual duplicates of the same product, or things that are closely related.
"It's totally fine for a page to link to itself with rel=canonical, and it's also totally fine, at least with Google, to have rel=canonical on every page on your site. The crawling and indexing team wants to reserve the ultimate right to determine if the site owner is accidentally shooting themselves in the foot and not listen to the rel=canonical tag."
4. Affiliate pages don't get high rankings – Given Google’s consistent fight against spam sites this is a no-brainer. If a website is an affiliate website that is very similar to other pages (only with a different logo, or a couple of extra links) then this page won't get high rankings. Similarly Google may not index properly an affiliate site or pass an PageRank (PR) to it through links.
5. Redirects work but they don't pass the whole PageRank - If you change your domain name and redirect old pages with a 301 redirect from your old page to your new page then the link power will be passed to your new domain name but the overall power of the links will decrease. 301 redirects do not pass the full PageRank and 301 redirect chains have the capacity to actually damage your SEO.
6. Low quality pages can cause problems - Google has indicated that if there are a large number of pages on a website it considers to have low value then the status of the site itself is affected and Google may not crawl as many pages from that site which means that there will be a drop in traffic and organic SEO position on the search engine results pages (SERPs). Thin content, duplicate content or content which has not been optimized properly may well cause Google to stop indexing a site altogether, so it really pays to have lots of text on your site.
7. PageRank sculpting and website navigation – PageRank sculpting is a term which describes on-page SEO activity designed to very specifically preserve PageRank (PR) on a single page from being squandered (more about the complexity of this at a later post). Right now the point is that the official Google line is that there is little to be gained from getting into this complex SEO activity because Google always has the power to override it at its discretion when it deems that valuable content is being excluded from being indexed properly.
8. You still shouldn't use JavaScript links for your website navigation – Javascript in navigation is not as forbidden as it once was mainly because Google has got very good at the way it indexes links contained in some Javascript. Google, however, has not completely solved the Javascript issue which means that some indexing issues still persist. So if you do have Javascript executable code in your site navigation you need to also find another way to guide the search engine bots to the relevant pages.
9. Google does not like paid links – Advertisements should not affect search engine rankings and Google is adamant in its insistence that paid advertisement is detected and adjusted for in any way possible so that it does not unfairly slant search engine results. If you do take paid advertisement or, worse, have paid links (and I know it’s a really grey area) then be prepared to work extra hard just to maintain your position let alone make advancements.
10. Google likes originality – another no-brainer for anyone involved in any SEO activity on their site. If there is one thing you should do (or can do due to constraints on time) and one thing only, then original content is most definitely it. Make sure you have as much content description as possible and as many interlinked pages as possible and maintain your content by constantly interlinking to it.
Keep all this in mind when you are thinking about SEO and you will be able to plan and maintain a coherent SEO Strategy for your website.
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