4Ps Marketing review of Google's advice to webmasters

In creating its ‘Webmaster Guidelines’, Google has clearly followed its own advice by presenting a page that is simple, relevant and with its users in mind.

As part of the Webmaster Help Centre, Google’s guidelines are designed to help webmasters create effective websites that can be found, indexed and ranked by the number one search engine. The page is well laid out and divided into subheadings to direct users to relevant content. Google seem aware that not all users will read the full advice, and thus the ‘when your site is ready’ subheading appears first to save webmasters with completed sites from having to read the entire page.

The importance of presenting relevant content is repeatedly emphasised, with Google insisting that webmasters should design sites for users and not for search engine. Webmasters should create useful, information rich sites with pages that accurately describe their content. Developers need to take time to really think about what users would type to find their pages, and make sure that the finished site actually includes these keywords. TITLE tags and ALT attributes should also be descriptive and accurate.

The design of the site is important too; dynamic pages (those with the “?” character) should be kept to a minimum as not every search engine spider crawls such pages as well as static ones. Important content, names and links maybe better displayed in text rather than images as the Google crawler cannot recognise text that appears in images.

Although it is important to get the content and design of your site right, the most important thing for Google is that webmasters adhere to the ‘quality guidelines’. Webmasters should avoid tricks to improve their ratings and think more about their users by asking questions, such as ‘does this help my user?’ and ‘what would I do if search engines didn’t exist?’

Link schemes, such as ‘I’ll link you if you link me’, are a violation of Google webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact your website’s ranking. Instead of cheating, webmasters should make pages relevant to attract hits, and this will encourage other sites to link to you, subsequently improving your ranking. 4ps Marketing can help with this type of sustainable SEO.

With all this in mind, the message from Google is clear; if you look after your users and play by the rules your site will get a better ranking. The guidelines are clear, concise and well worth a read.