How to Make a Google Friendly Site

Some useful questions to ask an SEO include:

• Can you show me examples of your previous work and share some success stories?
• Do you follow the Google Webmaster Guidelines?
• Do you offer any on line marketing services or advice to complement your organic search business?
• What kind of results do you expect to see, and in what time frame? How do you measure your success?
• What’s your experience in my industry?
• What’s your experience in my country/city?
• What’s your experience developing international site?
• What are your most important SEO techniques?
• How long have you been in business?
• How can I expect to communicate with you? Will you share with me all the changes you make to my site, and provide detailed information about your recommendations and the reasoning behind them?
• Review of your site content or structure
• Technical advice on website development: for example, hosting, redirects, error pages, use of Java Script
• Content development
• Management of on line business development campaigns
• Keyword research
• SEO training
• Expertise in specific markets and geographies.

Be wary of SEO firms and web consultants or agencies that send you email out of the blue.

Avoid SEO that talk about the power of “free-for-all” links, link popularity schemes, or submitting your site to thousands of search engines. Ask for explanations if something is unclear. If an SEO creates deceptive or misleading content on your behalf, such as doorway pages or “throwaway” domains, your site could be removed entirely from Google’s index. Some SEOs will promise to rank you highly in search engines, but place you in the advertising section rather than in the search results. A few SEOs will even change their bid prices in real time to create the illusion that they “control” other search engines and can place themselves in the slot of their choice.

 

One common scam is the creation of “shadow” domains that funnel users to a site by using deceptive redirects. These shadow domains often will be owned by the SEO who claims to be working on a client’s behalf. However, if the relationship sours, the SEO may point the domain to a different site, or even to a competitor’s domain. If that happens, the client has paid to develop a competing site owned entirely by the SEO.

 

Doorway pages drain away the link popularity of a site and route it to the SEO and its other clients, which may include sites with unsavory or illegal content. The SEO promises this will make the page more relevant for more queries. This is inherently false since individual pages are rarely relevant for a wide range of keywords.

 

There are a few warning signs that you may be dealing with a rogue SEO:

 

• owns shadow domains
• puts links to their other clients on doorway pages
• offers to sell keywords in the address bar
• doesn’t distinguish between actual search results and ads that appear on search results pages
• guarantees ranking, but only on obscure, long keyword phrases you would get anyway
• operates with multiple aliases or falsified WHO IS info
• gets traffic from “fake” search engines, spyware, or scum ware
• has had domains removed from Google’s index or is not itself listed in Google

If you feel that you were deceived by an SEO in some way, you may want to report it.

In the United States, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) handles complaints about deceptive or unfair business practices. To file a complaint, visit: http://www.ftc.gov/ and click on “File a Complaint On-line,” call 1-877-FTC-HELP, or write to:

Federal Trade Commission
CRC -240
Washington, D.C. 20580

If your complaint is against a company in a country other than the United States, please file it at http://www.econsumer.gov/.

How to make a Google friendly site:

• Provide high-quality content on your pages, especially your homepage.
• Make sure that other sites link to yours
• Google uses sophisticated text-matching techniques to display pages that are both important and relevant to each search.
• Natural links to your site develop as part of the dynamic nature of the web when other sites find your content valuable and think it would be helpful for their visitors. Unnatural links to your site are placed there specifically to make your site look more popular to search engines.
• Only natural links are useful for the indexing and ranking of your site.
• Use a text browser, such as Lynx, to examine your site. Most spiders see your site much as Lynx would. If features such as Java Script, cookies, session IDs, frames, DHTML, or Macro media Flash keep you from seeing your entire site in a text browser, then spiders may have trouble crawling it.

 

Things to avoid

 

• Don’t fill your page with lists of keywords, attempt to “cloak” pages, or put up “crawler only” pages. Google considers those links and pages deceptive and may ignore your site.
• Don’t feel obligated to purchase a search engine optimization service.
• Don’t use images to display important names, content, or links
• Don’t create multiple copies of a page under different URLs.

 

When your site is ready:

• Submit it to Google at http://www.google.com/submityourcontent/.
• Submit a Sitemap using Google Webmaster Tools. Google uses your Sitemap to learn about the structure of your site and to increase our coverage of your webpages.
• Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.
• Offer a site map to your users with links that point to the important parts of your site.
• Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links.
• Make sure that your elements and ALT attributes are descriptive and accurate.
• Allow search bots to crawl your sites without session IDs or arguments that track their path through the site.
• Make sure your web server supports the If-Modified-Since HTTP header. This feature allows your web server to tell Google whether your content has changed since we last crawled your site.
• Make use of the robots.txt file on your web server. This file tells crawlers which directories can or cannot be crawled.
• Make reasonable efforts to ensure that advertisements do not affect search engine rankings.
• Monitor your site’s performance and optimize load times.
• Google strongly recommends that all webmasters regularly monitor site performance using Page Speed, YSlow, WebPagetest, or other tools.
• If you believe that another site is abusing Google’s quality guidelines, please report that site at https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport.
• Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines.
• Don’t use unauthorized computer programs to submit pages,
• If your site participates in an affiliate program, make sure that your site adds value.

(With help from Google writings)