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Google

Search Engine Optimisation – What Not To Do

So Google has now released a search engine optimisation starter guide for webmasters, which they use internally:

Although this guide won’t tell you any secrets that’ll automatically rank your site first for queries in Google (sorry!), following the best practices outlined below will make it easier for search engines to both crawl and index your content. Google

Still worth a read even if it is fairly basic, generally accepted (in the industry) best practice search engine optimisation for your site.

Here’s a list of what Google tells you to avoid in the document;

  1. choosing a title that has no relation to the content on the page
  2. using default or vague titles like “Untitled” or “New Page 1″
  3. using a single title tag across all of your site’s pages or a large group of pages
  4. using extremely lengthy titles that are unhelpful to users
  5. stuffing unneeded keywords in your title tags
  6. writing a description meta tag that has no relation to the content on the page
  7. using generic descriptions like “This is a webpage” or “Page about baseball
    cards”
  8. filling the description with only keywords
  9. copy and pasting the entire content of the document into the description meta tag
  10. using a single description meta tag across all of your site’s pages or a large group of pages
  11. using lengthy URLs with unnecessary parameters and session IDs
  12. choosing generic page names like “page1.html”
  13. using excessive keywords like “baseball-cards-baseball-cards-baseball-cards.htm”
  14. having deep nesting of subdirectories like “…/dir1/dir2/dir3/dir4/dir5/dir6/
    page.html”
  15. using directory names that have no relation to the content in them
  16. having pages from subdomains and the root directory (e.g. “domain.com/
    page.htm” and “sub.domain.com/page.htm”) access the same content
  17. mixing www. and non-www. versions of URLs in your internal linking structure
  18. using odd capitalization of URLs (many users expect lower-case URLs and remember them better)
  19. creating complex webs of navigation links, e.g. linking every page on your site
    to every other page
  20. going overboard with slicing and dicing your content (it takes twenty clicks to get to deep content)
  21. having a navigation based entirely on drop-down menus, images, or animations (many, but not all, search engines can discover such links on a site, but if a user can reach all pages on a site via normal text links, this will improve the accessibility of your site)
  22. letting your HTML sitemap page become out of date with broken links
  23. creating an HTML sitemap that simply lists pages without organizing them, for
    example by subject (Edit Shaun – Safe to say especially for larger sites)
  24. allowing your 404 pages to be indexed in search engines (make sure that your
    webserver is configured to give a404 HTTP status codewhen non-existent
    pages are requested)
  25. providing only a vague message like “Not found”, “404″, or no 404 page at all
  26. using a design for your 404 pages that isn’t consistent with the rest of your site
  27. writing sloppy text with many spelling and grammatical mistakes
  28. embedding text in images for textual content (users may want to copy and
    paste the text and search engines can’t read it)
  29. dumping large amounts of text on varying topics onto a page without paragraph, subheading, or layout separation
  30. rehashing (or even copying) existing content that will bring little extra value to
    users

Pretty simple stuff but sometimes it’s the simple seo often get overlooked. Of course, you put the above together with Google Guidelines for webmasters.

Search engine optimization is often about making small modifications to parts of your website. When viewed individually, these changes might seem like incremental improvements, but when combined with other optimizations, they could have a noticeable impact on your site’s user experience and performance in organic search results.

Interested in learning about search engine optimisation for Google? Check out our free cheat sheet!