Published on December 22, 2008 Google’s guide to SEO: 5 top tips
Last month, Google published it’s own dos and don’ts guide to optimising your website for the best possible search engine rankings. As this year draws to a close and you start thinking about what you want to do with your website in 2009, we thought it would be a good idea to review some of those dos and don’ts as they offer some useful advice for anyone trying to get better search engine rankings.
- Content: DO make sure your content is displayed as text (not as part of images) and is free from spelling and grammatical errors. Keep each page focussed on a single topic rather than having a lot of different content all on the same page. This helps search engines like Google get a clear picture of what the page is about when they index your site.
- Meta Content: DO make sure your ‘meta tags’ that you set up relate to the content on the page so are not too generic, don’t duplicate and don’t only include search terms like your category names (meta tags are the special, hidden words in your page that are only seen and used by search engines. They help index the content on your page)
- Links in your site: DO frequently check your site for broken links and redirect customers who receive ‘page not found’ errors to somewhere that will help them find what they are looking for. Ozcart does this by redirecting page not found errors to your sitemap. DO NOT block Google from finding your ‘page not found’ pages (also called 404 pages) or offer non helpful descriptions when a page is not found by a website visitor. Also, DO NOT mix www and non www versions of your links. ozCart sites use redirects to always use www in your URL unless you ask us to set your site up otherwise.
- Page titles: DO make sure that every page title is clear, simple and reflects the content of the page. DO NOT have duplicate page titles or try to ‘stuff keywords’ into your title to cover every possible thing that your website is about. ozCart generates page titles based on your category name and product name so in most cases you should not get duplicates. It also includes an override system so you can manually edit any of the automatically generated titles yourself.
- URLs: DO use search engine friendly URLs and ensure that you do not have too many subcategories within categories as this makes search engines travel too deeply into your site (they may not go that far).
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