SEO: Google’s Design & Content Guidelines
Every person knows Google is #1 when it comes to the major search engines. Thus, it’s important to follow their guidelines. Here are some helpful design and content guidelines that Google would like for you to follow with your website and its design.
Design & Content Guidelines
- 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. If the site map is larger than 100 or so links, you may want to break the site map into separate pages. Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.
- Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it.
- Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. The Google crawler doesn’t recognize text contained in images.
- Make sure that your TITLE tags and ALT attributes are descriptive and accurate.
- Check for broken links and correct HTML.
- If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a “?” character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few.
- Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100).
Be sure to follow these guidelines with your website so that you can stay in the good graces of Google.
Tags: google guidelines, seo, web design, web design guidelinesMisc: Top 15 Firefox Extensions & My Addiction To These Firefox Extensions
Yes, I know the best medicine is to talk about your addiction. I must admit it……so here goes! *hangs head in shame* I’m a Firefox extension junkie, but I’m really trying to get help I promise. At the time of this post, I had 40 Firefox extensions, but to show my shrink that she was actually helping me I voted 3 Firefox extensions off the island and am now left with 37 extensions. That number alone bothers me; why can’t it be 35 or 40, but then again that’s another issue for her to solve another day.
Here’s a list of my favorite extensions along with some commentary about them.
Autocopy: This is my #1 used extension. I’m so used to it that I now forget to do Ctrl C in other applications. After 5 minutes of trying to figure out why I can’t paste a link into my browser from my email I realize that I forgot to do Ctrl C. Yes, I’m totally addicted to this one.
Forecastbar Enhanced: Not all of my extension are used for work purposes. This one is used so much I can’t honestly remember when the last time was that I watched the local news for the weather. You can actually play meteorologist to all your friends who have no clue about this extension. Then again they may throw snowballs at you when you said it will be sunny tomorrow when it actually snows.
Web Developer: This extension is full of various goodies for web development. It will help you develop and test websites. It also allows you to gain access to the HTML source code, CSS files, and javascripts of interesting sites. You can also disable javascript, redirect and such.
SEO for Firefox: Created by Aaron Wall of SEOBook this tool is very useful in finding out various things about a website when you search Google such as it’s Pagerank, last Google cache date, links pointing to it in Google and Yahoo, .edu and .gov sites linking to the domain and so forth.
Rank Checker: Another resourceful to extension created by Aaron Wall of SEOBook that allows you to check you rankings for keywords on Google, Yahoo and MSN as well as the international versions of these sites. You can also keep track of the changes that transpires with your keywords.
HTML Validator: This one is one of my most used extensions as well as it makes it easy to show a client what exactly they need to fix on their website to make it more browser compliant as well as have the site validate.
IE Tab: This is one beneficial to me so I don’t actually have to use IE to do cross-browser testing when I’m designing websites. I’m not a big fan of IE7 so I’m so glad I can use IE Tab.
Tab Mix Plus: This extension enhances Firefox’s tab browsing capabilities including such features as duplicating tabs, merging tabs, controlling tab focus, tab clicking options, undo closed tabs and windows. Very useful for things such as XM Radio that automatically pop out into a new window; then you can just merge them together.
DT Whois: Helps you find out useful information about a domain name with just one click. For instance, you can see exactly who owns a site and where it’s hosted at as well.
Download Statusbar: I love this extension too! You can view and manage downloads from a tidy statusbar without the annoying download pop up window getting in the way of your web browsing. Also, sometimes you may not want to download the program right then; thus it stays in your statusbar until you’re ready to install the program.
Flashblock: Lets you block all flash movies from loading; lets you pages load faster without all of the extra junk trying to load at once. You can also determine what sites get theirs loaded automatically.
Firebug: This is one of my latest extension that I recently downloaded. It integrates with Firefox to put a variety of development tools at your fingertips while you browse. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page.
User Agent Switcher: This one also is a new extension that I recently downloaded. It adds a menu and a toolbar button to switch the user agent of the browser. You can go from Firefox to Netscape to Opera to IE.
Fireshot: A great extension that lets you create screenshots of a site. However, unlike other extensions, this plug-in provides a set of editing and annotation tools, which let you quickly modify your screen captures and insert text and graphical annotations on it. This type of functionality is so useful for me as a designer.
MeasureIt: This extension lets you see how big a certain area is on websites (in pixels) in case you’re trying to emulate a particular look and feel of a website. Makes it easy to guess what size graphics to create in Photoshop and what not.
So these are my favorite 15 Firefox extensions, what are some of your favorite extensions? Leave us some comments about what your favorite ones are that you couldn’t live without. Please tell me there are others like me out there. Maybe we can start a support group together!
Tags: regency interactive, regency interactive corporation, seo, web designSEO: SMX Advanced: Recap From Matt Cutts
Last week we posted recaps of what all went on at SMX Advanced. Well this week Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s Webspam team, posted his recap of what happened at SMX Advanced. It’s always good to hear from people on the opposite end of the spectrum of us SEO companies. Matt also mentioned that he thought there was more blackhat strategies being told than there were last year.
Supposedly, there was a big stir last week with everyone saying there was too much blackhat being talked about at the conference. Although we do not practice any blackhat strategies at Regency Interactive, I personally believe it’s always handy to know what those strategies are so that you are aware of them. Especially, when client comes to you after being burned by other SEO companies you already know some things to check for to see if the previous company did any blackhat practices on that particular site.
To learn what Matt thought about SMX Advanced you can continue reading his article here.
Tags: matt cutts, regency interactive, regency interactive corporation, seo, seo firm, smx, smx advanced, whitehat seoSEO: Reasons Why Your Google Traffic Might Have Dropped
Recently, Ann Smarty over at Search Engine Journal posted an article “5 Reasons Why Your Google Traffic Might Have Dropped” and today we’re going to summarize what she’s pointing out to you in the article.
The main reasons why your Google traffic may have dropped are probably related to one of these situations:
- You’ve been penalized.
- Your site has been hacked.
- Google is tweaking its algorithm.
- Overall (seasonal) change in searches.
- Your competitors increased their promotional efforts.
If in fact you have been penalized by something that you did then you will need to work hard to figure out what exactly it was that you did on your website that Google did not like. Once you have taken off anything that may be conceived as something that violates their guidelines then you can ask for a re-inclusion. If you pass a human review, then you should be forgiven.
The second likely option is your website being hacked. If your website has been hacked and this is a common scenario here lately, you will need to figure out just what they did. Some red flags that you have been hacked are Google webmaster tools showing you that some of the terms that you were found by recently are not relevant to your website as well as getting an increase in traffic for keywords not related to your website such as casino or hotel. Once you have taken off anything that may be conceived as something that violates their guidelines then you can ask for a re-inclusion.
The next item that could have caused your rankings to drop was Google making changes to their index. They are always going to continually update their datacenters to weed out spam and whatnot.
Obviously, if you sell Christmas trees and it’s only June you’re going to see a dip in your traffic simply because nobody is searching for Christmas trees in June.
The last option is that your competitors increased their promotional efforts based on your website outranking them. Always keep an eye out for what your competitors are doing while continuing to improve your on-site SEO.
If you need any help with understanding why your competitors have passed you by in the organic rankings, the Support Team at Regency Interactive can assist you with getting your website back to where it was previously in the search engine listings.
Tags: search engine optimization, seo, web design, website analysis, website design, website optimizationWebsite Redesign: What’s Wrong With Best Swim Wear?
We have a new site for the series “What’s Wrong With This Website” as I came across this website this weekend while I was looking for some new swim trunks: BestSwimWear.com. The first thing that stuck out to me was the out-of-date look the site had to it with the “default” link colors around the images due to borders being set up on the images. Then, when you scroll to the bottom you see that the website was designed and copyrighted in 1996. I’m willing to believe that this is how the website looked back then in 1996. Let’s begin the analysis!
The first thing that I noticed is that the main header image is predominately gray, but yet the name brand images have a shadow behind them while also having a white background around them as well. This would look more professional if it was all just white minus the shadows since the rest of the website is white.
Next, you can see that they are using a text-based navigation menu that is actually an image. There’s no rollover to these images so I’m not quite sure why they used an image. Especially since the font is just an ordinary font each user would already have on their computer. There are so many images that can capture your attention above the fold that you can actually miss their navigation and scroll right on past it. You should always make sure your users can find what they need on the website as well as be able to find the menu to click on.
We already pointed out that the images use a default blue border around them which means that they are not using any up-to-date CSS or anything. They could just update their look real simple by using CSS.
Which leads me to my last item critique. I came across this website by doing a search on Google for “mens swimsuit” and yet they only have 3 name brands to offer its male customers. However, they have 35 name brands to offer its female customers. By offering more lingerie and women’s swimsuits it’s pretty obvious that your website is not really catering towards men.
This brings a close to the series “What’s Wrong With This Website” for the time being. With SMX Advanced being today and tomorrow we’ll be posting some topics that come up from that conference. I’m sure it will be a good one!
If you’re interested in a website critique, feel free to contact Regency Interactive today at 252-428-0200!
Tags: web design, web redesign, website analysis, website design, website redesign
