Week 23 – Webmaster Guidelines

It’s week 23 of the #atozofseo which brings us on to:

ⓦ for Webmaster Guidelines:

It’s surprising how few people (outside of the SEO industry) know about this resource from Google on how to build a great site. They even provide a 32 page PDF that contains some BIG clues about what they expect from a website (in order for it to be understood by their crawler, indexed and ranked).

The page also indicates specific guidelines concerning quality and manipulation of your site to ‘deceive’ them (some people do this unwittingly via poor quality SEO whilst others do set out to cheat)

Below are the basic principles you should adhere to.

Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines.

Don’t deceive your users.

Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you’d feel comfortable explaining what you’ve done to a website that competes with you, or to a Google employee.

Think about what makes your website unique, valuable, or engaging. Make your website stand out from others in your field.

The last point is one to elaborate on – with the rise of EAT and BERT, links are becoming less important (imo). Read the guide!

Link to the PDF (bit out of date but still worth understanding. Get stuck in!