Guide to Google's Webmaster Guidelines

If you are looking for help on how to create a search engine friendly website, take your advice straight from the horse's mouth: Google.

Here's a summary of the advice Google itself gives webmasters about search engine friendly website design, content, quality and technical set-up.

Action Steps
The best contacts and resources to help you get it done

Search Engine Friendly Design and Content

The rule of thumb is: Above all, make your site useful for people. Then worry about search engines!

I recommend: Create a site that is full of useful information for readers.  This means the text on your website should make it very clear what your site is about. Remember you are primarily creating your site for people, not for search engines.

Try to include the words that searchers would use to find sites like yours. Also include TITLE tags (meta tags) and ALT tags that describe your pages accurately.

Make sure all pages of your site can be reached via static text links. A hierarchical structure is often useful to create a good navigation structure which is useful for both visitors and search engines. You should also include a sitemap which contains text links to all pages of your site.

Finally, make sure your HTML code is correct and does not contain any broken links - and do not include too many links on a page. This is not only confusing for visitors, but could also be mistaken for a (spammy) link farm by search engines.

More design and content guidelines from Google ...

Search Engine Friendly Technology

Make sure your site's technical set-up is search engine friendly.

I recommend: Use the robots.txt file, which contains information for crawlers about which directories and pages should be crawled and which shouldn't.

Make sure a search engine spider can see all of your site. You can simulate this by viewing your site with a text browser like Lynx.

Check if your web server supports the HTML header "If-Modified-Since". If this header is being used, a search engine spider can tell whether your site was updated since the last crawl, and you save on bandwidth.

More technical guidelines from Google ...

Search Engine Friendly Site Quality

This is all about not using any spamming techniques. Google does not like spamming, and it's very likely that they will drop you from their index if they catch you spamming. So, make sure you avoid any of the following techniques.

I recommend: Do not create multiple pages, subdomains or domains with basically identical content.

Do not use hidden text or links.

Do not create pages just for search engines.

Do not create pages with keywords that are not relevant to your site.

Do not bombard Google with automated queries, e.g. for rank checking.

Do not use deceptive redirects.

More quality guidelines from Google ...

Tips & Tactics
Helpful advice for making the most of this Guide

• A mistake many people make is that they only worry about search engine optimization once their site is already live on the Internet. It would be much better if you integrated SEO considerations while you are designing and building your new website. If you want to read up on more search engine marketing tips, visit the ineedhits search marketing blog at http://www.ineedhits.com/free-tools/blog/search-engine-marketing-blog.aspx?source=work
• A mistake many people make is that they only worry about search engine optimization once their site is already live on the Internet. It would be much better if you integrated SEO considerations while you are designing and building your new website. If you want to read up on more search engine marketing tips, visit the ineedhits search marketing blog at http://www.ineedhits.com/free-tools/blog/search-engine-marketing-blog.aspx