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Dos and Don'ts - Ignore them at your peril:
Following these guidelines will help Search Engines to find, crawl, and rank your site, which is the very best way to ensure you'll be included in a Search Engine's results. If you follow these well, you can also get yourself a higher ranking with the top 3 Search Engines too.
Quality Guidelines - The Basics:
- Don't join in link schemes or Free-For-All sites aimed at giving you more links to your site. Using some of these can actually end up getting you banned from some Search Engines.
- Don't try using "tricks" to get higher in Search Engines. The best way to check this is to ask yourself "Would this help my users?"
- Design your pages aimed at users, NOT Search Engines. Try not to trick your users or display different content to Search Engines.
Quality Guidelines - Specific Rules:
- Don't use "cloak domain names" or use redirects from other domains.
- Don't build "mirror sites" with the same (or only slightly different) content.
- Don't fill your pages with words that have nothing to do with your site or content.
- Don't use hidden links or text that your users can't see.
Design / Content Guidelines:
- Give your users a site map with links to the more important parts of your site. If the site map contains more than 100 links, you may find it helpful to break it up into seperate pages.
- Keep the links on page to a reasonable number where possible (ideally less than 100).
- Use plain text to names important information and links instead of pictures. At the time of writing, none of the major Search Engines can recognize text inside pictures.
- Build a useful, text-information filled site with pages that describe your products and services accurately.
- Try to think about the keywords users would use when search for a site like yours, then ensure that your site actually has these words in its content.
- Make a site with a clear structure and plain text links (using the tag). Users should be able to visit each page from at least one static plain text link.
- Check frequently for broken links across the whole of your site.
- Ensure your TITLE tags are descriptive and accurate for the information on that page. The same goes for ALT tags if you use pictures.
- If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a "?" character to display content), remember that not every Search Engine can crawl these types of pages. The best thing to do is keep parameters short and the number of them small.
Technical Guidelines:
- Use the robots.txt file where you need to. This file tells Search Engine spiders which areas of your site can and cannot be crawled. Make sure it's up to date so you don't accidentally block spiders from areas you want them to visit. Visit http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/faq.html to find how to use this file effectively.
- Try to avoid pages that will not work without Session ID's as Search Engine spiders often do not support the cookies that are required for Sessions.
When your site is ready:
- Try to get your site listed on relevant directories like Yahoo! or The Open Directory Project.
- Let all sites that should know about site be aware it is online.
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