Google webmaster guidelines was put together to educate webmasters and anyone building and designing websites or blogs about how to create these websites that meet Google’s standards.

From my observation, in the last few years, it has become more and more difficult to rank blogs or websites high up on the search engines for a given keyword phrase using purely SEO (search engine optimization) techniques.

From what is known, Google has been hiring some of the best SEO experts and programmers at its HQ to program and constantly update its engine’s algorithms which is responsible for ranking websites and blogs.  What is the reason for this humungus effort? Simple! “When you type a search term in the Google search box, Google wants to give you ‘near to exact results’ based on the keyword you typed!”

This, I think is one of the greatest efforts being embarked by the world’s largest search engine. Smaller search engines like Yahoo.com, MSN.com, Bing.com etc eventually will or should I say, have begun to follow in the same direction. “When the BIG boys play, everyone gets excites!”

As far as the user experience is concern, Google will definitely outperform and outrank any other search engine out there because it simply wants to achieve one goal, which is  “to give the highest satisfaction in terms of search results, to the online community.”

Below, I have listed all the webmaster guidelines Google has set recently (split into 3 subsections). I would strongly suggest for you to follow these guidelines when creating your websites or blogs if you’re concern of positioning it high up on the search engines.

1) Design and content guidelines
2) Technical guidelines
3) Quality guidelines

Google suggests, IF you’re unable or don’t wish to follow all it’s guidelines, the least you should implement is its Quality guidelines.

When you have created your website or blog:

• Submit it to Google at http://www.google.com/addurl.html.
• Submit a Sitemap using the Google Webmaster Tools. Google uses your Sitemap to learn about the structure of your site and to increase it’s coverage of your webpages. But if you’ve setup WordPress.org on your domain, you can use the sitemap.xml plugin to create a sitemap of your blog automatically. It’s much easier.
• And lastly, inform other webmasters you’re planning to link to from your blog and tell them when your blog will be launched on the Net.

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. If you must use images for textual content, consider using the “ALT” attribute to include a few words of descriptive text.
• Make sure that your <title> elements 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).
• Review Google’s Image guidelines for best practices on publishing images.

Technical Guidelines

• Use a text browser such as Lynx to examine your site, because most search engine spiders see your site much as Lynx would. If fancy features such as JavaScript, cookies, session IDs, frames, DHTML, or Flash keep you from seeing all of your site in a text browser, then search engine spiders may have trouble crawling your site.
• Allow search bots to crawl your sites without session IDs or arguments that track their path through the site. These techniques are useful for tracking individual user behavior, but the access pattern of bots is entirely different. Using these techniques may result in incomplete indexing of your site, as bots may not be able to eliminate URLs that look different but actually point to the same page.
• Make sure your web server supports the If-Modified-Since HTTP header. This feature allows your web server to tell Google whether your content has changed since we last crawled your site. Supporting this feature saves you bandwidth and overhead.
• Make use of the robots.txt file on your web server. This file tells crawlers which directories can or cannot be crawled. Make sure it’s current for your site so that you don’t accidentally block the Googlebot crawler. Visit http://www.robotstxt.org/faq.html to learn how to instruct robots when they visit your site. You can test your robots.txt file to make sure you’re using it correctly with the robots.txt analysis tool available in Google Webmaster Tools.
• If your company buys a content management system, make sure that the system creates pages and links that search engines can crawl.
• Use robots.txt to prevent crawling of search results pages or other auto-generated pages that don’t add much value for users coming from search engines.
• Test your site to make sure that it appears correctly in different browsers.
• Monitor your site’s performance and optimize load times. Google’s goal is to provide users with the most relevant results and a great user experience. Fast sites increase user satisfaction and improve the overall quality of the web (especially for those users with slow Internet connections), and we hope that as webmasters improve their sites, the overall speed of the web will improve.Google strongly recommends that all webmasters regularly monitor site performance using Page Speed, YSlow, WebPagetest, or other tools. For more information, tools, and resources, see Let’s Make The Web Faster. In addition, the Site Performance tool in Webmaster Tools shows the speed of your website as experienced by users around the world.

Quality Guidelines

These quality guidelines cover the most common forms of deceptive or manipulative behavior, but Google may respond negatively to other misleading practices not listed here (e.g. tricking users by registering misspellings of well-known websites). It’s not safe to assume that just because a specific deceptive technique isn’t included on this page, Google approves of it.

Webmasters who spend their energies upholding the spirit of the basic principles will provide a much better user experience and subsequently enjoy better ranking than those who spend their time looking for loopholes they can exploit.

If you believe that another site is abusing Google’s quality guidelines, please report that site at https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport. Google prefers developing scalable and automated solutions to problems, so we attempt to minimize hand-to-hand spam fighting. The spam reports we receive are used to create scalable algorithms that recognize and block future spam attempts.

Quality guidelines – basic principles

• Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines. Don’t deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as “cloaking.”
• 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. Another useful test is to ask, “Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn’t exist?”
• Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or “bad neighborhoods” on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.
• Don’t use unauthorized computer programs to submit pages, check rankings, etc. Such programs consume computing resources and violate our Terms of Service. Google does not recommend the use of products such as WebPosition Gold™ that send automatic or programmatic queries to Google.

Quality guidelines – specific guidelines

• Avoid hidden text or hidden links. To see how this works, click here.
• Don’t use cloaking or sneaky redirects. To see how this works, click here.
• Don’t send automated queries to Google. To see how this works, click here.
• Don’t load pages with irrelevant keywords. To see how this works, click here.
• Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content. Click here.
• Don’t create pages with malicious behavior, such as phishing or installing viruses, trojans, or other badware.
• Avoid “doorway” pages created just for search engines, or other “cookie cutter” approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.
• If your site participates in an affiliate program, make sure that your site adds value. Provide unique and relevant content that gives users a reason to visit your site first.

So by reading, understanding and implementing these guidelines, you are able to meet with Google’s standards and obviously if Google is happy, you should have no problem ranking your website high on Google.

Happy following these guidelines!

Amar@Aaron
CEO, Niche Marketing Resources