How does google crawls our blogs?

Qlick Search Engine Optimization Tips

According to Google (the big G), to be able to help Google find, index, and rank your site you should take note of these (3) three Webmaster Tool Guidelines:

1. Design and Content
2. Technical Guidelines
3. Quality Guidelines

Design and Content

But on this article I will focus more on Design and Content Guidelines. The Design and Content Guidelines pertains to the proper organization or syntax usage of your html tags and css combine. The Design and Content Guideline indicates that in creating website:

1. Make sure that a site has clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.

– What does google means about clear hierachy…? It is about the proper usage of tags.

h1, h2, h3, and h4 tags

The image below compare the proper usage of header tags:

H2 tags is ideal for Title Post

H2 tags should be used in Title Post

In the above example I compared the old and new bloggers template of my friend Elmot, animotivation. The first image shows his first template uses h2 tags for the date instead for the title post. In which the crawler will read the date first rather than the title of the post. An SEO friendly template should present the following hierarchy.

ttle Tag – Page Title
h1 Tag – Blog Title
h2 Tag – Title Post
h3 Tag – Subtitle
a tag – Links

The relevance of the page will be based on the keywords on its proper hierarchy of your tags.

2. Offer a site map to your users with links that point to the important parts of your site. If the site map has an extremely large number of links, you may want to break the site map into multiple pages.

Last time I post an article about how to create a sitemap.xml. but this falls to the technical guideline of the Webmaster Tools Guidelines. This sitemap pertains to the links to all your blog post or pages. If your a wordpress user you can use the archives widget or use a Plugin by dagondesign.com to automatically create this links for you.

3. Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number.

Links going out to your page will give you less priority in ranking for the serp.

4. Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.

5. Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it.

The hierarchical positioning of words or keywords thru out the pages will help you rank on search engine result page.

6. 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.

7. Make sure that your elements and ALT attributes are descriptive and accurate.

8. Check for broken links and correct HTML.

You can use the W3C Markup Validation Service to check for errors and problems regarding your tags.

9. 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.

That’s about it. Next time I’ll be giving example on how to explain the other 2 two guidelines. If you have something to add please feel free to share any additional information regarding this matter.