Need robots.txt - Tell Google which page should not be crawled
For non-sensitive information, block unwanted crawling by using robots.txt
Don't let your internal search result pages be crawled by Google. Users dislike clicking a search engine result only to land on another search result page on your site
Allowing URLs created as a result of proxy services to be crawled.
Create unique, accurate page titles
A <title> tag tells both users and search engines what the topic of a particular page is. The <title> tag should be placed within the <head> element of the HTML document. You should create a unique title for each page on your site.
1<html>
2<head>
3 <title>Brandon's Baseball Cards - Buy Cards, Baseball News, Card Prices</title>
4 <meta name="description" content="Brandon's Baseball Cards provides a large selection of
5 vintage and modern baseball cards for sale.
6 We also offer daily baseball news and events.">
7</head>
8<body>
Choose a title that reads naturally and effectively communicates the topic of the page's content.
Choosing a title that has no relation to the content on the page.
Using default or vague titles like "Untitled" or "New Page 1".
Using a single title across all of your site's pages or a large group of pages.
Using extremely lengthy titles that are unhelpful to users.
Stuffing unneeded keywords in your title tags.
Use the description meta tag
A page's description meta tag gives Google and other search engines a summary of what the page is about. A page's title may be a few words or a phrase, whereas a page's description meta tag might be a sentence or two or even a short paragraph
1<html>
2<head>
3 <title>Brandon's Baseball Cards - Buy Cards, Baseball News, Card Prices</title>
4 <meta name="description" content="Brandon's Baseball Cards provides a large selection of vintage and modern baseball cards for sale. We also offer daily baseball news and events.">
5</head>
6<body>
Accurately summarize the page content
Write a description that would both inform and interest users if they saw your description meta tag as a snippet in a search result
While there's no minimal or maximal length for the text in a description meta tag, we recommend making sure that it's long enough to be fully shown in Search (note that users may see different sized snippets depending on how and where they search), and contains all the relevant information users would need to determine whether the page will be useful and relevant to them.
Writing a description meta tag that has no relation to the content on the page.
Using generic descriptions like "This is a web page" or "Page about baseball cards".
Filling the description with only keywords.
Copying and pasting the entire content of the document into the description meta tag.
Using a single description meta tag across all of your site's pages or a large group of pages.
Use heading tags to emphasize important text
use H1, H2 etc tags wherever required
Use meaningful headings to indicate important topics, and help create a hierarchical structure for your content, making it easier for users to navigate through your document.
Similar to writing an outline for a large paper, put some thought into what the main points and sub-points of the content on the page will be and decide where to use heading tags appropriately.
Placing text in heading tags that wouldn't be helpful in defining the structure of the page.
Using heading tags where other tags like <em> and <strong> may be more appropriate.
Erratically moving from one heading tag size to another.
Excessive use of heading tags on a page.
Very long headings.
Using heading tags only for styling text and not presenting structure.
Add structured data markup
Structured data helps to display the results in best possible and attractive way on Google
Keep track of how your marked up pages are doing
Check your markup using the Rich Results test
using invalid markup
Changing the source code of your site when you are unsure about implementing markup.
Adding markup data which is not visible to users.
Creating fake reviews or adding irrelevant markups.
Organize your site hierarchy
Plan your navigation based on homepage
Do you have enough pages around a specific topic area that it would make sense to create a page describing these related pages (for example, root page -> related topic listing -> specific topic)?
Do you have hundreds of different products that need to be classified under multiple category and subcategory pages?
Using breadcrumb - Create a simple navigational page for users
Make it as easy as possible for users to go from general content to the more specific content they want on your site
Controlling most of the navigation from page to page on your site through text links makes it easier for search engines to crawl and understand your site
Use <a> tag for all navigation
Create a navigational page for users, a sitemap for search engines
Having a navigation based entirely on images, or animations
Letting your navigational page become out of date with broken links.
Creating a navigational page that simply lists pages without organizing them, for example by subject.
Show useful 404 pages
Having a custom 404 page30 that kindly guides users back to a working page on your site can greatly improve a user's experience
Your 404 page should probably have a link back to your root page
and could also provide links to popular or related content on your site.
Allowing your 404 pages to be indexed in search engines (make sure that your web server is configured to give a 404 HTTP status code or—in the case of JavaScript-based sites—include the noindex tag when non-existent pages are requested).
Blocking 404 pages from being crawled through the robots.txt file.
Providing only a vague message like "Not found", "404", or no 404 page at all.
Using a design for your 404 pages that isn't consistent with the rest of your site.
Simple URLs convey content information
Creating descriptive categories and filenames for the documents on your website not only helps you keep your site better organized, it can create easier, friendlier URLs for those that want to link to your content.
Visitors may be intimidated by extremely long and cryptic URLs that contain few recognizable words.
If your URL is meaningful, it can be more useful and easily understandable in different contexts:
If you do find that people are accessing the same content through multiple URLs, setting up a 301 redirect32 from non-preferred URLs to the dominant URL is a good solution for this. You may also use canonical URL or use the rel="canonical"33 link element if you cannot redirect.
Use words in URLs
Provide one version of a URL to reach a document
Using lengthy URLs with unnecessary parameters and session IDs.
Choosing generic page names like page1.html.
Using excessive keywords like baseball-cards-baseball-cards-baseballcards.html.
Having deep nesting of subdirectories like .../dir1/dir2/dir3/dir4/dir5/dir6/page.html.
Using directory names that have no relation to the content in them.
Having pages from subdomains and the root directory access the same content, for example, domain.com/page.html and sub.domain.com/page.html.
Optimize your content
Make your site interesting and useful
Know what your readers want (and give it to them)
Think about the words that a user might search for to find a piece of your content. Users who know a lot about the topic might use different keywords in their search queries than someone who is new to the topic.
Write easy-to-read text
Organize your topics clearly
Create fresh, unique content
Optimize content for your users, not search engines
Writing sloppy text with many spelling and grammatical mistakes.
Awkward or poorly written content.
Embedding text in images and videos for textual content: users may want to copy and paste the text and search engines can't read it.
Dumping large amounts of text on varying topics onto a page without paragraph, subheading, or layout separation.
Rehashing (or even copying) existing content that will bring little extra value to users.
Having duplicate or near-duplicate versions of your content across your site.
Inserting numerous unnecessary keywords aimed at search engines but are annoying or nonsensical to users.
Having blocks of text like "frequent misspellings used to reach this page" that add little value for users.
Deceptively hiding text from users
37, but displaying it to search engines.
Be careful who you link to : use nofollow
You can confer some of your site's reputation to another site when your site links to it.
Sometimes users can take advantage of this by adding links to their own site in your comment sections or message boards. Or sometimes you might mention a site in a negative way and don't want to confer any of your reputation upon it.
Combat comment spam with nofollow
1<a href="http://www.example.com" rel="nofollow">Anchor text here</a>
Automatically add nofollow to comment columns and message boards
Many blogging software packages automatically nofollow user comments, but those that don't can most likely be manually edited to do this. This advice also goes for other areas of your site that may involve user-generated content, such as guest books, forums, shout-boards, referrer listings, etc. If you're willing to vouch for links added by third parties (for example, if a commenter is trusted on your site), then there's no need to use nofollow on links; however, linking to sites that Google considers spammy can affect the reputation of your own site. The Google Search Central documentation has more tips on avoiding comment spam40, for example by using CAPTCHAs and turning on comment moderation.
Optimize your images
By using the <picture> element you can also specify multiple options for different screen sizes for responsive images
You might also use the loading="lazy" attribute on images to make your page load faster for your users.
Use the HTML <img> or <picture> elements.
Use the alt attribute
Use brief but descriptive filenames and alt text
Supply alt text when using images as links
Using CSS to display images that you want us to index
Using generic filenames like image1.jpg, pic.gif, 1.jpg when possible—if your site has thousands of images you might want to consider automating the naming of the images.
Writing extremely lengthy filenames.
Stuffing keywords into alt text or copying and pasting entire sentences.
Writing excessively long alt text that would be considered spammy.
Using only image links for your site's navigation.
Make your site mobile-friendly
Configure mobile sites so that they can be indexed accurately
Regardless of which configuration you choose to set up your mobile site, there are key points that you should take note of:
If you use Dynamic Serving or have a separate mobile site, signal to Google when a page is formatted for mobile (or has an equivalent page that's formatted for mobile). This helps Google accurately serve mobile searchers your content in search results.
If you are using Responsive Web Design, use the meta name="viewport" tag to tell the browser how to adjust the content. If you use Dynamic Serving, use the Vary HTTP header to signal your changes depending on the user agent. If you are using separate URLs, signal the relationship between two URLs by adding the <link> tag with rel="canonical" and rel="alternate" elements to the page.
Keep resources crawlable. Blocking page resources can give Google an incomplete picture of your website. This often happens when your robots.txt file is blocking access to some or all of your page resources. If Googlebot doesn't have access to a page's resources, such as CSS, JavaScript, or images, we may not detect that it's built to display and work well on a mobile browser. In other words, we may not detect that the page is mobile-friendly, and therefore not properly serve it to mobile searchers.
Avoid common mistakes that frustrate mobile visitors, such as featuring unplayable videos.
Mobile pages that provide a poor searcher experience can be demoted in rankings or displayed with a warning in mobile search results. This includes but is not limited to full page interstitials49 on mobile that hinder user experience.
Provide full functionality on all devices. Mobile users expect the same functionality—such as commenting and check-out—and content on mobile as well as on all other devices that your website supports. In addition to textual content, make sure that all important images and videos are embedded and accessible on mobile devices. For search engines, provide all structured data and other metadata—such as titles, descriptions, link-elements, and other meta-tags—on all versions of the pages.
Make sure that the structured data, images, videos, and metadata you have on your desktop site are also included on the mobile site.
Test your mobile pages with the Mobile-Friendly Test50 to see if Google thinks your website works well on mobile devices.
If you use separate URLs for your mobile pages, make sure to test both the mobile and the desktop URLs, so you can confirm that the redirect is recognized and crawlable.
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