One of my assignments this week was to read through the Google Webmaster Guidelines and summarize their general recommendations.
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Make sure your pages can get links from other pages. You will want to make sure you use crawlable links when you do that, which means using anchor tags (<a> with a href attribute).
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Create a sitemap and ensure that it has links to all the important pages on the site. They also recommend having this as a “human-readable” list of links for those important pages.
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Keep the number of links on a page to a “reasonable number”. They recommend “a few thousand at most”, which, to me, seems excessive.
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Ensure that the hosting server supports the “If-Modified-Since” HTTP header, which is what informs the Googlebots when content has been changed since they last visited the page. It’s important as it saves bandwidth and, thus, networking overhead costs.
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Use the robots.txt file well. It is important to ensure that the web crawler bots are not crawling non-important pages. Besides ensuring the robots.txt file has the right information, you also want to make sure that it is kept up-to-date. Doing these things ensures that your “crawling budget” is utilized well.
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Another thing that you can do is manually submit your site to Google’s crawlers. This triggers them to head over to your site immediately, as opposed to waiting for it to be discovered crawling other sites.
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Lastly, you should make sure that administrators of other relevant sites know about yours. Emailing an announcement, or posting such on social media is a great tool towards creating awareness of your site and garnering backlinks.
