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Google Updated Webmaster Guidelines: Know What Can Harm Your Rankings

Google have updated Webmaster guidelines and following them will help Google find, index and rank your website. It is specifically pointed that blocking JavaScript and CSS files may have a negative impact on your indexing and search rankings in Google.

Google strongly stimulate people to pay very close attention to the updated Webmaster guidelines. The tech giant has updated its indexing system which will function more like a modern browser. It gave precise advice on allowing Googlebot to access the CSS, JavaScript and image files that a website uses. According to the giant, disallowing crawling of JavaScript or CSS files in your website’s robots.txt have a negative impact on your search rankings.

The technical Webmaster guidelines specifies that low quality guest blogging may be considered no or little original content by Google. The tech giant has restricted some guest blog networks in order to make their search results more accurate. Some webmasters attempts to attract more visitors to their site by creating pages with too many words but no authentic content. Google will penalize such domains that try to rank highly by displaying scraped pages that don’t add required value to users.

Design & Content Guidelines

The design and content guidelines emphasize to make a website with a clear hierarchy and text links where every page should be accessible from at least one static text link. A website should include a site map and if it has a very large number of links, breaking it into multiple pages can be a good idea. Create a well-designed, useful and information-rich website that clearly and accurately describes your product.

Try to use more text instead of images to describe important content, names, or links. This is because the Google crawler does not recognize text contained in images. Your title elements and ALT attributes should be accurate and descriptive.

Technical Guidelines

If you want your website to be on the top of search results, allow all of its assents, like CSS and JavaScript files, to be crawled. Your web server should support the If-Modified-Since HTTP header as it allows your server to tell Google if the content has changed since your site was last crawled. Supporting this features also saves you overhead and bandwidth.

Using the robots.txt file on your web server tells crawlers which directories can be crawled and which cannot be. The advertisements on your site should not affect search engine rankings. The pages and links created by content management system should be easy to crawl. It is important to test your website to make sure that it appears accurately in different browsers.

Monitor the performance of your site and optimize load times. Fast websites are more liked and visited by users and improve the quality of the web. The tech giant strongly recommends you to monitor site performance using different tools on a regular basis.

The quality guidelines are all about deceptive and manipulative behavior. It specifies that make your site keeping users in mind, not the search engines. Do not trick search engine to improve the ranking if your site.

The rule of thumb is make your website valuable, unique and more engaging. If your site stands out from others in the same field, half the work is done.

7 Common Mistakes to Avoid in SEO and Make Your Campaign A Big Hit

Make Your SEO Campaign a Big Hit!

SEO is the only way to get your website in the top search results and if not managed in a proper way, it could even lead to a huge disaster. When webmasters develop a site, they often ignore the SEO best practices and I must say that this is a terrible mistake. No website is perfect, especially when it is for the first time you build it, but there are ways to make it perfect by avoiding some basic mistakes.

Fortunately, you’ve got the chance to identify and correct all the mistakes so that you website can start enjoying more traffic and high visibility on search results.

Here are the 7 common SEO mistakes that you should avoid, as mentioned by Google, and make your site a big hit. Let’s face it:-

1. Low Quality Content – It not always mean copying from other websites, duplication within your own site could confuse the search engines to decide which content to index. It means existence of same content in more than one web-page within the same or different website. Avoid homepage duplication, duplicate URLs, web-pages with similar content, unplayable content and lack of content marketing.

2. Blocked JavaScript and CSS – Having blocked JavaScript, CSS and image files is a big mistake that could lead to suboptimal rankings, as mentioned by Google. It’s better to always allow Googlebot access to the JavaScript, CSS as well as image files in order to enjoy optimal indexing.

3. Using Unreliable SEO Services – Companies promising quick and cheap SEO services often use black hat SEO techniques. These aggressive black hat tactics not at all follow the search engine guidelines which may have a negative impact on the search results. These techniques breaks search engines rules and create a poor user experience which is not at all good for any website. Better to avoid them.

4. Not Focusing on Keyword Research – It’s easy to get quality content but very difficult to find the traffic-generating keywords. Give time to keyword research as there is no fun of having wrong keywords for your site and wasting your time on getting them on the top results. If you really want to bring traffic to your site, make sure you work on adequate keywords. You can find suitable keywords and build a search network using tools like Keyword Planner.

5. Inappropriate Meta Titles and Descriptions – Title tags and meta descriptions play a crucial role in indexing the web-pages. It is what search engines use to get a good idea of what the page is all about. The meta title and descriptions should include important keywords so that search engines can get a clear overview of the page’s content. It’s always better to include your brands in the title tag and every page should have its own unique title tag.

6. Discarding the Old Website Pages Completely – When you create a new site and completely kill the old one, it has a negative impact on your search rankings. Old pages that have already boosted SEO should never be completely deleted. The best way is to redirect pages to new site so they continue to appear even on page upgrades. Make sure that all images, videos and links on these pages are properly reconnected.

7. Missing Alt Tags – Search engines cannot differentiate between images without its title and Alt tag. So it is very important to enter relevant title and alt tags for each and every image you upload on your website. Give your images meaningful names so that search engines can easily find and differentiate them from others.

The above mentioned are few SEO mistakes that you should avoid to enjoy better search results. Avoiding these common mistakes is the only way to get your web-pages in top search results and what it all required is your concern and proper research.

Good luck for your SEO campaign…

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