SLIDE 1
Deconstructing Google ‐ Presentation Resources
wsisme.com chris@wsisme.com Chris Murray (514) 693‐9339 Ext 111
- 1. Google wants to find your pages
Google uses bots called spiders to crawl the Internet. The first step is to make sure the spiders can find the pages of your Website otherwise they can’t index and form an opinion if they don’t know they exist. All pages on the site can be reached by a link from another findable page (Internal linking) The link should include text or, for images, an alt attribute, that is relevant to the target page Provide a page with a list of links to all important pages (IE: site map in your footer) Limit the number of links on a page to a reasonable number (a few thousand at most but we suggest under 100 links on a page) Add a robots.txt file on the root of your server to tell Google what to look at and what to avoid Set‐up a Google Search Console account and associate it with your Website
- Submit an XML sitemap file that lists the URLs of all important pages on your site
- Review the results of the sitemap submission and fix any crawling errors
- Compare the submitted URLS vs crawled URLs to ensure Google’s found every page
- Review results, queries, position, impressions, clicks and more
- 2. Google wants to understand your pages
Create a useful, information‐rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content Use a keyword research tool to research keyword volumes and difficulty Select target keywords, assign a primary keyword for the home page and keyword per page Use the selected keywords in your content of the page in the Website Use synonyms and variations of your keywords Ensure that your <title> elements and alt attributes per page have the keyword and are descriptive, specific, and accurate Design your site to have a clear conceptual page hierarchy. (main navigation with sub navigation under main headings that make sense for the user and for Google) Add keyword to the page name and file name (URL) Don’t embed important text in images, Google can’t “see” it Add descriptive file names to your images and use your keyword Use the selected keyword in image alt attributes Use the selected keyword in the internal links Allow all site assets that significantly affect page rendering to be crawled: for example, CSS and JavaScript files that affect the understanding of the pages Provide explicit clues about the meaning of a page by including structured data
- Structured data is a standardized format for providing information about a page and
classifying the page content Use a search engine friendly CMS or hard coded clean html also works
- WordPress is a friendly CMS but be careful about bloat