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Jimsun Lui

Jimsun Lui is working as SEO director in Agog Digital Marketing Strategy Ltd, well versed in providing Chinese and English search engine optimization consulting. He also manages a Chinese SEO portal Asklui.

Jimsun Lui has written 3 articles for SB Informer.

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Proper Search Engine Optimization Practices for Google

What you must do for attaining good Google ranking?

Jimsun Lui

July 11, 2007


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Introduction

Webmasters perform SEO and want to get good search engine ranking in Google because it is the most popular search engine in the world. However, you must be aware that Google is very strict in fighting against manipulation of search engine ranking.

To make sure your website has potential to get top Google ranking, your SEO effort must alert the following:

Website Structure and Content Development

Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link. The key point is a clear hierarchy, and reachable from static text link.

Offer a site map. It is a very important SEO element for Google to index your web pages and assign appropriate search engine popularity scores (link popularity) to your web pages. It is particularly useful for large websites.

Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content with words users would type to find your pages. Google clearly states that they love information-rich website. So, SEO should emphasize on content development, and not SEO tricks.

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 use images, make sure you provide descriptive and accurate ALT tags.

Avoiding SEO Spam

The fundamental works for SEO is to ensure only search engine acceptable practices are used, that is, make pages for users, not for search engines. If you or your SEO company implements unacceptable SEO practices or tricks, your website can be banned and removed from search engine index. This is especially true for Google. From experience, they are very determined to fight against search engine spam.

Therefore, you must alert that you do not commit in unacceptable SEO practices listed below:

Don't deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as "cloaking." Cloaking refers to the practice of presenting different content or URLs to users and search engines, for example, showing different content to search engines than to users, or present HTML version to search engines and present Flash pages to users. Serving up different results based on user agent can be perceived as cloaking.

Hiding text or links in your content can cause your site to be perceived as untrustworthy since it presents information to search engines differently than to visitors.

Text (such as excessive keywords) can be hidden in several ways, including but not limited to the following “black-hat” SEO techniques: white text on white background, use of CSS display:none or display: hidden to hide text, including text behind an image via DIV tag or layering techniques, small font size such as setting font size to 0. Some SEO companies believe that Google cannot detect spam if CSS tricks are used. Unfortunately, this is wrong.

Links can be hidden including but not limited to the following “black-hat” SEO techniques: link consists of hidden text, use of CSS to make tiny hyperlink such as text with one pixel high, link hidden in a small character such as hyperlink a hyphen in middle of a web page.

“Keyword stuffing" refers to the practice of loading a webpage with keywords in an attempt to manipulate a site's ranking in Google's search results. Excessive keywords in a meaningful web page can be perceived as keyword stuffing. Proper SEO must take care of this element.

Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar. Google tries hard to index and show pages with distinct information. This filtering means, for instance, that if your site has a "regular" and "printer" version of each article, and neither of these is blocked in robots.txt or with a noindex meta tag, Google will choose one of them to list.

In the rare cases in which Google perceives that duplicate content may be shown with intent to manipulate our rankings and deceive our users, Google also make appropriate adjustments in the indexing and ranking of the sites involved. Google implies that your website or whole network of websites can be penalized with low search engine rankings or removed from their index. Are you willing to take this risks and continue to build shadow websites?

For some reasons, if you cannot avoid duplicate content, Google suggests you can make use of robots.txt file to avoid Google indexing duplicated web pages or websites.

Alternatively, you can re-think of consolidate duplicated pages into 1 or expand each page to contain unique content.

Conclusion

SEO is not meaning of applying tricks to manipulate search engine ranking. SEO is about making a website search engine friendly and trustworthy, and building reputation to your website. To be search engine friendly and trustworthy, you must avoid unacceptable search engine optimization practices described above. If your SEO service provider is committing to those practices, stop to use them now and remove all spammy elements before your site get banned.