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All the SEO professionals use Google’s webmaster guidelines to choose their tactics and strategies that align with google’s expectations. These guidelines are essential in achieving sustainable SEO results using techniques that are in line with Google’s expectations.

What Are the Google Webmaster Guidelines?

These guidelines are separated into:

– Webmaster guidelines.
– General guidelines.
– Content-specific guidelines.
– Quality guidelines.

Webmaster guidelines are more general best practices that will allow you to build your site so that it’s easier to appear in Google Search
Other guidelines include those that will prevent your site from appearing in search.

General guidelines are those best practices that will help your site look its best in the Google SERPs (search engine results pages).

Content-specific guidelines are more specific towards those different types of content on your sites like images, video, and others.

Quality guidelines include all those techniques that are prohibited and can get your page banned from the SERPs.

Make sure your keywords are relevant

Your site should be easy to discover by the client. and one way to do that is to examine the top ranking sites and determine the keyword relevance.

Check what keywords those top-ranking sites are using in data descriptions and page titles.

You can also check top-ranking sites by your niche. There are many tools to identify keywords used on a site.

Make sure that pages on your site can be reached by links from another findable page.

Your site’s primary means of navigation are links and Google also suggests that all pages of your sites have at least one link from another page. This all can be done by menu, breadcrumbs, or contextual links.

Try to make a crawlable link, it ensures a great user experience. Google can easily crawl and understand your website, which means better ranking for your page.

Limit the quality of links on a page to a reasonable number.

Google recommends not use more than 100 links per page.

It is better to have useful links for the users rather than filling the page with the links.

It also gives a bad user experience. Google also considers quantities of links as spam.

Create a useful, information-rich site & write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.

As their guidelines state, Google prefers information-rich sites.

But this “‘Information-rich” requirement varies from industry to industry, because of which competition analysis is required.

This can be determined by
– What other sites are writing about.
– How they are writing about those topics.
– How their sites are structured, among other attributes.

Think about the words users would type to find your pages.

Keywords are very important, so while doing keyword research, you should think from the user’s point of view. And think what will make them find our page.

You should know what keywords you want to use and around what you’ll be doing your keyword research. While doing effective keyword research, you must consider things like searching a phrase that your client may search for.

Design your site to have a clear conceptual page hierarchy.

What’s the conceptual page hierarchy? This means that your site to be organized by topical relevance.

You need to follow SEO silos, where you put your main topic as main topics and subtopics arranged under the main topic. They are a great way to organize a page according to topics present on your page.

The deeper the clear conceptual page hierarchy your page, the better, Google will understand and tell that your page is informative.

Ensure all website assets are fully crawlable & indexable

There is some situation where blocking CSS and JS files are acceptable.

First, if you were blocking them because they had issues playing nice with each other on the server.

Second, if you were blocking them because of some other conflict, either way, Google does have guidelines for this also.

And it’s important, you don’t want to block CSS and JS files.

All the files are important for Google to understand your site so it is important to make all your website assets full crawlable & indexable.

Make your site’s important content visible by default.

Google’s guidelines talk about making the most important content on your page be visible by default. This means you don’t need navigation elements, buttons, tabs, and other things to reveal this content.

Google also talks about “considering this content less accessible to users, and believe that you should make your most important information visible in the default page view.”

Google’s webmaster guidelines are really guidelines

And at last as SEOs, Google’s webmaster guidelines are just guidelines. They are not necessarily a rule.

But, be careful – If you violate them egregiously, you could be banned from the SERPs. So just try to follow the guidelines and stay on Google’s good side.