4 Tips for Creating a Google-Friendly Site

Processing more than 100 billion searches every month, Google remains the world’s leading search engine. While Bing is slowly but surely trending in the right direction, there are no signs of the Microsoft-owned search engine overtaking Google anytime soon. So if you’re a webmaster, you should focus your optimization efforts creating a Google-friendly site.

Unique, High-Quality Content

The single most important step to creating a Google-friendly site is to publish unique, high-quality content. If there’s limited content on your website, or if the content is the same rehashed articles found elsewhere on the web, there’s really no reason for Google to rank your site above others in its index.

Granted, some duplicate content is to be expected (e.g., boilerplate templates, legal jargon, excerpts, etc.). However, the bulk of your website’s content should be unique, relevant to its target demographic, and high-quality. And don’t forget, images, infographics and videos count as content and are often more likely to be shared than text-only content.

Follow Webmaster Guidelines

If you haven’t done so already, familiarize yourself with Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. These guidelines provide recommendations for webmasters on how to create a Google-friendly sites. Among other things, they outline some of the practices that are acceptable as well as practices/techniques that are unacceptable.

Engaging in SEO practices that are prohibited in Google’s Webmaster Guidelines will only make your battle for a top search ranking that much harder — and in some cases, it could result in a manual penalty. The bottom line is that you want to follow Google’s Webmaster Guidelines to ensure a healthy search ranking for your website.

Watch the Backlink Building

There’s nothing wrong with building backlinks to your website. On the contrary, backlinks remain a powerful “ranking signal” used by Google and other search engines. However, you should use caution to ensure that backlinks are created naturally and not artificially. If you mass produce a significant number of backlinks, it could trigger a filter that actually hurts your search optimization efforts. Rather than building backlinks manually, try creating content that other users want to link to.

Submit Sitemap

In addition to following Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, you should also a submit a sitemap to the Big G. Simply create an XML sitemap of your website (either manually or using a third-party tool). Then:

1. Log into your Webmaster Tools account
2. Choose your website
3. Site configuration
4. Sitemaps
5. Add/Test Sitemap
6. Enter the URL of the sitemap
7. Submit Sitemap

Once added, Google will crawl your sitemap, analyzing every page on your site. Studies have shown that websites with sitemaps have a greater percentage of indexed pages when compared to sites without them.

Have any other tips for creating a Google-friendly site you can share with our readers? Let us know in the comments section below!