What are the general guidelines that will help google find your page?

There are several guidelines you should follow for making it easy for google to find you. Only then you will be ranked in the top positions. Please follow the below checklist and check if you are missing on any of these guidelines.

Guideline #1 Anchor Links:

Anchor Links are very important. Make sure that your page can be reached or navigated from other findable link on google. The referring link should include a “text” that is relevant to the target page. Or if it is an image there should be an image attribute describing what the image is about. Google cannot crawl all the links. Ensure that your link uses an <a> tag with an “href” attribute.

Guideline #2 Are sitemaps important in terms of SEO ranking:

It is very important that you upload your sitemap in your google search console. If you are using WordPress you can use Yoast SEO plugin to automatically create an XML sitemap. Click on the SEO tab in the side bar of your WordPress dashboard, select features tab and enable XML sitemaps.

Yoast plugin creates sitemaps for all the various sections on your website. All the individual sitemeps are combined into a sitemap index by Yoast. All you have to do is to submit this sitemap url link Yoast keeps updating this link, as you add, remove or update any content on your website.

Guideline #3 Limit the number of links on any pages.

Do not add too many links on any of your pages. Limit the number of links to a few thousands.

Guideline #4 If modified since Http header:

If modified since header tells Googlebot one of the two things:

• It responds with a 304 status code only with headers, telling google that the page has not changed since its last visit Or
• It responds with a 200 status code sending the entire document to google telling that content has been updated since its last visit, so it needs to be downloaded and crawled once again.

For those people who have huge website crawling process will consume a lot of bandwidth and an extra cost. So If modified since http header can save them some resources.

Guideline #5 Use robots.txt

In SEO, the robot.txt file tells the robots which pages it should crawl and which pages it should not crawl. Robots.txt file is also known as Robots Exclusion Protocol or Standard.

If you want google bots to spend its crawling budget effectively on your website you should remove pages that have duplicate content or error pages, hacked pages, pages having infinite spaces or proxies, low quality spam content.

If you help google spend their budget wisely, your most valuable pages can be easily discovered, which means your site visibility will also increase.

Guideline #6 Avoid embedding text inside image

Try to use text instead of images to display information that is important to your users. Especially text like heading, menu items should be written in a text format.  In case you want to use image, use an alt tag that can tell google what the image is about. Page translation does not work on images. Hence use of text embedded on images should be avoided as far as possible.

Guideline #7 Mobile friendly

Make sure your website is responsive and mobile friendly. Use mobile friendly testing tool to test whether all your pages appear properly on all mobile devices. 

Aditi is an expert in digital marketing. She handles SEO activities for her other business- Yog Gokul Yoga. She also actively manages the social media handles. Aditi is also a certified Yoga teacher. Prior to this she has worked with various financial companies as a credit analyst.