Just as the name suggests, a Google-Friendly Site allows a clear and transparent flow of page content on search engines. Especially, in terms of the Google custom search engine followed by other Search Engine Result Pages ((SERPs) which include and are not limited to Bing, Yahoo, AOL, and Yandex. Furthermore, this has everything to do with site ranking.
Whereby, the more your website is search friendly to the search engines, the more it breaks down the workload for the engine’s internal technicality. Additionally, the Google-Friendly Site pages are easily found by the algorithm crawlers, scripts, and bots. Appearing in the top #3 is excellent coz almost half of the clicks on any search results go there.
Google-friendly sites make the backend work a lot easier for the crawlers to bid for the best search snippets to output. However, according to the Webmasters Help Community, other key points are considered during the results output.
Getting Started For Beginner Webmasters
If you’re interested in improving your site’s appearance on SERPs such as Google Search, this guide is for you. That’s if you’re also willing to put in a little time learning about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Console. Moreover, you don’t need to understand HTML or coding. But, you do need to spend some time thinking about it.
Like how your site is organized and written, and be willing to make some changes to your site. The good news is that a little effort can go a long way in improving your search results. For instance, you can decide whether you want to hire an SEO expert or not. Though, many medium website owners do all their own Search Engine Optimization by themselves.
In fact, if you read some of our documentation carefully, you can become an SEO expert yourself. But, some if not all small business site owners (and nearly all large sites) hire professional SEO experts to help improve their presence on Google. Thus, you should read this guide if you’re not thinking about hiring a professional SEO.
Below are a few simple steps to get you going:
- Sign up for Search Console. You’ll get alerts when Google sees unusual activity on your sites. Such as crawling problems or indications of hacking.
- Add and verify your ownership of your site. You’ll need to prove that you are the owner of your website, in this case, Obviously, because of one thing: Search Console shows information about your site that only site owners should know. Whilst, allowing you to make changes that can affect how your site appears on Google.
- Read the guide to basic Search Console usage. A beginner typically needs only a quick site check-up once a month. Unless Google alerts you that we’ve found a problem.
- Learn how Google Search works. You’ll understand a lot more of the information that you read here — it will make troubleshooting much easier.
- Read the SEO starter guide. This is an introduction to best practices for your website to ensure that Google is able to find, understand, and present your site properly in its search results. It contains a lot of information, but you can take your time working through it.
Last but not least, after learning the basics — if you decide that you want to learn more advanced topics in SEO or Search Console — you can continue with the SEO track to discover more.
What A Google-Friendly Site Entails
For a typical query, there are thousands, even millions, of web pages with potentially relevant information. So, how does Google figure out what to show in your search results? Well, the journey starts before you even type your search. As we speak, Google is using web crawlers to organize information from web pages and other publicly available content in the SERPs.
Google ranking systems sort through hundreds of billions of web pages in the Search index to give you useful and relevant results in a fraction of a second. Especially those affluent and rich enough in relation to a Google-friendly site. So, what is the role of Google-friendly Sites in SEO ranking?
Do you know the SEO ranking factors that’ll make a difference in your business this year? SEO requirements keep changing, and it can be hard to keep up with the latest developments. But if you want your site to get traffic, you have to be in the know.
Well-optimized sites get more and more traffic over time, and that means more leads and sales. If you neglect SEO, no one will be able to find your site, meaning all your hard work will be for nothing. For your information, there are elements to use as long as you wish to up your ranking and appear randomly on Search Engines’ first pages.
Consider the following:
- Secure and Accessible Website (Especially with a correctly installed SSL and GDPR Rules)
- Page Load Speed & Bounce Timelines (Including Mobile AMP Pages)
- Dominate all devices with responsiveness (Consider your theme and the plugins necessary for your website)
- Domain Age, URL, and Website Authority (Grow your domain and earn space without rerouting and replacing it often)
- Well written and Optimized Content ( Avoid ambiguity and passive voice)
- Technical SEO (Be creative on other SEO guides available or at your disposal)
- A User-friendly Experience (RankBrain and responsive page and post-layout designs)
- Inbound and Outbound Links (Link to other websites and allow them to link back to you)
- Social Signals & Integration ( Let your online visitors and readers find your other useful social media profiles)
- Real Business Information (including the description, category, location, and contacts)
To have a Google-Friendly Site, its Webmaster Guidelines provide general design, technical, and quality guidelines. As long as you familiarize yourself with the guides, even though you may not be a pro-webmaster, it could really help improve your site page optimization. Below are detailed tips for creating a Google-friendly site.
1. Register Your Website With Search Console
The first step in establishing your website as an official presence is to verify website ownership in Search Console. This process verifies the owners and operators of the site. Once you’ve verified your website, you can use Search Console to understand and monitor how Google displays information about your site.
Google Search Console provides tools to help you submit your content to Google and monitor how you’re doing in Google Search. If you want, Search Console can even send you alerts on critical issues that Google encounters with your site. Sign up for Search Console, to begin with. By the same token, make sure you update your site’s Google knowledge panel.
Google algorithms find information, like your site’s name, corporate contact information, and social profiles, that is publicly available on the web. You can update or provide more information for your site for broader reach and recognition in Search results. If you’re verified as an official representative, you can update your Google knowledge panel to override the information Google finds automatically.
2. Add Structured Data For A Google-Friendly Site
To create a Google-Friendly Site, you should also add structured data. Google Search works hard to understand the content of a page. You can help us by providing explicit clues about the meaning of a page to Google by including structured data on the page. Structured data is a standardized format for providing information about a page and classifying the page content.
With that in mind, you can learn more about structured data in detail. And then, have a look at some structured data features that all websites can benefit from below.
Consider the following:
- Site logo: You can specify which image you want Google to use for your organization’s logo in Search results and your Google knowledge panel. To do this, add
Logostructured data to your official website that identifies the location of your preferred logo. - Breadcrumbs: Breadcrumb trails on a page indicate the page’s position in the site hierarchy. A user can navigate all the way up in the site hierarchy, one level at a time, by starting from the last breadcrumb in the breadcrumb trail. To help Google understand your breadcrumbs, you can add Breadcrumb structured data to your site.
Eventually, to have a Google-Friendly Site, you must try and highlight your customer support methods. As an example, you can make use of the Rich Results Test to test your markup. And then, give the Google system a week to find and update your site details in Search results. Also, learn more about how to update your Google knowledge panel in detail.
3. Establish Your Business Details With Google
Ultimately, Google offers a variety of ways to help you provide key business details so that they show up for users in Search results. There’s even this guide that describes how to make your business’s location, official site, and content info available for results, Google knowledge panel, and Google Maps.
You can enhance the appearance and coverage of your official website and presence in Search results by first establishing it with Google. This makes it easier for users to recognize your official site and reach the information you provide more easily when they search. Manage how your business appears on Google Maps and Google Search by claiming your Business Profile first.
Once you verify yourself as the owner of a listing, you can provide or edit your address, contact info, business type, and photos. This enables your local business information to show up in Google Maps and the Google knowledge panel.
4. Give Your Visitors The Information They’re Looking For
In the first place, a Google-Friendly Site is easily accessible. Build your site with a logical link structure. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link. Use a text browser, such as Lynx, to examine your site. The next thing is to provide high-quality content on your pages, especially your homepage. This is the single most important thing to do.
If your pages contain useful information, their content will attract many visitors and entice webmasters to link to your site. Moreover, in creating a helpful, information-rich site, write pages that clearly and accurately describe your defined topics. As a matter of fact, you’ll try and think about how the words users would type to find your pages and include those words on your site.
Especially, if the information they are searching for online provides a breakthrough in their long-term research journey. Also, learn how Google discovers, crawls, and serves web pages in detail.
5. Make Sure That Other Websites Link Back To Yours
For example, links help Google crawlers find your site and can give your site greater visibility in Google Search Results. When returning results for a search, Google uses sophisticated text-matching techniques to display pages that are both important and relevant to each search.
Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote by page A for page B. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important.” Keep in mind that Google algorithms can distinguish natural links from unnatural links.
Natural links to your site develop as part of the dynamic nature of the web when other sites find your content valuable and think it would be helpful for their visitors. Unnatural links to your site are placed there specifically to make your site look more popular to search engines.
Some of these types of links (such as link schemes and doorway pages) are covered in Google Webmaster Guidelines. Only natural links are useful for the indexing and ranking of your site. Test your website or blog pages’ Google-friendliness through the AMP page.
Things To Avoid For A Google-Friendly Site
Most spiders see your site much as Lynx would. If features such as JavaScript, cookies, session IDs, frames, DHTML, or Macromedia Flash keep you from seeing your entire site in a text browser, then spiders may have trouble crawling it. Inclusion in Google’s search results is free and easy; you don’t even need to submit your site to Google.
Google is a fully automated search engine that uses web crawlers to explore the web constantly, looking for sites to add to its index. In fact, the vast majority of sites listed in its results aren’t manually submitted for inclusion, but found and added automatically when they crawl the web. With this in mind, consider the following factors.
1. Website Pages Cloaking
Don’t fill your page with lists of keywords, attempt to “cloak” pages, or put up “crawler only” pages. If your site contains pages, links, or text that you don’t intend visitors to see, Google considers those links and pages deceptive and may ignore your site.
2. SEO Services Purchase
Don’t feel obligated to purchase a search engine optimization service. Some companies claim to “guarantee” a high ranking for your site in Google’s search results.
While legitimate consulting firms can improve your site’s flow and content, others employ deceptive tactics in an attempt to fool search engines. Be careful; if your domain is affiliated with one of these deceptive services, it could be banned from our index.
3. Image Alternate Naming
Don’t use images to display important names, content, or links. Our crawler doesn’t recognize text contained in graphics. Use ALT attributes if the main content and keywords on your page can’t be formatted in regular HTML.
4. Multiple Copies of Page URLs
Don’t create multiple copies of a page under different URLs. Many sites offer text-only or printer-friendly versions of pages that contain the same content as the corresponding graphic-rich pages. If your site has identical content that can be reached via different URLs, there are several ways of indicating the canonical (preferred) version of a page. You can see more information about canonicalization in detail.
5. For ranking on the search list
Determine whether your site is in Google’s index – Do a site: search for your site’s home URL. If you see results, you’re in the index. For example, a search for “site:wikipedia.org” returns these results as such. If your site isn’t in Google – Although Google crawls billions of pages, it’s inevitable that some sites will be missed.
The crawlers miss a site due to the following reasons:
- The site isn’t well connected to other sites on the web
- You’ve just launched a new site and Google hasn’t had time to crawl it yet
- The design of the site makes it difficult for Google to crawl its content effectively
- Google received an error when trying to crawl your site
- Your policy blocks Google from crawling the site
So, how do you get your site on Google? Luckily, Google offers webmaster guidelines for building a Google-friendly website. While there’s no guarantee that the crawlers will find a particular site. However, the refined guidelines should help make your site appear in our search results. One way to get there is through the Custom Search Console toolkits.
Questions to ask yourself first:
- Are my website URLs showing up on Google?
- Do I serve high-quality content to users?
- Is my local business showing up on Google?
- Does my site content load fast and is easy to access on all devices?
- Is my website secure?
You can find additional getting started information on http://g.co/webmasters in detail. In nutshell, SEO ranking refers to your content’s position on the search engine results pages (SERPs). A #1 ranking means that when people search for a particular term, your web page is the first result (apart from promoted results and answer boxes).
NB: You can also report information that you believe is incorrect in a Google knowledge panel, by clicking the Feedback link at the bottom of the Google knowledge panel.
Customers are often looking for ways to contact businesses, and Google works to show the best available information to help them in a variety of ways. You can highlight your customer support methods in Google Search by following several best practices that help ensure it’s showing the most accurate information for your business or service.
More Related Resource Topics:
- Site Ranking Factors | 5 Best Criteria & 10 SEO Practices
- Broken Links | What Are They & How Do They Affect SEO?
- Google Search Console | Improve Your Site Rankings & CTR
- Google Webmaster Tools (GWT) | Search Console Optimization
- URL Inspection Tool | Step-by-step Guideline For Beginners
- Remove URLs Tool | How It Works For Beginner Websters
That’s it! Everything to know about what a Google-Friendly Site entails and its benefits in ranking. We hope that the above article provides an exclusive eye-opener to you or even someone you know. Especially towards creating a site that works better. But, if you’ll have more contribution inputs, please feel free to Consult Us and let us know.
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