Your website could sport a very professional design but unless that site is not ranking well in search engines, it may be tough for new and potential customers to discover your business on the Internet. Therefore, when planning to create an online presence for your brick and mortar business, it is extremely important that your site layout and content is optimized for search engines. If you are wondering why the title says “Google friendly” where there are exist so many other search engines on the Internet (including popular ones like Yahoo!, Ask and MSN), that’s because Google has the reach like no other. Most website owners would agree that Google alone drives 90-95% of traffic to their websites. There are basically two ways to drive visitors from Google to your website – one, you buy ads that show up on Google results pages for certain keywords (using AdWord) or two, work hard to get good rankings in search results (organic traffic). While the former method costs money, organic traffic is free but requires effort and understanding of how search engines work.Check out our Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide!
Things to do
Our Webmaster Guidelines provide general design, technical, and quality guidelines. Below are more detailed tips for creating a Google-friendly site.
Give visitors the information they're looking for
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. In creating a helpful, information-rich site, write pages that clearly and accurately describe your topic. Think about the words users would type to find your pages and include those words on your site.
Make sure that other sites link to yours
Links help our crawlers find your site and can give your site greater visibility in our 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 our 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 our Webmaster Guidelines.
Only natural links are useful for the indexing and ranking of your site.
Make your site 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. 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.
Things to avoid
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.
Don't feel obligated to purchase a search engine optimization service. Some companies claim to "guarantee" 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.
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.
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. More information about canonicalization.
Source: by Google Updated 18/12/2012
Search Engine Optimization (SEO). SEO is an acronym for "search engine optimization" or "search engine optimizer." Deciding to hire an SEO is a big decision that can potentially improve your site and save time, but you can also risk damage to your site and reputation. Make sure to research the potential advantages as well as the damage that an irresponsible SEO can do to your site. Many SEOs and other agencies and consultants provide useful services for website owners, including:
