Non-profit website Google SEO: Recommendations for the site diagnostics

　　

Recommendations for website Diagnostics

January 18, 2012 10:46:00

Published by: Google Chinese search quality team

A few weeks ago, we invited non-profit public service webmasters to submit their websites to our search quality team to participate in our online site diagnostics program. Thank you for taking part in this event. Now we have summarized some of the areas that need improvement, based on the websites we submitted, and provided some suggestions and resources you can get from Google. Although the site is mainly for the diagnosis of non-profit public service sites, but we believe that our proposed improvements will also make other sites benefit.

1. Please start using Google Webmaster Tools

We found that some sites have never used Google Webmaster tools, and do not know the convenience of this tool. Google Webmaster Tools can provide you with detailed reports on the visibility of web pages in Google search results. This is an automatic upgrade of the product, for webmasters to provide web site information, to help you handle multiple requests. By learning, you can do many tasks yourself, such as viewing the status of a Web site, understanding your site links, or clearing malicious content on your site. Therefore, we strongly recommend that you use this tool. You just need to add your site and verify it before you start using it. In addition, we recommend this video to visually explain how to use this tool to make it work like SEO (Search engine optimization).

2. Improve the title of your website

If users search your site with Google, they may see the title of your site first. The title is the most direct way to help Google and users understand the important content of the site. We recommend that you have a practical, descriptive title for all pages of your site, and you can refer to our help page for help. Ideally, a good title should include the name of the institution and the descriptive label. Next, we cite some of the sites that have been submitted to illustrate:

Example:

1. Institution: Olive Tree Disabled Exchange Platform

Title: Olive Tree Disabled Exchange Platform

Forum Disabled Persons Employment Disabled friends, training, incubation center caring for the disabled

2. Institution: Gesang West Student Network

Title: Gesang West Student Network-Gesang Education aid official website charity knot to 1 pairs of 11+1

As you can see, a good title should include the name of the institution and the descriptive label. Each page on the site is unique, so you should create different titles for different pages, highlighting the diversity of your site. Moreover, it also helps users understand

This page differs from other pages in the site.

3. Attach importance to descriptive meta tags

Site title tags and descriptive meta tags are simple and easy ways to help improve the visibility of web sites in Google search results. They may directly affect the likelihood that your site will be clicked. However, we see that some webmasters still fail to make full use of these methods. Previously, we have published a blog about how to improve the descriptive meta tags. In this connection, let's take a look at a good example of a site that has been submitted.

　　

If a descriptive meta tag is not used, or the contents of the META tag are not relevant, Google automatically selects the page summary from the site content. Note that you can select a page summary through a variety of policies, so your meta tag description is best enriched, authentic, and consistent with the content of your site.

4. Give full play to the role of H elements

Viewing the title of a Web page is one of the ways Google search engine algorithms can determine the content of a Web page, which helps us understand the priority attributes of the Web page content.

The H element in the title gives Google and the user a quick idea of the important information on your organization and website. For Google and users, the lower the H element number, the more important the text, so please make full use of the role of H1 tags. Even if you don't understand the visual rendering of the H1 tag, you can change how it looks in your CSS.

5. Use ALT text in image

We found that many public service sites like to display pictures, but most of the sites do not properly take advantage of the image of the ALT attribute. If used properly, this property will not only help Google understand your images, but also help users who use text-formatted browsers, access restrictions, or use restricted devices to understand your pictures.

Please note that if you plan to show multiple pictures, the network speed may also be affected. The proper use of the ALT attribute at this point will play an important role. The ideal alt text should be informative and descriptive.

6. Tell Google whether to crawl: Site map and Robots.txt

In this event, we found that most of the submitted sites did not provide site maps. Creating and submitting site maps helps make sure that Google understands all the pages on your site, including those that might not be discovered by Google's normal crawl process. Just as we recommend that you organize your Web pages logically, it is equally important to organize your entire Web site logically, especially if necessary to provide links to related documents within the site.

On the other hand, many public welfare organizations will involve some important information. To address this issue, you can create an appropriate robots.txt file to tell Google search engine not to crawl this part of the content.

7. www or non-www?

This is another issue that we have found in the website we have submitted. For some sites, add the WWW can be normal operation, but remove the WWW can not be opened. In this case, we recommend that you use the 301 redirect feature to point to your preferred domain name. You can view the related features of setting the preferred domain using webmaster tools.

8. Use the correct HTTP result code

Another common problem is that many Web pages return the wrong HTTP result code. Some Web site error pages do not return HTTP result code 404 and Return HTTP success code 200. Only documents that are actually accessible should return HTTP success result code 200. If the page no longer exists, you should return code 404, which means "the page does not exist". You can view header responses for all URLs using the Googlebot crawl feature in Webmaster Tools, the Live HTTP Headers Firefox add-on, and other third-party tools or web-sniffer.net.

One of the websites that participated in the event was closed due to the ongoing maintenance of the site. The following is a search result for this website:

　　

Yes, if you decide to temporarily shut down your site because of site maintenance or for legal or other reasons, your site should return the 503 HTTP result code (which means "Service Unavailable") to inform the search engine that the site is temporarily closed. In addition, it allows site owners to provide visitors and crawlers with the approximate time to open and run the site again.

9. Users are fond of fast web sites.

We find that most users attach great importance to Web site speed. If the browser takes a long time to open your Web page, some users may not have the patience to wait or browse your site. To this end, we provide a variety of tools and suggestions to help webmaster understand and optimize the performance of the site. The easiest way to get started is to use page Speed online and the Great popular Web page Speed Chrome extensions. We also have a large number of resources from Google and other sites to help speed up your site, and we recommend that you read this article.

In addition, you need to ensure that users can easily and quickly find information about your contact information/volunteer/support services. This time we tried to get in touch with some of the sites we submitted, but we found it would take a long time to find their contact information, so remember to place such content prominently in the primary domain.

Thank you all for submitting the website to participate in this event non-profit organization! Your hard work has made our world a better place. We are pleased to be able to help you and hope that these suggestions and help will benefit you. If you webmaster also have on the site rankings and other questions included, please login to our webmaster Help forum, ask your questions and feedback.

Finally wish you happy Spring Festival!