Reviewing My Website With Google's Webmaster Guidelines Part 2
Posted on May 26, 2014 by Mike Nuttall
I continue analysing my website with reference to Google's Webmaster Guidelines.
Continuing on from yesterday I am on the Design and content guidelines, point 2:
2. "Offer your users a site map."
OK, I don't have one, that is simply remedied. Annother item added to my todo list.
3. "Keep the links on a page to a reasonable number."
What's a reasonable number? I just counted the links on one of my blog posts: 51. Is that reasonable? I don't know. I will assume it is. Most of them are internal to the website and relevant and useful. They all have a function, and the external links are also relevant related information. I shall leave the links as they are unless more information comes to light.
4. "Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content."
I am trying to provide useful blog posts, probably the most useful ones are those related to MODX my content management system of choice, because they are quite technical and include a lot of how-to type posts. Then in my main blog I have posts that I think will be useful to the general reader who might need a website and be looking for related information. And finally this journal, this is more of an experiment with quantity rather than quality. I'm trying to keep the posts interesting and informative but that's not always easy, but on the whole I do think I am writing stuff that has some utility and wouldn't be considered too spammy.
I don't get the last part of that sentence "... and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content ". If you were writing pages that describe your content, you wouldn't be producing content! I guess they mean clearly and accurately describe your business or the subject area your website deals with.
Ok, I shall give myself a pass for that one.
5. "Think about the words users would use in the search engines"
Yeh, yeh that's exactly what I'm doing, that's why I keep saying web, website, design, developer and Leeds! There, I did it again!
OK, lets compare how many of these word I have in my site compared to the websites that come on the top three for Google Search.
I'll do the search for website design Leeds and compare the word count on my site with word count on 3 top positioned sites.
| website | design | Leeds | |
| onsitenow.co.uk | 2, 352 | 2,554 | 2,113 |
| deepblue | 7,935 | 24,322 | 26,808 |
| parallax | 2,506 | 1,373 | 1,105 |
| chris moss | 2,732 | 24,545 | 5,687 |
(Geek tip: how I found the numbers)
Ok so what can that tell me? Well it is only data from 3 other sites so not much, except that quantity isn't everything, clearly because parallax don't have that many more instances of website than me and in fact less occurrences of design and Leeds.
A webmaster's tiemtable
My doings today:
| 13 hours 15 minutes | This website: learning more about the MODX cache and tools for cacheing: xFPC, brilliant; updating website with the latest suggestion from Google's Webmaster Guidlines; writing bash scripts to regenerate websites cache; working out a better process for writing, saving and promoting blog posts; generating all the Day XX graphics for the 100 day blog challenge; measuring page speed. |
| 16 minutes | Research: MODX formit, using blank fields instead of captcha |
| 15 minutes | Networking: Looking at 4N forums, hootsuiting |
| 13 minutes |
Total: 14 hours 21 minutes
Rather a bitty day today, trying to get the blog writing into a routine, it's going a bit slow because I am trying out different tools, but I think I've got a process sorted now.
Exercise: 45 minutes pressups, dips, situps and alt arm curls.
Tomorrow: Get my new blogging routine rolling. Do my books and records. Start my stagnating project.
