Monitor Website Performance

Do you monitor your website performance?

To be truthful, initially, I didn't give my site a lot of thought until I started having a lot of trouble. I began investigating different articles and tools, like Webmaster Tools, on performance and found some fascinating information.

One article I read from Google brought up an excellent point; Don't sit back and complain about how your site doesn't bring in traffic and how Google is blocking it, when YOU may very well be the reason your site doesn't rank because of errors or other quality issues.

Google has many tools that can help you understand more about your website performance. More importantly, Google has guidelines that you should be aware of as a webmaster. If you are not adhering to those "rules of the road" Google may sideline you until you fix your site.

General Guideline:

There are fundamental guidelines you need to follow for Google to find, index and rank your website. Google can take a number of actions on your site depending on the level of violation. Google can remove your site entirely if your site violates illicit rules, or they can cause your site to no longer show up in the search result if they see it as spam.

Quality Guidelines

Knowing and understanding Googles Quality Guidelines are essential to your site showing up in a Google search and ranking where you want it too. The Quality Guidelines are all about quality experience for the user. Treating your site like it is not being read by search engines, will give you a better-prepared website for users.

So what are the Quality Guidelines from Google? Google addresses standard forms of deceit, loopholes, and manipulation, however, a good webmaster will uphold the highest quality by going beyond these minimum standards of quality.

Basic Guidelines

• Design pages for users, not search engines.
  
• A website should be valuable, unique, and engaging to the user. Sites should exist for the user, not search engines.
  
• Don't deceive users.
  
• Don't use tricks to improve ranking.
  
• A way to test this is to ask "Will this help the user if there was no search engine?"
  

Specific Guidelines You Should Follow:

• Monitor your site for hacking and remove it if you discover you have been hacked.
  
• Remove user-generated spam
  

Specific Guidelines You Should NOT DO:

• Auto-generated content
  
• Link schemes
  
• Pages that have little or no user value
  
• Cloaking
  
• Hidden text
  
• Doorway pages
  
• Sneaky redirects
  
• Keyword stuffing/loading
  
• Submitting automated queries to Google
  
• Any malicious internet behavior
  

More good information! Good luck with Google!

https://support.google.com/web...

https://support.google.com/web...

Michelle