SEO Guidelines and recommendations for your website's positioning

About SEO, we find rivers of information on the Internet. Therefore, it's important to distinguish which are the good practices we can implement to improve, from those we must prioritize.

In this article, we will explain what the guidelines and recommendations in SEO are. This topic is highly useful for anyone starting their SEO projects and aiming to work on organic web positioning on Google and other search engines.

With the guidance of our experts, Blas Giffuni and Camilo Ramírez, we will teach you the SEO guidelines, i.e., the things we must definitely do, as well as the recommendations, which may not be mandatory but are valuable. Let's get started!

What is the difference between guidelines and recommendations in SEO?

SEO guidelines indicate to Google how to perform better crawling, indexing, and positioning of the website. On the other hand, SEO recommendations are good practices through which the brand or business benefits but are not prioritized.

Are SEO guidelines or recommendations general for any project?

Yes, SEO guidelines and recommendations are general and can be applied to any type of project. If we don't pay attention to them and dedicate effort to implement them, our project may not be effective.

One of the positive aspects of SEO is that it has a well-defined set of best practices to follow. Therefore, they can be applied to any type of business, and by following them, we will improve the positioning of our website in search engines.

The Guidelines in SEO

Use a Robots.txt file to request or prevent crawling of a page on your website:

A robots.txt file tells search engines whether they can access certain parts of a website and therefore crawl them.

You may not want certain pages of your site to be crawled because they may not be useful to users if they appear in search results. You can achieve this through the robots.txt file, instructing the search engine not to analyze certain content on your website.

So, if you don't want a page to appear in Google, but you don't mind users being able to access it through a link, use the noindex tag.

Additionally, to better protect your site, use appropriate authorization methods, such as requiring user passwords or removing the page from the site if it contains confidential information.

301 and 302 Redirects for Good SEO on Your Website:

Directing users to the correct pages of our website is fundamental. However, sometimes we move content temporarily or permanently, and therefore, we must use redirects, which allow us to indicate to both users and search engines the current location of the content they want to access.

When talking about redirects in SEO, we mainly refer to 301 and 302 redirects. They tell the search engine crawler robots that the URL of a web page has changed permanently or temporarily.

For a better understanding, let's use an example from physical channels. If there is a store in a location and a customer arrives at that store, it is common for them to find a notice informing them of where the store has moved and where they can find it from that moment on. This is a redirection!

Similarly, if a customer arrives at the same store and an ad explains that they moved to the warehouse at the end of the hallway while renovations are being made, this is another type of redirection.

Both examples are cases that can occur on our website, and redirects that we can use to be followed by Google.

301 Redirect:

This is a permanent type of redirection, which is used when the URL of a page has changed.

This formula also serves to create a new page with updated content from another that already exists. In this way, you can prevent Google from penalizing the ranking of those pages for duplicate content.

So, if we change the content from one page to another and we know that this content will be hosted there permanently, this would be a 301 code redirect, and Google will follow it because it has no other option since the server is forcing it to redirect elsewhere.

302 Redirect:

In the case of code 302, it refers to a temporary redirect and is designed to be used when there is a need to redirect content to a page that will not be the definitive one.

It is usually used when adjustments or maintenance are being made to the content of a page. While you fix it, you can redirect the user to another page that may be of interest to them.

Or maybe a product is temporarily out of stock, and we want to put a similar product, we can make a 302 redirect, and Google will know: "oh, maybe this product will return or, perhaps, I can temporarily send users here because I know I have to follow this server indication."

Specify link attributes:

This is another mechanism used to give Google a guideline.

When you have a link on your pages that links to other content within or outside your website, it is necessary to specify the attribute, which indicates what type of link it is.

Some types of attributes are:

• Paid links: This informs search engines that you have received payment to place such a link on a page of your website.

• Affiliate links: A digital marketing model where a percentage of commission is paid for each sale that comes from a specific link.

• Nofollow links: An attribute through which we indicate to Google or the search engine not to track the destination URL.

• UGC links: UGC stands for User Generated Content. This attribute is used to identify links that were created by users or customers and, therefore, are not necessarily reliable or sponsored by the brand or business.

Recommendations in SEO

Meta Title: The meta title is an HTML tag with which you can define the title of each page on your website, and it is the text that you usually see as the title in the results of the search engines where you made a query.

Meta Description: The meta description is an HTML tag with which we describe the content of a web page in 140 or 160 characters. It is the descriptive paragraph that will appear below the title and URL on the search engine results page.

Sitemap.xml: The sitemap.xml acts as a map of your website that tells Google which pages of it and where to find them.

Are the meta title and meta description not SEO guidelines?

The meta title and meta description are two points that almost everyone considers crucial, i.e., if they are not fulfilled, the SEO strategy will fail.

Actually, this is not true. Meta titles and descriptions are primarily recommendations because, as we write them, Google can rewrite them at any time to provide a better solution and experience for its users considering search intentions.

To the point that, if you read the documentation, Google says that if there is no good description, it is better to leave it blank because they will write it anyway.

Now, anyway, we recommend working on these tags and striving to do them well to take work off Google. Because if you are competing for positioning, the search engine will more easily choose a website that gives them less work.

Why is sitemap.xml not an SEO guideline?

The sitemap is a good practice, but it is not a guideline or an obligation because, remember that Google can review and find pages of our website in many ways, and one of the easiest ways to do this is through crawling the website with crawlers.

Also, sometimes a sitemap can be more of a problem than a solution: imagine that you have a structure of URLs that you are blocking in the robots.txt, but you still add them to your sitemap.

In this way, you are giving conflicting information to Google. On the one hand, you indicate in the robots.txt that it does not have permission to index that URL, and on the other hand, you recommend that it be reviewed through the sitemap.

In Google's case, it has not said what percentage of errors it accepts in the sitemap, but in Bing's case, if you have more than 2% of your URLs with errors, it generally invalidates the sitemap.

Sitemap VS. Site Scan

When we talk about the sitemap, we are talking about a document that tells the search engine where a URL is located, how important it is relative to the homepage, and when it was last updated.

That is a sitemap, a document that ideally has all the pages of your website that you want Google to find, understand, know, and review.

While scanning the pages, it means that Google or a user will start with one of those pages, which hopefully is the homepage but probably not, and will start reviewing the content and clicking. As it clicks, it will take that information and analyze what exists behind each link and within each URL.

To delve into the meanings of these terms, you can read the articles focused on SEO glossary that you find on this blog.

We invite you to continue reading our blog to learn more about search engine positioning.