Google’s Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide first began as an effort to help teams within Google, but Google thought it’d be just as useful to webmasters that are new to the topic of search engine optimization and wish to improve their sites’ interaction with both users and search engines.
UPDATE 30.09.2010: Google has updated and released its Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide, which gives a lot of SEO tips to bloggers and webmasters to help improves SERP or search rankings.
Although this guide won’t tell you any secrets that’ll automatically rank your site first for queries in Google , following the best practices outlined below will make it easier for search engines to both crawl and index your content.
Search engine optimization is often about making small modifications to parts of your website, and not being obsessed with implementing the so-called SEO tricks.
When viewed individually, these changes might seem like incremental improvements, but when combined with other optimizations, they could have a noticeable impact on your site’s user experience and performance in organic search results. You’re likely already familiar with many of the topics in this guide, because they’re essential ingredients for any webpage, but you may not be making the most out of them.
The contents of this UPDATED SEO Guide includes:
- Improving Site Structure
- Improve the structure of your URLs
- Create unique, accurate page titles
- Make use of the “description” meta tag
- Make your site easier to navigate
- Optimizing Content
- Offer quality content and services
- Write better anchor text
- Optimize your use of images
- Use heading tags appropriately
- Dealing with Crawlers
- Make effective use of robots.txt
- Be aware of rel=”nofollow” for links
- SEO for Mobile Phones
- Notify Google of mobile sites
- Guide mobile users accurately
- Promotions and Analysis
- Promote your website in the right ways
- Make use of free webmaster tools.
Download: Google’s Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide pdf format. (Link updated to point to latest version)
Major search engines, provide free tools for webmasters. You may want to check them out too!
Google’s Webmaster Tools | Yahoo! Site Explorer | Microsoft Bing Search Webmaster Tools.
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