Search Engine Optimization(SEO) Starter Guide From Google
Google has just released a starter guide(PDF) for Search Engine Optimization. Search Engine Optimization(SEO) is not something difficult or complex ie assuming you can create good content that users want. If you don't have good content no amount of SEO is going to help you get a good consistent ranking in google or other search engines. So how do you go about SEO according to Google ?
- Create unique, accurate page titles
- Title should accurately describe the page's content
- Create unique title tags for each page
- Use brief, but descriptive titles
- Make use of the "description" meta tag
- Accurately summarize the page's content
- Use unique descriptions for each page
- Search Engine Friendly URLs
- Use words in URLs. Avoid:
- using lengthy URLs with unnecessary parameters and session IDs
- choosing generic page names like "page1.html"
- using excessive keywords like "baseball-cards-baseball-cards-baseball-
cards.htm"
- Create a simple directory structure. Avoid:
- having deep nesting of subdirectories like ".../dir1/dir2/dir3/dir4/dir5/dir6/
page.html"
- using directory names that have no relation to the content in them
- Provide one version of a URL to reach a document. Avoid
- having pages from subdomains and the root directory (e.g. "domain.com/
page.htm" and "sub.domain.com/page.htm") access the same content
- mixing www. and non-www. versions of URLs in your internal linking structure
- using odd capitalization of URLs (many users expect lower-case URLs and
remember them better)
- Make your site easier to navigate
- Create a naturally flowing hierarchy. Avoid
- creating complex webs of navigation links, e.g. linking every page on your site
to every other page
- going overboard with slicing and dicing your content (it takes twenty clicks to
get to deep content)
- Use mostly text for navigation. Avoid
- having a navigation based entirely on drop-down menus, images, or
animations
- Use "breadcrumb"navigation
- Put an HTML sitemap page on your site, and use an XML Sitemap file. Avoid
- letting your HTML sitemap page become out of date with broken links
- creating an HTML sitemap that simply lists pages without organizing them, for
example by subject
- Consider what happens when a user removes part of your URL
- Have a useful 404 page. Having acustom 404 page that kindly guides users back to a working page on your site can greatly improve a user's experience. Your 404 page should probably have a link back to your root page and could also provide links to popular or related content on your site. Avoid
- allowing your 404 pages to be indexed in search engines (make sure that your
webserver is configured to give a404 HTTP status codewhen non-existent
pages are requested)
- providing only a vague message like "Not found", "404", or no 404 page at all
- using a design for your 404 pages that isn't consistent with the rest of your site
- Offer quality content and services.Creating compelling and useful content will likely influence your website more than any of the other factors discussed here.
- Write easy-to-read text. Avoid
- writing sloppy text with many spelling and grammatical mistakes
- embedding text in images for textual content (users may want to copy and
paste the text and search engines can't read it)
- Stay organized around the topic. Avoid
- umping large amounts of text on varying topics onto a page without
paragraph, subheading, or layout separation
- Use relevant language.Think about the words that a user might search for to find a piece
of your content. Users who know a lot about the topic might use different keywords in their
search queries than someone who is new to the topic
- Create fresh, unique content. Avoid
- rehashing (or even copying) existing content that will bring little extra value to
users
- having duplicate or near-duplicate versions of your content across your site
(more onduplicate content)
- Offer exclusive content or services
- Create content primarily for your users, not search engines. Avoid
- inserting numerous unnecessary keywords aimed at search engines but are
annoying or nonsensical to users
- having blocks of text like "frequent misspellings used to reach this page" that
add little value for users
- deceptivelyhiding text from users, but displaying it to search engines
- Write better anchor text
- Choose descriptive text. Avoid
- writing generic anchor text like "page", "article", or "click here"
- using text that is off-topic or has no relation to the content of the page linked to
- using the page's URL as the anchor text in most cases
- Write concise text. Avoid
- writing long anchor text, such as a lengthy sentence or short paragraph of text
- Format links so they're easy to spot. Avoid
- using CSS or text styling that make links look just like regular text
- Think about anchor text for internal links too. Avoid
- using excessively keyword-filled or lengthy anchor text just for search engines
- creating unnecessary links that don't help with the user's navigation of the site
- Use heading tags (h1,h2 etc) appropriately
- Imagine you're writing an outline. Avoid
- placing text in heading tags that wouldn't be helpful in defining the structure of
the page
- using heading tags where other tags like <em> and <strong> may be more
appropriate
- erratically moving from one heading tag size to another.
- Use headings sparingly across the page. Avoid
- excessively using heading tags throughout the page
- putting all of the page's text into a heading tag
- using heading tags only for styling text and not presenting structure
- Optimize your use of images
- Use brief, but descriptive filenames and alt text. Avoid
- using generic filenames like "image1.jpg", "pic.gif", "1.jpg" when possible
- writing extremely lengthy filenames
- stuffing keywords into alt text or copying and pasting entire sentences
- Supply alt text when using images as links. Avoid
- writing excessively long alt text that would be considered spammy
- using only image links for your site's navigation
- Store images in a directory of their own
- Use commonly supported filetypes
- Make effective use of robots.txt
- Use more secure methods for sensitive content. Avoid
- allowing search result-like pages to be crawled
- allowing a large number of auto-generated pages with the same or only slightly
different content to be crawled:
- allowing URLs created as a result of proxy services to be crawled
- Be aware of rel="nofollow" for links. Setting the value of the "rel" attribute of a link to "nofollow" will tell Google that certain links on your site shouldn't be followed or pass your page's reputation to the pages linked to.
- Promote your website in the right ways
- Blog about new content or services
- Don't forget about offline promotion
- Know about social media sites. Avoid
- attempting to promote each new, small piece of content you create; go for big,
interesting items
- involving your site in schemes where your content is artificially promoted to the
top of these services
- Add your business to Google's Local Business Center
- Reach out to those in your site's related community. Avoid
- spamming link requests out to all sites related to your topic area
- purchasing links from another site with the aim of getting PageRank instead of
traffic
- Make use of free webmaster tools from Google(Webmaster Tools), Yahoo(Site Expplorer) and Microsoft(Webmaster Center)
- Take advantage of web analytics services like Google AnalyticsYou can use these to get insight into how users reach and behave on your site, discover the most popular content on your site and measure the impact of optimizations you make to your site (e.g. did changing those title and description meta tags improve traffic from search engines?)
- Helpful resources for webmasters