Google's Search Engine Optimisation Starter Guide Version 1.1, published 13 November 2008 Welcome to Google's Search Engine Optimisation Starter Guide. This document first began as an effort to help teams within Google, but we thought it'd be just as useful to webmasters who are new to the topic of search engine optimisation and wish to improve their sites' interaction with both users and search engines.
Even though this guide's title contains the words "search engine", we'd like to say that you should base your optimisation decisions first and foremost on what's best for the visitors to your site. They're the main consumers of your content and are using search engines to find your work. Focusing too hard on specific tweaks to gain ranking in the organic results of search engines may not deliver the desired results.
If your document appears in a search results page, the contents of the title tag will usually appear in the first line of the results. (If you're unfamiliar with the different parts of a Google search result, you might want to take a look at the anatomy of a search result video by Google engineer Matt Cutts, and this helpful diagram of a Google search results page.) Words in the title are shown in bold if they appear in the user's search query.
A relevant, deeper page (its title is unique to the content of the page) on our site appears as a result Good practices for page title tags • Accurately describe the page's content - Choose a title that effectively communicates the topic of the page's content.
The beginning of the description meta tag for our homepage, which gives a brief overview of the site's offerings Description meta tags are important because Google might use them as snippets for your pages. Note that we say "might" because Google may choose to use a relevant section of your page's visible text if it does a good job of matching up with a user's query.
A user performs the query [rarest baseball cards] One of our deeper pages, with its unique description meta tag used as the snippet, appears as a result Good practices for description meta tags • Accurately summarise the page's content - Write a description that would both inform and interest users if they saw your description meta tag as a snippet in a search result.
search engines. Also, it can create easier, "friendlier" URLs for those that want to link to your content. Visitors may be intimidated by extremely long and cryptic URLs that contain few recognisable words. A URL to a page on our baseball card site that might cause problems for a user URLs like these can be confusing and unfriendly. Users would have a difficult time reciting the URL from memory or creating a link to it.
Below is another example, showing a URL on our domain for a page containing an article about the rarest baseball cards. The words in the URL might appeal to a search user more than an ID number such as "www.brandonsbaseballcards.com/article/102125/" would.
• Provide one version of a URL to reach a document - To prevent users from linking to one version of a URL and others linking to a different version (this could split the reputation of that content between the URLs), focus on using and referring to one URL in the structure and internal linking of your pages. If you do find that people are accessing the same content through multiple URLs, setting up a 301 redirect from non-preferred URLs to the dominant URL is a good solution for this.
A sitemap (lower-case) is a simple page on your site that displays the structure of your website and usually consists of a hierarchical listing of the pages on your site. Visitors may visit this page if they are having problems finding pages on your site. While search engines will also visit this page, getting good crawl coverage of the pages on your site, it's mainly aimed at human visitors.
• Put an HTML sitemap page on your site and use an XML Sitemap file - A simple sitemap page with links to all of the pages, or the most important pages (if you have hundreds or thousands) on your site, can be useful. Creating an XML Sitemap file for your site helps ensure that search engines discover the pages on your site.
A blogger finds a piece of your content, likes it and then references it in a blog post While the content that you create could be on any topic imaginable, here are some recommended best practices: Good practices for content • • Write easy-to-read text - Users enjoy content that is well written and easy to follow.
• Offer exclusive content or services - Consider creating a new, useful service that no other site offers. You could also write an original piece of research, break an exciting news story or leverage your unique user base. Other sites may lack the resources or expertise to do these things. • Create content primarily for your users, not search engines - Designing your site around your visitors' needs while making sure that your site is easily accessible to search engines usually produces positive results.
• Format links so that they're easy to spot - Make it easy for users to distinguish between regular text and the anchor text of your links.Your content becomes less useful if users miss the links or accidentally click them.
Good practices for heading tags • Imagine that you're writing an outline - Similar to writing an outline for a large paper, put some thought into what the main points and subpoints of the content on the page will be and decide where to use heading tags appropriately.
Our image wasn't displayed to the user for some reason, but at least the alt text was Another reason is that if you're using an image as a link, the alt text for that image will be treated similarly to the anchor text of a text link. However, we don't recommend using too many images for links in your site's navigation when text links could serve the same purpose.
• Use commonly supported file types - Most browsers support JPEG, GIF, PNG and BMP image formats. It's also a good idea to have the extension of your file name match the file type. Make effective use of robots.txt A "robots.txt" file tells search engines whether they can access and therefore crawl parts of your site. This file, which must be named "robots.txt", is placed in the root directory of your site. The address of our robots.
directories or subdirectories in your robots.txt file and guess the URL of the content that you don't want seen. Encrypting the content or password-protecting it with .htaccess are more secure alternatives.
A comment spammer leaves a message on one of our news posts, hoping to get some of our site's reputation Another use of nofollow is when you're writing content and wish to reference a website, but don't want to pass your reputation on to it. For example, imagine that you're writing a blog post on the topic of comment spamming and you want to call out a site that recently comment-spammed your blog.
Promote your website in the right ways While most of the links to your site will be gained gradually, as people discover your content through search or other ways and link to it, Google understands that you'd like to let others know about the hard work that you've put into your content. Effectively promoting your new content will lead to faster discovery by those who are interested in the same subject.
Make use of free webmaster tools Major search engines, including Google, provide free tools for webmasters. Google's Webmaster Tools help webmasters better control how Google interacts with their websites and get useful information from Google about their site. Using Webmaster Tools won't help your site get preferential treatment; however, it can help you to identify issues that, if addressed, can help your site perform better in search results.
Helpful resources for webmasters Google Webmaster Help Forum - Have questions or feedback on our guide? Let us know Google Webmaster Central Blog - Frequent posts by Googlers on how to improve your website Google Webmaster Help Centre - Filled with in-depth documentation on webmaster-related issues Google Webmaster Tools - Optimise how Google interacts with your website Google Webmaster Guidelines - Design, content, technical and quality guidelines from Google Google Analytics - Find the source of your visi
