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01 Google SEO Starter Guide

This document provides a starter guide for search engine optimization (SEO). It discusses creating unique and accurate page titles using title tags, making small modifications across a website that can improve user experience and search performance. While focusing on visitors, SEO is about optimizing a site's visibility in search engines through best practices like improving site structure, optimizing content, dealing with crawlers, and SEO for mobile. An example baseball card website is used to illustrate these points throughout the guide.

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474 views6 pages

01 Google SEO Starter Guide

This document provides a starter guide for search engine optimization (SEO). It discusses creating unique and accurate page titles using title tags, making small modifications across a website that can improve user experience and search performance. While focusing on visitors, SEO is about optimizing a site's visibility in search engines through best practices like improving site structure, optimizing content, dealing with crawlers, and SEO for mobile. An example baseball card website is used to illustrate these points throughout the guide.

Uploaded by

shakur81
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Search Engine Optimization

Starter Guide
Welcome to Google's
Search Engine Optimization
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 that are new to
the topic of search engine optimization and wish to improve their
sites' interaction with both users and search engines. Although this
guide won't tell you any secrets that'll automatically rank your site
first for queries in Google (sorry!), following the best practices
outlined below will make it easier for search engines to crawl, index
and understand your content.

Search engine optimization is often about making small modifications


to parts of your website. 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 web page, but you may
not be making the most out of them.

Even though this guide's title contains the words "search engine",
we'd like to say that you should base your optimization decisions first
and foremost on what's best for the visitors of 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.
Search engine optimization is about putting your site's best foot
forward when it comes to visibility in search engines, but your
ultimate consumers are your users, not search engines.

Your site may be smaller or larger than our example site and offer
vastly different content, but the optimization topics we discuss below
should apply to sites of all sizes and types. We hope our guide gives
you some fresh ideas on how to improve your website, and we'd love
to hear your questions, feedback, and success stories in the Google
Webmaster Help Forum.


Table of Contents
SEO Basics
4 Create unique, accurate page titles
6 Make use of the "description" meta tag
From here on, I'll be Improving Site Structure

explaining various points 8 Improve the structure of your URLs


on search engine 10 Make your site easier to navigate
Optimizing Content
optimization (SEO)!
14 Offer quality content and services
16 Write better anchor text
18 Optimize your use of images
20 Use heading tags appropriately
Dealing with Crawlers
21 Make effective use of robots.txt
22 Be aware of rel="nofollow" for links
SEO for Mobile Phones
24 Notify Google of mobile sites
Googlebot 26 Guide mobile users accurately
Crawling content
on the Internet for Promotions and Analysis
Google's index
every day, every 28 Promote your website in the right ways
night, non stop. 30 Make use of free webmaster tools

An example may help our explanations, so we've created a fictitious


website to follow throughout the guide. For each topic, we've fleshed
out enough information about the site to illustrate the point being
covered. Here's some background information about the site we'll
use:

Website/business name: "Brandon's Baseball Cards"


Domain name: brandonsbaseballcards.com
Focus: Online-only baseball card sales, price guides, articles,
and news content
Size: Small, ~250 pages

Search engine optimization affects only organic search results, not


paid or "sponsored" results such as Google AdWords.

“Paid” Search, AdWords

Organic Search


SEO Basics

Create unique, accurate page titles

Indicate page titles by using title tags <html>


<head>
<title>Brandon's Baseball Cards - Buy Cards, Baseball News, Card Prices</title>
A title tag tells both users and search engines what the topic of
<meta name="description=" content="Brandon's Baseball Cards provides a
a particular page is. The <title> tag should be placed within the large selection of vintage and modern baseball cards for sale. We also offer
<head> tag of the HTML document (1). Ideally, you should create a daily baseball news and events in">
unique title for each page on your site. </head>
<body>

Page title contents are displayed in search (1) The title of the homepage for our baseball card site, which lists the business
name and three main focus areas.
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 check out 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 bolded if they appear in the
user's search query. This can help users recognize if the page is
likely to be relevant to their search (2).

The title for your homepage can list the name of your website/ (2) A user performs the query [baseball cards]. Our homepage shows up as a result,
with the title listed on the first line (notice that the query terms the user searched
business and could include other bits of important information like
for appear in bold).
the physical location of the business or maybe a few of its main
focuses or offerings (3).

If the user clicks the result and visits the page, the page's title will appear at the top
of the browser.

(3) A user performs the query [rarest baseball cards]. A relevant, deeper page (its
title is unique to the content of the page) on our site appears as a result.

Glossary
Search engine HTML
Computer function that searches data available on the Internet using keywords or Abbreviation for HyperText Markup Language, a language used when describing web
other specified terms, or a program containing this function. page documents. It denotes the basic elements of web pages, including the document
<head> tag text and any hyperlinks and images embedded within.
An element that indicates the header in an HTML document. The content of this Search query
element will not be displayed in a browser. Single or multiple terms which are input by the user when performing a search on
search engines.


SEO Basics
Best Practices

Improving Site Structure


Accurately describe the page's content
Choose a title that effectively communicates the topic of the page's content.

Avoid:
choosing a title that has no relation to the content on the page
using default or vague titles like "Untitled" or "New Page 1"

Create unique title tags for each page

Optimizing Content
Each of your pages should ideally have a unique title tag, which helps Google know how the page is
distinct from the others on your site.

Avoid:
using a single title tag across all of your site's pages or a large group of pages

Use brief, but descriptive titles


Titles can be both short and informative. If the title is too long, Google will show only a portion of it in
the search result.

Dealing with Crawlers


Avoid:
using extremely lengthy titles that are unhelpful to users
stuffing unneeded keywords in your title tags

Page titles are an


important aspect of
search engine
optimization.
SEO for Mobile Phones
Promotions and Analysis

Links

The anatomy of a search result


http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/11/anatomy-of-search-result.html
Diagram of a Google search results page
http://www.google.com/support/websearch/bin/answer.py?answer=35891


SEO Basics

Make use of the "description" meta tag

Summaries can be defined for each page <html>


<head>
<title>Brandon's Baseball Cards - Buy Cards, Baseball News, Card Prices</title>
A page's description meta tag gives Google and other search
<meta name="description=" content="Brandon's Baseball Cards provides a
engines a summary of what the page is about (1). Whereas a large selection of vintage and modern baseball cards for sale. We also offer
page's title may be a few words or a phrase, a page's description meta daily baseball news and events in">
tag might be a sentence or two or a short paragraph. Google </head>
Webmaster Tools provides a handy content analysis section that'll tell <body>
you about any description meta tags that are either too short, long, or (1) The beginning of the description meta tag for our homepage, which gives a brief
duplicated too many times (the same information is also shown for overview of the site's offerings.
<title> tags). Like the <title> tag, the description meta tag is placed
within the <head> tag of your HTML document.

What are the merits of description meta


tags?
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.
Alternatively, Google might use your site's description in the Open
Directory Project if your site is listed there (learn how to prevent
(2) A user performs the query [baseball cards]. Our homepage appears as a result,
search engines from displaying ODP data). Adding description meta with part of its description meta tag used as the snippet.
tags to each of your pages is always a good practice in case Google
cannot find a good selection of text to use in the snippet. The
Webmaster Central Blog has an informative post on improving
snippets with better description meta tags.

Words in the snippet are bolded when they appear in the user's query
(2). This gives the user clues about whether the content on the page
matches with what he or she is looking for. (3) is another example,
this time showing a snippet from a description meta tag on a deeper
page (which ideally has its own unique description meta tag)
containing an article.
(3) 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.

Glossary
Snippet Domain
Text displayed beneath the title of a corresponding web page on the search results An address on the Internet that indicates the location of a computer or network. These
pages of a search engine. A web page summary and/or parts of the page that match are administrated to avoid duplication.
the search keywords will be displayed.
Open Directory Project (ODP)
The world's largest volunteer-run web directory (a list of Internet links collected on a
large scale and then organized by category).

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