Search Engine Optimizing (SEO) – tips and tricks directly from Google themselves

SEO starter guide

A summary of the Google SEO starter guide:

I asked myself the question: Who knows best about search engine optimization (SEO)? The answer is simple, why not the search engine itself? If you think about it, Google must be one of the most user friendly companies in the world. And of course they’ve already served us webmasters with the information we need, to understand how the search engine works, and to optimize our websites for it.

Google has a 32-page guide, all about optimizing your website for users and for their search engines. This guide is some really good reading but it will definitely take some time for you to get through it. That’s why I’ve wrote this summary for you. I’ll mention and describe the most important content from the guide. This will make it easier for you to understand it, and of course, it will save you some valuable time.

1. Title

The title of the page is the same as the large text shown in your search results. It is extremely important that this short text is relevant to the content and good written. It is the first text that people see in the search results. The title is what users and the search engine uses to see what your page is all about. What you shall think about is to make your title unique, but still describing.

The title is VERY important for your Google ranking as well as for the potential visitor.

Avoid to:

Write long irrelevant titles.
Copy text from your webpage to the title.
Use unspecific titles as “title1” or “football”.

2. Meta tag “description”

How to write a meta description:

Put this tag in the “head” section of your code: <META NAME="Description" CONTENT="informative description here">

The description is supposed to a summary of what your page is about. It can show up in the snippet (search result text) and the search engine can use it as information about your page. Google can use the description as a snippet itself; the snippet has a direct impact on the chances of your site being clicked from Google. The Meta-tags do no longer affect your Google rankings, but it some extra content space for you where your page can be described.

Write unique Meta descriptions for every single page of your site. Use site-level for the main page or navigation page and page-level for all the others. Here’s a chance to give the potential visitor information about your page that wouldn’t have been displayed in the snippet otherwise. You don’t have to use full sentences but still give the reader the information he/she needs.

An example of a bad description:

A better one:

Avoid to:

Write a description that has nothing to do with the content of the page.
Copy/paste content from your page.
Write unspecific descriptions like “this page is about baseball”.
Stuff keywords in the description tag.

3. URL structure

Easy understanding web addresses conveys the content of the page, for both users and search engines. Web addresses with good structure can also be used as a navigator by the visitor. Therefor it is important that the filename of your pages are short and a good description of the page. If it’s possible, try to always use readable words instead of using ID numbers in your URL.

If your filenames are many words or full sentences, use punctuations.

The web address: http://www.example.com/hello-friend.html is much more useful then http://www.example.com/hellofriend.html. Google recommend you to use dashes (-) instead of underscore (_).

Avoid to:

Use long web addresses with unnecessary parameters and session-ID.
Generic filenames like “page2.html”.
Put to many keywords in the filenames.

4. Page navigation

An easy navigated website will make it easy for the visitor to find what he’s looking for. You can also help the search engine to understand the importance of the specific page for the website.

Every website has a root. It is the most visited page and the core of the navigation. If you have many pages with the same topic, you should make a page where you can navigate to more specific pages. Root-> pages with same topic-> specific pages.

Use breadcrumbs to make it as easy as possible for the user to navigate. Breadcrumbs are internal links where the users can see where they are on the website.

Breadcrumbs can look like this:

horses > horseshoes > size 21

Create both sitemap and Sitemap

The sitemap is a navigation page in HTML where the visitor can go if he’s not finding what he’s looking for. If you have many pages and categories this is absolutely necessary. Try to sort your links in the sitemap to make it easy for the navigating visitors.

The Sitemap or XML Sitemap-file is a file that includes all your pages on your website. By sending this navigation page to Google, you can be sure that Google is finding all your pages. Follow this link to learn exactly how to create XML Sitemaps. To send your Sitemap to Google, you must log in to your Google webmasters account (here)) and verify your site from there by following instructions. From there you can send in your Sitemap to Google.

Customize your 404-page

The 404-page is the “page not found” is the page shown when following broken links or typing in wrong URL. If you customize it and write a message like, “Sorry, but the page you’re looking for cannot be found, please follow the home button to our homepage”, you can lead misguided visitors back to you site again.
Click here for exact information about creating a custom 404 page .

Avoid to:

Abuse linking navigation and put links to all pages from every page.
Split up your content to much (it shouldn’t take 20 clicks find specific information).
Navigation based on animations, listing or images. This will make it hard for the search engine to navigate (if you’re not using alt text).
Do not use outdated HTML sitemaps.

5. Content

A website with interesting content will gain visitors spontaneously. Users recognize good content when they see it and will recommend it to others. It may be through blogs, social media, e-mail, forums or something else.

Make your content unique and exclusive in some way. Think about that many people use abbreviations when they search instead of the full word. Some people may search for “NHL” when others search for “national hockey league”. To find out which keywords people mostly use, try the Adwords keyword-finder. You can find it here: https://adwords.google.com/o/Targeting/Explorer

Try to make your text easy for the reader to understand. Most readers prefer when the text is easy to read and follow.

Create new unique content. Google does not like duplicate content.

Create your website for the users, not the search engines. If your website fulfills your visitors demands and is available for the search engines, you will see good results.

Avoid to:

Put large amounts of text with various topics on the same page without paragraphing, subheadings, or layout definition.
Reuse or copy text that won’t bring anything new to the web.
Have identical versions of text in different places on your site.
Stuff keywords in your text.
Use misspellings as keywords.
Hide text for the users and show it for the search engine.

6. Anchor text

What is an anchor text? The anchor text is the clickable text in a link. HOME <-anchor text. You put the anchor text in the anchor tag <a href=“...”></a>.
The anchor text helps both Google and users to know what the linked content is about. Use describing and short text when you write an anchor text. Form the links so they’re easy to see. Don’t make your links blend into the rest of the text. The users might miss them or click on them by mistake.

Avoid to:

Make your anchor text to long.
Make your links look like regular text.
Put to many keywords in your anchor text and make it hard for the user to navigate.

7. Images

Information related to your images can be given by using the “alt” attribute. If the images can’t load properly, or if they for some reason just cannot be shown, the “alt” text is what will show up for the user. If you’re using the image as a link, the “alt” text will work as an anchor text for the search engine. Google recommend you to not use images as links if they can be replaced by text though.

It is the combination between image filenames and “alt text” that Google image-search uses to read information from images.

To make it easy for you and the search engine, store all the website-images in one single folder. Try to use the common file types that most browsers can read, such as JPEG, GIF, PNG and BMP.

Use short and describing text in your image filenames and alt-texts. A Sitemap for the images on your website can help out the Googlebot to find them. Learn about image sitemaps here: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=eng&answer=178636

Avoid to:

Use generic image filenames such as “picture32.gif” or “image3.gif”.
Use just keywords in your alt-text or to paste in sentences.
Only use image-links as navigation on your website.

8. Headings

There are six sizes of heading tags. The tags are <h1> <h2> <h3> <h4> <h5> <h6>, <h1> is the most important and <h6> is the least important tag. As the title usually is bigger than the rest of the text, it’s important in the way that is shows the reader what the text is about. If you use different heading sizes in your text, you can create a hierarchy and make things easy for the reader.

Avoid to:

Use headings where it would be more appropriate to use other tags like the <em> tag or the <strong> tag.
Use too many headings in the same page.
Have all your text under one heading.
Use heading tags only to form the text and not to improve the structure of it.

9. Excluding content from search engines

Exclude pages from crawling using the Google webmasters tool

If you don’t want the search engine to crawl some of your pages, you can use the robots.txt file to control that. The robots.txt file should be placed in the root-folder of your website. Google has made this really easy for you. All you have to do is to log in to your Google account, go to the webmaster section and click on crawl access. From here you can edit your robots.txt files, choose which files you want to exclude from crawling and Google will write your robots.txt file for you. Save the robots.txt file and put it in your root folder. The page/pages will now be excluded from Google.

10. Linking

Prevent comment spam with “nofollow”

If you type in the value "nofollow" for the "rel" attribute of a link, you will inform Google that certain links on this page won’t be followed and that your site's reputation won’t be transferred to the pages linked to.

By doing this, comment spam on your website, won’t affect your sites reputation among the search engines.

Use “nofollow” in your links like this: <a href=“URL” rel=“nofollow”>Anchor text</a>

Use “NOFOLLOW” when referring to other sites

Another occasion to use “NOFOLLOW” is when you write something on your website and referring to another site, but you don’t want to transfer your reputation to it. For example, if you want to link to another website without giving it the benefits from you link.

If you want to use “NOFOLLOW” for every link on your webpage, put it in the robots Meta-tag. Put the Meta-tag in the head section of your HTML code. The robots Meta-tag looks like this:

11. Marketing

Market your website

To make your website grow on the internet, you want as many backlinks as possible. This links will increase gradually through people who find your website through search engines. To speed up this process, you can market your website in different ways.

Use social media networks to spread news about updates on your website, a new article for example.
Spread news about your website through blogging, other webmasters who follow your website or your RSS feed might pick up the news.
Market your website or company offline, outside the web:

By putting your webaddress on business cards, letterheads or posters if you have any.
By sending newsletters to inform about news on you website.

If you have a local business you can add it to Google places to reach customers through Google maps.

12. Webmaster tools

Make use of the free webmaster tools from Google

Google has many free webmaster tools that will help you to optimize your website and solve problems that might affect your PageRank. With this service, you can:

see which parts of a site Googlebot had problems crawling
notify Google of an XML Sitemap file
analyze and generate robots.txt files
remove URLs already crawled by Googlebot
specify your preferred domain
identify issues with title and description meta tags
understand the top searches used to reach a site
get a glimpse at how Googlebot sees pages
remove unwanted sitelinks that Google may use in results
receive notification of quality guideline violations and request a site reconsideration

The free webmaster tools such as Google analytics and Google website optimizer can give you high-leveled analyses about your website. With those services you can:

See how users behave at your website
Find the most popular content on your site
Measure how different optimizations affect your traffic from search engines

Links from Google search engine optimization starter guide:

Google Webmaster Help Forum
http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/webmasters/

Google Webmaster Central Blog
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/

Google Webmaster Help Center
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/

Google Webmaster Tools
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/

Google Webmaster Guidelines
http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html

Google Analytics
http://www.google.com/analytics/

Google Website Optimizer
http://www.google.com/websiteoptimizer/

Tips on Hiring an SEO

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35291

This was a short version of the 32-page Google search engine optimization starter guide. You can find the full guide here.

This version contains almost all important information from the full guide, but if you want to read about SEO for mobile phones I recommend you to read the full guide.

Read more about building website traffic.

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Search Engine Optimizing (SEO) – tips and tricks directly from Google themselves

A summary of the Google SEO starter guide:

1. Title

2. Meta tag “description”

How to write a meta description:

An example of a bad description:

A better one:

3. URL structure

4. Page navigation

Create both sitemap and Sitemap

Customize your 404-page

5. Content

6. Anchor text

7. Images

8. Headings

9. Excluding content from search engines

Exclude pages from crawling using the Google webmasters tool

Other ways to exclude certain content from showing in the search results

10. Linking

Prevent comment spam with “nofollow”

Use “nofollow” in your links like this: <a href=“URL” rel=“nofollow”>Anchor text</a>

Use “NOFOLLOW” when referring to other sites

11. Marketing

Market your website

12. Webmaster tools

Make use of the free webmaster tools from Google