Google's SEO Starter Guide

Welcome to Google's Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide.
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Google's Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide.
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 webpage, but you may not be making the most out of them. Search engine optimization affects only organic search results, not paid or "sponsored" results, such as Google AdWords.
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. 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
Your site may be smaller or larger than this and offer vastly different content, but the optimization topics we discussed 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.

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Create unique, accurate page titles

A title tag tells both users and search engines what the topic of a particular page is. The
should be placed within the tag of the HTML document. Ideally, you should create a unique
title for each page on your site.

The title of the homepage for our baseball card site, which lists the business name and three
main focus areas
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.

The title for your homepage can list the name of your website/business and could include other bits of important information like the physical location of the business or maybe a few of its main focuses or offerings.

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.

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 - 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.

Avoid:

• using extremely lengthy titles that are unhelpful to users

• stuffing unneeded keywords in your title tags

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Improve the structure of your URLs

Creating descriptive categories and filenames for the documents on your website can not only help you keep your site better organized, but it could also lead to better crawling of your documents bysearch 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 recognizable words.Users would have a hard time reciting the URL from memory or creating a link to it. Also, users may believe that a portion of the URL is unnecessary, especially if the URL shows many unrecognizable parameters. They might leave off a part, breaking the link.
Some users might link to your page using the URL of that page as the anchor text. If your URL contains relevant words, this provides users and search engines with more information about the page than an ID or oddly named parameter would.Lastly, remember that the URL to a document is displayed as part of a search result in Google, below the document's title and snippet. Like the title and snippet, words in the URL on the search result appear in bold if they appear in the user's query.Google is good at crawling all types of URL structures, even if they're quite complex, but spending the time to make your URLs as simple as possible for both users and search engines can help. Some webmasters try to achieve this by rewriting their dynamic URLs to static ones; while Google is fine with this, we'd like to note that this is an advanced procedure and if done incorrectly, could cause crawling issues with your site. To learn even more about good URL structure, we recommend this Webmaster Help Center page on creating Google-friendly URLs.

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Make use of the "description" meta tag

A page's description meta tag gives Google and other search engines a summary of what the page is about. Whereas a page's title may be a few words or a phrase, a page's description meta tag might be a sentence or two or a short paragraph. Google Webmaster Tools provides a handy content analysis section that'll tell you about any description meta tags that are either too short, long, or duplicated too many times (the same information is also shown for