Google’s Guide to SEO

Google have shown that they don’t hate SEO and are giving beginners advice on how to optimise their sites with the release of  a  Search Engine Optimisation Starter Guide document. Any information that comes from Google on search is extremely valuable as they are an authoritative source and this document confirms most of what we believe to be good practice in on-page SEO.

It is pretty basic stuff for the seasoned SEO but valuable information for the beginner as even these basic tips can have the most dramatic results on a poor website. The document gives  good overview on how to improve the indexing of your site by Google. We give a summary below:

Starting SEO Summary

Meta Information

Titles – make sure your titles are descriptive, accurate and unique.

Descriptions – may be used as the search snippet but alternative sources are the Open Directory Project or snippets of content from the page. Desired search terms should be used in the description. Descriptions should be unique, brief – one or two lines, contain key phrases but should not be a list just a list of keywords.

The keyword meta is not considered at all.

URLs

URLs should be descriptive, short and not repeat key phrases excessively. Names of pages should be descriptive as should directories. Create a simple directory structure avoiding deep levels of directories.

Use one URL to reach one document to avoid content duplication. Can use the canonical tag to inform search engines about duplicate content.

Use a sitemap to inform Google about the structure of the site. The URL in the sitemap is also taken as the canonical URL.

Navigation

Use a logical and simple structure for navigation and avoiding linking  to every other part of the site.

Use (X)HTML for navigation not JavaScript or Flash as these are still most easily followed by search engines. Breadcrumb navigation links are a good idea for search engines and humans.

Create an HTML sitemap in addition to an XML sitemap.

Use a custom 404 page – instead of breaking the flow of surfing, a custom 404 can create the option to go somewhere else on the site.

Content

Write good content which is easily readable and focused on a particular topic in a language that is suited to your audience.

Content should be fresh and unique, i.e. not copied from another site and be primarily for the users not the search engines. So no hiding text or popular mis-spellings allowed.

Create links within the site with relevant, descriptive anchor text rather than a generic phrase or word such as, ‘click here’ or ‘this page’. Avoid using the page URL as the anchor text except when promoting a particular page.

Make the links easy to spot – (and as a bonus make it easy to see which ones have been visited by changing their colour after they have been clicked.)

Headings

Use headings appropriately so that you have one main heading h1 describing the overall content of page and  divide content into a hierarchy of sections and sub-sections using h2, h3  as on this page. Makes it easier for users to scan the page to find what they are looking for.

Images

Use the alt attribute to describe images. It is treated in a similar way to the anchor text of a link if an image is used as a link. Alt text also helps to get an image into Google image search. Alt text should be a short and descriptive representation of the image. Google recommends that images should be stored in a single directory for easy access.

Robots.txt

Use this to hide content that is not helpful to users or in situations where many near duplicate pages of information are present. An alternative to the robots.txt is the nofollow attribute. This is useful to create a links but prevent the flow of PageRank to the target page.

Site Promotion – Link building

That is the building of links to increase the prominence of sites in the results. There is a small section on promoting your website which covers starting a blog content, off-line promotion such as business cards, newsletters and social media but frowns on the practise of  buying paid-links or spamming links.

Conclusion

This is a good resource for on-page SEO and will no-doubt help sites that have no search engine optimisation, however not surprisingly it downplays  link-building as a valid way of increasing site visibility.  For sites that are in competitive niches, link building by simply requesting sites to link to you or buying links are still  an important factor in gaining positions in the search engine results.