Google recently released their Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide, which I recommend you download and read if you have any interest in getting your website to rank well in the search engines.
There’s nothing really new in the guide – many of the topics are already ‘best practice’ for web page optimization – but it’s important that Google has put its stamp of approval on these techniques.
The guide is brief at 22 pages, well laid out, and spells out specific “good practices” for each method.
There’s no index, so here’s a list of the methods they discuss:
- Create unique, accurate page titles
- Make use of the “description” meta tag
- Improve the structure of your URLs
- Make your site easier to navigate
- Offer quality content and services
- Write better anchor text
- Use heading tags appropriately
- Optimize your use of images
- Make effective use of robots.txt
- Be aware of rel=”nofollow” for links
- Promote your website in the right ways
- Make use of free webmaster tools
- Take advantage of web analytics services
“Promote your website in the right ways” mentions using a blog on your website to let visitors know when you’ve added something new. If you’re a business owner, and your website doesn’t have a (regularly updated) blog, you need to add one quick-sticks. Blogs are one of the best ways to get visitors to your site.
About six months ago, my coder and myself decided that the phpLD directory script was abusing some of the tings mentioned in this article.
We modified the code so empty descriptions weren’t filled in with a default, which was causing duplicate content. After we did this, I saw my duplicate pages that Google reported drop from 1,800 to 20. This was amazing and I also seen an increase of how often Google crawls my site. There was also a improvement in my search engine ranking for my keywords as well.
Another problem with the phpLD script is the over use of the H1 tags, which we fixed as well.
This is very important information which Google has provider and we should pay attention to it.