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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. Welcome to Google's Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide Table of Contents 4 6 8 10 14 16 18 0 1 4 6 8 0 Googlebot Crawling content on the Internet for Google's index every day, every night, non stop. From here on, I'll be explaining various points on search engine optimization (SEO)! SEO Basics Create unique, accurate page titles Make use of the "description" meta tag Improving Site Structure Improve the structure of your URLs Make your site easier to navigate Optimizing Content Offer quality content and services Write better anchor text Optimize your use of images Use heading tags appropriately Dealing with Crawlers Make effective use of robots.txt Be aware of rel="nofollow" for links SEO for Mobile Phones Notify Google of mobile sites Guide mobile users accurately Promotions and Analysis Promote your website in the right ways 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, ~50 pages “Paid†Search, AdWords Organic Search Search engine optimization affects only organic search results, not paid or "sponsored" results such as Google AdWords. Create unique, accurate page titles SEO Basics Glossary Indicate page titles by using title tags Page title contents are displayed in search results (1) The title of the homepage for our baseball card site, which lists the business name and three main focus areas. <html> <head> <title>Brandon's Baseball Cards - Buy Cards, Baseball News, Card Prices</title> <meta name="description=" content="Brandon's Baseball Cards provides a large selection of vintage and modern baseball cards for sale. We also offer daily baseball news and events in"> </head> <body> () 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 for appear in bold). If the user clicks the result and visits the page, the page's title will appear at the top of the browser. () 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. A title tag tells both users and search engines what the topic of a particular page is. The <title> tag should be placed within the <head> tag of the HTML document (1). Ideally, you should create a unique title for each page on your site. 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 (). Search engine Computer function that searches data available on the Internet using keywords or other specified terms, or a program containing this function. <head> tag An element that indicates the header in an HTML document. The content of this element will not be displayed in a browser. HTML Abbreviation for HyperText Markup Language, a language used when describing web page documents. It denotes the basic elements of web pages, including the document text and any hyperlinks and images embedded within. Search query Single or multiple terms which are input by the user when performing a search on search engines. 4 SEO Basics Im proving Site Structure O ptim izing Content Dealing w ith Craw lers SEO for M obile Phones Prom otions and Analysis Links The anatomy of a search result http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/007/11/anatomy-of-search-result.html Diagram of a Google search results page http://www.google.com/support/websearch/bin/answer.py?answer=5891 Best Practices Page titles are an important aspect of search engine optimization. Choose a title that effectively communicates the topic of the page's content. Accurately describe the page's content choosing a title that has no relation to the content on the page using default or vague titles like "Untitled" or "New Page 1" Avoid: 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. using a single title tag across all of your site's pages or a large group of pages Avoid: 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. using extremely lengthy titles that are unhelpful to users stuffing unneeded keywords in your title tags Avoid: 5 Make use of the "description" meta tag SEO Basics Glossary Summaries can be defined for each page What are the merits of description meta tags? (1) The beginning of the description meta tag for our homepage, which gives a brief overview of the site's offerings. <html> <head> <title>Brandon's Baseball Cards - Buy Cards, Baseball News, Card Prices</title> <meta name="description=" content="Brandon's Baseball Cards provides a large selection of vintage and modern baseball cards for sale. We also offer daily baseball news and events in"> </head> <body> () A user performs the query [baseball cards]. Our homepage appears as a result, with part of its description meta tag used as the snippet. () 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. A page's description meta tag gives Google and other search engines a summary of what the page is about (1). 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 <title> tags). Like the <title> tag, the description meta tag is placed within the <head> tag of your HTML document. 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 search engines from displaying ODP data). Adding description meta 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 (). This gives the user clues about whether the content on the page matches with what he or she is looking for. () 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. Snippet Text displayed beneath the title of a corresponding web page on the search results pages of a search engine. A web page summary and/or parts of the page that match 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). Domain An address on the Internet that indicates the location of a computer or network. These are administrated to avoid duplication. 6 SEO Basics Im proving Site Structure O ptim izing Content Dealing w ith Craw lers SEO for M obile Phones Prom otions and Analysis Links Content analysis section http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/007/1/new-content-analysis-and- sitemap.html Prevent search engines from displaying ODP data http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=564 Improving snippets with better description meta tags http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/007/09/improve-snippets-with- meta-description.html site: operator http://www.brianwhite.org/007/04/7/google-site-operator-an-ode-to-thee/ Best Practices Use description meta tags to provide both search engines and users with a summary of what your page is about! Accurately summarize the page's content writing a description meta tag that has no relation to the content on the page using generic descriptions like "This is a web page" or "Page about baseball cards" filling the description with only keywords copying and pasting the entire content of the document into the description meta tag Avoid: Write a description that would both inform and interest users if they saw your description meta tag as a snippet in a search result. Use unique descriptions for each page using a single description meta tag across all of your site's pages or a large group of pages Avoid: Having a different description meta tag for each page helps both users and Google, especially in searches where users may bring up multiple pages on your domain (e.g. searches using the site: operator). If your site has thousands or even millions of pages, hand-crafting description meta tags probably isn't feasible. In this case, you could automatically generate description meta tags based on each page's content. 7 Improve the structure of your URLs Improving Site Structure Glossary Simple-to-understand URLs will convey content information easily URLs are displayed in search results (1) A URL to a page on our baseball card site that a user might have a hard time with. () The highlighted words above could inform a user or search engine what the target page is about before following the link. () A user performs the query [baseball cards]. Our homepage appears as a result, with the URL listed under the title and snippet. 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 by search 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. URLs like (1) can be confusing and unfriendly. 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 (). To the right is another example showing a URL on our domain for a page containing an article about the rarest baseball cards. The words in the URL might appeal to a search user more than an ID number like "www. brandonsbaseballcards.com/article/1015/" would. 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. Crawl Exploration of websites by search engine software (bots) in order to index their content. Parameter Data provided in the URL to specify a site's behavior. ID (session ID) Data provided for the identification and/or behavior management of a user who is currently accessing a system or network communications. 01 redirect An HTTP status code (see page 1). Forces a site visitor to automatically jump to a specified URL. Subdomain A type of domain used to identify a category that is smaller than a regular domain (see page 6). Root directory Directory at the top of the tree structure of a site. It is sometimes called "root". 8 SEO Basics Im proving Site Structure O ptim izing Content Dealing w ith Craw lers SEO for M obile Phones Prom otions and Analysis Links Dynamic URLs http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=4049 Creating Google-friendly URLs http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=769 301 redirect http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=96 rel="canonical" http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=1994 Best Practices Create a simple directory structure Use a directory structure that organizes your content well and makes it easy for visitors to know where they're at on your site. Try using your directory structure to indicate the type of content found at that URL. having deep nesting of subdirectories like ".../dir1/dir/dir/dir4/dir5/dir6/page.html" using directory names that have no relation to the content in them Avoid: Choose a URL that will be easy for users and search engines to understand! Use words in URLs using lengthy URLs with unnecessary parameters and session IDs choosing generic page names like "page1.html" using excessive keywords like"baseball-cards-baseball-cards-baseballcards.htm" Avoid: URLs with words that are relevant to your site's content and structure are friendlier for visitors navigating your site. Visitors remember them better and might be more willing to link to them. Provide one version of a URL to reach a document Avoid: To prevent users from linking to one version of a URL and others linking to a different version (this could split the reputation of that content between the URLs), focus on using and referring to one URL in the structure and internal linking of your pages. If you do find that people are accessing the same content through multiple URLs, setting up a 01 redirect from non-preferred URLs to the dominant URL is a good solution for this. You may also use canonical URL or use the rel="canonical" link element if you cannot redirect. having pages from subdomains and the root directory access the same content - e.g. "domain.com/page.htm" and "sub.domain.com/page.htm" using odd capitalization of URLs - many users expect lower-case URLs and remember them better 9 Make your site easier to navigate Improving Site Structure The navigation of a website is important in helping visitors quickly find the content they want. It can also help search engines understand what content the webmaster thinks is important. Although Google's search results are provided at a page level, Google also likes to have a sense of what role a page plays in the bigger picture of the site. All sites have a home or "root" page, which is usually the most frequented page on the site and the starting place of navigation for many visitors. Unless your site has only a handful of pages, you should think about how visitors will go from a general page (your root page) to a page containing more specific content. Do you have enough pages around a specific topic area that it would make sense to create a page describing these related pages (e.g. root page -> related topic listing -> specific topic)? Do you have hundreds of different products that need to be classified under multiple category and subcategory pages? A breadcrumb is a row of internal links at the top or bottom of the page that allows visitors to quickly navigate back to a previous section or the root page (1). Many breadcrumbs have the most general page (usually the root page) as the first, left-most link and list the more specific sections out to the right. Navigation is very important for search engines Plan out your navigation based on your homepage Glossary Ensure more convenience for users by using ‘breadcrumb lists’ (1) Breadcrumb links appearing on a deeper article page on our site. 1900-1949 1950-1999 000-present (root) about articles 008 009 010 price-guides news shop The directory structure for our small website on baseball cards. 404 ("page not found" error) An HTTP status code (see page 1). It means that the server could not find the web page requested by the browser. XML Sitemap A list of the pages on a particular website. By creating and sending this list, you are able to notify Google of all pages on a website, including any URLs that may have been undetected by Google's regular crawling process. 10
