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search engine optimization starter guide
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welcome to google s 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.
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table of contents seo basics 4 create unique accurate page titles 6 make use of the description meta tag from here on i ll be explaining various points on search engine optimization seo improving site structure 8 improve the structure of your urls 10 make your site easier to navigate optimizing content 14 16 18 0 offer quality content and services write better anchor text optimize your use of images use heading tags appropriately dealing with crawlers 1 make effective use of robots.txt be aware of rel nofollow for links seo for mobile phones crawling content on the internet for google s index every day every night non stop googlebot 4 notify google of mobile sites 6 guide mobile users accurately promotions and analysis 8 promote your website in the right ways 0 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 search engine optimization affects only organic search results not paid or sponsored results such as google adwords paid search adwords organic search
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seo basics create unique accurate page titles indicate page titles by using title tags a title tag tells both users and search engines what the topic of a particular page is the
brandon s baseball cards buy cards baseball news card prices title
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seo basics best practices improving site structure 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 optimizing content 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 dealing with crawlers avoid using extremely lengthy titles that are unhelpful to users stuffing unneeded keywords in your title tags page titles are an important aspect of search engine optimization seo for mobile phones promotions 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 5
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seo basics make use of the description meta tag summaries can be defined for each page 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
brandon s baseball cards buy cards baseball news card prices title
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seo basics best practices improving site structure accurately summarize the page s content write a description that would both inform and interest users if they saw your description meta tag as a snippet in a search result avoid 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 optimizing content use unique descriptions for each page 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 avoid using a single description meta tag across all of your site s pages or a large group of pages dealing with crawlers use description meta tags to provide both search engines and users with a summary of what your page is about seo for mobile phones promotions and analysis links content analysis section http googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/007/1/new-content-analysis-andsitemap.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-withmeta-description.html site operator http www.brianwhite.org/007/04/7/google-site-operator-an-ode-to-thee 7
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improving site structure improve the structure of your urls simple-to-understand urls will convey content information easily 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 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 urls are displayed in search results 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 a user performs the query [baseball cards our homepage appears as a result with the url listed under the title and snippet 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 glossary 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
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choose a url that will be easy for users and search engines to understand seo basics best practices improving site structure use words in urls 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 avoid 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 optimizing content 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 avoid 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 provide one version of a url to reach a document 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 avoid 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 dealing with crawlers seo for mobile phones promotions 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 9
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improving site structure make your site easier to navigate navigation is very important for search engines 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 root about articles news 008 009 010 plan out your navigation based on your homepage 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 price-guides 1900-1949 1950-1999 000-present shop the directory structure for our small website on baseball cards ensure more convenience for users by using `breadcrumb lists 1 breadcrumb links appearing on a deeper article page on our site 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 glossary 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
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seo basics allow for the possibility of a part of the url being removed consider what happens when a user removes part of your url some users might navigate your site in odd ways and you should anticipate this for example instead of using the breadcrumb links on the page a user might drop off a part of the url in the hopes of finding more general content he or she might be visiting http www.brandonsbaseballcards.com/news/010/upcoming-baseballcard-shows.htm but then enter http www.brandonsbaseballcards.com/news/010 into the browser s address bar believing that this will show all news from 010 is your site prepared to show content in this situation or will it give the user a 404 page not found error what about moving up a directory level to http www.brandonsbaseballcards.com/news improving site structure users may go to an upper directory by removing the last part of the url optimizing content prepare two sitemaps one for users one for search engines a site map lower-case is a simple page on your site that displays the structure of your website and usually consists of a hierarchical listing of the pages on your site visitors may visit this page if they are having problems finding pages on your site while search engines will also visit this page getting good crawl coverage of the pages on your site it s mainly aimed at human visitors an xml sitemap upper-case file which you can submit through google s webmaster tools makes it easier for google to discover the pages on your site using a sitemap file is also one way though not guaranteed to tell google which version of a url you d prefer as the canonical one e.g http brandonsbaseballcards.com or http www.brandonsbaseballcards.com more on what s a preferred domain google helped create the open source sitemap generator script to help you create a sitemap file for your site to learn more about sitemaps the webmaster help center provides a useful guide to sitemap files xml version 1.0 encoding utf-8 dealing with crawlers
http www.brandonsbaseballcards.com loc daily changefreq 0.8 priority url http www.brandonsbaseballcards.com/news loc url http www.brandonsbaseballcards.com/news/008 loc url http www.brandonsbaseballcards.com/news/009 loc url http www.brandonsbaseballcards.com/news/010 loc url urlset examples of an html site map and an xml sitemap an html site map can help users easily find content that they are looking for and an xml sitemap can help search engines find pages on your site promotions and analysis seo for mobile phones links webmaster tools https www.google.com/webmasters/tools what s a preferred domain http www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=441 sitemap generator script http code.google.com/p/googlesitemapgenerator guide to sitemap files http www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=156184 11
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improving site structure make your site easier to navigate best practices create a naturally flowing hierarchy make it as easy as possible for users to go from general content to the more specific content they want on your site add navigation pages when it makes sense and effectively work these into your internal link structure avoid creating complex webs of navigation links e.g linking every page on your site to every other page going overboard with slicing and dicing your content so that it takes twenty clicks use mostly text for navigation controlling most of the navigation from page to page on your site through text links makes it easier for search engines to crawl and understand your site many users also prefer this over other approaches especially on some devices that might not handle flash or javascript avoid having a navigation based entirely on drop-down menus images or animations many but not all search engines can discover such links on a site but if a user can reach all pages on a site via normal text links this will improve the accessibility of your site more on how google deals with non-text files for navigation the focus should be on simplicity and ease of use 1 flash web technology or software developed by adobe systems incorporated it is able to create web content that combines sound video and animation javascript a type of programming language it can add dynamic features to web pages and is used by many web services drop-down menu a system in which one chooses content from a menu when one clicks on the menu the list of choices are displayed in a list in a drawn out manner accessibility the ability for users and search engines to access and comprehend content glossary user experience the experience gained by a user through using products services etc emphasis is placed on providing an experience truly sought after by the user such as enjoyment convenience and comfort http status code a code that expresses the meanings of responses from the server when computers are conveying information to each other the code is allotted as three numerical digits with a different meaning depending on the number used.
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seo basics best practices improving site structure put an html site map page on your site and use an xml sitemap file a simple site map page with links to all of the pages or the most important pages if you have hundreds or thousands on your site can be useful creating an xml sitemap file for your site helps ensure that search engines discover the pages on your site avoid letting your html site map page become out of date with broken links creating an html site map that simply lists pages without organizing them for example by subject optimizing content have a useful 404 page users will occasionally come to a page that doesn t exist on your site either by following a broken link or typing in the wrong url having a custom 404 page that kindly guides users back to a working page on your site can greatly improve a user s experience your 404 page should probably have a link back to your root page and could also provide links to popular or related content on your site google provides a 404 widget that you can embed in your 404 page to automatically populate it with many useful features you can also use google webmaster tools to find the sources of urls causing not found errors avoid allowing your 404 pages to be indexed in search engines make sure that your webserver is configured to give a 404 http status code when non-existent pages are requested providing only a vague message like not found 404 or no 404 page at all using a design for your 404 pages that isn t consistent with the rest of your site dealing with crawlers seo for mobile phones promotions and analysis links how google deals with non-text files http www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=7746 custom 404 page http www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=9641 404 widget http googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/008/08/make-your-404-pages-moreuseful.html sources of urls causing not found errors http googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/008/10/webmaster-tools-showscrawl-error.html 404 http status code http www.w.org/protocols/rfc616/rfc616-sec10.html 1
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optimizing content offer quality content and services interesting sites will increase their recognition on their own creating compelling and useful content will likely influence your website more than any of the other factors discussed here 1 users know good content when they see it and will likely want to direct other users to it this could be through blog posts social media services email forums or other means organic or word-of-mouth buzz is what helps build your site s reputation with both users and google and it rarely comes without quality content 1 a blogger finds a piece of your content likes it and then references it in a blog post anticipate differences in users understanding of your topic and offer unique exclusive content think about the words that a user might search for to find a piece of your content users who know a lot about the topic might use different keywords in their search queries than someone who is new to the topic for example a long-time baseball fan might search for [nlcs an acronym for the national league championship series while a new fan might use a more general query like [baseball playoffs anticipating these differences in search behavior and accounting for them while writing your content using a good mix of keyword phrases could produce positive results google adwords provides a handy keyword tool that helps you discover new keyword variations and see the approximate search volume for each keyword also google webmaster tools provides you with the top search queries your site appears for and the ones that led the most users to your site consider creating a new useful service that no other site offers you could also write an original piece of research break an exciting news story or leverage your unique user base other sites may lack the resources or expertise to do these things the google adwords keyword tool can help you find relevant keywords on your site and the volume of those keywords glossary social media service a community-type web service that promotes and supports forging connections among fellow users google adwords an advertising service which places relevant advertisements on search results pages and other content when a user searches for keywords using google adwords advertisements related to those keywords are displayed on the right top and/or bottom of the search results pages alongside the organic search results 14
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seo basics improving content and services should be a priority regardless of the type of website best practices improving site structure write easy-to-read text users enjoy content that is well written and easy to follow avoid writing sloppy text with many spelling and grammatical mistakes embedding text in images for textual content users may want to copy and paste the text and search engines can t read it stay organized around the topic it s always beneficial to organize your content so that visitors have a good sense of where one content topic begins and another ends breaking your content up into logical chunks or divisions helps users find the content they want faster avoid dumping large amounts of text on varying topics onto a page without paragraph subheading or layout separation optimizing content create fresh unique content new content will not only keep your existing visitor base coming back but also bring in new visitors avoid rehashing or even copying existing content that will bring little extra value to users having duplicate or near-duplicate versions of your content across your site more on duplicate content dealing with crawlers create content primarily for your users not search engines designing your site around your visitors needs while making sure your site is easily accessible to search engines usually produces positive results avoid inserting numerous unnecessary keywords aimed at search engines but are annoying or nonsensical to users having blocks of text like frequent misspellings used to reach this page that add little value for users deceptively hiding text from users but displaying it to search engines seo for mobile phones promotions and analysis links keyword tool https adwords.google.com/select/keywordtoolexternal top search queries http www.google.com/webmasters/edu/quickstartguide/sub1guide5.html duplicate content http www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=6659 hiding text from users http www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=665 15
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