Google has re-released their Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide or Search Engine Optimisation Starter Guide as it is known as in Australia. The starter guide outlines Google’s SEO best practices and gives you guide in regards to what you should and shouldn’t do.
The Search Engine Optimisation Starter Guide is, as I said a best practices guide released by Google to make it easier and less complex for Search Engines to crawl, index and interpret your website content. Obviously the guide is not intended to give away any magical formulas to shoot your website to the top of the SERPS. However it will help you with your Search Engine Optimisation and it may give you some new ideas on how to optimise your site and increase your visibility.
Below is a list of the contents in the 32-page Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide:
- Create unique and 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.
- Optimise your use of images.
- Use heading tags appropriately.
- Make effective use of robots.txt.
- Be aware of rel=”nofollow” for links.
- Notify Google of mobile sites.
- Guide mobile users accurately.
- Promote your website in the right ways.
- Make use of free webmaster tools.
The original Google SEO Starter Guide was released in 2008. This version has been updated to reflect all the changes in Search Engine technology. According to Google’s Webmaster Central Blog, the new and vastly improved version will also include glossary terms, more examples of SEO best practices and better ways to optimise your website for mobile devices.
This is a definitely a must read for anyone new to search engine optimisation that is optimizing their own website or any business/website owner that needs a Search Engine Optimisation refresher.