On Wednesday, Google published its Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide, which outlines best practices for webmasters wishing to improve their site’s natural search rankings. Google’s Webmaster Central Blog describes the document as “a compact guide that lists some best practices that teams within Google and external webmasters alike can follow that could improve their sites’ crawlability and indexing.”

Google is often extremely vague about techniques for improving rankings, so webmasters should welcome the concrete, straightforward tips presented in the document. Although Google cautions that the guide “won’t tell you any secrets that’ll automatically rank your site first for queries in Google,” the document does illuminate the factors that Google considers important when calculating the value of natural search results.

The guide can help individual webmasters as they optimize their websites, and it also provides clues to the site elements Google considers valuable. SEOs have long contended that many of these elements are important, but the guide backs-up these assertions.

A few of the SEO tips confirmed by the guide are:

• Use title tags that describe the page’s content (i.e., include keywords in title tags).
• Use words (particularly keywords) in site URLs.
• “Provide one version of a URL to reach a document” (i.e., duplicate content can reduce the value of your site’s pages).
• Use HTML and XML sitemaps.
• Use “descriptive text” (i.e., keywords) as anchor text for internal and external links.
• Use keywords in image filenames and alt text to improve image search.

You can download a PDF version of Google’s Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide directly at http://www.google.com/webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf. The guide includes “good practices” sections on title tags, meta tags, URL structure, site navigation, content, anchor text, heading tags, images, and robots.txt files.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 14th, 2008 at 3:37 pm by Darby Tober and is filed under Google, Natural Search (SEO). You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.