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.
From here on, I'll be explaining various points on search engine optimization (SEO)!
Googlebot Crawling content on the Internet for Google's index every day, every night, non stop.
Table of Contents
SEO Basics
4 Create unique, accurate page titles
6 Make use of the "description" meta tag
Improving Site Structure
8 Improve the structure of your URLs 10 Make your site easier to navigate
Optimizing Content
14 Offer quality content and services 16 Write better anchor text
18 Optimize your use of images
0 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
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:
Search engine optimization affects only organic search results, not paid or "sponsored" results such as Google AdWords.
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
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 tag should be placed within the tag of the HTML document (1). Ideally, you should create a unique title for each page on your site.
Page title contents are displayed in search results
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 ().
(1) The title of the homepage for our baseball card site, which lists the business name and three main focus areas.
() 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.
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.
Brandon's Baseball Cards - Buy Cards, Baseball News, Card Prices
Search engine
Computer function that searches data available on the Internet using keywords or other specified terms, or a program containing this function.
tag
An element that indicates the header in an HTML document. The content of this element will not be displayed in a browser.
Glossary
Best Practices
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
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.
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.
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
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SEO Basics Improving Site Structure Optimizing Content Dealing with Crawlers SEO for Mobile Phones Promotions and Analysis
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 tags). Like the tag, the description meta tag is placed within the tag of your HTML document.
What are the merits of description meta tags?
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.
(1) The beginning of the description meta tag for our homepage, which gives a brief overview of the site's offerings.
() 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.
Brandon's Baseball Cards - Buy Cards, Baseball News, Card Prices
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
Glossary
Best Practices
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
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
Use description meta tags to provide both search engines and users with a summary of what your page is about!
Links
Content analysis section
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/007/1/new-content-analysis-and- http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/007/09/improve-snippets-with-
Prevent search engines from displaying ODP data
site: operator
Improving snippets with better description meta tags
sitemap.html meta-description.html
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=564 http://www.brianwhite.org/007/04/7/google-site-operator-an-ode-to-thee/
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SEO Basics Improving Site Structure Optimizing Content Dealing with Crawlers SEO for Mobile Phones Promotions and Analysis
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 ().
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.
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.
(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.
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
Glossary
Choose a URL that will be easy for users and search engines to understand!
Best Practices
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"
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
Links
Dynamic URLs
301 redirect
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=4049 http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=96
Creating Google-friendly URLs rel="canonical"
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=769 http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=1994
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SEO Basics Improving Site Structure Optimizing Content Dealing with Crawlers SEO for Mobile Phones Promotions and Analysis
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.
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?
Ensure more convenience for users by using ‘breadcrumb lists’
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.
(root)
about
articles news
008 009 010
1950-1999 000-present
The directory structure for our small website on baseball cards.
(1) Breadcrumb links appearing on a deeper article page on our site.
shop
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.
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Glossary
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-baseball- card-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/?
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