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Google’s SEO Starter Guide – Must Read!

Google has officially released a starter guide to illustrate some Search Engine Optimization (SEO) concepts two days ago.

To people who have read Aaron’s SEO Book or frequent SEO forums, you may already know 99% of the stuff inside this guide. However, this guide is extremely useful when you need it to prove and show your client that certain techniques are forbidden or not allowed. Having said that, I would still recommend you to read through the SEO starter guide here (pdf version).

For some of you (or may be a lot of you) who might not have the time to read through the 22-page guide, you can refer to my following summary:

Creating unique and descriptive page titles
To me, this helps a lot in ranking your page on the search engines. Having a unique page title should be your priority when designing or developing your site. Not only the titles have to be unique, but it also needs to describe the content on that page for optimal results.

Now, you may asking what if you have a site that has thousands of pages and needs to check for duplicated titles? Instead of checking them page by page yourself, you can simply use Google Webmaster Tools account to check if there are any duplicates (they have a reporting feature there)

Make use of the ‘Description’ meta tag
Yes, they are not dead yet! Google still advise us to put in descriptive words to describe a page so that they have more alternatives to choose what to display to the searchers.

Improve structure of your page URL
This means that if you have a choice, use readable and descriptive URLs for all your pages across in the site. For example, avoid using urls like 0987yrtiudc.html and use something secrets/paypal-login-password.html (just an illustration).

Improve your site’s navigation
This section advise webmasters to use text for navigation in your site. Avoid using entirely images or animations for navigation. They also recommend you to submit a sitemap to them if you have a medium to a large site.

Write better anchor text
A better anchor text will do a good job describing what is the target page about. Ok, maybe not so much for the human readers but this is critical for the search engines. To illustrate, use the second version below for better SEO purpose:

1. You can access the Google SEO Starter Guide here.
2. Go ahead and read the Google SEO Starter Guide!

Use headers tag appropriately
Using header tags in your page will also help Google to allocate relevancy to your page. In case you are not sure about what’s header tags, refer to this header tags illustration. You should also note not to overuse them thou..

Optimize your site’s images
Does your image contains alt description? This description tag is not only good for SEO purpose but will also benefit other users who are unable read off the screen. I strongly advise you to add in the alt tag for every images you put on your site for accessibility purpose.

The guide also cover other stuff like robots.txt, encourage web analytics usage and making use of webmaster console tools. All of these advise is golden if you are new and want to make sure that your site is being picked up by Google to send you some initial traffic.

In closing, don’t forget to read the Google Webmaster Guidelines to supplement this SEO Starter guide

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