Google's Search Engine Optimization

google_ad_section_start -->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 erformance in organic search results. You're likely already familiar with many of the topics in this guide, because they're essential ingredients for any webpage, 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. 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, ~250 pages

Create unique, accurate page titles

A title tag tells both users and search engines what the topic of a particular page is. The tag of the HTML document. Ideally, you should create a unique title for each page on your site.

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.

Titles for deeper pages on your site should accurately describe the focus of that particular page and also might include your site or business name.

Make use of the "description" meta tag

A page's description meta tag gives Google and other search engines a summary of what the page is about. 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 tag of your HTML document.

Improve the structure of your URLs

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 Google's Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide, Version 1.1, published 13 November 2008
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.

Make your site easier to navigate

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.

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?

Offer quality content and services

Creating compelling and useful content will likely influence your website more than any of the other factors discussed here. 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.

Write better anchor text
Anchor text is the clickable text that users will see as a result of a link, and is placed within the anchor tag .

This text tells users and Google something about the page you're linking to. Links on your page may be internal—pointing to other pages on your site—or external—leading to content on other sites. In either of these cases, the better your anchor text is, the easier it is for users to navigate and for
Google to understand what the page you're linking to is about.

Use heading tags appropriately

Heading tags (not to be confused with the HTML tag or HTTP headers) are used to present structure on the page to users. There are six sizes of heading tags, beginning with

, the most important, and ending with

, the least important.

Optimize your use of images
Images may seem like a straightforward component of your site, but you can optimize your use of them. All images can have a distinct filename and "alt" attribute, both of which you should take advantage of. The "alt" attribute allows you to specify alternative text for the image if it cannot be displayed for some reason.

Make effective use of robots.txt

A "robots.txt" file tells search engines whether they can access and therefore crawl parts of your site. This file, which must be amed "robots.txt", is placed in the root directory of your site.

Be aware of rel="nofollow" for links Setting the value of the "rel" attribute of a link to "nofollow" will tell Google that certain links on your site shouldn't be followed or pass your page's reputation to the pages linked to. Nofollowing a link is adding rel="nofollow" inside of the link's anchor tag.

Promote your website in the right ways

While most of the links to your site will be gained gradually, as people discover your content through search or other ways and link to it, Google understands that you'd like to let others know about the hard work you've put into your content. Effectively promoting your new content will lead to faster discovery by those who are interested in the same subject. As with most points covered in this document, taking these recommendations to an extreme could actually harm the reputation of your site.

Make use of free webmaster tools

Major search engines, including Google, provide free tools for webmasters. Google's Webmaster Tools help webmasters better control how Google interacts with their websites and get useful information from Google about their site. Using Webmaster Tools won't help your site get preferential
treatment; however, it can help you identify issues that, if addressed, can help your site perform better in search results. With the service, webmasters can:

Take advantage of web analytics services

If you've improved the crawling and indexing of your site using Google Webmasters Tools or other services, you're probably curious about the traffic coming to your site. Web analytics programs like Google Analytics are a valuable source of insight for this. You can use these to:

• get insight into how users reach and behave on your site
• discover the most popular content on your site
• measure the impact of optimizations you make to your site (e.g. did changing those title and description meta tags improve traffic from search engines?)