Let me ask you a question, who is “the man” when it comes to SEO? The obvious answer would be the search engine (the search engines, rather). And when it comes to search engines, we all have to admit that Google is the dominant entity. So when I read on their blog that they have released an SEO starter guide, I thought to myself – perfect!
What can we expect from their starter guide? Here is an excerpt of the blog post:
Our Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide covers around a dozen common areas that webmasters might consider optimizing. We felt that these areas (like improving title and description meta tags, URL structure, site navigation, content creation, anchor text, and more) would apply to webmasters of all experience levels and sites of all sizes and types. Throughout the guide, we also worked in many illustrations, pitfalls to avoid, and links to other resources that help expand our explanation of the topics. We plan on updating the guide at regular intervals with new optimization suggestions and to keep the technical advice current.
The guide is in PDF format and downloads in less than a minute. I have not had the time to go over it thoroughly but I am expecting something simple and effective. Others already have their opinion, like Bill Hartzer. He points out a big flaw where “the example site noted in the guide is set up as a 302 Temporary Redirect to the Google.com home page.” He states that this is something that you would NEVER want to do. Apparently, Google’s starter guide is not error free. Why don’t you take a look at it for yourself? Perhaps in the future, we can tackle some topics presented there.
3 Comments to "Google’s SEO Starter Guide"
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I had a quick look at it and, yes, it is a good basic overview. Thanks.
[...] in the last two posts when I talked about Google PageRank not being the end all be all of your SEO efforts. Trust me, I am not merely sour graping – I have been quite open about the PageRank of some of my [...]
Is the website Good?
This might sounds like a funny thing to say as a guideline, but I think it bears mentioning. An economical SEO firm can’t do SEO for a website that comprises just a few pages of flash, or a few pictures embedded into 3-4 pages. SEO is a major commitment. Before you start SEO, you need to have a professional looking site on a stable server. Without this, the economical SEO firm is not going to give you the results you desire.
From now on, I think that traditional SEO will get into the top 10 on Google. But, to get to #1 for a popular search phrase, you will need to painstakingly keep improving and editing your website until you have really low bounce rates. My SEO guideline is that you need to make sure that when people get to your website, they find what they’re looking for. I reached this conclusion after reading about personalized search. I think personalized search will be of great concern to many SEO companies. Personally, I think “personalized search” is the holy grail of algorithms to rank websites. It’s virtually impossible to fool and will continue to change the SEO industry.
If you’re looking for a good introduction to SEO guideline, check this one out. http://www.bergstrom-seo.com/resources/google-search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf. It was written by google, and it’s really good.