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Search Engine Optimization
Starter Guide

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'ttell you any secrets that'll automatically rank your site
f irst 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 incrementalimprovements, 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 "searchengine",
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 isabout 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 toimprove your website, and we'd love
to hear your questions, feedback, and success stories in the Google
Webmaster Help Forum.



Table of Contents
SEO Basics

4 Create unique, accurate page titles
6 Make use of the "description" meta tag

From here on, I'll be
explaining various points
on search engine
optimization (SEO)!

Improving Site Structure

8 Improve the structure of yourURLs
10 Make your site easier to navigate
Optimizing Content

14
16
18
0

Offer quality content and services
Write better anchor text
Optimize your use of images
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

Googlebot

Crawling content
on the Internet for
Google'sindex
every day, every
night, non stop.

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 toillustrate 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, ~50 pages
Search engine optimization affects only organic search results, not
paid or "sponsored" results suchas Google AdWords.

“Paid” Search, AdWords

Organic Search



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....