If you own, manage, monetize, or promote products or services online, Google has a beginner’s guide meant especially for you. It’s called Google’s Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Starter Guide and is a collection of Google search engine guidelines, best practices and a wide variety of “the basics.” While there are countless SEO guides for those who want to improve their results on Google search, Google’s beginner’s guide is unique because it was created by an insider group of Google employees who work on the Google Search Quality Team.
Who Needs to Use Google’s SEO Starter Guide?
According to Google, the guide won’t provide any secrets that will automatically rank your site first in Google, but following the best practices outlined in the guide will make it easier for search engines to “crawl, index and understand your content.”
Basic SEO advice for novices — and experts, alike
- Build and maintain a website that benefits or helps your users.
- Successful search engine optimization is geared toward making the user experience better.
- Better user experience can mean different things but for small businesses.
- Google accounts for a dominate usage of search engine usage, worldwide. (Depending on how measured, up to 95%.)
- Among the users of your website are search engines — advanced technology and software that help users discover and use your content, product, knowledge, etc.
- Better SEO practices can improve the performance of all sizes and types.
Links to the topics in Google’s Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Starter Guide
- Getting started
- Help Google find your content
- Tell Google which pages shouldn’t be crawled
- Help Google (and users) understand your content
- Manage your appearance in Google Search results
- Organize your site hierarchy
- Optimize your content
- Optimize your images
- Make your site mobile-friendly
- Promote your website
- Analyze your search performance and user behavior
- Appendix: Link URLs used in the guide
More Search Result Resources From Google
Webmaster Central Blog
Information about updates to Google Search.
How Search Works
What happens behind the scenes when you search for something in Google Search.
Google Webmasters Twitter
Follow Google for news and resources to help you make a great site.
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