Google’s Guide To Search Engine Optimization
If you’re new to search engine optimization (SEO) or just wondered what Google thinks is the best way for your site to rank higher there’s some interesting stuff to read in Google’s Search Engine Optimization
Starter Guide [Google.com, PDF]. There’s no magic formula to reach that first place for a search on a specific keyword (of course), but it does contain 22 pages of sound advice for anyone wanting to make it as easy as possible for any search engine to crawl your site.
If you’re too lazy to read the document we can boil it down to:
- Unique page titles for each page: Keep ‘em short, detailed (and descriptive) and unique.
- Unique “description” meta tags: This tag is often kept static through-out a site, but if you make sure it contains valid and useful information (as in accurately summarizing the page content) Google can use instead of a snippet from the body text. A great way to lift up keywords that are valid for the page.
- URL structure: Having nice URL:s with keywords in them (as in http://www.thefruitshop.com/fruits/bananas/greenones/”) does make a difference, and keywords matching the search query will be shown in bold text.
- Sitemaps: Provide both HTML and XML sitemaps (former for human visitors, latter for search engines)
- Write good anchor texts: Descriptive links wins.
- Don’t forget the alt-attribute for images!
- Make use of Google’s free tools such as Webmaster Tools, Website Optimizer and of course Analytics to see what works and what doesn’t.