Best SEO Advice Straight from Google

January 29, 2010 by mm

Every­one is try­ing to sell you how to improve your organic search results with Google it seems. Super Secret THIS and Spe­cial Soft­ware THAT are what they parade before you. And then the next week is Super Soft­ware with Spe­cial Secrets!

“Get rich quick!” they proffer…but you know that any­thing that sounds too good to be true prob­a­bly IS.

Why is SEO so impor­tant and what do you need to know?

SEO is impor­tant because it is a free way to get peo­ple to come to your web­site. If you make wooden ships and you want peo­ple to know about it, just set up a web­site devoted to your wooden ships and the next thing you know (if you fol­low good SEO pro­to­cols), you will find your web­site listed on Google’s search results. How­ever, if you don’t fol­low these, you will be one among many oth­ers who do not show up in search results when peo­ple type “wooden ships” in Google’s search index.

To make this eas­ier, Google has writ­ten a guide for SEO and it’s really the best advice you can find.

I could rewrite this handy Google SEO PDF (which you can get by click­ing going to Google’s Web­mas­ter Cen­tral Blog to get it or you can also down­load the Google SEO Starter’s Guide from here in case they decide to take it off their site), but it might be bet­ter just to read the thing. It’s only 22 pages after all and you could cer­tainly learn a lot by read­ing it.

But let me break it down to you quite sim­ply and maybe I’ll write more about each step as time goes along.

10 Tips for SEO Directly from Google

1. Use a title page that makes sense. This title is stored in an HTML tag called and you want to use it right. Be descrip­tive and don’t jam a mil­lion key­words into it. Google will use this when show­ing the title of your web­page in search results.
2. Use the descrip­tion meta tag called <META> as well. Write a good descrip­tion which doesn’t con­tain any garbage like key­word stuff­ing. Google “may” use this under the search result title info.
3. Use dashes to build your URLs and feel free to put key­words into them. You will notice that I do this with this blog (and all my oth­ers). Don’t use web­page URLs with a bunch of num­bers and junk in them.
4. Keep your site sim­ple to nav­i­gate, cre­ate a sitemap and a Sitemap. A sitemap is a page you ded­i­cate to help peo­ple find things on your site such as impor­tant pages and down­loads; it’s impor­tant for your read­ers. A Sitemap is an XML file which Google and other search engines use to quickly index your site for search; it’s impor­tant for Google, Bing, Yahoo! and the other search engines. Keep­ing your site easy to nav­i­gate is done with­out the use of exten­sive menus with drop­downs and prefer­able instead just use sim­ple text links to go from page to page.
5. Be pre­pared for peo­ple to type in the wrong address, users who hack your URLs to find pages and help peo­ple to redi­rect where they need to go. I think it’d be a good idea to sub­sti­tute your nor­mal 404 error page with a sitemap, but I usu­ally don’t build sitemaps any­way. There are plu­g­ins in Word­Press that will han­dle this for you.
6. Write good prose on your blog. Don’t write junk or sell peo­ple or cre­ate fake text for index­ing or to trick Google.
7. Use com­mon sense with anchor text and, best of all, try to get oth­ers to link your web­site with anchor text. Ensure that they use appro­pri­ate key­words in the link to your site.
8. Use head­ing tags to orga­nize your prose into an out­line struc­ture. Don’t mix up your head­ing struc­ture tags (I can’t list them here because it messes up my post). Believe it or not, Google uses these quite a bit to index your site and make it rel­e­vant for paid and unpaid search.
9. Use the tag com­po­nent for your images. Also use real names for pic­ture names; don’t use pic1.jpg for instance. This helps with image search. Store your images in the same directory.
10. Use a robots.txt file. This helps to keep Google from index­ing cer­tain things on your site. Let’s say that you sell a PDF file from your site and you don’t want Google to dis­cover it and put it in their index. This file will pre­vent that.

Among these tips were to also use Google’s tools such as Google Ana­lyt­ics and their web­mas­ter tools, which you should do as well.

Google also man­ages to keep track of who links to you and who you link to. Build­ing an online rep­u­ta­tion is prob­a­bly the one fac­tor that will get you noticed on search, so try to build some links with others…