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’t tell you any secrets that’ll automatically rank your site first for queries in Google (sorry!), following the best practices outlined below will make it easier for search engines to both crawl and index your content. Search engine optimization is often about making small modifications to parts of your website. When viewed individually, these changes might seem like incremental improvements, 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 webpage, but you may not be making the most
out of them.
Search engine optimization affects only organic search results, not paid or “sponsored” results, such as Google AdWords Google’s Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide, Version 1.1, published 13 November 2008
Even though this guide’s title contains the words “search engine”, 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 is about putting your site’s best foot forward when it comes to visibility in search engines.
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 to illustrate 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, ~250 pages
Your site may be smaller or larger than this and offer vastly different content, but the optimization topics we discussed below should apply to sites of all sizes and types.
We hope our guide gives you some fresh ideas on how to improve your website, and we’d love to hear your questions, feedback, and success stories in the Google Webmaster Help Group.
Create unique, accurate page titles A title tag tells both users and search engines what the topic of a particular page is. The <title> tag
should be placed within the <head> tag of the HTML document. Ideally, you should create a unique title for each page on your site.
The title of the homepage for our baseball card site, which lists the business name and three main focus areas Google’s Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide, Version 1.1, published 13 November 2008
If your document appears in a search results page, the contents of the title tag will usually appear in
the first line of the results (If you’re unfamiliar with the different parts of a Google search result, you might want to check out the anatomy of a search result video by Google engineer Matt Cutts, and this helpful diagram of a Google search results page.) Words in the title are bolded if they appear in the
user’s search query. This can help users recognize if the page is likely to be relevant to their search.
The title for your homepage can list the name of your website/business and could include other bits of important information like the physical location of the business or maybe a few of its main focuses or offerings.
A user performs the query [baseball cards] Our homepage shows up as a result, with the title listed on the first line (notice that the query terms the user searched for appear in bold) If the user clicks the result and visits the page, the page’s title will appear at the top of the
browser
Titles for deeper pages on your site should accurately describe the focus of that particular page and
also might include your site or business name.
A user performs the query [rarest baseball cards]
Google’s Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide, Version 1.1, published 13 November 2008
A relevant, deeper page (its title is unique to the content of the page) on our site appears as a
result
Good practices for page title tags
• Accurately describe the page’s content – Choose a title that effectively communicates the
topic of the page’s content.
Avoid:
• choosing a title that has no relation to the content on the page
• using default or vague titles like “Untitled” or “New Page 1″
• Create unique title tags for each page – Each of your pages should ideally have a unique
title tag, which helps Google know how the page is distinct from the others on your site.
Avoid:
• using a single title tag across all of your site’s pages or a large group of pages
• Use brief, but descriptive titles – Titles can be both short and informative. If the title is too
long, Google will show only a portion of it in the search result.
Avoid:
• using extremely lengthy titles that are unhelpful to users
• stuffing unneeded keywords in your title tags
Make use of the “description” meta tag A page’s description meta tag gives Google and other search engines a summary of what the page is about. Whereas a page’s title may be a few words or a phrase, a page’s description meta tag might be a sentence or two or a short paragraph. Google Webmaster Tools provides a handy content analysis section that’ll tell you about any description meta tags that are either too short, long, or duplicated too many times (the same information is also shown for <title> tags). Like the <title> tag,
the description meta tag is placed within the <head> tag of your HTML document.
Google’s Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide, Version 1.1, published 13 November 2008 The beginning of the description meta tag for our homepage, which gives a brief overview of the site’s offerings Description meta tags are important because Google might use them as snippets for your pages.
Note that we say “might” because Google may choose to use a relevant section of your page’s visible text if it does a good job of matching up with a user’s query. Alternatively, Google might use your site’s description in the Open Directory Project if your site is listed there (learn how to prevent search
engines from displaying ODP data). Adding description meta tags to each of your pages is always a good practice in case Google cannot find a good selection of text to use in the snippet. The Webmaster Central Blog has an informative post on improving snippets with better description meta
tags. Snippets appear under a page’s title and above a page’s URL in a search result. A user performs the query [baseball cards] Our homepage appears as a result, with part of its description meta tag used as the snippet Words in the snippet are bolded when they appear in the user’s query. This gives the user clues about whether the content on the page matches with what he or she is looking for. Below is another example, this time showing a snippet from a description meta tag on a deeper page (which ideally has its own unique description meta tag) containing an article.
Google’s Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide, Version 1.1, published 13 November 2008 A user performs the query [rarest baseball cards]
One of our deeper pages, with its unique description meta tag used as the snippet, appears as a result Good practices for description meta tags
• Accurately summarize the page’s content – Write a description that would both inform and interest users if they saw your description meta tag as a snippet in a search result.
Avoid:
• writing a description meta tag that has no relation to the content on the page
• using generic descriptions like “This is a webpage” or “Page about baseball
cards”
• filling the description with only keywords
• copy and pasting the entire content of the document into the description meta
tag
• Use unique descriptions for each page – Having a different description meta tag for each
page helps both users and Google, especially in searches where users may bring up
multiple pages on your domain (e.g. searches using the site: operator). If your site has
thousands or even millions of pages, hand-crafting description meta tags probably isn’t
feasible. In this case, you could automatically generate description meta tags based on
each page’s content.
Avoid:
• using a single description meta tag across all of your site’s pages or a large
group of pages
Improve the structure of your URLs Creating descriptive categories and filenames for the documents on your website can not only help you keep your site better organized, but it could also lead to better crawling of your documents by Google’s Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide, Version 1.1, published 13 November 2008 search engines. Also, it can create easier, “friendlier” URLs for those that want to link to your content.
Visitors may be intimidated by extremely long and cryptic URLs that contain few recognizable words. A URL to a page on our baseball card site that a user might have a hard time with URLs like these can be confusing and unfriendly. Users would have a hard time reciting the URL from memory or creating a link to it. Also, users may believe that a portion of the URL is unnecessary,
especially if the URL shows many unrecognizable parameters. They might leave off a part, breaking the link. Some users might link to your page using the URL of that page as the anchor text. If your URL contains relevant words, this provides users and search engines with more information about the
page than an ID or oddly named parameter would. The highlighted words above could inform a user or search engine what the target page is about before following the link Lastly, remember that the URL to a document is displayed as part of a search result in Google, below the document’s title and snippet. Like the title and snippet, words in the URL on the search result
appear in bold if they appear in the user’s query.
A user performs the query [baseball cards] Our homepage appears as a result, with the URL listed under the title and snippet Google’s Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide, Version 1.1, published 13 November 2008
Below is another example showing a URL on our domain for a page containing an article about the rarest baseball cards. The words in the URL might appeal to a search user more than an ID number like “www.brandonsbaseballcards.com/article/102125/” would.
A user performs the query [rarest baseball cards] A deeper page, with a URL that reflects the type of content found on it, appears as a result Google is good at crawling all types of URL structures, even if they’re quite complex, but spending the time to make your URLs as simple as possible for both users and search engines can help. Some webmasters try to achieve this by rewriting their dynamic URLs to static ones; while Google is fine with this, we’d like to note that this is an advanced procedure and if done incorrectly, could cause
crawling issues with your site. To learn even more about good URL structure, we recommend this Webmaster Help Center page on creating Google-friendly URLs. Good practices for URL structure
• Use words in URLs – URLs with words that are relevant to your site’s content and structure are friendlier for visitors navigating your site. Visitors remember them better and might be more willing to link to them.
Avoid:
• using lengthy URLs with unnecessary parameters and session IDs
• choosing generic page names like “page1.html”
• using excessive keywords like “baseball-cards-baseball-cards-baseballcards.
htm”
• Create a simple directory structure – Use a directory structure that organizes your content
well and is easy for visitors to know where they’re at on your site. Try using your directory
structure to indicate the type of content found at that URL.
Avoid:
• having deep nesting of subdirectories like “…/dir1/dir2/dir3/dir4/dir5/dir6/
page.html”
• using directory names that have no relation to the content in them
Google’s Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide, Version 1.1, published 13 November 2008
• Provide one version of a URL to reach a document – To prevent users from linking to one
version of a URL and others linking to a different version (this could split the reputation of
that content between the URLs), focus on using and referring to one URL in the structure
and internal linking of your pages. If you do find that people are accessing the same content
through multiple URLs, setting up a 301 redirect from non-preferred URLs to the dominant
URL is a good solution for this.
Avoid:
• having pages from subdomains and the root directory (e.g. “domain.com/
page.htm” and “sub.domain.com/page.htm”) access the same content
• mixing www. and non-www. versions of URLs in your internal linking structure
• using odd capitalization of URLs (many users expect lower-case URLs and
remember them better)
Make your site easier to navigate The navigation of a website is important in helping visitors quickly find the content they want. It can also help search engines understand what content the webmaster thinks is important. Although
Google’s search results are provided at a page level, Google also likes to have a sense of what role a page plays in the bigger picture of the site.
All sites have a home or “root” page, which is usually the most frequented page on the site and the starting place of navigation for many visitors. Unless your site has only a handful of pages, you should think about how visitors will go from a general page (your root page) to a page containing more
specific content. Do you have enough pages around a specific topic area that it would make sense to create a page describing these related pages (e.g. root page -> related topic listing -> specific topic)?
Do you have hundreds of different products that need to be classified under multiple category and subcategory pages?
The directory structure for our small website on baseball cards Google’s Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide, Version 1.1, published 13 November 2008
A sitemap (lower-case) is a simple page on your site that displays the structure of your website, and usually consists of a hierarchical listing of the pages on your site. Visitors may visit this page if they are having problems finding pages on your site. While search engines will also visit this page, getting
good crawl coverage of the pages on your site, it’s mainly aimed at human visitors.
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