I was browsing my “personalized newspaper” this morning (a.k.a Google Reader) and came across a post on the Google Webmaster blog which offered a “Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide” for download.
Now I will admit, that I read my fair share of content about SEO, and I find that the majority of it is just the same old information reformatted as “new content”. But when THE search engine decides to publish a starter guide, I sit up and take notice.
What struck me most about this document is that SEO is more about common sense techniques to make your site(s) more functional than anything else. There are folks out there who want you to believe that SEO is some “dark-art” which only a select few of us understand, papers like this help to dispel that myth .
If you’re a small business owner, I would highly recommend that you download a copy of this paper today, read it, and then read it again. It will give you more than enough information to make some basic changes to your website that will result in better user interaction with your site, and allow all the search engines out there to better crawl your site (which, will hopefully result in better rankings!)
I made a fair amount of notes about points that really stuck out while I was reading the paper and wanted to provide some of my own insights for my readers. This post got a little long, so I am going to break it into two posts!
I am going to start with two things that I think are the most important factors to consider when decided to make any changes to your site.
“…base your optimization decisions first and foremost on what’s best for the visitors of your site.”
Seems to be pretty much common sense doesn’t it? If your goal is to simply rank #1 on <insert search engine here> than it may be more difficult than you think to stay focused on writing good quality content for people rather than search engines. Come up with some high-quality goals (I like using the SMART principle) to help you stay on track.
“Creating compelling and useful content will likely influence your website more than any of the other factors discussed here.”
Print this off, and use it as a bookmark in all your SEO books Maybe even setup a reminder in whatever email software you use to pop up that message a couple of times each day. It’s simple, yet great advice. Optimizing your site(s) can get very addictive, but if you keep the idea of creating great, useful content as your number one priority you’re going to be OK in the long-run.
“…making small modifications to parts of your website.”
Don’t go crazy after reading this paper and rip your entire website apart. Pick a section, make some minor changes and measure the effects. If you don’t already had Google Analytics installed do it today, and wait 4-6 weeks (maybe even 
before you even start thinking about changes. Your goal here is to make changes only when you’re able to measure their results.
“…descriptive categories and filenames for the documents on your website…”
Pretty simple stuff here, basically, you want to make it as easy as possible for the search engines to crawl your content. If you have files named 120-xyz.html you’re not helping Google or your customers know what the heck it is they are looking at. Use some common sense here.
“…it could also lead to better crawling of your documents…”
This is a follow-up quote from the point above. Search engines like things that make sense!
A nice side benefit of a clean directory structure and filenames that make sense is that when someone out there links to your high-quality content you get some added benefits of possible search terms showing up in the link text!
That’s it for today, check back tomorrow for the remaining part of the post!
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