Google Rolls Out SEO Starter Guide
Google recently announced on their webmasters blog, a 22 page pdf of best practices for search engine optimization. Now since I am an SEO, I closely examined the information, and really do recommend anyone who would like to perform their own SEO, take a look this article, because it is what I teach, and practice to the “T.” I do however take issue with #6, I’ll talk about that below the list.
What topics are covered in Google’s Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide?
- Difference between organic, and paid traffic.
- Creating unique, accurate page titles.
- Good practices for page title tags.
- Make use of the “description” meta tag.
- Good practices for description meta tags.
- Improve the structure of your URLs.
- Good practices for URL structure.
- Make your site easier to navigate.
- Good practices for site navigation.
- Offer quality content and services.
- Good practices for content.
- Write better anchor text.
- Use heading tags appropriately (H1 tags etc.)
- Good practices for heading tags.
- Optimize your use of images.
- Good practices for images.
- Make effective use of robots.txt file.
- Be aware of rel=”nofollow” for links.
- Good practices for promoting your website.
- Make use of free webmaster tools.
- Take advantage of web analytics services.
Go to their blog and download it.
Oh yeah, regarding #6….Well, awhile back Google created a fire storm in the SEO world with a post on Dynamic URLS vs. Static URLS. The above list is obviously straight from Google, and you really should follow the advice, but it seems to me that Google is flip flopping on this point…again….(#6)
In the above post, they recommend having search engine “friendly” urls with keywords in them, which is true, and has been for some time since it helps in a couple of ways, search engines love keyword rich urls, secondly the url looks much better, thus increases CTR (Click thru rate).
For example, which of the links would you feel safer clicking on, or sharing:
(A) www.green.com/north-carolina.html
or:
(B) www.green.com/language=en/answer=3/sid=98971298178906/query=URL
Obviously you would choose (A), why? It is clean, and reflects a better user experience since it has keywords you perhaps typed in query for. Google is all about user experience, so I guess I still am perplexed at the disparity of this topic. The only way to achieve “good url structure” as they recommend, is to do a mod-rewrite? (Dynamic site) I am going to stick to my guns, as most notable SEO’s are doing, and continue to teach better url structure like they suggest in this article…
Do any of you agree or disagree?
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