Recommendation Guide Search Engine Optimization (SEO) From Google
Who is this guide for? if you own, manage, monetize, or promote online content via Google Search, this guide is meant for you. You might be the owner of a growing and thriving business, the webmaster of a dozen site the SEO specialist in a web agency or a DIY SEO ninja passionate about the mechanics of search, this guide is meant for you. If you're interested in having a complete overview of the basics of SEO according to our best practices, you are indeed in the right place. This guide won't provide any secrets that'll automatically rank your site first in Google (sorry!), but following the best practices outlined bellow will hopefully make it easier for search engines to crawl, index and understand your content. Search engine optimization (SEO) 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 result. You're likely already familiar with many of the topics in this guide, because they're essential ingredients for any web page, but you may not be making the most out of them. You should build a website to benefit your users and any optimization should be geared toward making the user experience better. One of those users is s search engine, which helps other users discover your content. Search Engine Optimization is about helping search engines understand and present content. Your site may be smaller or larger than our example site and offer vastly different content, but the optimization topics we discuss below should apply to sites of all size 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. Getting started Glossary here's a short glossary of important terms used in this guide. index - Google stores all web pages that it knows about in its index. The index entry for each page describes the content and location (URL) of that page. to index is when Google fetches a page, read it, and adds it to the index: google indexed several pages on my site today. Crawl - The process of looking for new or updated web pages. Google discovers URLs by following links, by reading sitemaps and by many other means. Google crawls the web looking for new pages, then indexes them (when appropriate). Crawler - Automated software that crawls (fetches) pages from the web and indexes them. Googlebot - The generic name of Google's crawler. Googlebot crawls the web constantly. SEO - search engine optimization the process of making your site better for search engines. also the job title of a person who does this for a living. we just hired a new SEO to improve our presence on the web. Are you on Google? Determine whether your site is in Google's index - Do a site: search for your site's URL. if you see results, you're in the index. if your site isn't in Google - although Google crawls billions of pages, it's inevitable that some site will be missed when our crawlers miss a site, it's frequently for one of the following reasons: The site isn't well connected from other sites on the web You've just launched a new site and Google hasn't had time to crawl it yet The design of the site makes it difficult for Google to crawl its content effectively Google received an error when trying to crawl your site your policy blocks Google from crawling the site How do l get my site on Google? Inclusion in Google's search result is free and easy, you don't even need to submit your site to Google. Google is a fully automated search engine that uses web crawlers to explore web constantly, looking for sites to add to our index. In fact the vast majority of sites listed in our results aren't manually submitted for inclusion, but found and added automatically when we crawl the web. Google search console provides tools to help you submit your content to Google and monitor how you're doing in Google Search. if you want, search console can event send you alerts on critical issues that Google encounters with your site. Sign up for search console. Here are a few basic questions to ask yourself about your website when you get started Is my website showing up on Google? Do I serve hight-quality content to users? Is my local business showing up on Google? Is my content fast and easy to access on all devices? Is my website secure? you can find additional getting started information on http://g.o/webmasters The rest of this document provides guidance on how to improve your site search engines, organized by topic. You can download a short, printable checklist of tips from http://g.co/WebmasterChecklist Do you need an SEO expert? An SEO("search engine optimization") expert is someone trained to improve your visibility on search engines. by following this guide, you should learn enough to be well on your way to an optimized site. In addition to that, you may want to consider hiring an SEO professional that can help you audit your pages. Deciding to hire an SEO is a big decision that can potentially improve your site and save and save time. Make sure to research to potential advantages of hiring an SEO, as well as the damage that an irresponsible SEO can do to your site. Many SEOs and other agencies and consultants provide useful services for website owners, including: Review of your site content or structure Technical advice on website development: for example, hosting, redirects, error pages, use of JavaScript Content development Management of online business development campaigns Keyword research SEO training Expertise in specific markets and geographies Before beginning your search for an SEO, it's a great idea to become an educated consumer and get familiar with how search engines work. we recommended going through the entirety of this guide and specifically these resource: How Google crawls, indexes and serves the web Google Webmaster Guidelines How to hire an SEO If you're thinking about hiring an SEO, the earlier the better. A great time to hire is when you're considering a site design, or planning to launch a new site. That way, you and your SEO can ensure that your site is designed to be search engine-friendly from the bottom up, However, a good SEO can also help improve an existing site. Help Google find your content The first step to getting your site on Google is to be sure that Google can find it. The best way to do that is to submit a sitemap. A sitemap is a file on your site that tells search engines about new or changed pages on your site. Google also finds pages through links from other pages. See Promote your site later is this document to learn how to encourage people to discover your site. Tell Google which pages shouldn't be crawled Best Practices For non-sensitive information, block unwanted crawling by using robots.txt A "robots.txt" file tells search engines whether they can access and therefore crawl parts of your site. This file, which must be named "robots.txt", is placed in the root directory of your site. it is possible that pages blocked by robots.txt can still be crawled so for sensitive page you should use a more secure method. You may not want certain pages of your site crawled because they might not be useful to users if found in a search engine's search result. if you do want to prevent search engines from crawling your pages, Google Search Console has a friendly robots.txt generator to help you create this file. Note that if your site uses subdomains and you wish to have certain pages not crawled on a particular subdomain, you'll have to create a separate robots.txt file for that subdomain. Avoid: Don't let your internal search result pages be crawled by Google. User dislike clicking a search engine result only to land on another search result page on your site. Allowing URLs created as a result of proxy services to be crawled For sensitive information, use more secure methods Robots.txt is not an appropriate or effective way of blocking sensitive or confidential material. it only instructs well-behaved crawlers that the pages are not for them, but it does not prevent your server from delivering those pages to a browser that requests them. One reason is that search engines could still reference the URLs you block (showing just the URL, no title snippet) if there happen to be links. to those URLs somewhere on the internet (like referrer logs). Also non-compliant or rogue search engines that don't acknowledge the robots exclusion standard could disobey the instructions of your robots.txt. Finally, a curious user could examine the directories or subdirectories in your robots.txt file and guess the URL of the content that you don't want seen. In these cases, use the noindex tag if you just want the page not to appear in Google, but don't mind if any user with a link can reach the page. For real security, thought, you should use proper authorization methods, like requiring a user password, or talking the page off your site entirely. Help Google (and users) understand your content Let Google see your page the same way a suer does when Googlebot crawls a page, it should see the page the same way an average user does. For optimal rendering and indexing, always allow Googlebot access to the JavaScript, CSS, and image files used by your website. if Your site's robots.txt file disallows crawling of these assets, it directly harms how well our algorithms render and index your content. This can result in suboptimal rankings. Recommended action: 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> element of the HTML document. you should create a unique title for each page on your site. Create good titles and snippets in search result if your document appears in a search result page, the contents of the title tag may appear in the first line of the result ( 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. 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. Best Practices Accurately describe the page's content Choose a title that reads naturally and 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 titles for each page Each page on your site should ideally have a unique title, which helps Google know how the page is distinct from the other on your site. if your site uses separate mobile pages, remember to use good titles on the mobile versions too. Avoid: Using extremely lengthy titles that are unhelpful to users. Stuffing unneeded keywords in your title tags. Use the "description" meta tag A page's description meta tag gives Google and other search engines a summary of what the page is about. A page's title may be a few words or a phrase, whereas a page's description meta tag might be a sentence or two or event a short paragraph. Like the <title> tag, the description meta tag is placed with the <head> element of your HTML document. What are the merits of description meta tags? 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. 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 informative posts on improving snippets with better description meta tags and better snippets for your users, we also have a handy help Center article on how to create good titles and snippets. Best Practices Accurately summarize the page 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. While there's minimal or maximal length for the text in a description meta tag, we recommend making sure that it's long enough to be fully shown in search (note that users may see different sized snippets depending on how and where they search), and contains all the relevant information users would need to determine whether the page will be useful and relevant to them. Avoid: Writing a description meta tag that has no relation to the content on the page. Using generic descriptions like "This is a web page" or "page about baseball cards". Filling the description with only keywords. Copying and pasting the entire content of the document into the description meta tag. Use unique description for each page Have 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 (for example, 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 single description meta tag across all of your site's pages or a large group of pages. Use heading tags to emphasize important text Use meaningful heading to indicate important topics, and help create a hierarchical structure for your content, making it easier for users to navigate through your document. Best Practices Imagine you're writing an outline Similar to writing an outline for a large paper, put some thought into what the main points and sub points of the content on the page will be and decide where to use heading tags appropriately. Avoid: Placing text in heading tags that wouldn't be helpful in defining the structure of the page Using heading tags where other tags like <em> and <strong> may be more appropriate. Erratically moving from one heading tag size to another. Use headings sparingly across the page Use heading tags where it makes sense. to many heading tags on a pages can make it hard for users to scan the content and determine where one topic ends and another begins. Avoid: Excessive use of heading tags on a page. Very long heading Using heading tags only for styling text and not presenting structure. Add structured data markup Structured data is code that you can add to your site's pages to describe your content to search engines, so they can better understand what's on your pages. Search engines can use this understanding to display your content in useful(and eye-catching) ways in search result. That in turn can help you attract just the right kind of costumer for your business. For example, if you've got an online store and mark up an individual product page, this helps us understand that the page features a bike, its price, and customer reviews. we may display that information in the snippet for search results for relevant queries. we call these "rich result". In additional to using structured data markup for rich result, we may use it to serve relevant result in other formats. For instance, if you've got a brick-and-mortar store, marking up the opening hours allows your potential customers to find you exactly when they need, and inform them if your store is open/closed at the time of searching. you can mark up many business-relevant entities: Products you're selling Business location Videos about your products or business Opening hours Event listings Recipes Your company logo, and many more we recommend that you use structured data with any of the supported notations markup to describe your content. You can add the markup to the HTML code to your pages, or use tools like Data Highlighter and markup helper. Appendix: Link URLs used in this paper The following URLs are referenced in this paper: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/7451184
