SEO, or Search Engine Optimization is the art of getting better search results for you or for your clients, usually for Google but we shouldn't forget about Yahoo or Bing.
For this, the guys at Google put up a Starter Guide in SEO, that includes 32 easy to read pages with lots of important basic stuff about how to get started.
They've put there a lot of useful recommendations but also the things we need to avoid so that we can reach our SEO objectives.
It is structured into 6 sections:
1. SEO Basics
2. Improving Site
3. Structure Optimizing Content
4. Dealing with Crawlers
5. SEO for Mobile Phones
6. Promotions and Analysis
What I've found to be most interesting in this report:
- even though it's not really easy to apply, it's important to write unique titles and descriptions for your content
- people can search and interact with websites in weird ways, that you might not think about; they might take out a part of a link and expect to find something there and we should be prepared for that (with custom 404 pages and with a link structure that can support this kind of URL cuts)
- it's not just me that finds it hard to remember and use links with a lot of numbers and characters that I don't understand
- Google also has an Image Sitemap, not just the usual XML Sitemap used for better crawling
It was a good read and I recommend it to all people that want to understand what they need to do to make their website rank higher in Google!
