Google and SEO: From the Horse’s Mouth

A while back I wrote an article on How to Stay on Google’s Good Side. That post addressed guidelines for your website to help placement in Google.

Next, how about some SEO-specific information?

There isn’t much of a big secret as to how SEO works. Ok, there is a bit: most search engines won’t give you details as to how to be top ranked. Search engines guard how this works very closely. But there are some things which are understood to be fairly common factors in search engine placement.

The biggest issue for SEO involves the time factor. Most business owners don’t have time to deal with it, so they hire a professional. If you want to do it yourself or at least understand a little about the process, Google published their own SEO Starter Guide, which you can find at Google here.

Spend some time reading that over for information on what to do to your website to make it more Google-friendly. And while this is a Google-specific document, much of this applies to other search engines too. Some of it is just good usability practice, such as creating good page titles, having a good URL structure, and having a website that is easy to navigate.

As always, take your website information straight from the source. And when you hire someone to handle your SEO, or a web designer to create your site, you’ve got an idea of at least where they should be starting. This will certainly help you make much more informed decisions on the process.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 9th, 2009 at 5:51 am and is filed under SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.