SEO Lessons from Google

Often SEO advice is provided by non-professionals and well qualified as a bad joke, so who better to take your SEO lead from than Google, the masters of the black art, if for no other reason than for the fact that they rule the search engine market with as much as 80% of the search market i the US alone over the last few years.

As I repeatedly tell those who ask, SEO is nothing more than building well-constructed web sites, crossing the Ts and dotting the Is.  It is a checklist of actions that ensures your site is not only well-built and accessible, with useful content for those that visit it, but which contains the correct selection of natural eywords that are relevant to your page, site and business, thus drawing in prospective clients or interested parties.

Google’s Webmaster Help

To this end Google provides useful information to webmasters wishing to further brush up their site code and its usefulness. In their Webmaster Help section there is a plethora of information to read up on, and help both guide you through the SEO process, as well as to help any novice better understand how exactly Google works.

Most useful in the entire equation is a PDF (download) produced by Google that highlights all areas of a webmaster’s role that can be used to improve search engine ranking.  The document covers such topics as:

• Creating unique and accurate page titles.
• Making use of the description meta tag.
• Improving structure of your urls,
• Building easy to navigate sites,
• Creating quality content and services,
• Writing better anchor text,
• Using head tags properly,
• Optimal use of images,
• Making effective use of robots.txt,
• How to promote your site properly,
• And last, but not least, how to make use of free webmaster tools and analytics.

Rounding off everything at they end, they even provide links to tips on how to find and hire a decent SEO professional, if yo do not wish to go it alone on titivating the code on your website.

A Roundup & Other SEO Thoughts

The Google, despite not taking a leaf from their own book, and providing a decent document map or table of contents, is exceedingly useful and provides not only a guide but also clear visual examples on how any work you do will benefit both Google and your web site in the search results that they return for potential site visitors.

Beyond all of this great advice on SEO you also need to go about the task of finding useful and reliable keywords that will drive traffic to your site. You need to think about the competition you face with the types of words and phrases you choose, and to try and help yourself by reaching higher with keyphrases that return a lesser number of results so that you can get to the number one position more easily.  Finding the right kinds of keyphrases doesn’t require expense, or costly software, but rather requires imagination and such use of tools as Google’s very own Insight and Keyword Tools.

Conclusion: A Simple Task

SEO needn’t be timely or arduous, but rather needs thought, consideration and effort, that few people, for some reason are willing to put in, notwithstanding the use fo such tools as iWeb which seem to fly in the face of even the most basic SEO best practices. If you spend even just a few minutes thinking about how you want to integrate the process of SEO into the building of your website from the outset, it can make the task a lot more seamless and a lot less hassle throughout the build.

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