Sometimes when you ask for something and you get it, sometimes you regret asking so hard. And right now, many SEOs are doing just that with Google’s release of their Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide.

The guide is 22 pages and here is my take on the guide:

Notable Quotes:

“Search Engine Optimization is about putting your site’s best foot forward when it comes to visibility in search engines.” – Page 2

Title Tag

Home Page Title Tag: Brandon’s Baseball Cards – Buy Cards, Baseball News, Card Prices which lists the business name and three main focus areas.

Sub Page Title Tag: Top Ten Rarest Baseball Cards – Brandon’s Baseball Cards

Good: Accurately describe the page’s content
Create Unique Titles for Each Page
Brief and Descriptive Titles

Bad: Using non-related text or “Untitled” or “New Page 1″
Duplicate Titles
Unhelpful Titles
Keyword Stuffing

Description Tag

Meta Description is important because Google might use them as snippets for your pages.

Good: Accurately describe the page’s content
Use unique descriptions for each page

Bad: Information with no relation to the page’s content
“This web page” or “Page is about baseball cards”
Only filling in keywords
Copying and Pasting the entire content into the tag

Best Practices for URL Structure

Good: Use words in URLs

Bad: Lengthy URLs with Session IDs
Using Generic Page Names like page1.html
Using Excessive Keywords like baseball-cards-baseball-cards-baseball-cards.html

Create a Simple Directory Structure

Avoid: Nesting subdirectories: “../dir1/dir2/dir2/dir4/dir5/dir6/page.html”
Using directory names that have no relation to the content

Provide one version of a URL to reach a document

Avoid: mixing non-www and www versions in your internal linking structure
Using odd capitalization in your URLs

Site Navigation

Create a naturally flowing hierachy

Don’t link every page of your site to every other page
Don’t make your users click 20 times to get to deep content

Use mostly text for navigation

Avoid: Navigation dependent solely on drop down menus, images or animations.

Use Bread-Crumb Navigation

404-Error Pages
- make sure you have them set up on your server
- don’t let search engines index them
- don’t provide a vague message like “Not Found” – use a custom 404 page
- don’t use a design that is not consistent with the rest of your site

If you haven’t seen it yet, check out this service from Google which allows you to have both video and voice chat through Gmail.