When Youre Able to Find Everything but What Youre Looking for

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Starter Guide

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 possessor of a growing and thriving business, the website owner of a dozen sites, the SEO specialist in a web bureau or a DIY SEO expert passionate nearly the mechanics of Search: this guide is meant for yous. 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 whatsoever secrets that'll automatically rank your site first in Google (sorry!), simply post-obit the best practices volition hopefully brand it easier for search engines to crawl, index, and understand your content.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is often most making pocket-sized modifications to parts of your website. When viewed individually, these changes might seem similar incremental improvements, simply when combined with other optimizations, they could have a noticeable touch on on your site'southward user feel and operation in organic search results. Yous're probable 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 do good your users, and gear whatsoever optimization toward making the user experience better. Ane of those users is a search engine, which helps other users discover your content. SEO is about helping search engines understand and nowadays content. Your site may be smaller or larger than our example site and offer vastly dissimilar content, but the optimization topics in this guide applies to sites of all sizes and types. We hope our guide gives you some fresh ideas on how to ameliorate your website, and we'd love to hear your questions, feedback, and success stories in the Google Search Primal Help Community.

Getting started

Are you on Google?

Determine whether your site is in Google'south index

Do a site: search for your site's abode URL. If you run across results, you lot're in the index. For example, a search for site:wikipedia.org returns these results.

If your site isn't in Google

Although Google crawls billions of pages, it'south inevitable that some sites will be missed. When our crawlers miss a site, it'southward 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 information technology yet
• The blueprint of the site makes it difficult for Google to clamber its content effectively
• Google received an mistake when trying to crawl your site
• Your policy blocks Google from crawling the site

How do I get my site on Google?

Google is a fully automated search engine that uses web crawlers to explore the web constantly, looking for sites to add to our index; you usually don't fifty-fifty need to do annihilation except post your site on the web. 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 spider web. Learn how Google discovers, crawls, and serves web pages.

We offer webmaster guidelines for building a Google-friendly website. While there's no guarantee that our crawlers will find a particular site, post-obit these guidelines can help brand your site appear in our search results.

Google Search Console provides tools to help you submit your content to Google and monitor how yous're doing in Google Search. If you want, Search Panel can even send you alerts on critical problems that Google encounters with your site. Sign upwardly for Search Console.

Here are a few basic questions to inquire yourself well-nigh your website when you lot get started.

• Is my website showing upwardly on Google?
• Practice I serve high-quality content to users?
• Is my local business showing up on Google?
• Is my content fast and easy to admission on all devices?
• Is my website secure?

You lot can find boosted getting started information on https://g.co/webmasters

The rest of this document provides guidance on how to improve your site for search engines, organized by topic. Yous tin can too download a brusque checklist in PDF format.

Help Google find your content

The kickoff footstep to getting your site on Google is to be sure that Google can find it. The best manner to do that is to submit a sitemap. A sitemap is a file on your site that tells search engines nearly new or inverse pages on your site. Learn more most how to build and submit a sitemap.

Google too finds pages through links from other pages. Larn how to encourage people to discover your site by Promoting your site.

Tell Google which pages you don't want crawled

For not-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 pages, use a more secure method.

# brandonsbaseballcards.com/robots.txt # Tell Google not to clamber any URLs in the shopping cart or images in the icons folder, # because they won't be useful in Google Search results. User-amanuensis: googlebot Disallow: /checkout/ Disallow: /icons/

You may not want certain pages of your site crawled considering they might not be useful to users if found in a search engine's search results. If you do want to prevent search engines from crawling your pages, Google Search Panel has a friendly robots.txt generator to help you create this file. Note that if your site uses subdomains and you wish to have sure pages not crawled on a particular subdomain, y'all'll have to create a separate robots.txt file for that subdomain. For more information on robots.txt, nosotros advise this guide on using robots.txt files.

Read about several other means to forestall content from appearing in search results.

Avoid:

• Letting your internal search result pages be crawled by Google. Users dislike clicking a search engine upshot merely to state on another search outcome page on your site.
• Allowing URLs created equally a result of proxy services to be crawled.

For sensitive information, use more secure methods

A robots.txt file is not an advisable or effective way of blocking sensitive or confidential material. It simply instructs well-behaved crawlers that the pages are not for them, just information technology does not prevent your server from delivering those pages to a browser that requests them. One reason is that search engines could nonetheless reference the URLs you cake (showing just the URL, no title link or snippet) if there happen to be links to those URLs somewhere on the Internet (like referrer logs). As well, not-compliant or rogue search engines that don't admit 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 judge the URL of the content that y'all don't desire seen.

In these cases, use the noindex tag if yous just want the folio not to appear in Google, but don't listen if whatever user with a link can achieve the folio. For existent security, utilize proper potency methods, like requiring a user password, or taking the page off your site entirely.

Assistance Google (and users) understand your content

Let Google see your page the same style a user does

When Googlebot crawls a folio, it should see the page the same style an average user does. For optimal rendering and indexing, always allow Googlebot access to the JavaScript, CSS, and image files used past your website. If your site's robots.txt file disallows crawling of these assets, it direct harms how well our algorithms render and index your content. This can effect in suboptimal rankings.

Recommended action : Utilise the URL Inspection tool. It will allow you to meet exactly how Googlebot sees and renders your content, and it volition help yous identify and fix a number of indexing issues on your site.

Create unique, accurate folio titles

A <championship> element tells both users and search engines what the topic of a particular page is. Place the <title> element within the <head> element of the HTML document, and create unique title text for each page on your site.

<html> <head>          <title>Brandon's Baseball Cards - Buy Cards, Baseball News, Card Prices</title>          <meta name="description" content="Brandon's Baseball game Cards provides a large choice of     vintage and modern baseball cards for sale.     Nosotros also offer daily baseball news and events."> </head> <body> ...

Control your title links and snippets in search results

If your document appears in a search results folio, the contents of the <title> element may appear as the championship link for the search result (if y'all're unfamiliar with the different parts of a Google Search outcome, you might want to check out the anatomy of a search result video).

The <title> element for your homepage tin list the proper noun of your website or 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.

Accurately depict the folio'southward content

Choose title text that reads naturally and finer communicates the topic of the page'southward content.

Avert:

• Using text in the <title> element that has no relation to the content on the folio.
• Using default or vague text like "Untitled" or "New Page 1".

Create unique <title> elements for each folio

Brand sure each page on your site has unique text in the <title> element, which helps Google know how the page is singled-out from the others on your site. If your site uses split up mobile pages, remember to use descriptive text in the <title> elements on the mobile versions besides.

Avert:

• Using a single title in all <title> elements across your site'southward pages or a large group of pages.

Use cursory, but descriptive <title> elements

<title> elements can be both short and informative. If the text in the <title> element is likewise long or otherwise deemed less relevant, Google may show only a portion of the text in your <title> element, or a title link that's automatically generated in the search result.

Avoid:

• Using extremely lengthy text in <title> elements that are unhelpful to users.
• Stuffing unneeded keywords in your <title> element.

Use the meta description tag

A page'south meta clarification tag gives Google and other search engines a summary of what the page is nigh. A page'south title may be a few words or a phrase, whereas a page'due south meta description tag might exist a judgement or ii or fifty-fifty a short paragraph. Similar the <title> element, the meta description tag is placed inside the <head> element of your HTML document.

<html> <head>     <title>Brandon's Baseball game Cards - Buy Cards, Baseball News, Menu Prices</championship>          <meta proper name="description" content="Brandon's Baseball Cards provides a big choice of vintage and modern baseball cards for sale. We also offer daily baseball news and events.">          </head> <body> ...        

What are the claim of meta description tags?

Meta description tags are important because Google might utilize them as snippets for your pages in Google Search results. Note that we say "might" considering Google may choose to utilise a relevant section of your page'due south visible text if it does a expert job of matching upwardly with a user'due south query. Adding meta description tags to each of your pages is e'er a adept exercise in case Google cannot find a good selection of text to use in the snippet. Larn more well-nigh how to create quality meta descriptions.

Accurately summarize the folio content

Write a description that would both inform and interest users if they saw your meta description tag as a snippet in a search effect. While at that place's no 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 make up one's mind whether the page will be useful and relevant to them.

Avoid:

• Writing a meta description tag that has no relation to the content on the page.
• Using generic descriptions like "This is a web page" or "Page nigh baseball cards".
• Filling the description with only keywords.
• Copying and pasting the entire content of the document into the meta clarification tag.

Use unique descriptions for each folio

Having a dissimilar meta description 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 fifty-fifty millions of pages, hand-crafting meta description tags probably isn't feasible. In this example, you could automatically generate meta description tags based on each page'southward content.

Avoid:

• Using a unmarried meta description tag beyond all of your site'due south pages or a large grouping of pages.

Use heading tags to emphasize important text

Use meaningful headings to indicate important topics, and help create a hierarchical structure for your content, making it easier for users to navigate through your document.

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 volition be and determine where to use heading tags appropriately.

Avoid:

• Placing text in heading tags that wouldn't exist helpful in defining the structure of the page.
• Using heading tags where other tags like <em> and <strong> may exist more advisable.
• Erratically moving from one heading tag size to another.

Use headings sparingly across the page

Use heading tags where information technology makes sense. Too many heading tags on a folio can make information technology hard for users to scan the content and determine where one topic ends and another begins.

Avoid:

• Excessive use of heading tags on a folio.
• Very long headings.
• Using heading tags simply for styling text and not presenting construction.

Add together structured information markup

Structured data is code that yous can add together to your sites' pages to describe your content to search engines, so they can improve understand what's on your pages. Search engines can utilize this understanding to display your content in useful (and middle-communicable) ways in search results. That, in plough, can assist you attract merely the correct kind of customers for your business.

For instance, if you've got an online store and marking up an private production page, this helps u.s. understand that the page features a cycle, its price, and customer reviews. We may display that information in the snippet for search results for relevant queries. We call these rich results.

In improver to using structured data markup for rich results, nosotros may use information technology to serve relevant results in other formats. For instance, if you've got a brick-and-mortar shop, mark upwards the opening hours allows your potential customers to find y'all exactly when they demand you, and inform them if your shop is open/closed at the time of searching.

You can marker up many business-relevant entities:

• Products you're selling
• Business organization location
• Videos nearly your products or business
• Opening hours
• Events listings
• Recipes
• Your company logo, and many more

See a full list of supported content types.

We recommend that you employ structured data with any of the supported notations markup to describe your content. You tin add the markup to the HTML code to your pages, or use tools similar Data Highlighter and Markup Helper.

Check your markup using the Rich Results Examination

One time you've marked up your content, you can use the Google Rich Results test to brand sure that there are no mistakes in the implementation. Y'all tin either enter the URL where the content is, or re-create the actual HTML which includes the markup.

Avoid:

• Using invalid markup.

Use Information Highlighter and Markup Helper

If you desire to give structured markup a try without changing the source code of your site, you tin apply Data Highlighter, which is a tool integrated in Search Panel that supports a subset of content types.

If yous'd like to get the markup code ready to copy and paste to your page, endeavour the Markup Helper.

Avert:

• Changing the source code of your site when you are unsure almost implementing markup.

Keep track of how your marked upward pages are doing

The diverse Rich result reports in Search Console shows you how many pages on your site we've detected with a specific blazon of markup, how many times they appeared in search results, and how many times people clicked on them over the past 90 days. Information technology also shows any errors nosotros've detected.

Avoid:

• Adding markup data which is not visible to users.
• Creating fake reviews or adding irrelevant markups.

Manage your appearance in Google Search results

Correct structured data on your pages besides makes your folio eligible for many special features in Google Search results, including review stars, fancy decorated results, and more. See the gallery of search result types that your page tin be eligible for.

Organize your site hierarchy

Understand how search engines use URLs

Search engines need a unique URL per piece of content to be able to clamber and index that content, and to refer users to information technology. Dissimilar content (for case, different products in a shop) as well as modified content (for case, translations or regional variations) need to employ separate URLs in order to be shown in search appropriately.

URLs are generally split into multiple distinct sections:

protocol://hostname/path/filename?querystring#fragment

For example:

https://www.example.com/RunningShoes/Womens.htm?size=8#info

Google recommends that all websites apply https:// when possible. The hostname is where your website is hosted, usually using the same domain name that you'd apply for email. Google differentiates between the www and non-www version (for example, world wide web.case.com or just example.com). When adding your website to Search Console, nosotros recommend adding both http:// and https:// versions, every bit well every bit the www and non-www versions.

Path, filename, and query string make up one's mind which content from your server is accessed. These three parts are example-sensitive, and then FILE would result in a different URL than file. The hostname and protocol are case-insensitive; upper or lower case wouldn't play a role there.

A fragment (in this instance, #info) mostly identifies which part of the folio the browser scrolls to. Considering the content itself is usually the same regardless of the fragment, search engines commonly ignore whatsoever fragment used.

When referring to the homepage, a trailing slash afterward the hostname is optional since it leads to the same content (https://example.com/ is the same every bit https://example.com). For the path and filename, a trailing slash would be seen equally a different URL (signaling either a file or a directory), for example, https://instance.com/fish is not the same as https://example.com/fish/.

Navigation is important for search engines

The navigation of a website is important in helping visitors quickly find the content they want. It can besides aid search engines understand what content the website possessor thinks is of import. Although Google'south search results are provided at a folio level, Google as well likes to accept a sense of what role a folio plays in the bigger picture of the site.

Programme your navigation based on your homepage

All sites have a home or root folio, which is usually the most frequented page on the site and the starting identify of navigation for many visitors. Unless your site has just a handful of pages, call back most how visitors will go from a full general page (your root page) to a page containing more than specific content. Exercise yous have enough pages around a specific topic surface area that it would make sense to create a page describing these related pages (for case, root folio -> related topic listing -> specific topic)? Exercise you accept hundreds of unlike products that need to be classified nether multiple category and subcategory pages?

A breadcrumb is a row of internal links at the top or bottom of the page that allows visitors to quickly navigate back to a previous section or the root page. Many breadcrumbs take the most general folio (commonly the root page) as the starting time, leftmost link and listing the more specific sections out to the right. We recommend using breadcrumb structured information markup when showing breadcrumbs.

Create a simple navigational page for users

A navigational page is a simple page on your site that displays the structure of your website, and usually consists of a hierarchical listing of the pages on your site. Visitors may visit this page if they are having problems finding pages on your site. While search engines will also visit this folio, getting good crawl coverage of the pages on your site, information technology'south mainly aimed at homo visitors.

Create a naturally flowing hierarchy

Make it as easy as possible for users to get from general content to the more specific content they want on your site. Add together navigation pages when it makes sense and effectively work these into your internal link structure. Brand sure all of the pages on your site are reachable through links, and that they don't require an internal search functionality to be found. Link to related pages, where appropriate, to allow users to detect similar content.

Avoid:

• Creating complex webs of navigation links, for case, linking every page on your site to every other page.
• Going overboard with slicing and dicing your content (and so that it takes twenty clicks to reach from the homepage).

Use text for navigation

Controlling nigh of the navigation from page to page on your site through text links makes it easier for search engines to clamber and understand your site. When using JavaScript to create a page, use a elements with URLs equally href attribute values, and generate all carte items on page-load, instead of waiting for a user interaction.

Avoid:

• Having a navigation based entirely on images, or animations.
• Requiring script or plugin-based effect-handling for navigation.

Create a navigational folio for users, a sitemap for search engines

Include a unproblematic navigational page for your entire site (or the most of import pages, if you take hundreds or thousands) for users. Create an XML sitemap file to ensure that search engines observe the new and updated pages on your site, listing all relevant URLs together with their primary content's last modified dates.

Avoid:

• Letting your navigational page become out of date with cleaved links.
• Creating a navigational page that simply lists pages without organizing them, for example by subject.

Testify useful 404 pages

Users will occasionally come to a page that doesn't exist on your site, either by following a cleaved link or typing in the wrong URL. Having a custom 404 page that kindly guides users back to a working page on your site tin greatly meliorate a user's feel. Consider including a link back to your root page and providing links to popular or related content on your site. You tin utilise Google Search Panel to notice the sources of URLs causing "not plant" errors.

Avoid:

• Allowing your 404 pages to be indexed in search engines (brand certain that your web server is configured to requite a 404 HTTP status code or—in the instance of JavaScript-based sites—include the noindex tag when non-real pages are requested).
• Blocking 404 pages from beingness crawled through the robots.txt file.
• Providing merely a vague message similar "Non found", "404", or no 404 folio at all.
• Using a design for your 404 pages that isn't consistent with the residual of your site.

Simple URLs convey content information

Creating descriptive categories and filenames for the documents on your website not only helps you keep your site amend organized, it can create easier, friendlier URLs for those that want to link to your content. Visitors may be intimidated past extremely long and cryptic URLs that contain few recognizable words.

URLs similar the following can be disruptive and unfriendly:

https://www.brandonsbaseballcards.com/folder1/22447478/x2/14032015.html

If your URL is meaningful, it tin exist more than useful and hands understandable in different contexts:

https://www.brandonsbaseballcards.com/article/ten-rarest-baseball-cards.html

URLs are displayed in search results

Lastly, call back that the URL to a document is usually displayed in some form in a Google Search outcome nigh the certificate championship.

Google is adept at crawling all types of URL structures, even if they're quite complex, but spending the time to make your URLs as elementary every bit possible is a good exercise.

Use words in URLs

URLs with words that are relevant to your site's content and construction are friendlier for visitors navigating your site.

Avoid:

• Using lengthy URLs with unnecessary parameters and session IDs.
• Choosing generic page names similar page1.html.
• Using excessive keywords similar baseball-cards-baseball-cards-baseballcards.html.

Create a unproblematic directory construction

Employ a directory structure that organizes your content well and makes it easy for visitors to know where they're at on your site. Attempt using your directory structure to indicate the type of content plant at that URL.

Avoid:

• Having deep nesting of subdirectories like .../dir1/dir2/dir3/dir4/dir5/dir6/folio.html.
• Using directory names that have no relation to the content in them.

Provide one version of a URL to attain a document

To prevent users from linking to i version of a URL and others linking to a unlike version (this could split the reputation of that content between the URLs), focus on using and referring to one URL in the structure and internal linking of your pages. If y'all do find that people are accessing the aforementioned content through multiple URLs, setting up a 301 redirect from non-preferred URLs to the dominant URL is a expert solution for this. If y'all cannot redirect, you lot may too use the rel="canonical" link element.

Avoid:

• Having pages from subdomains and the root directory access the aforementioned content, for example, domain.com/page.html and sub.domain.com/page.html.

Optimize your content

Make your site interesting and useful

Creating compelling and useful content will likely influence your website more than any of the other factors discussed here. Users know skilful content when they run into it and will probable desire to direct other users to it. This could be through blog posts, social media services, email, forums, or other means.

Organic or give-and-take-of-mouth buzz is what helps build your site'south reputation with both users and Google, and it rarely comes without quality content.

Know what your readers want (and give it to them)

Think about the words that a user might search for to detect a piece of your content. Users who know a lot about the topic might utilize dissimilar keywords in their search queries than someone who is new to the topic. For example, a long-time football fan might search for "fifa", an acronym for the Fédération Internationale de Football Association, while a new fan might utilize a more than general query like "football playoffs". Anticipating these differences in search beliefs and accounting for them while writing your content (using a skilful mix of keyword phrases) could produce positive results. Google Ads provides a handy Keyword Planner that helps you find new keyword variations and see the approximate search volume for each keyword. Besides, Google Search Console provides yous with the top search queries your site appears for and the ones that led the most users to your site in the Performance Report.

Consider creating a new, useful service that no other site offers. You could besides write an original piece of research, break an exciting news story, or leverage your unique user base. Other sites may lack the resources or expertise to do these things.

Write piece of cake-to-read text

Users bask content that is well written and easy to follow.

Avoid:

• Writing sloppy text with many spelling and grammatical mistakes.
• Awkward or poorly written content.
• Embedding text in images and videos for textual content: users may want to copy and paste the text and search engines tin can't read it.

Organize your topics conspicuously

It's ever beneficial to organize your content so that visitors have a good sense of where one content topic begins and another ends. Breaking your content upward into logical chunks or divisions helps users find the content they want faster.

Avoid:

• Dumping large amounts of text on varying topics onto a folio without paragraph, subheading, or layout separation.

Create fresh, unique content

New content volition not simply keep your existing visitor base coming back, but also bring in new visitors.

Avert:

• Rehashing (or even copying) existing content that will bring little extra value to users.
• Having duplicate or near-duplicate versions of your content beyond your site.

Learn more than about duplicate content.

Optimize content for your users, not search engines

Designing your site effectually your visitors' needs while making sure your site is easily accessible to search engines usually produces positive results.

Avoid:

• Inserting numerous unnecessary keywords aimed at search engines only are abrasive or nonsensical to users.
• Having blocks of text similar "frequent misspellings used to reach this page" that add together trivial value for users.
• Deceptively hiding text from users, but displaying it to search engines.

Human action in a manner that cultivates user trust

Users experience comfortable visiting your site if they feel that it'south trustworthy.

A site with a skillful reputation is trustworthy. Cultivate a reputation for expertise and trustworthiness in a specific surface area.
Provide data about who publishes your site, provides the content, and its goals. If you accept a shopping or other fiscal transaction website, make sure you accept clear and satisfying customer service information to help users resolve issues. If you accept a news site, provide clear information nigh who is responsible for the content.

Using advisable technologies is likewise important. If a shopping checkout page doesn't have a secure connection, users cannot trust the site.

Expertise and authoritativeness of a site increases its quality. Be sure that content on your site is created or edited by people with expertise in the topic. For example, providing expert or experienced sources can help users empathise manufactures' expertise. Representing well-established consensus in pages on scientific topics is a skillful exercise if such consensus exists.

Provide an appropriate corporeality of content for your subject field

Creating high quality content takes a significant amount of at least ane of the following: fourth dimension, effort, expertise, and talent/skill. Make sure content is factually authentic, clearly written, and comprehensive. So, for instance, if yous describe your page as a recipe, provide a complete recipe that is easy to follow, rather than just a fix of ingredients or a basic description of the dish.

Avoid:

• Providing insufficient content for the purpose of the page.

Avoid distracting advertisements

Nosotros expect advertisements to be visible. However, don't let the advertisements distract users or prevent them from consuming the site content. For example, advertisements, supplement contents, or interstitial pages (pages displayed before or after the content yous are expecting) that make information technology hard to use the website. Learn more about this topic.

Avoid:

• Putting distracting advertisements on your pages.

Use links wisely

Write expert link text

Link text is the visible text inside a link. This text tells users and Google something about the page you're linking to. Links on your page may be internal—pointing to other pages on your site—or external—leading to content on other sites. In either of these cases, the improve your anchor text is, the easier it is for users to navigate and for Google to understand what the folio yous're linking to is near.

With advisable ballast text, users and search engines tin easily understand what the linked pages comprise.

Choose descriptive text

Write anchor text that provides at least a basic idea of what the folio linked to is about.

Avoid:

• Writing generic anchor text similar "folio", "article", or "click here".
• Using text that is off-topic or has no relation to the content of the page linked to.
• Using the page's URL as the anchor text in most cases, although in that location are certainly legitimate uses of this, such as promoting or referencing a new website's address.

Write curtailed text

Aim for short but descriptive text-commonly a few words or a curt phrase.

Avoid:

• Writing long ballast text, such equally a lengthy sentence or short paragraph of text.

Format links so they're piece of cake to spot

Make information technology easy for users to distinguish between regular text and the anchor text of your links. Your content becomes less useful if users miss the links or accidentally click them.

Avoid:

• Using CSS or text styling that brand links look only similar regular text.

Think about anchor text for internal links likewise

You may usually call back most linking in terms of pointing to outside websites, but paying more attention to the anchor text used for internal links tin aid users and Google navigate your site ameliorate.

Avoid:

• Using excessively keyword-filled or lengthy anchor text simply for search engines.
• Creating unnecessary links that don't help with the user'south navigation of the site.

Be careful who you link to

You can confer some of your site'south reputation to some other site when your site links to it. Sometimes users tin take advantage of this past adding links to their own site in your comment sections or message boards. Or sometimes you might mention a site in a negative way and don't want to confer any of your reputation upon it. For instance, imagine that you're writing a web log mail service on the topic of annotate spamming and you desire to phone call out a site that recently comment spammed your blog. You want to warn others of the site, then you include the link to information technology in your content; however, yous certainly don't want to requite the site some of your reputation from your link. This would be a practiced time to utilize nofollow.

Another example when the nofollow attribute tin can come handy are widget links. If you are using a third party'due south widget to enrich the experience of your site and appoint users, cheque if it contains whatsoever links that you did not intend to place on your site forth with the widget. Some widgets may add links to your site which are non your editorial pick and comprise ballast text that you as a website owner may non control. If removing such unwanted links from the widget is not possible, you tin always disable them with nofollow. If you lot create a widget for functionality or content that you provide, brand sure to include the nofollow on links in the default lawmaking snippet.

Lastly, if y'all're interested in nofollowing all of the links on a page, you can add together the tag <meta name="robots" content="nofollow"> inside the <head> tag for the page. You lot tin can observe more details nearly robots meta tags in our documentation.

Combat comment spam with nofollow

To tell Google non to follow or pass your page's reputation to the pages linked, set the value of the rel attribute of a link to nofollow or ugc. Nofollowing a link means adding rel="nofollow" or a more specific attribute such as ugc inside the link's ballast tag, as shown here:

<a href="http://www.example.com"          rel="nofollow">Anchor text hither</a>

or:

<a href="http://www.instance.com"          rel="ugc">Ballast text here</a>

When would this be useful? If your site has a blog with public commenting turned on, links within those comments could pass your reputation to pages that you may non be comfortable vouching for. Blog comment areas on pages are highly susceptible to comment spam. Nofollowing these user-added links ensures that you lot're not giving your page'southward hard-earned reputation to a spammy site.

Automatically add nofollow to comment columns and message boards

Many blogging software packages automatically nofollow user comments, but those that don't can virtually likely be manually edited to practise this. This advice also goes for other areas of your site that may involve user-generated content, such equally guest books, forums, shout-boards, referrer listings, etc. If you lot're willing to vouch for links added by 3rd parties (for instance, if a commenter is trusted on your site), then in that location's no need to use nofollow on links; however, linking to sites that Google considers spammy can impact the reputation of your own site. The Google Search Central documentation has more than tips on avoiding comment spam, for example by using CAPTCHAs and turning on comment moderation.

Optimize your images

Apply HTML images

Use HTML epitome elements to embed images in your content.

Employ the HTML <img> or <picture> elements

Semantic HTML markup helps crawlers find and procedure images. By using the <picture> chemical element you can also specify multiple options for different screen sizes for responsive images. You might also employ the loading="lazy" attribute on images to brand your page load faster for your users.

Avoid:

• Using CSS to display images that you want us to index.

Apply the alt attribute

Provide a descriptive filename and alt attribute description for images. The alt aspect allows you to specify alternative text for the image if it cannot be displayed for some reason.

Why employ this aspect? If a user is viewing your site using assistive technologies, such as a screen reader, the contents of the alt aspect provide information nigh the movie.

Another reason is that if you're using an image as a link, the alt text for that image will be treated similarly to the anchor text of a text link. However, we don't recommend using too many images for links in your site's navigation when text links could serve the same purpose. Lastly, optimizing your image filenames and alt text makes it easier for epitome search projects similar Google Images to better understand your images.

Apply brief but descriptive filenames and alt text

Similar many of the other parts of the page targeted for optimization, filenames and alt text are all-time when they're short, but descriptive.

Avoid:

• Using generic filenames similar image1.jpg, pic.gif, 1.jpg when possible—if your site has thousands of images you might desire to consider automating the naming of the images.
• Writing extremely lengthy filenames.
• Stuffing keywords into alt text or copying and pasting entire sentences.

Supply alt text when using images equally links

If you do make up one's mind to use an paradigm every bit a link, filling out its alt text helps Google sympathise more about the page you're linking to. Imagine that yous're writing ballast text for a text link.

Avert:

• Writing excessively long alt text that would be considered spammy.
• Using only image links for your site's navigation.

Help search engines find your images

An Prototype sitemap can provide Googlebot with more data most the images found on your site. This increases the likelihood that your images can exist found in Google Images results. The structure of this file is similar to the XML sitemap file for your spider web pages.

Use standard image formats

Use commonly supported filetypes; near browsers support JPEG, GIF, PNG, BMP and WebP image formats. It's too a good thought to have the extension of your filename match with the file type.

Make your site mobile-friendly

The globe is mobile today. Most people are searching on Google using a mobile device. The desktop version of a site might exist difficult to view and utilize on a mobile device. As a consequence, having a mobile ready site is critical to your online presence. In fact, starting in belatedly 2016, Google has begun experiments to primarily use the mobile version of a site's content for ranking, parsing structured information, and generating snippets.

Choose a mobile strategy

In that location are multiple ways of making your website mobile ready and Google supports different implementation methods :

• Responsive web pattern (Recommended)
• Dynamic serving
• Separate URLs

Afterward y'all accept created a mobile-set up site, yous can utilise Google's Mobile-Friendly Test to check if pages on your site meet the criteria for beingness labeled mobile-friendly on Google Search result pages. You lot can also check out the Search Console Mobile Usability study to gear up mobile usability problems affecting your site.

If your site serves lots of static content (like blog posts or product landing pages) beyond multiple pages, consider implementing it using AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages). It'due south a special flavor of HTML that ensures your site stays fast and user friendly, and can be farther accelerated by diverse platforms, including Google Search.

Configure mobile sites so that they can be indexed accurately

Regardless of which configuration you choose to gear up your mobile site, take note of these key points:

1. If you use Dynamic Serving or have a dissever mobile site, signal to Google when a page is formatted for mobile (or has an equivalent page that's formatted for mobile). This helps Google accurately serve mobile searchers your content in search results.
2. If you are using Responsive Spider web Pattern, apply the meta name="viewport" tag to tell the browser how to suit the content. If you use Dynamic Serving, employ the Vary HTTP header to signal your changes depending on the user agent. If you are using separate URLs, signal the relationship between two URLs by calculation the <link> tag with rel="approved" and rel="alternate" elements to the folio.
3. Keep resources crawlable. Blocking page resources can give Google an incomplete picture of your website. This ofttimes happens when your robots.txt file is blocking admission to some or all of your folio resources. If Googlebot doesn't have access to a page's resources, such as CSS, JavaScript, or images, we may non discover that information technology'due south built to display and work well on a mobile browser. In other words, nosotros may not detect that the page is mobile-friendly, and therefore not properly serve it to mobile searchers.
4. Avert common mistakes that frustrate mobile visitors, such as featuring unplayable videos.
5. Mobile pages that provide a poor searcher feel can be demoted in rankings or displayed with a alert in mobile search results. This includes merely is non express to full page interstitials on mobile that hinder user experience.
6. Provide full functionality on all devices. Mobile users expect the same functionality—such as commenting and cheque-out—and content on mobile as well equally on all other devices that your website supports. In addition to textual content, make certain that all important images and videos are embedded and accessible on mobile devices. For search engines, provide all structured data and other metadata—such as titles, descriptions, link-elements, and other meta-tags—on all versions of the pages.
7. Make sure that the structured data, images, videos, and metadata yous have on your desktop site are also included on the mobile site.

Best Practices

• Test your mobile pages with the Mobile-Friendly Test to encounter if Google thinks your website works well on mobile devices.
• If y'all use separate URLs for your mobile pages, make sure to test both the mobile and the desktop URLs, then y'all can confirm that the redirect is recognized and crawlable.

For more information, see Google'due south mobile-friendly guide.

While most of the links to your site will be added gradually, equally people discover your content through search or other ways and link to it, Google understands that you'd like to let others know about the hard work you've put into your content. Effectively promoting your new content will lead to faster discovery by those who are interested in the aforementioned subject. As with virtually points covered in this document, taking these recommendations to an extreme could really impairment the reputation of your site.

A blog mail on your own site letting your company base know that you added something new is a great way to go the word out nigh new content or services. Other website owners who follow your site or RSS feed could option the story upwards as well.

Putting effort into the offline promotion of your company or site can also be rewarding. For instance, if y'all accept a business site, make sure its URL is listed on your concern cards, letterhead, posters, etc. You lot could as well send out recurring newsletters to clients through the mail letting them know about new content on the company's website.

If you run a local business, claiming your Business Contour volition aid yous reach customers on Google Maps and Google Search.

Sites congenital around user interaction and sharing take made information technology easier to match interested groups of people upwardly with relevant content.

Avoid:

• Attempting to promote each new, small-scale piece of content you create; go for big, interesting items.
• Involving your site in schemes where your content is artificially promoted to the top of these services.

Chances are, in that location are a number of sites that cover topic areas similar to yours. Opening up communication with these sites is usually beneficial. Hot topics in your niche or community could spark additional ideas for content or building a skilful community resource.

Avoid:

• Spamming link requests out to all sites related to your topic area.
• Purchasing links from another site with the aim of getting PageRank.

Analyze your search performance and user behavior

Analyzing your search performance

Major search engines, including Google, provide tools for website owners to analyze their performance in their search engine. For Google, that tool is Search Console.

Search Console provides ii important categories of data: Tin can Google find my content? How am I performing in Google Search results?

Using Search Console won't help your site get preferential treatment; nonetheless, it can help yous place issues that, if addressed, can aid your site perform better in search results.

With the service, website owners can:

• See which parts of a site Googlebot had problems itch
• Test and submit sitemaps
• Analyze or generate robots.txt files
• Remove URLs already crawled by Googlebot
• Specify your preferred domain
• Identify problems with title and clarification meta tags
• Sympathize the top searches used to reach a site
• Become a glimpse at how Googlebot sees pages
• Receive notifications of quality guidelines violations and request a site reconsideration

Microsoft's Bing Webmaster Tools also offers tools for website owners.

Analyzing user behavior on your site

If you lot've improved the crawling and indexing of your site using Google Search Console or other services, you lot're probably curious virtually the traffic coming to your site. Spider web analytics programs similar Google Analytics are a valuable source of insight for this. Y'all can use these to:

• Become insight into how users reach and conduct on your site
• Discover the near popular content on your site
• Measure the impact of optimizations you make to your site, for instance, did changing those title and clarification meta tags meliorate traffic from search engines?

For avant-garde users, the information an analytics package provides, combined with information from your server log files, can provide even more comprehensive information nigh how visitors are interacting with your documents (such every bit additional keywords that searchers might use to discover your site).

Boosted Resource

Google Search Central blog
Get the latest information from our Google Search Central blog. Y'all tin discover data near updates to Google Search, new Search Panel features, and much more.

Google Search Central Assistance Forum
Post questions virtually your site's issues and find tips to create loftier quality sites from the product forum for website owners. At that place are many experienced contributors in the forum, including Product Experts and occasionally Googlers.

Google Search Central Twitter
Follow us for news and resources to aid yous make a nifty site.

Google Search Fundamental YouTube Aqueduct
Sentry hundreds of helpful videos created for the website owner community and get your questions answered by Googlers.

How Search Works
See what happens behind the scenes as you search for something in Google Search.

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Source: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/beginner/seo-starter-guide

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