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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 yous. You might be the owner of a growing and thriving business, the website possessor of a dozen sites, the SEO specialist in a spider web agency or a DIY SEO proficient passionate almost the mechanics of Search: this guide is meant for yous. If you're interested in having a complete overview of the basics of SEO co-ordinate to our best practices, you lot are indeed in the correct identify. This guide won't provide any secrets that'll automatically rank your site first in Google (sad!), simply following the all-time practices will hopefully make it easier for search engines to clamber, alphabetize, and empathise your content.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is oftentimes about making small modifications to parts of your website. When viewed individually, these changes might seem similar incremental improvements, but when combined with other optimizations, they could have a noticeable touch on on your site'due south user experience and performance in organic search results. Y'all're likely already familiar with many of the topics in this guide, because they're essential ingredients for whatever spider web page, merely you may not be making the most out of them.

Y'all should build a website to benefit your users, and gear whatsoever optimization toward making the user experience better. I of those users is a search engine, which helps other users discover your content. SEO is about helping search engines understand and present content. Your site may be smaller or larger than our example site and offer vastly different content, but the optimization topics in this guide applies to sites of all sizes and types. Nosotros hope our guide gives you some fresh ideas on how to improve your website, and we'd love to hear your questions, feedback, and success stories in the Google Search Central Help Community.

Getting started

Are you lot on Google?

Determine whether your site is in Google's index

Practise a site: search for your site's dwelling URL. If you lot see results, you'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's inevitable that some sites volition be missed. When our crawlers miss a site, information technology's frequently for ane of the following reasons:

• The site isn't well connected from other sites on the web
• Yous've just launched a new site and Google hasn't had time to crawl information technology yet
• The design of the site makes it difficult for Google to crawl its content finer
• Google received an mistake when trying to crawl your site
• Your policy blocks Google from crawling the site

How practice 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 together to our index; yous usually don't fifty-fifty demand to exercise annihilation except post your site on the web. In fact, the vast bulk of sites listed in our results aren't manually submitted for inclusion, only found and added automatically when nosotros crawl the 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, following these guidelines can help brand your site appear in our search results.

Google Search Console provides tools to aid you submit your content to Google and monitor how you're doing in Google Search. If you lot want, Search Console can even transport you alerts on critical bug that Google encounters with your site. Sign upward for Search Console.

Here are a few basic questions to enquire yourself about your website when you lot go started.

• Is my website showing upwards on Google?
• Exercise I serve high-quality content to users?
• Is my local business showing upward on Google?
• Is my content fast and easy to access on all devices?
• Is my website secure?

You tin find additional getting started information on https://g.co/webmasters

The balance of this document provides guidance on how to better your site for search engines, organized past topic. You can also download a short checklist in PDF format.

Help Google find your content

The first step to getting your site on Google is to be sure that Google can find it. The best fashion to do that is to submit a sitemap. A sitemap is a file on your site that tells search engines about new or changed pages on your site. Learn more about how to build and submit a sitemap.

Google also finds pages through links from other pages. Acquire how to encourage people to detect your site by Promoting your site.

Tell Google which pages you don't desire crawled

For non-sensitive data, cake unwanted crawling past using robots.txt

A robots.txt file tells search engines whether they can access and therefore clamber 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 however exist crawled, so for sensitive pages, apply a more secure method.

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

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

Read about several other ways to prevent content from appearing in search results.

Avert:

• Letting your internal search consequence pages exist crawled past Google. Users dislike clicking a search engine result only to land on another search result page on your site.
• Allowing URLs created as a result of proxy services to exist crawled.

For sensitive information, use more secure methods

A robots.txt file is not an appropriate or effective mode of blocking sensitive or confidential material. Information technology merely instructs well-behaved crawlers that the pages are non for them, but information technology does not prevent your server from delivering those pages to a browser that requests them. One reason is that search engines could still reference the URLs yous block (showing just the URL, no title link or snippet) if there happen to exist links to those URLs somewhere on the Net (similar referrer logs). Too, non-compliant or rogue search engines that don't acknowledge 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 guess the URL of the content that you don't want seen.

In these cases, utilize the noindex tag if you lot just desire the page non to appear in Google, merely don't listen if whatever user with a link can reach the page. For real security, use proper authorisation methods, like requiring a user password, or taking the page off your site entirely.

Help Google (and users) understand your content

Let Google run across your page the same way a user does

When Googlebot crawls a folio, information technology should see the folio the aforementioned way an average user does. For optimal rendering and indexing, always allow Googlebot admission to the JavaScript, CSS, and image files used by your website. If your site's robots.txt file disallows crawling of these assets, it directly harms how well our algorithms render and alphabetize your content. This can consequence in suboptimal rankings.

Recommended action : Employ the URL Inspection tool. It will allow you to see exactly how Googlebot sees and renders your content, and it will help you lot identify and fix a number of indexing problems on your site.

Create unique, authentic page titles

A <title> element tells both users and search engines what the topic of a item page is. Identify the <title> element within the <caput> element of the HTML document, and create unique title text for each folio on your site.

<html> <caput>          <title>Brandon's Baseball Cards - Buy Cards, Baseball game News, Card Prices</title>          <meta name="clarification" content="Brandon's Baseball Cards provides a large pick of     vintage and modern baseball cards for auction.     Nosotros also offering daily baseball game news and events."> </head> <torso> ...

Control your championship links and snippets in search results

If your document appears in a search results page, the contents of the <title> element may appear every bit the title link for the search result (if you're unfamiliar with the different parts of a Google Search result, you might want to check out the beefcake of a search result video).

The <title> chemical element for your homepage tin can listing the name 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 page'due south content

Choose title text that reads naturally and effectively communicates the topic of the page'south content.

Avert:

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

Create unique <championship> elements for each page

Make certain each folio on your site has unique text in the <title> element, which helps Google know how the folio is distinct from the others on your site. If your site uses separate mobile pages, call up to apply descriptive text in the <title> elements on the mobile versions too.

Avert:

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

Use brief, but descriptive <title> elements

<title> elements tin can exist both short and informative. If the text in the <title> chemical element is too long or otherwise accounted less relevant, Google may prove only a portion of the text in your <title> element, or a championship link that'southward automatically generated in the search consequence.

Avert:

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

Utilise the meta description tag

A page'south meta description tag gives Google and other search engines a summary of what the page is near. A page'due south title may be a few words or a phrase, whereas a page's meta description tag might exist a sentence or ii or even a short paragraph. Similar the <title> chemical element, the meta clarification tag is placed within the <head> chemical element of your HTML certificate.

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

What are the merits of meta description tags?

Meta clarification tags are important considering Google might use them every bit snippets for your pages in Google Search results. Note that we say "might" considering Google may cull to use a relevant section of your folio's visible text if information technology does a adept job of matching up with a user's query. Calculation meta description tags to each of your pages is e'er a skillful practice in example Google cannot find a good selection of text to use in the snippet. Larn more about how to create quality meta descriptions.

Accurately summarize the page content

Write a clarification that would both inform and interest users if they saw your meta description tag as a snippet in a search effect. While there's no minimal or maximal length for the text in a clarification meta tag, nosotros recommend making sure that information technology's long enough to be fully shown in Search (notation that users may see different sized snippets depending on how and where they search), and contains all the relevant information users would need to determine whether the page will be useful and relevant to them.

Avert:

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

Use unique descriptions for each page

Having a dissimilar meta clarification tag for each folio helps both users and Google, especially in searches where users may bring up multiple pages on your domain (for instance, searches using the site: operator). If your site has thousands or even 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's content.

Avoid:

• Using a single meta clarification tag across all of your site'due south pages or a large group of pages.

Use heading tags to emphasize important text

Employ meaningful headings to indicate important topics, and assist create a hierarchical construction for your content, making information technology 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 will exist and make up one's mind 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 <potent> may be more appropriate.
• Erratically moving from one heading tag size to another.

Employ headings sparingly across the page

Utilise heading tags where it makes sense. Too many heading tags on a folio can arrive hard for users to scan the content and make up one's mind where one topic ends and another begins.

Avert:

• Excessive use of heading tags on a page.
• Very long headings.
• Using heading tags just for styling text and non presenting construction.

Add structured information markup

Structured data is code that y'all tin add to your sites' pages to describe your content to search engines, so they tin can ameliorate empathize what's on your pages. Search engines tin apply this agreement to display your content in useful (and eye-catching) means in search results. That, in turn, can help you attract just the right kind of customers for your business.

For example, if you've got an online store and marking up an individual product page, this helps united states understand that the page features a bike, its cost, and customer reviews. We may display that information in the snippet for search results for relevant queries. Nosotros call these rich results.

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

You can mark up many business-relevant entities:

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

Encounter a total list of supported content types.

Nosotros recommend that you utilise structured data with any of the supported notations markup to describe your content. Yous can add together the markup to the HTML code to your pages, or use tools like Data Highlighter and Markup Helper.

Check your markup using the Rich Results Exam

Once you've marked up your content, you tin can utilise the Google Rich Results test to make sure that there are no mistakes in the implementation. You can either enter the URL where the content is, or copy the actual HTML which includes the markup.

Avert:

• Using invalid markup.

Utilize Data Highlighter and Markup Helper

If you want to give structured markup a try without changing the source lawmaking of your site, you tin can use Data Highlighter, which is a tool integrated in Search Console that supports a subset of content types.

If you'd like to get the markup code ready to re-create and paste to your page, endeavour the Markup Helper.

Avoid:

• Changing the source code of your site when yous are unsure virtually implementing markup.

Go along track of how your marked up pages are doing

The various Rich result reports in Search Console shows you how many pages on your site we've detected with a specific type of markup, how many times they appeared in search results, and how many times people clicked on them over the by 90 days. It besides shows any errors we've detected.

Avert:

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

Manage your appearance in Google Search results

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

Organize your site bureaucracy

Sympathize how search engines use URLs

Search engines need a unique URL per piece of content to exist able to clamber and index that content, and to refer users to it. Different content (for example, dissimilar products in a store) also as modified content (for example, translations or regional variations) demand to utilize carve up URLs in order to be shown in search appropriately.

URLs are generally split up into multiple distinct sections:

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

For example:

https://world wide web.example.com/RunningShoes/Womens.htm?size=8#info

Google recommends that all websites use https:// when possible. The hostname is where your website is hosted, commonly using the same domain proper name that yous'd apply for email. Google differentiates between the world wide web and non-www version (for instance, www.instance.com or simply example.com). When calculation your website to Search Console, we recommend calculation both http:// and https:// versions, every bit well as the www and non-www versions.

Path, filename, and query string determine which content from your server is accessed. These three parts are case-sensitive, 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 at that place.

A fragment (in this case, #info) generally identifies which function of the page the browser scrolls to. Because the content itself is commonly the same regardless of the fragment, search engines commonly ignore any fragment used.

When referring to the homepage, a abaft slash afterward the hostname is optional since it leads to the aforementioned content (https://example.com/ is the same every bit https://instance.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 equally https://case.com/fish/.

Navigation is of import for search engines

The navigation of a website is important in helping visitors quickly discover the content they want. It tin also help search engines understand what content the website possessor thinks is important. Although Google's search results are provided at a page level, Google likewise likes to have a sense of what role a page plays in the bigger motion picture of the site.

Plan your navigation based on your homepage

All sites accept a habitation or root page, which is usually the most frequented page on the site and the starting identify of navigation for many visitors. Unless your site has but a handful of pages, think about how visitors will become from a general page (your root folio) to a page containing more specific content. Do you have enough pages around a specific topic area that it would make sense to create a page describing these related pages (for example, root page -> related topic listing -> specific topic)? Exercise yous have hundreds of dissimilar products that demand to be classified under multiple category and subcategory pages?

A breadcrumb is a row of internal links at the tiptop or lesser of the page that allows visitors to quickly navigate back to a previous section or the root page. Many breadcrumbs accept the nigh full general page (ordinarily the root page) as the outset, leftmost link and list the more than specific sections out to the right. Nosotros recommend using breadcrumb structured data markup when showing breadcrumbs.

Create a unproblematic navigational page for users

A navigational page is a elementary 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 issues finding pages on your site. While search engines will also visit this page, getting good crawl coverage of the pages on your site, it'southward mainly aimed at human visitors.

Create a naturally flowing hierarchy

Make information technology as easy as possible for users to go from general content to the more than specific content they want on your site. Add navigation pages when it makes sense and effectively work these into your internal link construction. Make sure all of the pages on your site are reachable through links, and that they don't require an internal search functionality to exist constitute. Link to related pages, where appropriate, to let users to discover similar content.

Avoid:

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

Use text for navigation

Decision-making nigh of the navigation from folio 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 folio, use a elements with URLs as href attribute values, and generate all menu items on page-load, instead of waiting for a user interaction.

Avert:

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

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

Include a uncomplicated navigational page for your entire site (or the most important pages, if y'all have hundreds or thousands) for users. Create an XML sitemap file to ensure that search engines find the new and updated pages on your site, listing all relevant URLs together with their master content's last modified dates.

Avoid:

• Letting your navigational page become out of date with broken links.
• Creating a navigational page that only lists pages without organizing them, for instance by subject field.

Evidence useful 404 pages

Users will occasionally come to a page that doesn't exist on your site, either past following a broken link or typing in the wrong URL. Having a custom 404 page that kindly guides users dorsum to a working folio on your site tin greatly improve a user'due south experience. Consider including a link back to your root page and providing links to popular or related content on your site. You lot tin can use Google Search Console to find the sources of URLs causing "non plant" errors.

Avert:

• Assuasive your 404 pages to be indexed in search engines (make sure that your web server is configured to requite a 404 HTTP status code or—in the example of JavaScript-based sites—include the noindex tag when non-real pages are requested).
• Blocking 404 pages from being crawled through the robots.txt file.
• Providing but a vague message like "Not plant", "404", or no 404 page at all.
• Using a design for your 404 pages that isn't consistent with the balance of your site.

Simple URLs convey content data

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

URLs like the following tin can exist disruptive and unfriendly:

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

If your URL is meaningful, information technology can be more useful and hands understandable in dissimilar contexts:

https://www.brandonsbaseballcards.com/article/10-rarest-baseball-cards.html

URLs are displayed in search results

Lastly, recall that the URL to a document is usually displayed in some form in a Google Search consequence about the document title.

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 simple equally possible is a adept practice.

Use words in URLs

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

Avert:

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

Create a simple directory construction

Use a directory structure that organizes your content well and makes it easy for visitors to know where they're at on your site. Try using your directory construction to bespeak the blazon of content found at that URL.

Avoid:

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

Provide i version of a URL to reach a certificate

To preclude users from linking to one version of a URL and others linking to a different version (this could carve up the reputation of that content betwixt the URLs), focus on using and referring to one URL in the structure and internal linking of your pages. If you 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 practiced solution for this. If you cannot redirect, y'all may also use the rel="approved" link element.

Avoid:

• Having pages from subdomains and the root directory admission the same content, for case, domain.com/folio.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 good content when they see it and will likely want to direct other users to it. This could be through blog posts, social media services, email, forums, or other means.

Organic or word-of-mouth fizz is what helps build your site's reputation with both users and Google, and information technology rarely comes without quality content.

Know what your readers desire (and give information technology to them)

Think nigh the words that a user might search for to notice a piece of your content. Users who know a lot about the topic might use unlike keywords in their search queries than someone who is new to the topic. For case, a long-fourth dimension football fan might search for "fifa", an acronym for the Fédération Internationale de Football Association, while a new fan might use a more general query like "football playoffs". Anticipating these differences in search behavior and bookkeeping for them while writing your content (using a good mix of keyword phrases) could produce positive results. Google Ads provides a handy Keyword Planner that helps you lot discover new keyword variations and see the approximate search volume for each keyword. Also, Google Search Console provides you lot with the summit search queries your site appears for and the ones that led the about users to your site in the Performance Report.

Consider creating a new, useful service that no other site offers. Yous could also write an original piece of inquiry, pause an exciting news story, or leverage your unique user base of operations. Other sites may lack the resources or expertise to practice these things.

Write easy-to-read text

Users savour 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 re-create and paste the text and search engines can't read it.

Organize your topics conspicuously

It's always benign to organize your content then that visitors have a good sense of where 1 content topic begins and another ends. Breaking your content upward into logical chunks or divisions helps users observe the content they want faster.

Avert:

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

Create fresh, unique content

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

Avoid:

• Rehashing (or fifty-fifty copying) existing content that will bring niggling extra value to users.
• Having indistinguishable or nearly-duplicate versions of your content beyond your site.

Learn more about indistinguishable content.

Optimize content for your users, non search engines

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

Avert:

• Inserting numerous unnecessary keywords aimed at search engines but are annoying or nonsensical to users.
• Having blocks of text like "frequent misspellings used to attain this page" that add piddling value for users.
• Deceptively hiding text from users, just displaying it to search engines.

Act in a way that cultivates user trust

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

A site with a good reputation is trustworthy. Cultivate a reputation for expertise and trustworthiness in a specific expanse.
Provide data about who publishes your site, provides the content, and its goals. If y'all have a shopping or other financial transaction website, make sure y'all have articulate and satisfying customer service information to aid users resolve issues. If you have a news site, provide articulate information almost who is responsible for the content.

Using appropriate technologies is also 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 skilful or experienced sources can assist users understand articles' expertise. Representing well-established consensus in pages on scientific topics is a good practise if such consensus exists.

Provide an appropriate amount of content for your subject

Creating high quality content takes a significant amount of at least i of the post-obit: time, attempt, expertise, and talent/skill. Make sure content is factually authentic, clearly written, and comprehensive. So, for example, if you describe your page as a recipe, provide a consummate recipe that is easy to follow, rather than merely a set of ingredients or a basic clarification of the dish.

Avoid:

• Providing insufficient content for the purpose of the page.

Avert distracting advertisements

Nosotros expect advertisements to be visible. Yet, 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 later the content you are expecting) that get in difficult to use the website. Larn more nearly this topic.

Avert:

• Putting distracting advertisements on your pages.

Utilise links wisely

Write good link text

Link text is the visible text inside a link. This text tells users and Google something nigh 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 ameliorate your anchor text is, the easier it is for users to navigate and for Google to sympathize what the page you lot're linking to is about.

With appropriate anchor text, users and search engines tin can easily empathise what the linked pages contain.

Cull descriptive text

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

Avoid:

• Writing generic anchor text similar "page", "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 there are certainly legitimate uses of this, such as promoting or referencing a new website's accost.

Write concise text

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

Avoid:

• Writing long anchor text, such equally a lengthy judgement or brusque paragraph of text.

Format links so they're easy 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 make links look simply like regular text.

Recollect about anchor text for internal links too

You may commonly recall near linking in terms of pointing to outside websites, but paying more attention to the ballast text used for internal links can help users and Google navigate your site better.

Avoid:

• Using excessively keyword-filled or lengthy anchor text just 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 tin can confer some of your site's reputation to another site when your site links to it. Sometimes users tin take advantage of this by adding links to their own site in your comment sections or bulletin boards. Or sometimes you might mention a site in a negative mode and don't want to confer any of your reputation upon it. For example, imagine that you're writing a web log post on the topic of comment spamming and y'all want to call out a site that recently comment spammed your blog. You want to warn others of the site, so you lot include the link to it in your content; nonetheless, you certainly don't want to give the site some of your reputation from your link. This would be a proficient time to use nofollow.

Another example when the nofollow attribute can come handy are widget links. If you are using a third party'south widget to enrich the experience of your site and appoint users, check if it contains any links that you lot did non intend to identify on your site forth with the widget. Some widgets may add links to your site which are not your editorial choice and contain anchor text that yous equally a website possessor may non control. If removing such unwanted links from the widget is not possible, you can always disable them with nofollow. If yous create a widget for functionality or content that yous provide, brand sure to include the nofollow on links in the default code snippet.

Lastly, if you're interested in nofollowing all of the links on a page, you tin can add the tag <meta proper name="robots" content="nofollow"> within the <head> tag for the page. You tin notice more details about robots meta tags in our documentation.

Gainsay comment spam with nofollow

To tell Google non to follow or laissez passer your folio'due south 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 within the link'southward ballast tag, as shown here:

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

or:

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

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

Automatically add together nofollow to comment columns and bulletin boards

Many blogging software packages automatically nofollow user comments, but those that don't can nearly probable be manually edited to practise this. This advice besides goes for other areas of your site that may involve user-generated content, such every bit guest books, forums, shout-boards, referrer listings, etc. If you're willing to vouch for links added by third parties (for example, if a commenter is trusted on your site), then there's no need to use nofollow on links; withal, linking to sites that Google considers spammy can touch on the reputation of your own site. The Google Search Key documentation has more tips on avoiding annotate spam, for example past using CAPTCHAs and turning on comment moderation.

Optimize your images

Employ HTML images

Use HTML image elements to embed images in your content.

Use the HTML <img> or <picture> elements

Semantic HTML markup helps crawlers find and procedure images. Past using the <pic> element you can besides specify multiple options for different screen sizes for responsive images. You might also use the loading="lazy" aspect on images to brand your folio load faster for your users.

Avoid:

• Using CSS to brandish images that you want the states to index.

Use the alt attribute

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

Why use this attribute? If a user is viewing your site using assistive technologies, such every bit a screen reader, the contents of the alt attribute provide information most the motion picture.

Some other reason is that if y'all're using an image as a link, the alt text for that prototype 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'due south navigation when text links could serve the same purpose. Lastly, optimizing your image filenames and alt text makes information technology easier for image search projects like Google Images to better sympathize your images.

Utilize brief but descriptive filenames and alt text

Like 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, picture show.gif, 1.jpg when possible—if your site has thousands of images yous might want to consider automating the naming of the images.
• Writing extremely lengthy filenames.
• Stuffing keywords into alt text or copying and pasting unabridged sentences.

Supply alt text when using images as links

If you do decide to use an image equally a link, filling out its alt text helps Google empathize more about the folio you're linking to. Imagine that you're writing ballast text for a text link.

Avert:

• Writing excessively long alt text that would exist considered spammy.
• Using merely paradigm links for your site'south navigation.

Assist search engines find your images

An Paradigm sitemap tin provide Googlebot with more information about the images constitute on your site. This increases the likelihood that your images can be found in Google Images results. The structure of this file is like to the XML sitemap file for your web pages.

Use standard prototype formats

Use commonly supported filetypes; nigh browsers back up JPEG, GIF, PNG, BMP and WebP image formats. It'southward as well a skilful thought to have the extension of your filename match with the file blazon.

Make your site mobile-friendly

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

Choose a mobile strategy

There are multiple ways of making your website mobile set up and Google supports different implementation methods:

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

Later you have created a mobile-ready site, you tin can utilise Google's Mobile-Friendly Exam to cheque if pages on your site encounter the criteria for being labeled mobile-friendly on Google Search result pages. You tin can also bank check out the Search Console Mobile Usability report to fix mobile usability issues affecting your site.

If your site serves lots of static content (like web log posts or product landing pages) across multiple pages, consider implementing it using AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages). It's a special season of HTML that ensures your site stays fast and user friendly, and tin can be farther accelerated by various platforms, including Google Search.

Configure mobile sites then that they tin be indexed accurately

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

1. If y'all utilize Dynamic Serving or have a divide mobile site, indicate 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 Web Design, use the meta proper name="viewport" tag to tell the browser how to conform the content. If you use Dynamic Serving, use the Vary HTTP header to signal your changes depending on the user agent. If you are using separate URLs, bespeak the relationship betwixt two URLs past adding the <link> tag with rel="canonical" and rel="alternate" elements to the folio.
3. Proceed resource crawlable. Blocking folio resources can give Google an incomplete motion-picture show of your website. This oft happens when your robots.txt file is blocking admission to some or all of your page resource. If Googlebot doesn't have admission to a folio'southward resources, such equally CSS, JavaScript, or images, we may not detect that it'south built to display and piece of work well on a mobile browser. In other words, nosotros may not detect that the page is mobile-friendly, and therefore non properly serve it to mobile searchers.
4. Avert common mistakes that frustrate mobile visitors, such every bit featuring unplayable videos.
5. Mobile pages that provide a poor searcher experience tin can exist demoted in rankings or displayed with a alert in mobile search results. This includes but is not limited to full folio interstitials on mobile that hinder user experience.
6. Provide total functionality on all devices. Mobile users expect the same functionality—such as commenting and cheque-out—and content on mobile too every bit on all other devices that your website supports. In addition to textual content, make sure 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 certain that the structured data, images, videos, and metadata you lot have on your desktop site are besides included on the mobile site.

Best Practices

• Test your mobile pages with the Mobile-Friendly Examination to encounter if Google thinks your website works well on mobile devices.
• If yous use divide URLs for your mobile pages, make sure to examination both the mobile and the desktop URLs, so yous can confirm that the redirect is recognized and crawlable.

For more than data, see Google'southward mobile-friendly guide.

While most of the links to your site volition be added gradually, as 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 piece of work you lot've put into your content. Finer promoting your new content volition lead to faster discovery by those who are interested in the same subject. As with near points covered in this document, taking these recommendations to an extreme could actually harm the reputation of your site.

A weblog mail service on your own site letting your company base know that you added something new is a bully way to get the word out nearly new content or services. Other website owners who follow your site or RSS feed could pick the story up too.

Putting endeavour into the offline promotion of your company or site tin can also exist rewarding. For example, if you have a business site, make certain its URL is listed on your concern cards, letterhead, posters, etc. You lot could also transport out recurring newsletters to clients through the mail service letting them know about new content on the visitor's website.

If you lot run a local business, challenge your Business Profile volition assistance you lot reach customers on Google Maps and Google Search.

Sites built effectually user interaction and sharing have made it easier to lucifer interested groups of people up with relevant content.

Avoid:

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

Chances are, there are a number of sites that cover topic areas like 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 edifice a skilful community resource.

Avert:

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

Clarify your search performance and user behavior

Analyzing your search functioning

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 two of import categories of information: Tin Google notice my content? How am I performing in Google Search results?

Using Search Console won't help your site become preferential treatment; however, it tin help y'all identify issues that, if addressed, tin assist your site perform improve in search results.

With the service, website owners can:

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

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

Analyzing user behavior on your site

If yous've improved the crawling and indexing of your site using Google Search Console or other services, you lot're probably curious about the traffic coming to your site. Web analytics programs like Google Analytics are a valuable source of insight for this. Yous can apply these to:

• Get insight into how users reach and behave on your site
• Discover the most popular content on your site
• Measure the impact of optimizations you lot make to your site, for case, did changing those championship and clarification meta tags meliorate traffic from search engines?

For advanced users, the information an analytics packet provides, combined with data from your server log files, can provide even more comprehensive data nearly how visitors are interacting with your documents (such as additional keywords that searchers might use to find your site).

Additional Resources

Google Search Central blog
Get the latest data from our Google Search Central web log. You can find data almost updates to Google Search, new Search Console features, and much more than.

Google Search Key Aid Forum
Mail questions virtually your site's issues and find tips to create high 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 help you lot make a nifty site.

Google Search Primal YouTube Channel
Watch hundreds of helpful videos created for the website possessor community and go your questions answered past 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