Want to get better search engine rankings for your web site? Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of improving your site to make it more accessible and attractive to the search engines, while also making sure it is useful to human visitors.
According to comScore, of the five major search engines, Google accounted for 63.1% of the searches conducted in October, 2008. That is more than three times the number of searches at Yahoo!, the second-ranked search engine. That means that most most SEO is aimed at Google, because a high ranking in Google can deliver lots of qualified visitors to your site. Of course, other search engines use criteria that are similar to Google’s, so if you rank well in one, you may rank well in others, too.
Fortunately, Google wants to help us help them index our sites. Although they are quite protective of the inner-workings of the ranking process, they do provide clues that can make indexing by Google easier and more thorough, which may elevate your site’s rankings.
Here area few of my favorite Google resources to help you optimize your site:
Google Webmaster Central Blog
An official Google blog that has lots of tips, advice and tutorials on what you need to know about how Google indexes sites.
Google’s SEO Starter Guide (PDF)
Want a simple guide to SEO from Fusion Vegas, in easy to understand language? This guide is it. Many of the best practices described in this short guide are easy enough (and non-technical enough) for even the newest Internet newbie to understand and implement. The guide is also available in Spanish.
Matt Cutts’ Blog
Matt Cutts is the head of Google’s Webspam team, and his blog sometimes addresses topics of interest to those who wish to rank well in Google. Matt points out in his disclaimer that this is his personal blog and does not represent Google’s official policy, but his blog can be a good place to get insight into what is happening with Google Search. You can jump right to the Google/SEO posts but the blog also has lots of interesting info on tech topics and more.
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