As a web designer, I often get asked by clients and other I speak with at events, “How do I get my site to be higher in the search results?” I often tell them that it usually only requires a few simple steps to help move the ranking in the right direction. But as with most things, if you start with garbage in you’ll get garbage out. It often comes down to redesigning the site to clean out years of either neglect or too much attention (i.e. too much content that is dis-organized and lacks focus).

It’s what the industry has come to know as Search Engine Optimization or SEO. The Internet is filled with companies promising you results by using their SEO plans. But with a little education on such matters most problems can be addressed before calling on professionals to help. Google recently published a 20 some page starter guide to SEO. Its a starter guide to SEO, that covers such topics as:

• page titles and the importance of accurately titling your pages
• descriptive meta tags
• friendly URL structures
• using sitemaps to construct easy-to-navigate sites
• custom 404 error pages
• quality content
• using anchor text effectively
• using “alt” text for images
• and using robots.txt files

While most of the information in the guide should be old hat for your web designer, I’ve found that I educate the site owner a bit, they can focus on the areas of their site that need help.

Google has put together a good guide to help those outside the web development world to understand “this SEO thing” a bit better. Even though some of the guide could be deemed contrary to what Google has promoted in the past, such as the statement, “Search engine optimization affects only organic search results, not paid or “sponsored” results such as Google AdWords”, most of the information is right on target. Hopefully, Google will address the contrasts of in future version of the SEO guide.

Until next time, Tim