Thursday, January 21, 2010 at 11:30 PM
Webmaster Level: BeginnerWant to eat healthier and exercise more in 2010? That's tough! Want to learn about search engine optimization (SEO) so you can disregard the rumors and know what's important? That's easy! Here's how to gain SEO knowledge as you go about your new start to 2010:
Step 1: Absorb the basics
- If you like to learn by reading, download our SEO Starter Guide for reading while you're on an exercise bike, training for Ironman.
- Or, if you're more a video watcher, try listening to my "Search Friendly Development" session while you're cleaning your house. Keep in mind that some parts of the presentation are a little more technical.
- For good measure, and because at some point you'll hear references to them, check out our webmaster guidelines for yourself.
Step 2: Explore details that pique your interest
Are you done with the basics but now you have some questions? Good for you! Try researching a particular topic in our Webmaster Help Center. For example, do you want more information about crawling and indexing or understanding what links are all about?
Step 3: Verify ownership of your site in Webmaster Tools
It takes a little bit of skill, but we have tons of help for verification. Once you verify ownership of your site (i.e., signal to Google that you're the owner), you can:
- See more confidential information about your site, like crawl errors or messages from Google about your site
- Run through the Webmaster Tools checklist and learn new ways to monitor and manage your site
- Forward your Google messages to your personal email address
A sample message regarding the crawlability of your site
Step 4: Research before you do anything drastic
Usually the basics (e.g., good content/service and a crawlable site with indexable information) are the necessities for SEO. You may hear or read differently, but before you do anything drastic on your site such as robots.txt disallow'ing all of your directories or revamping your entire site architecture, please try:
- Researching material in our Help Center
- Checking for related posts in our Webmaster Forum
- Asking for feedback from the webmaster community -- we've got a super skilled group of Google employees, members, and Bionic Posters.
35 comments:
I love this article thing which is Google should do long time ago. I mean, in a such systematic way like this as I am not a computer geek but love to learn thing from A to Z. Thanks so much, Google WWebmaster for providing.
Hi
Strangely enough I wrote about Google's SEO beginners guide only a few days ago in my own blog however I did point out that some of the info and some of the links in Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide are out of date.
It's like a cramp up of all SEO tools and guidelines for beginners to expert level in one post.
Thanks for sharing some useful links.
Atniz
Yes, for beginners this video is great to understand some things
you guys are awesome and your information is always very handy and useful in my work..thank you!
It is really helpful for old fashioned Developers/Designers, who had less appreciation for correct usage of Technologies. Thankfully acknowledgement from Google will move things in right direction
Useful starter information. For more, regular insight and techniques see our SEO Blog
I think i'm in love with Maile Ohye...
good info.!
great information about the javascript onclick and 503 when moving sites... id say it was worth the hour :)
Great video thank you for sharing!
I am a sales manager with an engineering company in India.By implementing what is explained in your SEO guide we got terrific result. The exercise is painful, time eating but it is worth doing. The starter kit will remove all phobia's and black magic image of SEO.
It will help non IT person to understand web lingo and know how google display the information.
It will also ignite your further interest in SEO.
Thanks google and wish all of you successful SEO.
Regards,
Bhavesh Desai
I read this yesterday as I was researching crawl errors on my blog moving2brevard.blogspot.com. It was very helpful although I am still puzzled. 900 posts, first page (Yahoo and BING) and lost Google ranking due to errors! I will not give up - keep he wisdom coming! Thanks
Great deal , i was hoping too to indexed my blog at google,
Regards,
Robert
Great video. Worth the watch.
One question. In the video Maile says that tweets are only indexed if they are linked to. Is that still the case with the new Latest Results that Google just rolled out?
An example is when I search "obama twitter". The twitter results from a min or two ago come up in the latest results but are those really being linked to already from a website or another source (other than twitter)?
Thanks again for the video. Much appreciated.
This post is fit for me, thanks Google Team.
Its great stuff. I always read informative articles here . Google improving technology day by day.
Business getting new shape & size on internet.
Thanks Google
Love the video! it helped me answer alot of questions. I hope to see more of you again!
good article as a beginners,i felt very useful to learn SEO.Thanks
When we find out the website ranked highest by Google for our keyword, then we can find out the keywords used in the highest ranked website.
Thanks for cool SEO knowledge, I translate to Thai for eazy understand in Thai about SEO (More Google's translator)
Thanks, although i'd rather be interested in the "not so public" SEO factors :) j/k
Give me back my PR, thx.
Thanks this is something I needed all in the one place for a change. SEO might be easy for some but I am not a tech and just want my site to be right.
Great information! SEO seems so hard and it seems to take so long. I think that I'm actually missing some great information. Hopefully I'll be able to learn enough from the resources that you've pointed out to help even more.
Thanks! - Jared
Thanks
I'm glad I found this article, it certainly strengthed my belief about the 'how to' get your site known.
Great stuff.
Great video very useful for beginners keep up the good work. Thanks for the information
www.forextraining-free.info
I think its a Great work done by author and it really helps in seo.
In this address anyone can do a download of SEO Starter Guide in portuguese: http://www.otimizacaodesites.org/otimizacao-de-sites.pdf
Nice content,thank for this share
I would say Google has been very webmaster friendly with easy to optimize and understand tools. Most of the Webmasters at Elite Web Studio in Manchester are using Google in the UK specially in Manchester area for Search Engine Optimization(SEO) purposes. It had brought great results and good business. SEO with Google had been successful for us at www.elite-web.co.uk
Thank You
For beginners this video is great to understand some things
These updates are time and energy savers for people like me. Thanks so much for creating an seo beginner guide for those of us who aren't ready to spend a fortune on big firms.
Very Much for Beginners@Very Helpful
Quite resourceful
Hi everyone,
Since over a year has passed since we published this post, we're closing the comments to help us focus on the work ahead. If you still have a question or comment you'd like to discuss, free to visit and/or post your topic in our Webmaster Central Help Forum.
Thanks and take care,
The Webmaster Central Team
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