Friday, January 22, 2010
Want 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 (that is, 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
Step 4: Research before you do anything drastic
Usually the basics (for example, 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
disallow using robots.txt
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.
How we apply this
We archive Search Central announcements because client questions often trace back to a change that was announced years ago. Reading the original is faster than reconstructing it from second-hand summaries.
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