13 November 2008
Here's some welcome news from the Common Sense Desk. Google have released a free PDF ebook called the SEO Starter Guide. We'd like to recommend it to all our Clients.To be fair this information won't be news to anyone who reads Google's Webmaster blog, but pulling it together is a great victory for common sense, and will help demystify a subject people can obsess over. Go ahead and take a look, it will take you half-an-hour to read at the most.
The secret to SEO (of course there is no secret)
The guide deals with around a dozen basic topics for sites that want to achieve good organic search engine rankings... and they boil down to this:
• Create great content that is easy to use, share and index.
Hmmm... does that sound familiar to anyone? I think the thing that will surprise you is how simple most of this stuff is. There's no black magic, no keyword shenanigans, and (unsuprisingly) no attempt to game the system. This is about making your content as great as possible for the user, and as easy as possible for Search Engines to index. That's it.
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 buzz is what helps build your site's reputation with both users and Google,
and it rarely comes without quality content.
Google Simple SEO Guide
Of course this isn't to say that SEO is easy. Creating great content is always going to take work. But it does allow us, and you, to focus on what matters. A welcome break from the smoke and mirrors of some SEO companies.
But what about professional SEOs?
Just to be clear, I'm not saying that there is no place for SEO companies. There are plenty of things Google aren't telling us here... and that means that there will always be a place for genuine experts.
But I do hope that this guide helps shift the conversation back towards the users of websites, and away from the less-savoury end of Search Engine Optimisation.
Not surprisingly, as a business that creates accessible, content-rich websites, we'd welcome that :-)
Posted by Nick Warren at 10:09 AM
