Google's Search Engine Optimization

Welcome to Google's Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide. This document
first began as an effort to help teams within Google, but we thought it'd be just as
useful to webmasters that are new to the topic of search engine optimization and
wish to improve their sites' interaction with both users and search engines.
Although this guide won't tell you any secrets that'll automatically rank your site
first for queries in Google (sorry!), following the best practices outlined below
will make it easier for search engines to both crawl and index your content.
Search engine optimization is often about making small modifications to parts of
your website. When viewed individually, these changes might seem like incremental
improvements, but when combined with other optimizations, they could have a
noticeable impact on your site's user experience and performance in organic search
results. You're likely already familiar with many of the topics in this guide,
because they're essential ingredients for any webpage, but you may not be making the
most out of them.

Even though this guide's title contains the words "search engine", we'd like to say
that you should base your optimization decisions first and foremost on what's best
for the visitors of your site. They're the main consumers of your content and are
using search engines to find your work. Focusing too hard on specific tweaks to gain
ranking in the organic results of search engines may not deliver the desired
results. Search engine optimization is about putting your site's best foot forward
when it comes to visibility in search engines.

An example may help our explanations, so we've created a fictitious website to
follow throughout the guide. For each topic, we've fleshed out enough information
about the site to illustrate the point being covered. Here's some background
information about the site we'll use:

• Website/business name: "Brandon's Baseball Cards"

• Domain name: brandonsbaseballcards.com

• Focus: Online-only baseball card sales, price guides, articles, and news content

• Size: Small, ~250 pages