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Wow. This is more big news. Google launches it’s own guide to ‘SEO’. Wednesday (11/12/08) last week they wrote on their blog that there is too much information on the Web about SEO, so they decided to write a guide of ‘Best Practices’.

The guide can be downloaded (warning PDF) and it’s about 22 pages with plenty of pictures to understand these concepts fully. The guide starts out showing the difference between ‘paid’ and ‘organic’ search results. Paid are typically on the top and right of the search results and organic have #1, #2, etc on them (also the boxes with the Google Map is organic, Youtube videos, and Google Base in-between results are all ‘organic’). Sadly enough, Google doesn’t state that the results are blended with things other than webpages (video, products [Google base], books, locations of businesses, etc)

Then the guide goes into on-page optimization. Nothing about books, videos, products, etc. Just only webpages. It expresses the need to modify and implement the ‘title tag, meta description tag, rewriting a url (I’ll get into this later), site structure & breadcrumb navigation, sitemap, custom 404 page, use better anchor text, h1/h2 tags, alt tag in images, filename of images, robots.txt file, nofollow links, robots tag, and indirect seo things like blogging, offline promotion, local business center, networking within industry, and 3 Google products (Webmaster Tools, Analytics [cough], and Website Optimizer)’.

To look more deeply into this ‘guide’, Google only said a few weeks ago, “don’t rewrite your url, we got it covered“. Now in this guide they say rewrite it. Google also took out ‘submit to directories‘. This caused tremendous confusion among webmasters and both are still hotly debated today. Even after the removal a Google employee tells us why they took it out (35:37-37:13), it’s mainly because of the abuse it brought. Same thing with the URL rewrites, it was about people were ‘abusing’ it.

On-page optimization is great but it’s not even the first step! Keyword research is. How can you put keywords throughout your site, if you don’t know your target? Many companies and webmasters think they know the most effective keywords but that’s the problem, they are already assuming too much. Search is totally different than any form of advertising. “Boat” isn’t as effective as “Boats”, “Boats” is probably three times more effective. How do you know this? Keyword research, time in SEO, PPC testing, etc.

So, here is my plea webmasters. Read the Google’s SEO Guide but read it as a grain of salt. Read others as well, take the time to invest in your knowledge of SEO or hire someone to do it for you, if you don’t want to take extensive hours to read/research. Read SEO moz, Jim Boykins’s blog, Eric Ward, or just simply call me up (727-366-6474) and hire me for consultation or to do it for you.

Google isn’t going to tell you the entire story, they are only going to tell you what to do, to help them make them more money, nothing more, nothing less. Google is a multi-billion dollar business, not a non-profit, not a mom/pop shop, not someone looking out for your best interest. 

Refuge Design’s goal is to have the look and feel of a mom/pop shop but give you the expertise of the Search Marketing field, so that you make money, not Google, not Yahoo, but that YOU make money. Call us today (727-366-6474), we affordable to the small business and new startup companies, unlike 99% of all others in the field.

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