Google has recently released a new version of their Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide. This SEO starter guide is a great read for beginners looking to learn the basics of SEO. What began as a tool to help Google employees understand SEO, Google decided to share these guidelines with us webmasters so we could improve the site’s user experience. In this guide, Google outlines what webmasters need to do to make it easy for search engine crawlers to identify your content.

One thing that really caught my attention was what they said about optimizing for what’s best for the visitors of your site. Google’s vision is to provide users with the most relevant search results, and if your content is unique and relevant, then your site will move to the top of the search engines. They stress the importance of making your site ‘visible’ to the search engines, but ultimately you are trying to provide information to your users.

The guide is broken out into six chapters:

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1. SEO Basics
2. Improving Site Structure
3. Optimizing Content
4. Dealing with Crawlers
5. SEO for Mobile Phones
6. Promotions and Analysis

Chapters 1 and 6 are the most important and cover the most ground for beginners. It would be great if you had time to read the entire guide, but if you have no time definitely make your way around Chapters 1 and 6. You could skip the chapter about mobile phones for now because most people don’t have mobile sites yet. However, it would be a good idea to understand how SEO works with mobile in case you ever want to create a mobile site for your business/blog.

Overall, this is a great guide for beginners looking to learn about SEO.

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