Google released on their seo blog a set of guidelines which can be downloaded as a pdf document. Some of them are already known by everyone, some comes to put some light in a dark space where myths were flourishing:

• Unique Accurate Titles - everyone already knew that the titles are crucial fo on-site optimization:
  • titles must describe accurately the page content
  • unique title tags for each page
  • the titles should not be too long
• Make use of the “description” meta tag - Google might use them as snippets on the SERP pages. There was much debate if description meta tag is important or not. Many people were saying it’s totally ignored by Google. It seems that’s a myth busted. Like in the case of the titles descriptions must be:
  • Accurate
  • Unique (generated is not manually written, but you should not use the same meta tag description for all the pages)
  • It’s not mentioned in the document, but I would add that it should not be too long. the maximum size should be the one that can be displayed completly as a snippet in the SERP page.
• Use friendly URLs. I read in another post from google a few weeks ago, that they are not recommending anymore the usage of rewritten url. Still in this guide they advice to:
  • use relevant words in urls
  • have a simple directory structure without nesting too many directories
  • have only one url for the same content, avoid duplicate content and if necesary and use 301 redirect to preserve the uniticiy of the pages.
• Make your site easier to navigate
  • creating hirearchies(eg: http://www.cars.com/cars/audi/)
  • use text for navigation links and avoid javascript, flash, … so the content could be seen by the search engines.
  • Use “breadcrumb” navigation - i’m not sure if this advice is to have a site more user friendly, or it is really an iformation used by search engines
  • Use both HTML and XML sitemaps - I’m not sure why both of them will improve the results
  • Consider what happens when a user removes part of your URL - showing 404 error if the page does not exists or redirecting it to the most appropiate page
  • Add usefull information on 404 page(dispaying home page, suggesting possilbe pages and usefull information). You can also embed google 404 widget to provide helpfull suggestions form Google Webmaster Tools
• Write usefull content:
  • Write easy-to-read text
  • Focus on the topic, group and divide text in paragraphs
  • Write unique content
  • Write content for users not search engines
• Anchor text should be
  • descriptive
  • brief
  • visible
  • should be used for internal links as well
• Use of H1, H2, .. H6 heading tags without using them excesively
• Image optimisaztion:
  • Use descriptive and concise filenames and alt text for the images
  • Use alt text for images used as links
  • store the images in their own directory (e.g. /images)
• robots.txt should not be used to hide sensitive information;
• make use of nofollow attribute tags

Check the google document for more details.

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