Legal Research

Search Engine Optimization

I often talk about how the main search engines determine the ranking of search results on their displays. It's worth reading these 'official' docs and resources from Google.

Google's SEO Starter Guide

"Wednesday, November 12, 2008 at 11:55 AM

Webmasters often ask us at conferences or in the Webmaster Help Group, "What are some simple ways that I can improve my website's performance in Google?" There are lots of possible answers to this question, and a wealth of search engine optimization information on the web, so much that it can be intimidating for newer webmasters or those unfamiliar with the topic. We thought it'd be useful to create a compact guide that lists some best practices that teams within Google and external webmasters alike can follow that could improve their sites' crawlability and indexing.

Our Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide covers around a dozen common areas that webmasters might consider optimizing. We felt that these areas (like improving title and description meta tags, URL structure, site navigation, content creation, anchor text, and more) would apply to webmasters of all experience levels and sites of all sizes and types. Throughout the guide, we also worked in many illustrations, pitfalls to avoid, and links to other resources that help expand our explanation of the topics. We plan on updating the guide at regular intervals with new optimization suggestions and to keep the technical advice current.

So, the next time we get the question, "I'm new to SEO, how do I improve my site?", we can say, "Well, here's a list of best practices that we use inside Google that you might want to check out.""

Since libraries don't serve their customers by allowing and encouraging manipulation of the search rankings by advertisers, politicians and other special interest groups, we need to understand how the performance and positioning of our OPACs, databases and licensed resources differ from public search engines with revenue models designed to serve their primary customers - the folks paying the bills.

OF COURSE, That shouldn't stop you from optimizing your library websites to get higher local rankings!!

Stephen

Full post as published by Stephen's Lighthouse on November 14, 2008 (boomark / email).