After a long awaited 2 years, Google has updated and released their new Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide. The guide is an effort to encourage webmasters to follow best practices so that search engines can easily crawl and index your site. Many of the concepts outlined are probably basics that you are already aware of but there may be areas of opportunity to expand your on-page relevancy.

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The guide includes:

1. SEO basics on title tags and meta descriptions
2. Improving Site Structure: Clean URLs and navigation
3. Optimize content using better anchor text and image naming
4. How to use robots.txt and rel=“no follow” awareness
5. Optimizing for mobile
6. How to promote your site in the right ways and use webmaster tools to analyze site performance

Google takes the time to reiterate that while your goal for optimization may be better visibility in the search engines, the ultimate goal is to produce a better experience for your user. Whether you’re a seasoned SEO guru, or just starting to pick up some knowledge, I think this guide is a nice refresher and reminder of the core concepts the search engines (and users!) value.

Download your copy here: http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrusted_dlcp/www.google.com/en/us/webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf