Google themselves joined the SEO business yesterday, publishing their SEO starter guide as below. A quick glance over it shows it to be the very basics, only one step on from their webmaster guidelines really, and quite unlikely to put many SEO companies out of business…

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.”

It would be most interesting to see Google themselves SEO a new site into view in any area of mild competiveness using just these basic techniques, as there is a distinct lack of focus on obtaining links, which is, as we all know, what makes the Google-world go round.