Google has finally put their name to a guide for SEO practices. Announced on their webmaster central blog late last week, Google released a 22 page PDF titled, oddly enough, Google’s Search Engine Optimization Starters Guide.

To those looking for a top secret advantage or holy grail to a top ranking website… well, you might have to wait a little longer. This guide offers little more than an acknowledgement of what most would consider industry best practises. But for those looking for a brief introduction to the topic, especially when it comes to on-page optimization basics — this guide is good enough that I may make it my first stop for recommended reading.

And for those simply looking to avoid reading a 22-pg PDF report, I offer my own bullet point readers digest consolidation as follows:

• Make your title tags unique on every page of your site;
• Be sure to add a meta-description tag to each of your pages;
• Incorporate logical site architecture / information architecture principles;
  • ie. broad topic > specific category > finite subject
  • use breadcrumb trails, text based navigation structures
• Make content fresh, organized, unique, and relevant to the site’s subject;
• Keywords embedded in the url structure of pages are valuable additions;
• Write your content for the user, not the search engines;
• Optimize using ALT tags on in-line page images;
• Link with shorter descriptive anchor text – both internally and externally;
• Use header tags to differentiate headlines or scannable content;
• Make use of robots.txt files, sitemap files, webmaster central tools, and so on.

These types of on-page optimization factors are pretty much standard fare these days, especially within more competitive search markets. However, the fact that Google has put their name to, and indirectly endorsed, what most consider to be both ethical and standard industry practises — makes the SEO world a little easier to navigate, for everyone.

And that is an olive branch worth commending. Well done Google!