Official Google SEO Guide

[Shopping4Coupons]

Google recently released it's own search engine optimization guide.

When we're looking for tips on SEO for our blogs we should probably start with the guys at the top, right? Google themselves.
Lots of good tips to get your blog found in more searches.

Google's Official Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide <-- PDF Format

Just for the record I found this today on the blog of the Wordpress SEO Expert Vladimir Prelovac.

[Nathan]

Very cool! I'm downloading it right now. Thanks for sharing!

[sadiessay-so]

Downloaded - thanks for sharing!! That'll be a great help.

[Nathan]

I read the whole guide last night and it gave me some neat ideas concerning meta tags. I highly recommend this guide to all you bloggers out there. It is very informative and easy to understand.

[sadiessay-so]

Okay, I just finally got through this. Most of it I'm already doing, as far as meta tags, image names, etc.... The only thing I really have a question about is the robots.txt thing. I use Google Webmaster tools, even though I really don't understand it completely... Do I have to download something to get this? Or, what do I do? I seem to have it on Say-So, if you type in the extension after the address, but I don't have it on Skinny, the site or the blog. Any ideas? Anything you can explain in simple terms would be great.

[Brandon Sheley]

Originally Posted by sadiessay-so

Okay, I just finally got through this. Most of it I'm already doing, as far as meta tags, image names, etc.... The only thing I really have a question about is the robots.txt thing. I use Google Webmaster tools, even though I really don't understand it completely... Do I have to download something to get this? Or, what do I do? I seem to have it on Say-So, if you type in the extension after the address, but I don't have it on Skinny, the site or the blog. Any ideas? Anything you can explain in simple terms would be great.

you'll put a text file in yourdomain.com/robots.txt

[Nathan]

You won't be able to modify the robots.txt on your blogspot blog because it isn't self hosted. I already tried that. But you can create a robots.txt on your self hosted Sadie's skinny.

[Bloggeries]

Thanks for link!

I've read a few parts but never the entire thing.

Cheers!

[sadiessay-so]

Originally Posted by NathanKP

You won't be able to modify the robots.txt on your blogspot blog because it isn't self hosted. I already tried that. But you can create a robots.txt on your self hosted Sadie's skinny.

How do I do it, though? And once it's created, how do I tweak it? That was the one part of the whole article I didn't understand.

[Nathan]

Here's a good tutorial on robots.txt syntax

Tech Patterns :: Robots.txt syntax

Basically you are denying access for bots to certain folders on your server.

Wordpress should already have security set up, but you might want to look into it nonetheless. However, I would be surprised if Wordpress is not already robots.txt enabled. In fact, if you mess with up and you aren't really careful you're probably more likely to open a security hole than improve things.