Google Best Practices: Review

A while back Jason Katzenback of PortalFeeder pointed me at Google best Practices by Jerry West, he told me to take on board what was in the book because it was as he put it 'the real deal'.

Jerry has been consulting on internet issues since 1996 and the edition of Google Best Practices that I read was the latest edition updated in August 2007. Jerry is a big tester, taking little at face value and in his book what he shares is the result of his testing.

Purpose of the ebook.
Jerry wanted to produce a guide that was based upon building organic traffic to websites using Google. The goal being to produce long term sustainable businesses built upon a base of tested 'best practice'.
His premise is that we should not be too concerned about getting a number one Google ranking, or even traffic. The real story is getting people to the site who take the actions that we want them to do. This is a fundamental insight and one that is usually overlooked by SEO experts and other gurus but is very familiar to businesspeople in the offline and online world!

Topics Covered in Google Best Practices
Among others Jerry covers the following subjects:
1) Is SEO Dead?
2) The Title Tag
3) The Supplemental Index
4) Good Linking Structure
5) Page Rank, its real importance
6) Meeting Google's Criteria in site development

How Well Does Google Best Practices Perform?
Jerry West starts off by discussing domain names and he has some good reasons for choosing brandable domains over keyword domains. He goes on to cover buying domains and points to watch out for,including PageRank fraud. Follow his suggestions and I think you would be unlikely to buy a duff domain and, even if you did, you would know that you had done all you could.

I liked his suggestion for ensuring that domains are 'clean' but especialy that the same technique allows me to check up on what my competitors are up to.

Later he covers issues such as page loading speed and the size of pages. At first glance these may not seem too relevant to SEO, but they are and my eyes were opened when I read the reasons why.

There are some interesting points about niche sites and their management. No surprises here for automated blogs site owners, we already cover that ground in a Google Best Practices manner!

Of course there is a big section on keywords and their use. All the information is recently tested by Jerry. Some of what he writes runs counter to practice as suggested by many armchair gurus.

His linking advice is sound and I appreciated his suggestions in repsect of sharing traffic, both internally and to external sites.

There is detailed advice about redirects including the code needed to ensure that redirects are done properly.

An area that concerns many webmasters is the Supplemental Index and Google Best Practices has a whole section on the topic. He makes the point that a few pages in supplemental is not a bad thing but there are pages that one really does not want there and these should be identified and promoted out, of course Jerry shows us how!

There is a comprehensive section of resources – this is up to date and useful to webmasters and DIY SEOers.

Conclusion.
This ebook costs just $47. It has informational value to justify a much higher price. There is no wasted space and readers will be avoiding a lot of misinformation. Jerry even provides commentary for some of these assertions so that we can understand where some people are going wrong AND see how to do better.

I liked this ebook and printed it out for further reading. This is not one of those that stays on my hard drive waiting for me to find it from my desktop search tool.

By the way, Google Best Practices is available for just one day from Dealdotcom at a special price. Normally $47 from GooglebestPractices.com

Andrew.