Today I just found two great sources of information on Search Engine Optimization.

Google’s search engine starter guide

The first has been released directly by Google: Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide

It covers the most common areas that might need a bit of optimization: urls, titles, metatags, image’s alt attributes, robots.txt file and other topics. A must read for everybody that is interested in the topic.

SEO for ASP.NET podcast

The second resource is the great (as always) podcast by Polymorphic Podcast about SEO for ASP.NET.

The guest, Michael Neel, talks about which are the main points of Search Engine Optimization, especially with ASP.NET.

And the main point is:

have the full url (without the query’s parameters) of the page, the page title and the H1 all with the same keywords.

All the rest is micro optimization that is irrelevant if the first golden rule is not applied. As also the Google’s document confirms, the description meta-tag is used to show the description of the page in the result’s list, but not used in the indexing of the page

Good to know… now I’d better change the structure of the HTML of my blog since the H1 is the blog name (codeclimber) and not the title of the post as are all the other two elements.

One good tool to help see the layout of a page is the “Document outline” command of the WebDeveloper toolbar plugin for Firefox. This is the outline of my blog as retrieved by the Document Outline tool.

Then it covers also another interesting topic: ASP.NET Sitemaps. And finally, another sitemap, the one that Google can use to index exactly what you want him to index.

If you are interested in SEO, as with the Google’s doc, I really recommend you listen to this podcast: ASP.NET SEO.