As the economy tightens, we’ve seen a lot of design firms expressing a stronger interest in how to improve their studio’s online marketing efforts. Of particular interest, we hear a lot of designers asking how to help their web site (or their client sites) rank better in Google search results.

If that’s of interest to you, start with the source. Google has published a free 22-page PDF guide that lists some of the best practices you should use to improve your site’s search results:

Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide

Search engine optimization (SEO) is often about making small changes to parts of your website. Individually, those changes might not seem like much, but when combined, they can have a significant impact on your site’s search results.There is nothing groundbreaking in this guide. Which is good. SEO isn’t about crafty tricks, or crazy techniques to game the system. Understanding the fundamentals of good SEO is important for any designer who makes a living designing or working on client websites.

Several months ago we published a short SEO Guide for Graphic Designers that provided a short list of fundamentals to focus on. This guide from Google provides more detail and expands into a few more areas than our short post, but the fundamentals remain largely unchanged.

Speaking of fundamentals. This encouraged me to look back on my own review of Growing Your Business with Google by Dave Taylor over two years ago. The philosophy and specifics of how to design a search engine-friendly web site have not changed much since that book was published.

Source: This tip inspired by Managing Your Google Brand, a 2-hour evening talk I’m giving on December 8th at the Luminous Works Schoolhouse in Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood. If you are a designer in the Seattle area, I’d love to see you there. Every designer who creates web pages for clients should know this information.