SEO

3 ways to take advantage of the Google updates

Published: October 1st, 2009

Google appears to be weighting some factors more heavily since the recent spate of updates - here are three that you need to take advantage of:

1. Make sure you have an onsite blog

Sites with blogs seem to be doing even better in the SERPs following the recent updates. It makes sense that Google would move further in this direction, as if you have a section onsite devoted to regularly updated content then your link strategy will appear more natural – obviously the addition of a blog is more likely to attract links to the site (be it to the blog itself or the homepage). The outcome is greater trust.

2. Make sure you have content on the homepage

Sites that have a reasonable amount of content on the homepage seem to have performed better since the updates. This content is also useful for putting anchor text links into other parts of your sites – by doing this we have noticed that you can have more influence on the ‘sitelinks’ listed in the SERPs (the links to other parts of your site underneath your listing).

3. Make sure you have some form of feed on the site

This (like the other two points) has been known to be beneficial for a long time, though weighting appears to have been altered further towards this factor. Make sure you have a feed, whether it’s a feed of a regularly updated blog, news or an RSS feed. Again this update makes sense – regularly changing content is likely to point towards a higher quality user experience and therefore a higher quality site.

Please list any of your own observations in the comments section.

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Ever-changing Google.co.uk results

Published: September 25th, 2009

Changes in the Google.co.uk results seem to be becoming ever-more frequent – at first we noticed big changes from one day to the next, then changes from morning to afternoon, now we are seem to be experiencing changes from one minute to the next!

I searched for a term this morning and picked out the site I wanted at the bottom of the first page. Then refreshed and it was at second from top on the second page. Then my colleague searched for the same term and it was on the bottom of the first page in his results.

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Seven Simple Steps to Onsite Optimisation

Published: September 11th, 2009

These seven steps assume you’ve been given a fully finished site to optimise and you don’t have much time! Follow them and you can’t go far wrong.

1. Decide which pages will focus on which terms

This is crucial. Choose no more than a handful of terms per page. I am a believer that landing pages are for SEO as well as PPC (those who disagree can berate me in comment section below). Ensure this strategy does not become confused, with more than one page focusing on exactly the same key phrase - focusing on longer-tailed key phrases is fine though.

2. Alter page titles

Put priority terms at the front end of the title and make sure they are written with word proximity in mind. The closer together the words within the title, the better the effect on the ranking of the phrase combining those words. For example, the title ‘One two three’ is likely to have better rankings for the phrase ‘one two’ than the phrase ‘one three’. Also, phrases that are entered after the first 60-70 characters will be far less effective than those within the first 60-70 characters.

3. Write keyword rich content

Don’t over-do it on the key phrases but make sure there are a couple of each in there. At least 250-300 words on each landing page is best, though every little helps.

4. Ensure there is no duplicate content

Make sure there is only one version of each page – use .htaccess to redirect and robots.txt to exclude where necessary. Ensure identical content isn’t elsewhere on the web with use of Copyscape or simply by copying and pasting the text into Google. Make sure there is only one version of your homepage – Google views http://yoursite.com, http://www.yoursite.com, http://www.yoursite.com/index.html and http://yoursite.com/index.html as 4 different pages. Make sure it knows which one you prefer by using Google Webmaster Tools and the .htaccess file.

5. Insert relevant headings

Make sure there are headings on the page containing the key terms - but also ensure they do not exactly match the page titles.

6. Insert relevant meta tags

Write an interesting 120 character-long meta description mentioning relevant key terms. Ensure that the meta keywords tag does not mention anything that isn’t actually mentioned in the body of your content.

7. Upload sitemaps

Xml sitemap is vital to inform Google about your site structure and URLs. Html sitemap is useful.

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Is Google too awkward?

Published: August 28th, 2009

It‘s understandable that Google doesn’t like to offer too much help to those mystified by its algorithm. If it let all the details out then providing users with a valued list of results will become almost impossible. But is it just sometimes too…awkward? And could this be a chink in its armour in the future?

Its ‘awkwardness’ stems from its lack of communication and facelessness. This has not gone unnoticed though – right from the beginning it has changed their logo to reflect current events in an attempt to connect with its audience. And it has wheeled out Matt Cutts in order to give the organisation a human outlet for problem solving for those attempting to maximise the opportunities that the Google search model presents. Plus, those within the realm of Google Adwords can access a representative for help.

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Google.co.uk IS broken

Published: August 21st, 2009

Google appear to have rolled out an update to Google.co.uk before it was ready. According to Matt Cutts the update is an attempt to integrate .com results into the searches into results for the option ‘the web’. However, it seems to have brought free reign so that a huge number of international domains are appearing in the SERPs.

Try searching ‘motor forum’ and you will see what people mean when they are saying that the results are broken.

The problem behind this experimentation by Google is that they have never fully defined the options ‘the web’ and ‘pages from the UK (or any other country)’ options properly – the results are usually much the same in both options, with .co.uk domains generally enjoying a slight preference in ‘the web’. Many pages of multi-national interest are .com so Google have decided to even things up a bit to fulfil their ‘expectation’ criteria.

I should take a minute to explain this a bit – Google aim to return the result that most users expect to find. So if they search for ‘Barack Obama’ in a search that covers the web, they probably expect to find a biography page about Barack Obama, possibly on the Whitehouse website or on Wikipedia.

However this seemed to be working perfectly fine before - .com results were showing up in the expected places. In my opinion, anyway. Now my expectations are being dashed in quite a few searches.

I search ‘blinds’ expecting to see a raft of companies selling blinds. Now I see there’s a Telegraph article about Dragons’ Den and an American software company selling something called ‘window blinds’, presumably for Microsoft Windows.

Hopefully they’ll stop experimenting and my expectations will be restored – including the expectation that Google don’t mess up.

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