Google updates its search optimisation guide
If there's one document that should be of interest to every website owner, it's Google's guidelines for optimising a website - and it's just been updated.
11 October 2010
Many people are surprised that Google is so open about helping people get better search results - but it's long been a part of how they operate. Yes, they want people to be paid advertisers, so helping people get good results without paying seems counter-intuitive, but if Google's organic (non-paid) search results weren't good, then people wouldn't use it. If people didn't use it, then they couldn't attract advertisers.
Google has long-published helpful guidelines, but they've just updated these so we thought it would be worth taking a look at some of the most important points.
Page titles
Page titles are held within the <title> tag and are displayed in the title bar of the browser. Ideally, the title of every page should be unique and reflect accurately the content of that page. Because the page title is so important to Google, some people fill it with keywords and spam - but actually Google is pretty good at assessing if a page title is unnatural and downgrading it. If you get the title right for people, you'll have pretty much got it right for Google too. Titles shouldn't be too long, either - Google pretty much ignores the latter part of long titles.
Description meta tag
Although Google totally ignores the meta keywords tag, it does make intelligent use of the meta description - by using it as a snippet to describe your page in the Google search results. However, Google doesn't always use this - it may choose to use something within the page which it considers to be more relevant. It's important that the meta descriptions for each page are different - if they are the same, then it means Google will think the pages are the same or similar and won't show all of them in its search results.
URL structure
URLs can be used to help give Google a clear understanding of the page's content and the website's structure. For example, a URL which is:
www.example.com/pages/1/123af/article.asp?=3256 tells Google nothing whatsoever of value. Yet these URLs are fairly common. A URL which is more sensibly structured, such as:
www.example.com/news/2010/new-television-for-sale.html tells Google far, far more. And, it's good for your users too. A key thing to remember is that partial URLs should always work - so that URLs such as www.example.com/news/ will result in a valid page and not an error message. Getting this right really allows Google to understand the structure of your website, index it better and display more relevant pages in search results.
Sitemaps
There are two kinds of sitemaps which you can use on a website - an HTML sitemap, that's also visible to people, and an XML sitemap which is designed for Google. The HTML sitemap allows Google to find all the pages on your website, even if they are not properly linked to from elsewhere - it's also useful to visitors who may want to find a particular page without having to browse through lots of the site. An XML sitemap isn't really readable by humans - it contains much of the same information as an HTML sitemap, but more besides. This can include the date the page was created, for example - this is very relevant because Google is interested in some cases (such as news pages) in displaying new content more prominently.
Create interesting content
Many people believe that search optimisation is something that takes place just at a technical level. Actually, creating unique and interesting website content is vital - because it's the one thing which will make your site more popular with users, who will then link to it from their websites. Google measures the number and quality of those links - and more popular pages (pages with more links to them) get higher search engine results. So, this isn't something you can really rig - copying and pasting content from somewhere else is a real mistake, because Google is very good at identifying duplicate content and weeding it out of the search results. The quality and uniqueness of your website content is very important - both to people and to Google.
Creating meaningful anchor text
This is often overlooked by website owners but is vitally important. A link to another page contains text which is known as anchor text. If that text says something like 'for more information [click here]' (where [click here] is the link) then Google knows nothing about the page at the other end of the link (other than what it can find on the page itself, of course). However, if the link is structured more like 'download our [guide to search optimisation]' then Google knows that at the other end of the link is a guide to search optimisation.
Good use of heading tags
HTML allows for six levels of headings. Think of this as if you're writing an outline, with h1 at the top and h6 at the bottom. Good, intelligent headings give Google a really excellent insight into the structure of the page. They are also good for people - who can visually scan the page to find the thing in which they are interested.
Download the guide
We've really only skimmed some of the most important parts of the guide, but hopefully it's provided an insight into the quality of advice on offer. It's not a long guide, just over 30 pages, and it's very easy to read - it's pretty non-technical. You can download it from here: download Google's Search Engine Optimisation Starter Guide.
