Google SEO Video Review

Meet the Players

It’s no secret Google is top dog when it comes to search. Does that mean that we don’t consider what the other engines are doing? Statistics say Yahoo! and Google run neck and neck with unique visitors while Bing is not even on the map yet. I am looking at unique visitors here to see which site is entertaining more new blood. We can see Y and G with a similar trend line, Google starts to open up the gap in October 2008. In my opinion G and Y are 2 completely different sites; Google owns search— Yahoo! owns the social portal side. So if you are going to optimize your site for a search engine Google rules are worth learning!

After spending countless hours reading and watching Matt Cutts material I have created a reader’s digest version of Google SEO best practices. Out of all videos watched this one took the prize for me. Most of this makes perfect sense and speaks directly to general questions and concerns webmasters have.

If you have got about 38 minutes to kill there is some good insights into how Google sees websites. Matt and his team do public reviews of random websites the audience submits. For the most part Matt is gentle; it was a good thing certain webmasters were not present when the Google engineer kindly tore websites to pieces of junk. There is definitely information here from the horse’s mouth that you can take away with you.

Matt’s Video Overview

  • Provide multiple ways to get to page with html hyperlinks. Make easy for search engines to get to your site.
  • Make URLs nice and juicy. If it’s a ‘fruit juice’ page, page name = ‘fruit-juice’ Multiple parameters are difficult to crawl.
  • What are the words people are going to use to find your website? Use the free Google Adwords tool to find out.
  • Refrain from keyword stuffing. Google has technology to understand what a page is about without having to read the same keyword over and over. Intentional keyword stuffing is not a good idea.
  • Mind tour properties, hackers are attacking your web server. How do you find out if you are hacked? Go to Google and enter site:yourdomain.com Viagra (or any heavily spammed terms— pills, online, gambling, mortgages). Old versions of WordPress (2.2 and under) are more susceptible to hacking.
  • Use beginner language on homepage. Explain technical jargon in simple terms on homepage, let technical jargon fall deeper in your website.
  • Refrain from envelope pages, shadow domains, doorways, etc. SPAM domains will be ousted from the Google index faster then you think. Spam detection is Matt’s specialty. Good example shown in presentation.
  • Ask a stranger to test your website and observe what they do. If you are trying to sell your product how easily does the stranger find your sales process.
  • Look for CMS systems that are Search engine friendly. E.g. Expression engine, WordPress, etc.
  • Internal links should not be stamped with nofollow attributes unless you have good reason. This verifies that Google is not in favor of PageRank sculpting. Always try to minimize the clicks to goal. Most important content should be as close to the root as possible. You can apply nofollow to pages that are no use to the engine, e.g. registration pages.
  • Apply the 5 second rule to your design. What is your site about? Is it obvious within 5 seconds?
  • Look at the internal linking, make sure pages are named properly. E.g. index.php or index.html. Link juice is split up in many of these cases. Use 301 (permanent) or 302 (permanent) redirects.
  • Use Google webmaster tools.
  • Be careful buying domains names. Make sure they have not been torched by a spammer. Use the internet archive website to check history. Run a search on Google for the domain name, look for negative press that relates to spamming.
  • Use video to help rank for terms. Engaging videos can often rank for terms with no in links.
  • Refrain from using pure flash based sites if you want a decent chance of ranking. Not all hardware supports flash (e.g. IPhones). Google likes html over PDF or flash. Try to embed them in html pages.
  • High pagerank pages will get crawled before low rank pagerank pages.
  • Try to avoid excessive perimeters in your URL (2 or less). The more search engine friendly you can make them the better.

Like I said earlier, most of this stuff makes sense. That’s because Google Search is becoming more humanlike. Optimization today is entirely about the people that come to your site, how they get there and what actions they take. Google Analytics (analysis) will help you improve the visitor experience. If you can please your visitors by providing easy to navigate architecture with a prompt pathway to desired actions you win on both sides of the optimization game.

Be Sociable, Share!