I'd love to have one of those...
Google recently held their second site clinic in London, UK.
I won’t bore you with the event details because, frankly, I don’t know them, but I did want to give you a summary of the discussed topics as they directly pertain to any site owner.
1. Meta Tags
Title tags and meta description tags are still important, yet widely ignored by many bloggers.
If you’d like to know more about utilizing those two to the fullest, read my free 7 Steps to Complete Search Engine Ranking Optimization report.
As far as Google is concerned, you can completely ignore the meta keywords.
2. Heading Tags
Proper use of H1, H2, H3, etc tags helps Google determine the context of content on a page and also determine the priority of content in general and specifically your keywords.
For those of you who’d like to learn the proper structure of the home page and a post page, here they are:
What it should be for your home page – ideally:
- H1: Blog’s name
- H2: Your blog’s tagline – should be keyword-rich
- H3: Your recent posts
- H4: related content in the sidebar, like the heading of an “about” widget.
- H5: Unrelated headings in your sidebar, footer, etc.
What it should be for your posts:
- H1: post / page title
- H2′s and H3′s: subheadings and sub-subheadings
- H4: your blog’s name, and possibly related widgets
- H5: same as above: sidebars etc.
Side note: if you want to check your own blog structure, just go to http://validator.w3.org/, add your URL to validate your code and make sure you check the “Show Outline” box – that’s what will give you your blog outline at the very bottom of your page.
3. Navigation
Structure your site logically for both users and search engines.
Don’t forget to link to other posts and pages within your blog – this helps your readers navigate your site and makes it more “sticky”, thus reducing your bounce rate.
Also, be sure to have a regularly updated Sitemap, which can be easily created on WordPress blogs via a plugin. I use Google XML Sitemaps plugin on my blog.
4. Duplicate Content & Canonicalization
Definitely something you need to know about and fix as much as you can.
Both were discussed at length in these posts:
5. Misspelled Queries
This is a popular suggestion by many SEOs – ranking for possible misspelled searches.
A couple of issues with that:
- In some cases, Google’s automatic spelling correction gets the job done for users by suggesting the correct spelling.
- It’s not a wise ideas to stuff your site with every imaginable typo and it’s even worse to try to hide them with CSS, or Javascript – as I am sure you are aware, or should be anyway, that such methods are in violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.
6. Site Speed
No matter where I go, Google is discussing site speed, and they did again at this past summit. It must be important. Duh.
Not as much as a ranking factor, although it is, but from a user’s perspective.
Users love fast websites.
To increase blog speed, here’s a helpful series of posts I wrote:
- Need for Site Speed: Search Engine Ranking Chase Gains Momentum
- Need For Site Speed: Practical Guide For The Average Blogger
- Need For Site Speed: Why I Wish I Had This Fruit Stand Owner’s Problems
Marketing Takeway
Probably, nothing new for most of us here in terms of knowing about it.
But how about doing it?
The source for the article: Google Webmaster Central
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