BinaryDay

I have been away from the blog for quite sometime now. However a document released by Google that analyzed seo friendliness of 100 Google products and provides detailed instructions for improving the rankings and click through rate inside the SERP, has managed to get me back to blogging. The document contains sort of official confirmation about some hotly debated seo topics. Here are some seo insights obtained by me from the document.

1. Title Tag:
   • A descriptive title tag helps search engines to understand the content better
   • Most search engines use 60 characters from the title tag.
   • Search engines may give lesser importance to keywords after a certain point – Keep main keywords to the front.
   • Some users only look at titles – If you skimp on your title tag, you’re missing out on clicks from users who only
     scan result titles on a search results page Really!! (Page 5)
   • Prefered structure is <title> Brand Name – Target Keywords </title> : Leverage the brand if you have one (Page 6)
   • Do not copy title tag from some other page. (Page 7) Show this example the next time your boss shouts for a wrong copy paste job. Even Googlers use it
2. URL Structure
   • A descriptive url structure helps search engines to understand the content better
   • It plays a part in improving user click through rate
3. Meta Description Tag
   • description meta tags and keyword meta tags don’t count in Google’s ranking  (official confirmation of what we knew) -Page 9
   • The text from meta description tag is sometimes used for result snippet. Absence of meta description tag may result in non sensical text from the page to be shown as snippet.
   • Fill your two lines – Similar to the title tag, you want to use all of the space given to you in the snippet. You’ll describe your product better to users, have the opportunity for more bolded words, and take up more real estate on the search results page Page-9
   • Missing snippet for a page is a signal that something is wrong like google bot being denied access through robots.txt
4. Sitelinks
   • Webmasters can improve the chances of getting a sitelink by using 1. Hierarchical site structure, 2. using descriptive anchor text for internal links and 3. avoiding deep nesting of content behind many subdirectories. (p-13)
   • Google’s algorithm for creating sitelinks is not perfect. You should block unappealing sitelinks to get better sitelinks (p-15)
   • Google chooses popular and relevant content as sitelink (p-16)
5. Consolidating link juice
   • Either 301 redirect or canonical tag can be used to consolidate link juice from different pages showing the same content.  In the entire discussion about duplicate content, the emphasis is on split of link juice and not any duplicate content penalty. Is there a hint there? (p-19)
     
   • 301 redirect will not help if the page is blocked through robots.txt (p-19)
   • Don’t use 302s when 301s would be more appropriate (p-27) 302 redirect does not consolidate link juice.
   • 301 to the canonical or use the rel=”canonical” link element. Hopefully dobuts about effectiveness of rel=”canonical” tag will be removed now. (p-30)
6. Heading Tag Use
   • Use of heading tag helps search engines to understand your content better (p-34)
   • Smart use of CSS to get the same effect will not help (p-48)
   • H1 tags are better than H3 (p-48)
7. Images
   • Link images to the canonical destination pages to consolidate internal link juice (p-39)
   • Appropriate ALT text for linked images help search engines learn about target page and the image itself (p-42)
   • the alt text of images is  treated as anchor text by search engines (p-43)
8. Internal Anchor Text
   • Use of descriptive anchor text for internal pages helps (p-45)

Please let me know about any point that I might have missed or wrongly interpreted.

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