Google’s In-House SEO Report Card Give Insights

Binaryday.com has published their review of the leaked Google internal SEO report card produced for all Google assets. Its a nice find as it reaffirms some of the guesses that SEO’s have made as to how to best optimise a site.

Their review is great, but there’s some missed opportunities that could be worthwhile exploiting.

Google are playing up the importance of ‘descriptive’ title and meta description tags.

• Make title tags 60 characters in length as this is the default size
• Keep keywords to the front as later terms may have ‘less weight to words after a certain point’
• Add in what the product does, who it targets and what the main features are
• Use the noodp meta tag to override Googles default use and add in your own meta description snippet

Google advocate having your brand as the first part of a title – this may help with brand recognition and the implementation of Site Links with your listing?

Google reinforces the fact that meta keywords and descriptions do not benefit your search position, instead the meta description tag can be used to support your listing making it more inticing

To get Site Links…

• Use a heirarchal site structure (is Google using folders to define Site Links?)
• Use descriptive anchor text for links (I suggest keeping anchor texts uniform across all pages and inbound links with the exception of using plurals to further determine relevancy)
• Avoid deep nesting of content behind many sub directories (keep your site structure 1 or 2 tiers deep)
• Use Google Webmaster Tools to remove irrelevant terms

Google are highlighting issues with their multi-path site structure which sees google.com/foo google.com/foo/ google.com/foo/index.html www.google.com/foo www.google.com/foo/ www.google.com/foo/index.html foo.google.com foo.google.com/ foo.google.com/index.html all directing to the same page and all accessible in their own rights or being re-directed via 302 (temporary redirects). To combat this they suggest using 301 redirects on all non standard versions of the URL’s to either foo.google.com or google.com/foo.

Its also important to make sure your internal links and external links under your control follow this procedure to avoid further indexing of these ‘broken’ URLs.

Make sure any logo links back to your sites home page have descriptive alt text and not just a repetition of the brand name.

Remove all ‘click here’, ‘learn more’ and other generic links with more descriptive (keyword rich) texts.