Google recently released an “SEO Starter Guide”.  You can download it as a PDF from here.

 This is an interesting development, mainly because historically Google has wanted to minimize SEO as a factor in website design and promotion, so that webmasters would focus on quality and users rather than gaming the system for SEO rankings.  For Google to give specific advice on SEO is a real shift in policy, though you could see it coming based on other information such as Matt Cutts’ statements over the last couple years.

The guide actually gives some pretty good advice, although it is quite limited in scope and avoids detail guidelines.  There are really no revelations here — it is all stuff you will find in most SEO resources.  Areas covered include:

• Title tags — how they are used in search results, making sure they are unique, make them short
•  Meta description tags — use them, make them unique, keep them succinct
• URL structure — make them descriptive, use keywords (!), keep directory structure simple
• Navigation — use text links, create a good internal link hierarchy, use XML site maps
• 404 Not Found page — use a 404 page to handle bad links
• Quality content — offer good, fresh, relevant, unique content of interest to users
• Anchor text — use keywords in link text
• Headings — use headings appropriately, including use of <h1>, <h2>, etc tags
• Image tagging — use alt tags on images, and use keywords in image file names
• Robots.txt — use robots.txt to manage where spiders crawl in your site
• Use nofollow — use rel=’nofollow’ tag on links to sites/pages you don’t trust, or links you don’t control
• Promote your site — use blogs, social media sites, etc to publicize your site
• Webmaster tools — use the webmaster tools from Google and other search engine for diagnositics and information

All in all, some good stuff.  It is interesting to see Google validate some very standard SEO techniques, including keywords in anchor text, keywords in URLs, use of title/meta tags, <Hn> tags for headings, etc.  It is also interesting how Google recommends simple, non-dynamic URLs with keywords (which to some extent is contrary to some recent advice they gave — see the post on this here).

Of course, there is a lot that Google does not cover here that are important SEO techniques.  Inbound linking is a big one — they talk vaguely about “promoting” your site and using social media, but no specifics.  They also give no advice on keyword targeting, optimal content writing, keyword density, etc, nor does it cover more complex topics like use of Flash, AJAX, CSS, JavaScript, etc. 

One interesting comment I hear regarding this is the idea that “SEO is dead”, since if Google is giving SEO advice, who needs SEO specialists?  I don’t agree with this view.  While there are some basic “best practices” that have emerged for SEO, and these are being blessed by Google, there is so much more to SEO if you want to compete.  This is especially true if lots of websites adopt these basic practices.  For sites that want to stand out, they need to go to the next level — beyond these basic practices.  For that, they will need expertise from SEO specialists, which means we are not (yet) an endangered species.

John Erickson
www.leadqual.com

Recently there has been some discussion on whether Google gives special attention to links from .edu or .gov websites.  In a couple of statements, Google, through Matt Cutts, has stated they don’t. 

Does this mean you should give up looking for links from .edu and .gov site?  No way! 
You have to read between the lines here to see reality.

Here is a quote from Matt Cutts from a Google chat question:

TylerDee, TX: Are .gov and .edu back links still considered more “link juice” than the common back link?

Matt Cutts: This is a common misconception–you don’t get any PageRank boost from having an .edu link or .gov link automatically. Hah John, I beat you to it! If you get an .edu link and no one is linking to that .edu page, you’re not going to get any PageRank at all because that .edu page doesn’t have any PageRank.

JohnMu: We generally treat all links the same - be it from .gov or .edu or .info sites.

Here is another quote from Matt Cutts in an interview with Stephan Spencer:

Matt Cutts: Typically, our policy is: a link is a link, is a link; wherever that link’s worth is, that is the worth that we give it. Some people ask about links from DMOZ, links from .edu or links from .gov, and they say: “Isn’t there some sort of boost? Isn’t a link better if it comes from a .edu?” The short answer is: no, it is not. It is just .edu links tend to have higher PageRank, because more people link to .edu’s or .gov’s.

While it may be true that Google has no special logic for .edu and .gov links, look at that last statement:  “It is just that .edu links tend to have higher PageRank, because more people link to .edu’s or .gov’s”. 

Gee — that sounds special to me!  What they are saying is that links from .edu and .gov links are of higher value than many other links, simply because most of them have very high authority as link sources.  www.berkeley.edu and  www.stanford.edu are PR9, and most medium to large universities are PR6 or better.  Are those good places to get links?  You bet.  Also, .edu and .gov sites have good traffic, so you can also get real visitors over these links.

So, bottom line, look carefully before doing what Google tells you.  They have their own agenda and that is not necessarily helping you with SEO for your website.  As you do link building, by all means include .edu and .gov sites in your list of candidates.

John Erickson
www.leadqual.com

When creating a blog, a key decision is how/where it should be hosted, and what domain structure is used.

Typically, you have several options for hosting, which include:

1. Host the blog on your own website, or
2. Host the blog on some service, such as blogger.com, typepad.com, etc.

For SEO for the blog site itself there is not a big difference between these two options.  In either case you can promote your blog, have a good structure, and create great content so that it can rank well.

For domain usage, you also have several options.  These include:

1. Make the blog part of your website, such as at www.mysite.com/blog/
2. Make the blog a separate website, such as www.myblog.com
   Note that this could be hosted anywhere, including at a blog service that allows you to set up a unique domain.
3. Use a subdomain under your main website, such as myblog.mysite.com
4. Use a subdomain of a blog service, such as myblog.typepad.com
5. Use a directory within a blog service, such as www.blogservice/~myblog

If your blog is part of or related to your website, then it is generally better to use the first option, where the blog is part of the website and uses a directory within that website.  This is because all your blog content is part of the site, and that content and any inbound links benefit your site as a whole.  You can also get the best leverage from internal linking from your blog posts to other pages on your site (”internal page rank flow”).  Also, your blog immediately benefits from the page rank and link popularity of your website, enabling your blog posts to rank better, faster.

If your blog is not related to a website, the second option is generally best, where you set up your own domain name for your blog.  You can do this whether you are hosting your own blog or using a service (at least most services allow this option).  Using your own domain gives you much more flexibility for moving your blog in the future – you can more easily change hosting services and keep control of your blog.

The other options can work OK for SEO, especially if you pay attention to other factors such as good content, keywords, freshness, etc, but generally the first two options above are better.

One thing I often see, primarily on sites that use Windows IIS servers, is inconsistent capitalization in URLs.  For example:

www.mysite.com/products    (lower case)
www.mysite.com/Products    (proper case)

This is most common on Windows hosts, since Windows file handling is case insenitive, so that the above two links would serve the same content regardless of how the actual file or URL was stored or handled in the system.

On UNIX hosts, however, the above two links would not be the same — one link would typically return a 404 Not Found error if the capitalization did not match a file name.

Since on Windows hosts the user gets the same web page back regardless of capitalization, does it matter if a website uses a mix of lower and upper case on a URL when referring to the same page, and does this impact search engine (SEO) rankings?

(more…)

Google has recently added a new feature to their webmaster tools that will give the source of broken links they find while crawling.  For more information, see the announcement here.

Google has long reported broken links in the webmaster tools, but you could not tell where they came from.  The new feature lets you see the source of these broken links, both within your site and from other external websites.  You can find the new information in the Diagnostics | Web Crawl section of Google webmaster tools, where they report “404 Not Found” errors.  If the list is long, you can download the report as a document to make it easier to use.

This gives a great opportunity to improve user experience and your SEO results.  Here are some tips on what to do  with this new information:

1.  First, fix any errors within your site, especially if there are large numbers.  This helps users avoid “404 not found” errors, and lets search engines find your real pages.  Also, if you had many errors, you can increase trust of the search engines in your site by fixing them, which can improve rankings.
2. For external broken links, see if you can have the source website fix the problem.  Otherwise, put in a HTTP 301 redirect that handles the broken link, redirecting to the correct URL (do not use JavaScript, meta refresh or HTTP 302 redirects, be sure to use a 301).  This will again help users, and also help your SEO by directing that inbound page rank to a real page, helping it rank better.  This is a bit like a free inbound link!
3. Look at how that link might have been a problem in the first place.  Are your URLs too long or complicated to copy?  Do you have complex query parameters to deal with?  Did you rename or delete pages without using a 301 redirect to handle retired URLs?  Are there errors in your bookmarking buttons and tags?  Think about what you can do to prevent broken links in the first place.

Google continues to add some great features to webmaster tools.  Yahoo and MSN have also been adding some great tools as well.  Make good use of the information they provide, and it will help your users and your SEO.

     John Erickson
     LeadQual