When it comes to Search Engine Optimization (SEO), there really is quite a bit of passionate debate about what you can and cannot do to improve your ranking in natural search results with Google, Yahoo, and others. Generally it is difficult to get definitive details on this topic from the search engine companies for a couple of good reasons. The first is that they do need to protect their competitive advantage in this market. Their “secret sauce” is the detail behind how they are better than the other search engines in identifying “good content” on the web. The second is to avoid providing search engine spammers with the details needed to make it easier to subvert the search engines to get high ranking pages without developing legitimate content. It appears that Google is making a concerted effort to strike a careful balance between providing more information, while not giving away too much.
Google has clearly been increasing their effort to provide information that will help web developers legitimately improve the quality of their websites. One simple example is the following blog entry “Using ALT attributes smartly” found in the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog. This one blog entry very definitively confirms a specific point that many SEO practitioners have suspected for some time. Google engineer Matt Cutts provides a good explanation in the form of an embedded video of how using the ALT attribute in appropriate HTML tags does help Google better index your website. Their webmaster blog also has many more entries that cover other issues of interest to webmasters. If you have a website, and would like to know what you can do to help make it rank better in Google search results, I would recommend that you carefully read their articles.
Additionally… Google really has been adding greater detail to the information available in Google Webmaster Central, and more depth in functionality in the tools available through Google Webmaster Tools. If this was not enough, Google has really been making major improvements to Google Analytics, which provides more useful metrics for measuring website performance than any of the other tools I have previously used.
If you have not previously used these resources, you really should spend some time investigating them. If it has been a while since you have referred to them, you will likely be pleasantly surprised with how much they have improved. I also anticipate we will continue to see additional improvements from Google.
Recent Comments