When the the king of search looks to optimize its own content for search results, you know it’s not by going out and buying back links. They get those free of charge by their millions of users who love their resources. So what can Google do to improve their own rankings? They optimize their code on-site.
The SEO Report Card for Google
Last week Google blogged about their own SEO report that they conducted on themselves. You can read the report in PDF format yourself: Google’s SEO Report Card.
If you look at Section III of the report, On-page optimization you will find the first thing listed is the use of heading tags. When I saw that they not only looked at heading tags, but had it listed as the first item of business, it made me smile. It’s what I keep telling clients, and readers on this blog to pay attention to.You need to know how to use heading tags to build a website.
Using heading tags incorrectly is one of the most common web design mistakes made today. See my 2009, and 2008 reports. Google passed their own test on this one, at least with most of their content.
Another item they pointed to was the importance of having a well developed title for each page of your site. Poor title quality ranked #9 on my report for top website mistakes in 2009. See a post I made a while ago about how to title your site pages. In that post I mention trying to stay less than 65 characters in length. In Google’s SEO report card they suggest 60 or less. A quality title is vital!
The report is stuffed with a ton of great info, and though it is an SEO report, a great deal could be learned in regards to basic web design. Many of the items they looked at are found in my usability analyses. This supports the long standing concept that SEO can be an important step in improving a websites usability. To me, it’s just one more reason to use W3C’s method to site validation.
If you want to improve your SEO or HTML knowledge, reading their report would be a highly recommended step.
Download: Google’s SEO Report Card – PDF file
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Hi, thanks for this very informative post. Yeah it’s really important to have a good meta tags, especially the title tag, meta description and keywords, because that will affect your rankings definitely
Yah I agree with what you said..they could really affect rankings.
Great info, Robert.
Although, Google SEO’ing their own pages makes me laugh. Considering they still “own” search, and can rank their own pages at whatever they like, doing SEO is a little redundant.
In the past, I’ve wondered how many words Google “owns” in the search engine results pages… words like “groups”, “bookmarks”, “buzz”, “maps”. Soon you won’t be able to search for a word without Google popping up!
What bothers me most is their Google chrome why it doesn’t have the necessary plugins for SEO purposes like the one in firefox? what do you think? even the google pagerank toolbar google chrome don’t have
Well, it’s a relatively new browser. I’m sure it’ll have that and more in due course. That’s why I’m running Firefox primarily and Chrome as secondary for now. Can’t do without those plugins.
Till then,
Jean
google is gotten wiser now a day with their algorithm
I’m the same way but i’m finding myself using Chrome a lot more often lately.
As for the report.. it’s an interesting read.
Yeah, definitely. Unlike yahoo which can still be fake..but with google, watch out..hehe
That is the reason why I am following Google. Great post! Thanks for sharing it.
I just downloaded the report. Hope to learn from it as well to improve our e-commerce site.
Thanks!
thanks. been needing help with this for awhile now
I am having the same problem with one of my customers they are big and have the resources but they make the dumbest of mistakes.
It is too funny sometimes when you look “under the hood” of some of these big companies and they are not fully optimized. Yes they don’t really need it, but why scrimp when you have the resources to do it.
Yeah, definitely. Unlike yahoo which can still be fake.
I’ve seen so many people use heading tags just to make a word bold, many of them so called seo experts too!
How you know about it i think Google did already everything for on page factor because Google is the Father of SEO and SEO rules
This is some very great information, I think if anybody plans to be successful online needs to learn SEO.
That’s why it’s important to keep you always updated on Google algorithm.
Google algorithm always checks the quality of the content…. if you have good content then you have not to bother…
thanks a lot i don’t know that Google need to improve his rankings site.
Phnomeenal breakdown of the topic, you should write for me too!
This is quite funny.
Thank you very much for sharing such an excellent article.