Optimising for Google
Google is the World's most popular search engine so naturally much of our efforts to optimise our clients' sites are focussed on Google search results. Keeping up to date with changes and innovations at Google is part of our job - below are some of the things we're thinking about now. Read on...
Google Caffeine
In June 2010, Google announced Caffeine: speedier, more accurate search results. But what does this mean for websites and for SEO? Well, to just scratch the surface, it means that speed of your website, and links to and from your site, and the density of key words in your site is now more important than ever. Contact Us to find out how Caffeine could affect your site.
Google Local Search
Google local search is the list of businesses that appear marked on a map when someone searches for a particular business or type of business (e.g. 'airport parking Melbourne', or 'bakeries CBD').
Local search has been around for a few years, but it still surprises us how few businesses take control of these listings and put up with inaccurate local search results, or worse, non-appearance in local listings!
In the example below you can see that we are maximising one of our clients appearance in Google search results by the top placement in local search results, as well as the top sponsored link.
YouTube optimisation, Image optimisation for Google
Google has been placing YouTube videos (as well as other video offerings and images) into the search results for some time.
We've added videos from our clients' sites to YouTube and have began linking to them from other websites. We believe in-bound-link popularity of videos (particularly at YouTube) will help define which videos will show in Google results, not the actual "user ratings" of the videos themselves. Several clients have seen the benefits of having videos appearing in search results driving targeted traffic back to their sites.
Optimising images to appear in search results can be a little more tricky. We've used a couple of techniques to get images to rank well at Google with mixed success. We've followed Google's image guidelines, which in a nut shell state that you need to ensure you have optimised text around the image you're trying to optimise. So each image should have a caption, and lots of keywords surrounding the picture.
It also goes without saying, create a keyword optimised "image alt" tag (but please, don't go keyword stuffing your 'alt tags'. It's one of the oldest tricks in the 'blackhat seo' book!). It's so passe!
The last thing you should do is login to your Google Account, sign up for a webmaster's Tool kit and submit your site map. Once you've done that, you can submit your site to Google's Advanced Image Search.
This gets the images on your site in front of a crazy crew of Image labelers! This then gives Google human checking of images for search results. Learn more here: http://images.google.com/imagelabeler/
Google News Optimisation, optimising news stories for Google.
We've done some interesting work with www.crikey.com.au on this front, helping them get listed in Google news then optimising their site using tagging technology to get them ranking well.
What we've noticed results-wise is the fragility of Google News results. To give you an example, the other day, a news story about Pamela Anderson's wedding cake appeared 1st at Google for "wedding cake", knocking a client of ours (Ferguson Plarre) result down 1 spot. Pammy stayed there for a day or two, then dropped to 10th. She's now way out of the top 10 and everything's back to normal.
We probably shouldn't get too worried about the impact of Google News results affecting our rankings for sustained periods.
Contact Us
For more information, give us a call on 03 9415 2383 or visit our Contact Us page.
