Google speaks

I’m just back from WordCampIreland held in Kilkenny over the weekend and have a notebook full of juicy tips. This was the first WordCamp to be held in Ireland and proved to be a rich resource for the SEO-minded and online marketer. For those not familiar, WordCamps are a professional meet-up of individuals using, or interested in, WordPress as a site platform. So while it was primarily about WordPress use, the online visibility (SEO and Digital Marketing) of those users was a theme running throughout the sessions.

Google search home page

There were two representatives from Google’s organic search team there (Luisella Mazza and Elena) and the good news is that they listed a number of SEO tips for increasing your Google ranking and enabling easier site crawling for the Google bots. The bad news is that they stated that there are now over 200 factors used by Google in determining page rank!

And they didn’t list them all.

So SEO isn’t getting any simpler. But here are some of the points they made:

Keywords

Use words that people search for.

Categorise your content (blog posts) with keywords.

Use keywords in your URL path.

Have keywords in your Title (Meta Title tag).

Have keywords and ‘English’ description of your site in your Meta Description tag.

Avoid Duplicate Content and Indexing

Use canonicalisation: avoid duplicates by having only 1 version of URL ie. either www.name.com or name.com, not both so as not to have a situation where back-links are pointing to different versions of the same URL. This is to avoid the dilution of link popularity.

If using WordPress, select your preferred domain on the WP Admin panel.

Images

Google’s crawlers cannot ‘see’ images, so they suggest the following to allow them to index what’s on the page:

Give images relevant file names.

Add ALT attributes to your images.

Include a textual description of images.

Spammers, Nasties and Security Best Practice

Check using Google search to see if spammers have made it onto your site. Google gives a ‘malware’ warning if it detects dubious content. This is a sure-fire way to lose ranking.

Spammers hack sites for two reasons: 1) to add links 2) to distribute malware.

Security suggestions include:

• keep an eye on site
• add .htaccess file to increase security
• keep WordPress (or software) up to date

Site Maps and Navigation

Create an XML site map for Google and submit to them.

Create a sitemap for your visitors.

Ensure all pages are linked back to rest of site.

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