Tasha Harrison

There’s big changes on Google today. The search engine is going to include results from sites such as Twitter and from blogs. This is important, because it means that the search results we receive will be up to date news, as it happens. The explosion of  Twitter, in particular, has been the main catalyst for this change. It gives people the ability to publish news as it is happening. It is important that Google reflects this new real-time news source (Rupert Murdoch should take notice).

The other big change is the increased personalisation of your search. Google records your web history and bases its search results on the sites that you visit. So if you regularly visit a particular news site, it will place that site higher up the search rankings if it is relevant to your search. This is a big game changer for SEO, since it favours more established sites. It also means that when you view your own site on Google you will generally see it ranking differently than most of your potential customers, meaning that you have no idea how well your site is actually ranking.

Most good SEOs will have seen this trend already and will have been aware that personalisation has been increasing over the last couple of years. It provides us with a new challenge and increases the need for different forms of online marketing, like social media and online PR. It also creates a problem for SEO companies who still guarantee positions on Google, as they will find it hard to prove.

From a users point of view I actually think these changes are rather limiting. Surely the point of search engines is that we can find something new. Before the days of social bookmarking sites like StumbleUpon and Digg, we relied on search engines to bring us new sites and information. Now we will increasingly receive the same sites, having to look further through the results to find something new.

Writing the meta data for your website can be one of the most laborious tasks, but it is also one of the most important parts of launching any new site or improving your existing site.

There are three types of meta data that relate directly to search engine optimisation (SEO). They are:

• Title tag/Page title: this is the title that your browser will give to the page. It is also the first port of call for the search engines when they examine your site. It tells them exactly what your page is about. Search engines use this title in your listing.
• Meta description: this should compliment your page title and give a little more detail about the content of the page. Search engines use this description in your listing.
• Meta keywords: keyword stuffing used to be a common ‘trick’ for getting your site to rank highly on Google and as a consequence the meta keywords were given a much smaller significance.  In essence they are a way of telling search engines which keywords your page is relevant to.

The reason the page title is the most important is that it holds the highest relevance for search engines, so make sure that each page has a unique page title that explains exactly what that page is about and remember to keep it brief. I always like to put the name of the company in the title to help build brand recognition in the listings on Google.

For example, a site called Clothesonline will have a page title for its blue jeans of:

Blue denim jeans – Clothesonline

For the black jeans page:

Black denim jeans – Clothesonline

And so on – it really is that simple, but very effective.

SEO is the art of driving relevant traffic to a site from search engines.  This is done getting a site to rank well on search engines for selected keywords that are most relevant to that site’s core message or product.

There are several elements that search engines look for in a site:

• Page title: this is the title that you can see at the top of your browser and that Google uses when it lists your site.
• Meta description: this is data that sits in the code of your site. It is used by search engines as the description.
• Meta keywords: keyword stuffing used to be a very effective way of ranking highly on Google, but it is now considered to be spamming.  They are still worth entering into the code, but be very specific with them.
• Headings and content: the content on your page is very very important.  Google will look at the content and judge how useful your site will be for the user. The easiest way to get your content right is to create it for your user.
• Links: other sites linking to your site shows Google that they think your site is useful, so Google sees links to your site as a recommendation.
• Site structure: when Google’s bots visit your site they need to be able to find all of your pages easily.  A logical structure makes it easier for them.

These are the basic foundations for optimising your site.

For more on SEO I recommend these articles:

Cheap SEO is not always the best SEO – Cheap is what it is
Beginner’s Guide to SEO links