Believe it or not, everything that Google speaks about is related to SEO, but here are three posts from Webmaster Central that are very relevant to what SEOs should be looking at:
1. Target visitors or search engines?
- Make good use of page titles
This is true of the main heading on the page itself, but is also true of the title that appears in the browser’s title bar.
Whenever possible, ensure each page has a unique title that describes the page well.
- Write with words
Images, flash, and other multimedia make for pretty web pages, but make sure your core messages are in text or use ALT text to provide textual descriptions of your multimedia.
- Make sure the text you’re talking about is in your content
Visitors may not read your web site linearly like they would a newspaper article or book. Visitors may follow links from elsewhere on the web to any of your pages.
- Make sure your pages are accessible
I know — this post was supposed to be about writing content, not technical details. But visitors can’t read your site if they can’t access it.
2. Building link-based popularity
To sum up, even though improved algorithms have promoted a transition away from paid or exchanged links towards earned organic links, there still seems to be some confusion within the market about what the most effective link strategy is. So when taking advice from your SEO consultant, keep in mind that nowadays search engines reward sweat-of-the-brow work on content that bait natural links given by choice.
3. Deftly dealing with duplicate content
Here Adam Lasnik specifically addresses a few questions about duplicate content:
- What is duplicate content?
- What isn’t duplicate content?
- Why does Google care about duplicate content?
- What does Google do about it?
- How can Webmasters proactively address duplicate content issues?
It is important to take SEO advice with a grain of salt, even mine. What works for one vertical doesn’t mean it will work for all of them. Building a better website means research and understanding of your vertical.
My advice:
1. start by analyzing the top 10 across Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask
2. Look for common denominators, compare and contrast
3. Do the work and stay away from the “easy road,” do right by your visitors.
