Google’s recent post on their webmaster central blog gave five things to avoid in SEO and six fundamental SEO tips, when Google give you six fundamental SEO tips you of course pay some attention.
These SEO Tips started with one that on the face of it has little to do with SEO: ‘Do Something cool’, to make your site stand out from the competition: does this really help SEO though? Well as the Panda update takes in a lot more factors than before it probably does make some differences mainly from making your site more sticky, your site does need to stand out and be good to use too, and not stand out for the wrong reasons, for this to work. Does ‘do something cool’ mean break from the SEO rules we tend to follow though? Probably not.
Include relevant words in your copy was Google’s second SEO tip, yes they are telling you to add keywords; using keywords has never been black hat and Google want to understand what your site is about. What is black hat is stuffing irrelevant keywords or too many keywords with too high density. Google say though to try and put yourselves into the shoes of the searchers, we of course should all know this and know the best way to do this is to check exactly how many people are searching for each term so we can best serve them.
Be smart about your tags and site architecture, another SEO tip we all know about but perhaps sometimes forget about. In terms of internal linking especially this is often an after thought but should be done before other off page SEO work is started. Google also go on to tell you to ‘create unique title tags and meta descriptions’: you really should be doing this already for every page anyway.
Google’s fourth SEO Tip is a good one and that is to sign up for email forwarding in Google Webmaster tools. If you do this Google will actually help you with your on-page SEO by reporting any problems to you: with algorithms always changing and new factors being used all the time this information direct from Google shouldn’t be missed.
Attract Buzz, is Google’s fifth SEO tip, not completely clear but we think they mean to create good link-bait content that will attract natural links as well as likes, follows and of course +1s, as Google were seemingly keen to mention. Whether any of these, other than natural links, have SEO value though is unclear.
Google’s last SEO tip is to stay ‘Fresh and Relevant’, another good tip but one we should all know. Regular content updates are important and this includes tweaks to your existing pages as well as adding new blog posts, articles and other content. Google do also mention building a social media presence and creating an ideal mobile experience: these have a less direct impact on SEO, though Google may be starting to check mobile compatibility of sites when delivering results to a mobile device.
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