Google latest: User experience and authority take centre stage
It’s Google update time again! With Penguin 2.0 around the corner, Matt Cutts, head of Google’s Webspam team, has released the latest pointers for website developers and owners on what to expect in Search Engine Optimisation over the next few months (you can see the original video on Matt Cutts’ blog). This morning he also announced that action has been taken on several thousand ‘link sellers’, penalising them and the sites they have sold to. The changes that are coming in are giving more small businesses a chance to be seen.
Search Engine Optimisation is a moving target, and one which SEO professional work on full time, second guessing the small things that will make a website stand out in search. Daily SEO is often out of reach of small businesses, with proper management running into tens of thousands a year and sometimes more, but this latest round of changes and refining of the Google search algorithm gives some great pointers for smaller sites to make sure they are doing all they can for page rank.
User Experience and Site Quality
In particular, there is a continued and strong emphasis on a good user experience. It’s interesting that the quality of the site is being cited now as a factor in page rank. This is something Galia Digital promotes strongly, helping newer businesses move from low quality template sites to their own bespoke website which delivers a good user experience and ticks all the quality boxes for Google.
Authority
A very interesting development is that Google are digging deeper into authority in particular markets. This is great news for people who keep their website dynamic by blogging, and establish themselves as an authority in their particular field. It’s right on target with Google’s wish to improve the user experience and make sure that the best, most current information is right up there at the top of search results. Don’t fall into the trap of paid advertorial blogs though – this is something that is being targeted as a negative, where people have paid to place advertorial on a high page ranking site with the hope of passing that page rank down. Artificially passing page rank is a ‘black hat’ technique that is under the spotlight.
Bookmarking
Bookmarking sites has been mentioned, and although it’s been made clear that this doesn’t yet mean bookmarks on your browser help the page rank of a favourite site, we wonder just how far away that sort of detailed behaviour analysis can be, particularly where a browser is part of the same stable as a search engine. For the moment, though, the concept that returning visitors build your site’s pagerank is one to hold on to. Keep the site fresh, and update your social media posts regularly to drive visitors to your site again and again.
The message this summer is clear: make sure your site is clean and high quality; review the user experience; be dynamic and authoritative; keep an eye on your Analytics data!
Contact Galia Digital for more information on how to make your business stand out online.