Sharing advice from our London site clinic

Tuesday, April 12, 2011

We recently hosted our second site clinic, this time at TechHub in London, UK. Like
last year, here’s our
summary of the topics that came up.

• Title tags and meta description tags are easy ways to improve your site’s visibility in Google
  search results, yet we still see webmasters not fully utilizing their potential. We have a bit
  of help available about writing
  good page titles
  and
  descriptions
  which you can read to brush up on the subject. That said, you can
  ignore the meta keywords,
  at least as far as Google is concerned.
• One way Google’s algorithms determine the context of content on a page is by looking at the
  page’s
  headings.
  The way semantic markup is used throughout a site, including h1, h2,
  and h3 tags, helps us to understand the priorities of a site’s content. One should
  not fret, though, about every single H tag. Using common sense is the way to go.
• Just as we recommend you structuring pages logically, it is similarly important to structure the
  whole website, particularly by linking to related documents within your site as necessary. This
  helps both users and search engine bots explore all the content you provide. To augment this,
  be sure to provide a regularly updated
  Sitemap,
  which can be conveniently
  linked to from your site’s robots.txt file
  for automatic discovery by Google and other search engines.
• Duplicate content
  and
  canonicalization
  issues were discussed for many websites reviewed at the site clinic. Duplicate content within a
  website is generally not a problem, but can make it more difficult for search engines to
  properly index your content and serve the right version to users. There are two common ways to
  signal what your preferred versions of your content are: By using
  301 redirects
  to point to your preferred versions, or by using the
  rel="canonical"
link element. If you’re concerned about setting your preferred domain in terms of
  whether to use www or non-www, we recommend you check out the related feature for
  setting the preferred domain feature in Webmaster Tools.
• Another commonly seen issue is that some sites have error pages which do not return an error
  HTTP result code, but instead return the HTTP success code 200. Only documents that
  are actually available should reply with the HTTP success result code 200. When a
  page no longer exists, it should return a 404 (Not found) response. Header
  responses of any URL can be checked using
  Fetch as Googlebot
  in Webmaster Tools or using third party tools such as the
  Live HTTP Headers Firefox addon
  or web-sniffer.net.
• Ranking for misspelled queries, for example, local business names including typos, seems to be
  an area of concern. In some cases,
  Google’s automatic spelling correction
  gets the job done for users by suggesting the correct spelling. It isn’t a wise idea to stuff
  a site’s content with every typo imaginable. It’s also not advisable to hide this or any other
  type of content using JavaScript, CSS or similar techniques. These methods are in violation of
  Google’s Webmaster Guidelines
  and we may take appropriate action against a site that employs them. If you’re not sure how
  Googlebot “sees” your pages, for example, when using lots of JavaScript, you can get a better
  idea by looking at the text-only version of the cached copy in Google web search results.
• Users love fast websites. That’s why
  webpage loading speed
  is an important consideration for your users. We offer a wide range of tools and recommendations
  to help webmasters understand the performance of their websites and how to improve them. The
  easiest way to get started is to use
  Page Speed Online,
  which is the web-based version of our popular
  Page Speed Chrome extension.
  Our
  Let’s make the web faster page
  has great list of resources from Google and elsewhere for improving website speed, which we
  recommend you to read.

We’d like to thank the
TechHub
team, who helped us facilitate the event, and give a big thank you to all participants. We hope
you found the presentation and Q&A; session interesting. We’ve embedded the presentation below.

And as we mentioned in the site clinic, sign up at the
Google Webmaster Help Forum
to discuss any further questions you might have and keep an eye on our
Webmaster Central Blog.

Written by
Kaspar Szymanski,
Pierre Far,
Sven Naumann