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.
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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, andh3tags, helps us to understand the priorities of a site's content. One should not fret, though, about every singleHtag. 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.
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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
301redirects to point to your preferred versions, or by using therel="canonical"linkelement. 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 doma