Considering Google’s popularity and huge search market share most webmasters focus their web sites optimization for Google search only. There is no prescribed standard for search engine optimization where one can find the precise do’s and don’ts in optimizing websites. Now Google has given us access to its own SEO Report Card which analyzes the SEO value of Google products. This PDF formatted SEO Report Card is a wonderful resource to webmasters and internet marketing companies engaged in SEO services as well.
The Report Card is written by Brandon Falls the same Google employee who had crafted out the Google Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide.
The Report Card is a successful attempt in gaining knowledge in the following areas:
- Tells us accepted optimization standards.
- How to make users find pages easily in search engines.
- Suggests staying away from user distracting acts that deter site’s performance in search engines.
- Helps to improve web pages from both search engine and user’s perspective. (because the co-exist equally)
The report gives suggestions and examples for fixing the issues covering many topics including broken links, URL structure, titles/metas and onpage content. The report card falls into three parts:
Subject I: Search result presentation
- Title tag format and length
- Description meta tag use
- Google sitelink triggering
- Appealing Google sitelinks
- Clear main page result on Google
Subject II: URLs and redirects
- Directory form
- Convert to subdomain form
- Subdomain form
- Convert to directory form
- https:// in canonical
Subject III: Onpage optimization
- Heading tag use
- <h1> tag use
- Logo image link destination
- Logo image alt text
- Descriptive internal anchor text
The project looked at the main pages of 100 different Google products, measuring them across a dozen common optimization categories. Future iterations of the project might look at deeper Google product web pages as well as international ones. It is time to validate and appraise SEO efforts using this valuable check up card!
Great article! Good to see what Google is concerned with for their own products. Properly optimizing your pages to make them “search engine friendly” can greatly increase your search engine rankings, traffic levels, and potential earnings from your website.Tips from the horses mouth
Google has done a good job by sharing the report card with the public. Its quite surprising that they themselves categorize their product's SEO under 'need improvement' in so many SEO values. I guess the report will help SEO gurus to brush up their existing SEO say-sos
I am happy that Google has given a guideline to SEO. Its inspiring! SEO Report Card will be a good resource since it is directly from google. Thanks Google!
I'll be giving that a read thru for sure – I thought it might have been a tool like websitegrader? Anyways good find as usual on this one. Thanks!
I liked it. So much useful material. I read with great interest.
This is very valuable. Really it will help us a lot to understand Google’s search engine behaviour.
Really informative look into how Google approach their own SEO, and useful for new SEO’s to see what factors need to be considered when carrying out a full SEO audit. Always good to get tips directly from Google.
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