Last Friday afternoon, I was able to catch the end of the Blog Business Summit in Seattle. At the session called "Blogging and SEO Strategies," John Battelle brought up a good point. He said that as a writer, he doesn't want to have to think about all of this search engine optimization stuff. Dave Taylor had just been talking about order of words in title tags and keyword density and using hyphens rather than underscores in URLs.webmaster guidelines is to make sites for visitors, not for search engines. Visitor-friendly design makes for search engine friendly design as well. The team at Google webmaster central talks a lot with site owners who care a lot about the details of how Google crawls and indexes sites (hyphens and underscores included), but many site owners out there are just concerned with building great sites. The good news is that the guidelines and tips about how Google crawls and indexes sites come down to wanting great content for our search results.Make good use of page titles Write with words Images, flash, and other multimedia make for pretty web pages, but make sure your core messages are in text or use ALT text to provide textual descriptions of your multimedia. This is great for search engines, which are based on text: searchers enter search queries as word, after all. But it's also great for visitors, who may have images or Flash turned off in their browsers or might be using screen readers or mobile devices. You can also provide HTML versions of your multimedia-based pages (if you do that, be sure to block the multimedia versions from being indexed using a robots.txt file ).Make sure the text you're talking about is in your content guest post on Matt Cutts' blog when I talked about hyphens and underscores: You know what your site’s about, so it may seem completely obvious to you when you look at your home page. But ask someone else to take a look and don’t tell them anything about the site. What do they think your site is about? Consider this text:
“We have hundreds of workshops and classes available. You can choose the workshop that is right for you. Spend an hour or a week in our relaxing facility.”
Will this site show up for searches for [cooking classes] or [wine tasting workshops] or even [classes in Seattle]? It may not be as obvious to visitors (and search engine bots) what your page is about as you think.
Along those same lines, does your content use words that people are searching for? Does your site text say “check out our homes for sale” when people are searching for [real estate in Boston]?
Make sure your pages are accessible webmaster tools makes it easy. We'll let you know if we've had any trouble accessing any of the pages. We tell you the specific page we couldn't access and the exact error we got. These problems aren't always easy to fix, but we try to make them easy to find.
