April 17, 2008

Google webmaster guidelines in just 3 words

Written by Brian Turner

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Google’s webmaster guidelines can be reduced to just 3 words:

Good User Experience

Everything else is simply an explanation of how to try to avoid diminishing that in the face of increasingly aggressive SEO techniques - with both on-page and off-page optimisation.

1. On page user experience

We’ve all seen the websites which are keyword stuffing to the point of being unreadable - the focus is on trying to rank for keywords, rather than delivery any kind of action once a ranking is achieved:

The result is an experience that is poor for Google users if it ranks in Google’s search results - but conversely, where’s the point in trying to rank for something, if you cannot turn that advantage into an actionable experience?

1. Off page user experience

Of course, most webmasters have probably also encountered websites where their navigation link area has been entirely whored to the highest bidder.

Which, considering the glut of online publishing inventory, means the highest bidder probably hasn’t paid much at all:

SEO for the user experience

SEO originated as an extension of web accessibility.

All too often websites were built with only basic accessibility in mind - in other words, that the website was functional, rather than actually described what the site was actually about.

Dyamic sites with the same header information - not least page titles and meta data - are a clear example of this.

Additionally, while XHTML coders will focus on following W3C guidelines on building CSS-driven websites for better inter-operability between browsers, it is still a problem that basic tagging of images, use of h tags for heading and sub-heading hierarchies, and even basic use of sample keywords to reflect the page content is often ignored.

Hence SEO has a real and valid constructive role in helping search engines find, index, and ascribe a relevant description of web documents.

All too often this approach becomes aggressive, and denigrates the user experience.

Instead, mainstream SEO should focus on building around the user experience - at all levels. And this includes with link development.

Some people argue that Google is wholly against paid links, but I disagree.

While obviously Google would probably prefer to have all search results returned according only to Google’s own objective standard, and without any undue influence of any kind, not least from SEO practices, Google is grown up enough to see that link buying has become an integral part of the internet - not least where seriously competitive keywords are involved.

When you reverse engineer links from websites that have been penalised for link buying, it’s often obvious that such sites are involved with sloppy link buying programs.

There’s no attempt to build links around the user experience, but instead to simply find out how many webmasters will whore themselves, their websites, and their website users - and user experience - to a handful of dollars.

I’m not going to say that Google are pro-link buying, but I would definitely argue that there’s a big difference between link buying - and developing links for money around the user experience.

Perhaps I’m naive - perhaps I entirely misunderstand Google.

But for the time being at least, no matter how I read Google’s Webmaster guidelines, the summary of everything written there still reads as encouraging webmasters to encourage a good user experience for their visitors.

Filed Under SEO