Keeping up with Google

Recently, there has been a lot of blog posting about the way Google has changed over the past few months.Again we’re not sure what to believe is true, and Google, being Google, don’t give much away. However, as I keep repeating, one thing is for sure. Google are trying to get the most relevant search results to the end user. Here is what is clear so far about how they are achieving this.

Firstly, Google have launched Google+ which is not just social networking. What Google+ is doing is building up a profile of you, based on your movements online whilst logged in. Very soon, you will notice that your search results will be based on the preferences that have been chosen for you by your movements.  They will also appear to be more local.

Another thing is for sure, Search Engine Marketers are getting frustrated by changes with the Google Webmaster Tools. One of the main issues they face now are not being able to track the search queries searchers are making, and are now finding it hard to build campaigns based on these findings. Can we assume that Google want you to ‘guess’ in order to earn more money through people doing adword campaigns? Or is there another reason for these changes?

As a developer, I would prefer to believe the reasons for making these particular changes to Google Webmaster Tools are to benefit the competition, as this would clearly give some website owners a greater opportunity to compete with other larger websites that always seem to be at the top. Google have always been known to ‘shake things up’, and quite rightly so, otherwise it would be like trying to source information in Einsteins study.

So what can we do?

Well, we still know so little yet there is still so much we can do. In one of my previous posts I talk about using Semantic Markup and Microdata formats in HTML Documents to help explain what your content is all about to search engines. I believe this will become very important in the future. It makes sense to explain your content rather than having a bot randomly try and guess. They have been sensing content in the past, but no where near as specific as what HTML5 can do.

We must make excellent efforts into making our documents as accessible as possible. It is about time everyone used HTML5 Semantic Markup tags to help clearly define the areas of the document. When thinking about Accessibility, we often think about the Americans with Disabilities Act 1990, this is associated with web development to make the documents clearly readable by text readers, and providing visual aids for the hard of hearing. But now there is even more reason to use it, and we’re going to tie it in with HTML5 Semantic Tags. These provide assistance with navigating things such as header, section, footer, sidebars etc.. The new rule of thumb here is that if a screen reader can understand the way your content is laid out, so can a search engine bot. Try running a few sites using a text only browser such as Elinks to see how the content of your document will flow to robotic reading tools.

Next, is it important to validate the markup of your documents? Well, I think so. I know it’s hard when you offer content management systems to clients as some WYSIWYG editors (including those that have restricted functionality) don’t always get it right. But at the very least developers can endeavour to get this right during development. It may be beneficial to search engines to wrap most large content managed areas in ‘article’ tags, whilst this makes sense, I cant be certain it helps – it cant hurt to use it though.

I have heard recently that permalinks that are too long are a hindrance. For example, in WordPress you will get a permalink structure like:

http://www.website.com/category/another-category/this-is-a-post

Although I cant be totally sure about this. It does make sense to remove the build up of permalinks. Let’s keep things simple.

http://www.website.com/this-is-a-post

Note for WordPress users: If you’re worried about losing the keywords to your categories – remember you can have permalinks set the same way for your categories.

http://www.website.com/this-is-a-category

Whilst I am on the subject of WordPress, I will give you the permalink rule to get this. Custom Structure : /%postname%/
If you preferred to go into greater depth as to how you would like your permalinks to appear. You can use the Custom Permalinks plugin.

One other note I would like to make, when using HTML5 Semantic Markup it is important to realise that these tags still cause issues in legacy browsers. The important ones to note are Internet Explorer 8 and below. What I’ve been doing is wrapping div tags around semantic tags that contain the styles as before. I did make the mistake once of trying to add styles to semantic tags, and that became a disaster for Internet Explorer. There is an excellent boilerplate available that I have started using, it makes adding javascript a breeze and minimal browser issues. It provides feature detection using Modernizr and the documents are flowed correctly to assist in load times for your site. It is completely HTML5 ready. You can download it here.

Download HTML5 Boilerplate

 

 

Related posts:

1. 1st minisite of our ‘Generate Quality Enquiries Through Google Adwords’ campaign.

Comments (1) »

1. 

   Great blog joe

   Comment by glenn — January 22, 2012 @ 11:55 am

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