“What are some simple ways that I can improve my website’s performance in Google?”
Yeah, they are simple enough… I bet you’ve been following the Google webmaster central blog and have seen the post about their new SEO starter guide. Well, as they said, everybody knows this stuff already, but they just wanted to remind us all with one handy little guide. That’s okay, there are some pretty interesting facts in the guide, especially the “avoid” sections.
You see, when you’re creating a webpage from scratch, it’s pretty easy to line with the rules. I mean the title tags, the meta description tags, linking structure, site navigation. Well, the real pain in the ass is when you get to edit a complete website with around 300-400 pages, that all have same titles, same descriptions and keywords tags, all done in plain html and a tabled structure. Oh, and it has a stupid javascript menu aswell, like in the 90’s ;)
I’ve also noticed that stuffing keywords in the page title makes absolutely no sense. I mean Google’s first results page (on almost any keyword or keyphrase) contains high ranked pages that have short, descriptive titles, so there really is no need to repeat your keywords 5-6 times in the title, I’d say it’s rather harmful doing so.
Almost forgot. Have you seen the new Google Analytics overview pages? Their new design rocks and the advanced segmentation too – you can get up to 4 factors onto your dashboard line chart, so if you’re using Google Analytics as a stats program, you won’t have to click anywhere else besides your dashboard. Though I still do encourage you to stop wasting time (and money) and start using Google Analytics further more than just a stats program. There’s plenty of information on the web about how to take advantage of all Google Analytics’ features.
No probs ;)