Matt Cutt’s is one of the lead engineers and the go to guy at Google for information on SEO and how Google ranks pages for organic search. He won’t tell you what the algorithm is or the secret sauce for ranking websites but he will give you tips on how to make your site more search engine friendly.
This is the Site Review presentation from the Google IO conference a few weeks ago, Matt was also with two other people from his team at Google, Greg Grothaus, Tiffany Lane and Vannessa Fox, as she remarks is not on his team at Google. The video is an hour long and if you are interested in SEO I think worth your time. I went to Google IO, a developers conference, and debated if I wanted to sit in on this session. But Matt Cutt’s and gang kept me entertained and I learned some new things because search is always changing. If your website has any of these issues I can help you plus more.
Next week I will be in Seattle for SMX Advanced (that stands for Search Marketing Expo).
This week Google announced two improvements to the organic search results listings.
They are:
Expanded list of useful related searches
The addition of longer search result descriptions
The expanded list of useful related searches is at the bottom of the search pages where it gives you suggestions of other searches. Since Yahoo offers it at the top of the page, Google offers the information at the bottom. I guess they figure you have looked through all the listings and did not find what you want, so you might want to try these. This is also good information when you are doing keyword research for website content or blog posts. The example they give is if you search “principles of physics” the Google algorithms understand that “angular momentum”, “special relativity” etc. are related terms that may offer more information. Try it and see what you get.
The second is the addition of longer search result descriptions in the SERPS (Search Engine Ranking Pages). This is interesting, in the code for a web page there are meta tags where a website developer can add descriptions and titles for each page on a website. Now it looks like Google will grab more of that information and list it on the SERP pages. This is for searches with more than three words. This allows the descriptions to give back more information on what you are looking for exactly. I also noticed that some listings may have two lines where others would have four. As people get smarter and more definitive in their searches they will receive better results. This is an opportunity to add more keywords in your web page description.
