A document recently leaked by Google verifies that human reviewers check websites for quality alongside the much-famed algorithm. Based on the information in that report, it’s a good time to check your SEO tactics to see if they are still relevant.
A whoops by Google or clever move?
Whether it was deliberate or accidental, the search engine optimisation community managed to get their hands on a leaked document that Google distributes to their human website reviewers.
This document guides a human reviewer through the process of assessing a website for “quality”. No one can be sure how many or at what frequency Google uses human reviewers. What we do know is that Google actually do use human reviewers, and one of them could be reviewing your site right now!
The biggest take away from this document was the human reviewers are looking at the quality of your content. To me this means human created, high quality, meaningful, helpful content that users will find useful and enjoyable.
I think this is a perfect time to revisit some of the SEO basics and see if there is anything you can do to improve the user quality experience on your website.
Here are few things you can check.
Meaningful URLs
The first thing you can check is that you have meaningful URL’s on your website. For example if your site was about Indoor Plants do you have Indoor Plants mentioned in your URL somewhere? Would Google find what they expect when they followed one of your URLs?
Check your titles
Check to make sure your title describes your content. For example “Choosing the best Indoor Plants for your office” would be the title for an article, post or webpage describing just that.
Review Meta Tags
Make sure you create a catchy Meta description for your page such as, “Find out why Indoor Plants boost employee productivity”.
What’s that photo?
Are your photos optimised? Check the tags on photos to make sure they are properly tagged and captioned.
Quality Content
This is where quality really counts. Focus on writing articles that put quality first. You will naturally mention the right keywords if your article, post or page is on topic and high quality.
What is quality?
You page should have a relevant theme. For example, If your page is talking about Indoor Plants your page title, meta tags, content and pictures should all be about Indoor Plants. While this makes sense it’s easy to mix messages up.
Content should also be valuable. This is measured in a number of ways. Bounce rate and time on site. These measures are agreed in the SEO community as things to measure and improve over time. If your content is shallow users will bounce away from your site quickly. When a user bounces away it's also reflected in the amount of time they spend on your site, which will be low.
If you provide an engaging experience people will:
- Read the content
- Leave a comment
- Look at more content
- Share or "Like" your content
The human factor
While most sites are ranked in the search engines by algorithms it’s now clear that Google has human moderators, what would they see if they visited your pages?
SEO Has Changed Did You Notice?
Search engine optimization has changed. Sure, getting links is still as important as ever however it’s how you get those links that’s changed. Creating content is now more important than ever. So what’s more important, quality or quantity or both?
Getting Started With Search Engine Optimization
The basics of SEO are not difficult to understand, you just need to know where to start. In this article I’ll point you in the right direction with solid advice on where to start and what basic terminology you should know.
