Google have now just launched a ‘fun’ quiz aimed at Webmasters.
If you are responsible for a website, have an interest in SEO or just simply want to know a bit more about what Google look for, this 40 question quiz should help.
Just make sure you follow the instructions at the end to save or print at the end before pressing submit. It has been known for individuals not to do this, lose their data and have to repeat the test in its entirety…
Take the Google Webmaster Quiz Online
The trouble with first impressions is that you only get to make one. This is rarely truer than in the fickle world of Internet marketing.
Search engines demand that certain codes and statutes are abided by, whilst human visitors are notoriously varied in their expectations. However both are looking for one basic principle, quality.
Of course ‘quality’ is very much a loaded term. But when it comes to developing a website there are a few things that you can do to appease both the search engines and your visitors. To help you out we’ve put together this quick quality checklist to get you started.
According to Internet security company Dasient, 5.8 million pages over 640,000 sites were infected with malware in the third quarter of 2009, whilst Google revealed that the number of entries on the Google Safe Browsing Malware List has doubled in the last year.
But what is Malware and what do you do if your website is infected?
Yes, we’ve reached another annual milestone, 100 days until the pinnacle of the festive season, Christmas day. Whilst it’s not quite time to be dusting off your Cliff Richard CDs or getting the decorations out of the attic, website owners – particularly in the ecommerce sector – should at least be mindful of their strategy for this year’s Yuletide bonanza.
With a recession very much still on the agenda for most families, fuelled by job insecurities and rising prices, Christmas could well be starting earlier. Although we’ve barely bid adieu to the summer, consumers and businesses throughout the country will be gearing themselves up for a hectic and elongated festive season, possibly without the budget of previous years.
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Google Webmaster Tools now allows site owners to notify Google if you’ve changed domains. This “change of address” tool will update the search index for 180 days by which point your new domain should have been crawled and indexed.
Moving Domain
The standard rules apply though, i.e. should still use a 301 permanent redirect for your old site to new domain. See Google’s own guidelines for moving an old to new domain.
Firefox have now started allowing “Add-on Collections” which is a great way for users of Firefox to share, or make public, their favourite plugins (add-ons) for a give topic.
One of those to already be made available is a “Best of Breed Firefox Collection for SEO and Internet Marketers” from Andy Beard. Andy’s assembled some very useful plugins here in one collection so you could add them all or just view the list and add individually. Enjoy!
Google recently launched Web Elements. This new service allows Webmasters to quickly and easily add different dynamic functionality to any web page.
The current “Elements” include:
Obviously, these expand upon the functionality already used with Adsense and YouTube video.
Website owners wanting to freshen up a site or develop new ways to communicate and engage with visitors should find some useful tools at Google Web Elements.
A good barometer for what is and what isn’t important in the world of SEO is whether or not Google are talking about it. Despite the emergence of Bing and perennial rivals Yahoo, Google remains the dominant force in the world of search engines. So when their Webmaster Central Blog starts talking about the importance of Sitemaps, it’s probably time to listen.
Of course, it’s not exactly an industry secret that Sitemaps are an integral part of general SEO. However, with a three-fold rise in Sitemap submissions online last year and Google openly acknowledging (based on their earlier research) that they can help to get your site pages indexed quicker, it does make sense to implement one as soon as possible.
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Let’s try an exercise together. While you’re reading this article, bring up your website at the same time. The title of this article is ‘Would you buy from your own website?’. Now, this takes a little bit of objectivity, but look at your website’s front page.
What does the page say? Does it say professional, credible and reassuring? Or does it say ‘doesn’t really know how to use a computer’. When someone comes to your website for the first time, they need clear guidance as how to navigate through the content of your site. The importance of navigation cannot be stressed enough, these days with the plethora of choices available, sites that are difficult to navigate receive little attention; the user simply starts looking somewhere else.
One of the most heinous crimes against your own website is to make the visitor feel like they need to trawl through pages to get to what they want. One click! That’s how long it should take for the visitor to find themselves on a page that relates to what they came looking for. Just one click. Pick one of your products and see how easy it is to get from your front page to that product without any inside knowledge. Remember, it should take one click.
Ask yourself, if you were on the High Street and all the shops were selling the same thing, how would you decide which shop to buy from? That’s how you need to consider your own website, what will make it stand out from the hundreds, or thousands of other companies online offering the same thing. If you’ve thought this through, you’ll probably come up with some of the following:
The final and probably one of the most important questions to ask is ‘how easy, smooth and reassuring is your checkout process?’ People will get cold feet and have second thoughts if they don’t feel confident using your checkout process. If they feel you start to lose credibility, if they suddenly have to make a phone call or if they don’t believe that their payment card details are definitely going to be safe, they will simply click away from your website, with one click. Then your competitors will be enjoying the fruits of your labours because now the potential customer wants to buy, but is just looking for an alternative vendor that makes the entire ordering and payment process easy and reassuring. If your website doesn’t have an easy and reassuring payment procedure, you’ll likely lose business at the moment when they’re ready to part with their money.
So take a look at each aspect of your website from the first page when you strive to grab their attention, to the simple ease to finding the specific product or service they came looking for, the credibility of offering great advice and a way to contact a human being by email, or preferably by telephone. Lastly, does your website’s checkout procedure exude confidence, credibility and reassurance? If not, your competitors will be getting your business.
If you’d like an independent yet affordable review of your site, you could do a lot worse that try UserTesting.com. You receive video of someone using your site as well as a written summary.
It’s one of those rare occasion when the three major search engines come together in an effort to improve search by agreeing on common standards.
This time, it’s the turn of duplicate content and the issue of canonicalisation. Canonical, in this context, refers to the issue of duplicate content and there’s many reasons why this may occur. For legitimate reasons, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft have now agreed a new standard tag to be used in the header section of a web page to specify the preferred URL.
All very good as it will flag up to the search engines and work in a similar way to 301 redirects, i.e. consolidate your link popularity to the preferred location.
Further Reading:
If you’re a Webmaster or site owner, this should be of interest to you!
Within Google Webmaster Tools, it has been possible for a while to get a list of those pages that Google has as ‘Not found’ or 404.
First and foremost, if you have pages not found, you should take steps to fix them, e.g. if a page has been renamed, redirect the old page to the new page (301 permanent redirect).
Now though, Google Webmaster Tools shows you where your 404 pages are being linked from (Diagnostics | Web crawl):
Webmaster Tools Shows Inbound Links for 404 Pages
Once you analyse the inbound links to old or broken 404 pages, you can take the appropriate steps to fix the issue. You could contact the Webmaster of the site that is linking to yours and ask them to update to give their visitors a better experience or you could 301 redirect the old page to new page if there is a suitable replacement.
Whichever route you take, you should definitely keep an eye on your Webmaster Tools account and particularly your diagnostics section. Keep your site in order and you may just get rewarded for it by gaining additional traffic.
Webmaster Tools Shows Crawl Error Sources
Matt Cutts Tutorial on Using Web Crawl Diagnostics
