For those in the know, the recent publication of Google’s SEO Report Card is a very valuable and interesting read.

The 50 page document walks through the evaluation of certain page elements on websites, mainly focusing on product pages, and places a value on them, judging their effectiveness in the eyes of how Google would value them.

The document walks through title tags, meta descriptions, meta keywords, sitelinks, single URL for results (canonical results/duplicates), 301 and directories and sub-domains, in page heading tags (h1, h2, h3), logo link destination, logo image alt text and lastly internal links on website (descriptive).

All of these elements can obviously be put in place for any page, but typically hold more focus on product pages as the titles, meta tags etc can be more descriptive, more accurate and to the point.

Although Google judges over 200 factors I think these few cover off about 20-30 of the main factors for SEO on websites. If you can get these ones right then any remaining factors are likely to be out of your hands - like age of domain, inbound links (kind of out of your control) etc.

For more information and a proper SEO audit and strategy contact Chris Diprose.