For anybody still on the fence about the importance of proper search engine optimization, this latest piece of news should push you off. In March, Google publicly released their own SEO Report Card.

How many of Google’s web pages use a descriptive title tag? Do we use description meta tags? Heading tags? While we always try to focus on the user, could our products use an SEO tune up? These are just some of the questions we set out to answer with Google’s SEO Report Card.

Google’s SEO Report Card is an effort to provide Google’s product teams with ideas on how they can improve their products’ pages using simple and accepted optimizations. These optimizations are intended to not only help search engines understand the content of our pages better, but also to improve our users’ experience when visiting our sites. Simple steps such as fixing 404s and broken links, simplifying URL choice, and providing easier-to-understand titles and snippets for our pages can benefit both users and search engines.

There are a few things in particular that I felt were worthy to reiterate here at the Ignertia Web Development Blog, because I think we can all learn from it:

* Google has clearly stated what their purpose is for concerning themselves with SEO. This is an important practive for everyone to do before jumping into SEO.
* They carefully articulate an important goal of SEO: to help search engines understand the content of pages. I cannot overstate the importance of this distinction from what I often hear, which is “to help us rank higher.” Remember that an important purpose of SEO is to help search engines understand the content of the page and, if the content satisfies Google’s algorithm, to rank that content accordingly.
* They include the idea that good SEO practices can improve the users’ experience when visiting a site. This is also very important. Good SEO doesn’t simply focus on “keywords,” “rankings,” and “tricks”….far from it! Good SEO will focus on user experience…proper 404s, avoiding broken links, simplifying URLs, useful snippets, etc.

Now having read all that, I’ll leave you with this somewhat humurous observation…if you perform a Google Search for the keywords “search engines”, Google doesn’t show up, and Bing is likely ranked below Dogpile.