SEO is on every developer’s mind, and Google’s web developers are no different. A recent post on Google’s Webmaster Central Blog indicates that they are also working on SEO, and have recently tested themselves using their own scorecard.
Google’s SEO report card is part of what they describe as “an effort to provide Google’s product teams with ideas on how they can improve their product’s pages using simple and accepted optimizations. These [are] intended to not only help search engines understand the content of our pages better, but also to improve our user’s experience when visiting our sites.”
Like many things Google, they have posted the results of their scorecard online so others can learn from how they themselves could improve their SEO results. The report card focused on three critical SEO areas:
- Search Result Presentation
- URLs and redirects
- on-page optimization
Google’s report card, like many of our own, showed many areas graded as “needs improvement”, a few “satisfactory” and only an occassional “excellent”.