Contrary to popular belief – Google do give lots of direction on SEO and try to give webmasters and website owners tips on how to improve their visibility on the web. Check out their webmaster blog or follow Matt Cutts blog.
With a constantly adjusting algorithm, the way to stay ahead of the game is to follow Google’s guidelines and those guidelines are all centered around quality and usability.
Google just issued a new video with some new tips to make your site more search engine (and user) friendly and here are some of the highlights I took out of it:
Use image and video sitemaps if warranted on your site. It will not only improve your video’s be found on video search, but can also improve in organic search result with your video posted in search results
The use of RICH SNIPPETS (Tags used in the programming of a webpage to define certain kinds on content. Properly formatted, they are recognized by Google and can enhance how a listing appears in Google search results. – definition courtesy of http://www.veria.ca/glossary) – can help you highlight reviews, recipes, events and thus make you stand out of the crowd of search results.
Don’t just write copy for the sake of SEO – or spend hours, days, weeks tweaking your copy in order for it to ‘rank well’. Your copy is for the USER so make your copy COMPELLING and INTERESTING.
Use your description and title tags well. Why should a user pick you out of the many other search results for a given search. Be unique or offer the product a bit better than others so it catches their eye.
Still though and as always, use your KEYWORDS in your copy, title and description tags otherwise Google doesn’t know what the relevance of the page is.
Enjoy the video. It’s plain English so anyone should be able to understand it. If you’re and SEO Service provider or looking at doing SEO on your own site, check out this video.