Google Caffeine - How to Optimise?

In August 2009 Google made a major update to its search engine. These updates are usually met with nervousness by the SEO community, but this time Google decided to take a more softly approach, preferring to allow web professionals to view the update before it was rolled out. This meant that website owners could preview the impact the new changes had on their websites and make the necessary changes before the update went live.

The main objective of the Caffeine Update is to add speed to Google. Everyday new pages are added to the Google index and it's job is to sort out the good sites from the spammy ones. If Google were to present it's users with bad content after a search then there would be a risk that the user will move to a more reliable search engine. What Google wants from its results is relevancy and speed.

Although Google famously keeps its search engine algorithms a secret, the feedback since the update has indicated the following changes have been made.

• Website Speed - the Google guru, Matt Cutts has said that speed is now more important. Google users do not like web pages that take more than a few seconds to load.
• Authority of Domain - This is a measure of how powerful your domain is as a whole regardless of number of links to individual pages or page rank
• Good site content - the caffeine update seems to have placed more emphasis on good content and added more powerful filtering mechanisms to weed out sites that use spammy techniques.
• Age of Site - although it was always an important factor in Googles ranking algorithm, it seems to be even more so now.
• Domains that contain exact match keywords - more weight is given to domains that contain the exact keywords targeted in the domain name.
• Bigger search phrases - Google has increased it's index for the number of search phrases. This is not the case for all terms, but in general.
• Faster results - Google has halved the time it takes to display search results than they used to.

OK - so how to optimise for the new google update?

Google stresses that your website may drop due to the new update but not to panic as they iron out the glitches. If your site is properly optimised and it drops during this update, then it will rise again, if you are to believe the mandarins at Google. Here's what you should do:

Speed Up Your Site

• Use CSS stylesheets - this will lessen the amount of HTML code your site has to load. Also make sure that you link to an external stylesheet i.e. don't embed CSS in the HTML code.
• Put Javascript in External Files - Again, do not embed the javascript in your HTML code so page will load quicker. It helps the maintainability of your site to work this way as well.
• Optimise all Images on your Site - This is a real load killer for many sites. Use software programs like photoshop to reduce the size of your images. Also, resize the image to the correct size and don't use the 'height' and 'width' attributes in the CSS as this will add to processing load time.
• Use Compression - you can zip your content using Apache mod_gzip, or if you use Joomla CMS you can tick a setting that will gzip all your CSS and JS files.
• Move to a Faster Server - If you can afford it, move to a dedicated server or upgrade your package. Also, make sure your site is hosted in the country where your target audience is.
• Monitor your site speed - there are many tools out there like YSlow! and Hubspot that will run a speed check on your site. You should regularly use them to test performance.

Optimise On-Site Content

As the Caffeine update means that Google is placing more emphasis on content, it is important to:

• Go over every page of your site and ensure that you have placed the appropriate keywords in the head of the files.
• Use internal linking with your keywords but be careful not to overdo it.
• Use text for navigation, not images
• Avoid being too spammy with your meta tags
• Check your sitemaps are up to date or use an online sitemap generator if you don't have one.

Off-Site Optimisation

Make sure you get links to your site that are as relevant as possible. Try to encourage people to link back to you by creating quality content and referring to it from social sites and forums. An article like this will probably get a good few quality links which is much better that a ton of useless links.

If your struggling to get ranking for your package, we can help you with our link building packages or contact us for a free consultation on how to get your website ranking on the search engines.