How to Build a Successful Web Presence with Google Search [Video]

At Google I/O 2018 last month, Mariya Moeva and John Mueller from Google Switzerland shared their insights and knowledge as Google Webmaster Trends Analysts on how you can be more successful with your web projects using Google Search.

I finally had a chance to re-watch their video this week and picked up a number of excellent tips I wanted to share with my blog readers.

In one of the examples Moeva shared during the video, she explained how a Japanese company sharing recipes on their website made changes to their site by adding structured data.

The result?

Almost three times as much traffic as before the site changes.

That’s pretty amazing!

The video is almost 40 minutes long. If you’d rather get the highlights, check out my key takeaways.

Key Takeaways

• About 15 percent of searches daily are searches Google has never seen before
• You can help search engines find your web project: be it a website, app, plugin, theme, etc. – you control how your project appears in search
• If search engines understand your content, you’ll get more customers with search
• Make your content easy to discovery – submit a sitemap
• Use traditional-looking URLs, avoid fragments
• Use URLs consistently in links and sitemaps. Also use link rel="canonical" to indicate that is the URL you want search engines to look at
• Critical page metadata: page title, URL, and description
• Use Google Search Console to verify site ownership, learn what terms people use to search for your site, check your site
• Use a element with href attribute for your links -> best for search engine crawling
• Within Google Search Console, you can set up which parameters Google should ignore when crawling URLs
• Make your page fast and perfomant. Use Google Page Insights to learn how to improve performance
• If you’re building content management system plugins or themes, make sure they don’t slow down site performance. Protect users from spam with nofollow attribute. Remove plugins you no longer support.

Summary

While there are billions of Google searches daily, it might seem impossible to have your web project display in Google search results.

But you control how your project appears in search.

Remember the basics of providing a page title, URL, and description. Take advantage of structured data.

Use the tools Google provides, like Google Search Engine, to create a better web presence. And make it easy for users to add information.