I’m not sure at this stage how many users they’ve rolled the latest version out to. I know plenty of people who are still seeing the old version so for the benefit of everyone, here’s a screenshot.

Design

The one thing that I initially wanted to see was how much of the redesign is a reaction to Microsoft launching Bing.com last year? I headed over to the Bing.com search results and was a little shocked at how much of a rip off Google had done of the Bing search results.

I’m neither anti-Google or anti-Microsoft so this point isn’t at all politically motivated but Google have pretty much replicated the format of Bing.com and if the boot was on the other foot I’m sure people would be making a big deal of it.

Maybe as a designer, I’m being a bit overly sensitive and most people won’t notice but the links in the top left, top right, logo placement, search box, filters and search results are all in exactly the same positions. I would have expected Google to have come up with something a bit more ground-breaking and original. It’s entirely possible that both companies invested heavily in usability testing and this was the design that both came up independently of each other and it’s just a huge coincidence that they look the same?

However, after the initial disappointment of there not being anything new in terms of the design, I was pleasantly impressed by the new Google interface…

Search Results Layout

The search results format is the usual tried and tested method of sponsored results at the top with organic’s underneath and further sponsored links down the right. Google obviously saw no reason to change what is obviously proving to be a successful method of presenting search results.

Location Specific

Google have introduced a new “Auto-detect Location” feature below the search box which should default to your current location but is also easy to customise by entering a postcode or other location which is a nice feature if you’re looking for local search results.

Filters

The big improvement from Google though which none of their current competition can rival is the filters in the left column. Now it couldn’t be easier to view blogs, images, books, news, videos, maps, social media updates and discussions. But not only that, you can now also view results that are time specific so viewing results from the past 24 hours, week, month or year is easy if you’re looking for information that can easily date.

How will the new Google design effect SEO?

It’s probably safe to say that the Google algorithm itself hasn’t changed all that much so continue to write good, original content and market it in the same way that you always have for the search engines. However, there is definitely more emphasis now on new content so it’s probably never been more important to make sure that you keep providing fresh and useful content for your website to ensure that you’re at the forefront of any time dependent search.

What do you think to the new Google search results?

Over the next few weeks I’ll be going into a little more depth and detail about how you can improve the performance of a website in the search engine result pages (SERPs) but today I’ll go over a few basic things that you can change on your site itself that will improve your rankings.

On page factors

A lot of novice web designers who don’t understand the search engine optimization process often over complicate things by including things like back links and PR from day one without actually understanding what they need to do from a web design perspective to give their site a fighting chance to begin with.

There’s many on page factors that can improve a website’s position in the search engines so I’ll be touching on a few of these areas that will have the biggest influence to sites like Google, Yahoo, MSN and ASK.

Metatags

Back when search engine’s first came into use. Metatags were an important factor of determining how well a site was ranked. However, due to these being abused and words being used that may not relate to the actual content of the site most search engines no longer use the metatags for ranking purposes.

It’s still worth including meta-keywords for those that do use them and meta-description as this is displayed by some search engines as the snippet in their results pages but spending any significant time on this these days is a waste.

Spend no longer than about ten minutes setting your meta-tags up as there’s much more important factors involved nowadays that will influence rankings.

URL

The address of the web page is extremely important to search engines. A domain name with a specific key phrase will significantly help a page to rank well. Failing that, using a folder structure with names relating to the particular content and key phrases is a great way to go and the major search engines will certainly use this as a factor within their search engine results pages.

Title

After the URL, the <title> attribute is probably the next most important factor. Many novices who understand a little about search engine optimization will use the title attribute to include lots of variations of different keywords as they believe the more keywords they can get in here the better.

However, not only will this look like spam to users of the site it can also have the opposite effect to the one desired. Think of the title attribute as a percentage and the more keywords that are including within the title, the more diluted it becomes.

Using a 3 or 4 word key phrase for your title will usually be much more effective and descriptive of the page and in my experience I’ve found it to be much more beneficial when it comes to ranking.

Headings

h1, h2 etc are all used for headings of the page content and the same theory applies to these as was described in the previous section. Using heading’s that are descriptive and concise to the content without being overly descriptive will get picked out by the likes of Google.

Anchor text

When we talk about anchor text, we’re describing the content that is provided within a link. Using good descriptive text is not only good for search engine optimization but will also have the benefit of making the site usable by ensuring it’s easy for your users to understand where the link will take them, whilst it’s also good for accessibility.

Content

And finally, one of the factors that many novices over look is the actual content on the page. A search engine spider will read the entire content of a web page and decide based on words within that page, what the content is about and which key phrases it’s likely to relate to.

The content shouldn’t be used as a way of stuffing keywords into the content as your users will obviously have to read this too but making sure that the words your focusing on appear a few times in the text as well as using variations of these key words is important.

Summary

You may be reading this and thinking, “well duh” but the basics of search engine optimization aren’t that difficult. If web standards and semantics are used along with a little common sense then improving your SERPs by improving the on page factors isn’t rocket science.

A little thought about which key words you should be targeting and good use of semantic markup can go a long way to improving your site’s performance in the search engines.

This free guide contains over 20,000 words and would be over 60 pages long if printed, and that just includes the core 6 sections. There are dozens more pages of supplemental reading linked to from here and from within the guide itself and best of all it’s free.

As a web designer, I’ve done my fair bit of work in this area over the years but haven’t come across a guide that goes into as much depth as this and will certainly be taking the time out to read it for any useful tips that I could apply.

http://www.websitepublisher.net/seo-guide/