In early March, Google released its own SEO Report Card, an effort to provide the company’s product teams with ideas on how they could improve their products’ pages using accepted optimization techniques. The project looked at the main pages of 100 different Google products, measuring them across a dozen common optimization categories. So how did Google fare? All things considered, they could do better. The report card indicated that Google needs some serious work on its search result presentation (title tag format and length, description meta tag use, and site links), its URLs and redirection, and even its on-page optimization practices including the use of

< h1 > tags and alt text. Google did receive some “satisfactory” grades on many practices. The “optimization” suggestions were intended to not only help search engines understand the content of our pages better, but also to improve our users’ experience when visiting our sites. Simple steps such as fixing 404s and broken links, simplifying URL choice, and providing easier-tounderstand titles and snippets for our pages can benefit both users and search engines.