There's a new algorithm in town and it's joining the menagerie, it's Google Pigeon.
Google Pigeon was originally launched in US in July 2014, but was only released in UK and Europe in December. The purpose of Google Pigeon is to enhance the relevance of local search queries which will in turn help to retrieve more accurate search results for users. It is likely that websites may have noticed a slight increase or decrease in search ranking since the algorithm went live.
In order to ensure your website is fully optimised in line with this new algorithm you should consider the following:
- Include useful informative content on your home page, users want to know who you are, where you are and what the website is about.
- Useful, relevant content should be used across the entire site with reference to city or country to help Google understand the location of the business.
- Make sure that you have a suitable number of keywords, don't over do it, keyword stuffing is not going to help you, especially when it doesn't make sense! If your user can't make head or tail of it then neither is Google and the last thing you need is a slap on the wrist from the big "G".
- Efficient usage of page title tags, again these shouldn't be stuffed with keywords but good practice would include location and brand/name of company.
- Remember your alt tags and make sure you include location, remember alt tags are used by crawlers to assess what the image is about because they are unable to see it. An example of a good title tag could be "Sunset at Cobo Beach, Guernsey, Indulge Media".
- If you can, it is useful to include location in the URL's across the site, but if you are going to be updating URL's always make sure that you put a 301 redirect in place. This will help to avoid any 404 error messages and negative user experiences.
These points should help to optimise your website and hopefully assist SERP.
We will continue to keep you posted on Google algorithms updates throughout the year.
Image courtesy of ZeroOne
