Most web writers and SEO experts have conflicting views about what is more essential for higher page ranks – SEO techniques or good content. Most content creators and web masters think that unless they write great HTML code that validates well along with the content, their website will not be found by web crawlers or bots. This may actually not be true! Matt Cutts, Head of Google Webspam team, has some interesting insights to offer on the subject.
Do you have to be SEO savvy?
As Matt reassures, Google does not punish websites for not being SEO savvy. The rankings of these websites are not negatively affected if they are not optimized for search engines. Google is constantly trying to find and rank websites with good content. According to Matt, the search engine will find good content, even if its creators have made mistakes with SEO like not specifying meta tags, alt tags title tags, etc. Google bots will find good content even if it has to decode binaries that the content is embedded in or if the bots have to process some JavaScript to find links.
Most surprisingly, Google can locate great content even if the web pages are untitled. So you can breathe easy knowing that the search engine and its bots do not look only at the HTML Meta tags, the head tag and title tags to rank websites. The ultimate aim of Google is to ensure that content creators do not have to worry about SEO and that the search engine finds good content regardless of whether the webpages have been search engine optimized or not.
So what should you do?
Every year Google tries to find new ways to index and return web-pages, and is getting better by the day to find valuable pages and information. While all this great, as a savy webmaster, you should follow basic SEO guidelines that will help Google find and list your website in search results. Matt suggests that websites should at least have valid title tags and should be crawlable and accessible. Watch the video and find out what else Matt has to say on this subject.