In a post on his blog last week, Udi Manber, VP of engineering at Google in charge of Search Quality, revealed that the company was ready to start opening up on information that was previously kept highly secret, in an attempt to clarify certain elements of how it works. This came as welcome news to SEO companies everywhere, but perhaps some are expecting too much and in doing so are losing sight of the fundamentals that have been available from the outset.

Google is famous for being extremely guarded on how its algorithms and ranking systems work. As Manber explains in his article, the company has ploughed one thousand “programmer years” into developing the processes, and that’s not something that any corporation is overly willing to open up to competitors and the public. While the protective stance is understandable, it has directly led to frenzied speculation that makes up a good proportion of the SEO market today. The internet is full of companies that spend their time - and their client’s budgets - trying to fathom the inner workings of the Google system in order to manipulate search results in their favour. There’s an entire team of technicians at Google who are solely responsible for identifying and stamping out these activities, but it still goes on to an enormous extent.

While it will undoubtedly be interesting to see exactly what Google reveals in the coming months, it’s worth bearing in mind that the most relevant SEO fact has been freely available from day one - and that is that user experience is the single most important issue. It was at the start, and it still is today. It’s likely to be the case as long as search exists in its current form. If the user experience is lacking in quality then people will drift towards alternative search methods, and that’s something that Google simply can’t allow to happen.

What does this all mean for your website and its own SEO? Well, always put the user first. Create an easily understandable layout and design. Write content for humans, not search engine robots. Clearly define titles and tags in a descriptive and straight-forward way. Link in and out with other relevant websites. In short, always remember that your website is meant for your users, so everything on there should work for them. When your users are happy, the search engines are happy, and Google’s revelations - whatever they turn out to be - aren’t likely to change this.

At Greenmedia we’re constantly on the lookout for the latest developments in the industry, so we can give our clients the very best digital services. With that in mind, we attended the Online Marketing ‘07 event at the Business Design Centre in London this week to see what the leading figures in the sector were currently proposing. Visiting the Google University keynote, along with several discussions and workshops on search engine optimisation and web marketing, gave us a clear picture of the pressing issues in those areas.

“Listening to the keynote presentations at the show vindicated many of the SEO and online marketing techniques that we have been employing down the years, and served to confirm some of the newer ideas that we had uncovered recently,” said Jed Macewan, Greenmedia Director. “In combining this already effective approach with some of the emerging ideas that were discussed, we’re supremely confident that we can continue to offer a leading edge service across the board.”

Google responded to calls for more clarity on their quality guidelines this month by updating their explanations for web developers. While the guidelines themselves have stayed the same, this was a welcome move from Google in shedding light on what has become a recurrent thorny subject in the industry. Despite the many individual dos and don’ts of SEO, the basic premise of search engine success is a simple constant – build your website for real users, not search engines. One of the main issues in fulfilling this, if not the main issue, is content – more specifically, relevant content.

Greenmedia has always produced websites with the user experience in mind. We believe that if a site is difficult to use or presents any problems at all for those accessing it then it isn’t doing its job. As well as our all-encompassing SEO work, our services include content management systems (CMS) to help you keep your website fresh and up-to-date, and bespoke copywriting that is researched and created to appeal directly to your target audience. Both of these are expressly designed to boost your SEO performance in an organic way, focusing on keeping things relevant for users.