More Onsite SEO from Google SEO Report Card - Overall Review and Assessment

We'll start by reviewing the objectives set in the first part. There were two of those:

1. List the important things that Google checks during their SEO onsite analysis.

2. Evaluate what Google's SEO Report Card contains that SEO practitioners normally ignore.  

For the first objective, we learned that Google basically checks seven important onsite items in their SEO Report Card:  

1. Title tag format and length

2. Showing related snippets in search results

3. Effective use of sitelinks

4. Duplicate content check: clear main page result

5. Importance of URL canonicalization

6. Effective use of Header tag

7. Use of logo image alt text

As to the second objective, there are some things that might be missed by common SEO practitioners.

First, some SEOs completely dismiss meta descriptions. This is NOT bad (as shown in the analysis in the first part), however, there might be some important pages on your website that do not have ample content that Google can grab as nice and related snippets. For example, consider what Google does in their SEO Report Card (e.g http://www.google.com/mapmaker); they used meta descriptions only in some special parts of their website, to give a better user experience in the search result.

Second, some SEOs ignore and fail to improve the sitelinks of their clients, resulting in an effect on the click through from search engines that also decreases the effective traffic. Google recommends that you tweak sitelinks using Google Webmaster Tools.

Third, some SEOs dismiss the idea that duplicate content causes a penalty in rankings, and the normal reaction is to ignore these issues. However, it is surprisingly stated in the Google SEO Report Card that URL canonicalization is needed since "split" reputation or “link juices” can affect rankings.

Here is the exact comment from Google: “Prevent dilution of reputation - If the same content is accessible through multiple URLs, this could cause duplicate content. This content may rank worse because its reputation is spread over multiple URLs.”

It might not be, strictly speaking, a “penalty,” but it affects the URL's ranking.

Finally, some SEOs might not include header tags in their optimization, thinking they have a low impact on rankings. Even Google includes improving their header tags to give their content a better structure, however, which results in a better user experience as well as improved relevance in the search results.