What do you do for Google... not users?

Anything SEO that's not optimizing for visitors?

[philipp]

Since Google has so many reasonable approaches to rank (I would say), I wonder if you do anything SEO-wise that's simply for the purpose of better ranking. E.g. using <h1> makes sense in terms of HTML and accessibility, as well as it might make sense for Google. Links to your site also make sense; if there'd be no Google, you would still be happy to have them, right. But let's say for a second no search-engines exist, would there be anything you would stop doing for your website?

[ciml]

Sometimes a page with many links works well for users. Purely for PageRank conservation, I prefer keep to have less than 100 links per page.

[CorkNBeans]

It seems to me that many of the page titles that one must use to end up ranking well with Google don't serve users very well.

By the time people are done loading their titles with keyword phrases they seldom have room to also mention, uh, their company name (for instance). Or perhaps some specific information about what that webpage actual represents (Company Roster, Contact Information, etc.).

Everytime I add a bookmark I have to rename whatever the browser defaults to because it uses page titles. If I stayed with the default then my bookmarks would just be a long list of keywords.

Cork B.

[Mohamed_E]

My non-commercial site is designed for users. But they have to find it to become users ;) So I do minor SOEing for Google's sake. Some examples:

Many, many of the links to my site generate essentially zero visitors, so they are clearly for Google's sake.

I also use my keywords more frequently than I otherwise would, I rewrote several phrases that started as " ... the trail then reaches the summit" into " ... the xyz trail then reaches the summit of Mount Widget".

Also make sure that both variants of a keyword are represented, Mount Widget and Mt. Widget. Half my internal pages include one menu structure with anchor text of Mount Widget, the other half have Mt. Widget in the anchor.

Related to that are a few intentional misspellings. I am not interested in getting hits from typos, but there are words and phrases that are regularily misspelled. There are two lakes that all knowledgeable people refer to as "Lakes of the Widgets", and the page that deals with them is well optimized for the correct spelling. Fortunately the word "lake" (singular) occurs there in a legitimate context ("you pass Lake Gizmo on your way to Lakes of the Widgets"), the wrong phrase gets five hits for each hit to the correct one.

So even with a totally non-commercial site that I describe as "lightly optimized" a lot of thought is given to what will make Google happy.