Instead of waiting for a new SEO change to take effect, get ahead of the curve by offering a better user experience now. A focus on improving certain aspects of your site will ensure that you don’t drop down in the search results when new changes are rolled out, which means that you’ll still be visible to the people you want to reach. Waiting until changes are implemented will put you behind—and improving your Web presence now has the added benefit of creating a more relevant, attractive and secure website. [Read more…] about Getting Ahead of SEO Algorithm Tweaks By Offering a Better User Experience
Using Google Data Highlighter To Improve Your CTR
Google’s data highlighter tool has been around a couple of years now but it’s surprising how many of our clients that we work with have never heard of it let alone use it. With page one and the top 5 rankings in the SERPs becoming more and more crowded it’s crucial to polish your pages as much as possible to give them the edge needed to stand out from the rest of the pack and get more click throughs. You only a few seconds to grab a searchers attention and to get them to click your result in the SERPs over a competitor you really need to help the Google crawler bots understand the information that is on your page and which bits of information on the page it needs to focus on.
If you have never tried this tool before then here’s a quick and easy guide on how to get started.
Open the data highlighter tool here (you need to have a Google Webmaster Tools account already though so make sure you are signed up for that first).
Select your web property and then the url that you want to highlight. You can then choose to make these changes for either this page or many other pages after, for now it’s probably best if you just do a single page.
Next you can select the type of content or information that your page has.
Once the above is completed you can begin highlighting the data on your page, it’s pretty straight forward, just highlight all the crucial information on the page e.g. in the below example for an article its the title, author, date etc and then make the selection from the drop down list.
You can also add data for things such as number of reviews and/or stars awarded, however do not spam this! It may be tempting to give all your products 5 stars to entice people in but they will quickly leave when they see that there are no real reviews (if that is the case) thus giving the page a very high bounce rate and a negative affect on its ranking. Once you have highlighted and tagged all relevant data you can ‘publish’ this to Google.
Later if you wish to tag data on many pages at once you can select ‘tag this page and others like it’ at the first step and then once that page is completed you can choose to have those settings applied across multiple pages.
Any pages that have been highlighted and tagged with this tool can be revised and edited or even removed later on also in the WMT dashboard under search appearance > data highlighter
Google and other major search engines are bringing more information and data into the search results themselves so that a user isn’t going to click on a result unless they can see within the results that the page has the information they need, make sure your page is the one that gets that click!
Related: Google To Penalize Sites That Have App Download Pop-ups
Google To Penalize Sites That Have App Download Pop-ups
Google have announced that as of November 1st any site with a pop-up prompt asking users to download their mobile app will have their search rankings affected.
After November 1, mobile web pages that show an app install interstitial that hides a significant amount of content on the transition from the search result page will no longer be considered mobile-friendly.
They go on to to say that their mobile friendly algorithm and testing tool will take this into consideration for sites now too. Google also advised that smaller and less intrusive banners at the top of a mobile page should be used instead of pop-ups and interstitials and these would not be penalized.
Examples of bad and good app download prompts from Google.
Three Social Sharing Networks You Might Have Forgotten About
Social sharing is something that goes beyond Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and even Pinterest (which is now the #3 social networking site in the United States). Sharing your content beyond the top four may help you reach an audience that you hadn’t before. This may increase visits to your blog or website and may even turn some into loyal readers or customers.
BizSugar
BizSugar is a content sharing site that is similar to Digg. You can submit links to your content and then vote up content (each vote is called a sugar). This is a great, supportive site because it focuses mainly on small businesses. Even though content is easy to submit, the site isn’t spammy and a majority of the content is well-written. The main categories are marketing, finance, management, technology, and startups, with sub-categories for each one. The advertisements aren’t too distracting and in some cases, the comments on articles are just as informative as the content itself.
Google+
Google+ continues to gain traction for marketers looking to share content, especially because of Google’s growing emphasis on Authorship with Google+ profiles. Because of Authorship, marketers should set up a profile for themselves as individuals to take advantage, as well as a business page for their company. Businesses can’t be listed as authors, but having an active Google+ page (one that regularly posts content and contributes to online discussions) doesn’t take much time and may eventually make a stronger difference when it comes to SEO.
Tumblr
Many marketers may swear off Tumblr as something that is for teenagers sharing photos of Robert Pattinson, but it can be a real resource and opportunity to build community for brands and companies. For instance, the NBA has an amazing Tumblr that showcases unique photos of players and fans during games. They are all photos that don’t always make it in news stories and are worth a look. Tumblr can be a great place to not only share your own content, but follow and share content of customers and readers. Tumblr can be a great marketing and engagement tool if is it maintained and used properly. Take the time to have a great layout and make it easy to access the company’s profile from your website.
These are just three of the often under-valued social sharing networks that can help increase your audience and website traffic. When used with respect and a high level of engagement, they can really make a difference in your company’s overall online presence.
How On Page SEO Helps to Develop a Crawler Friendly Website
The crawlers are programs that check the pages for keywords. Well, this is only a general consideration, as the program is more complex than it sounds. It has to check millions of pages at 24 hours, but the majority of pages are visited even often. Google keeps the principles of crawlers secret, and this is the way it should be. There is no method for webmasters to determine all the parameters that are considered by those crawlers, but some of the aspects and the working principles behind those crawlers can be anticipated.
[Read more…] about How On Page SEO Helps to Develop a Crawler Friendly Website
How Google’s New EMD Update Ruined My Life
Every new update from Google bring the bad news to thousands of internet marketers. One of my internet marketing passion was searching for the exact domain name with good search volume, rank it by doing some SEOs & then make money by placing AdSense ads on this.
I was having more than 20 exact match domain (EMD) sites which were ranking better in Google & making me more than $1500 per month. Life was going cool until 28th September 2012 but suddenly I found many of my EMD sites (more than 15) were not ranking any more on the first page. Initially I was under impression that its a usual Google dance but when none of my domain returned to the previous rank then I thought there is really some problem. [Read more…] about How Google’s New EMD Update Ruined My Life
Google Keeps SEOs on Their Toes
When Google first launched panda in 2011, its main aim was to degrade the many websites that have been rated with poor user experience. The launch saw a significant impact of the search results of 11.8% of the sites in Google’s index. In July 24th 2012, Google announced that they pushed out the Panda 3.9 refresh. By this time, there were rumors circulating on the net, that Google was about to do a panda refresh. However, Google denied rumors of a Panda update. Google stated that the new update had impacted 1%of search results which is significant. However it is not so remarkable, compared to the higher percentage seen when Google first launched Panda or when Panda was introduced in Korea and Japan and the impact on search results were 5% of all indexed sites. [Read more…] about Google Keeps SEOs on Their Toes
Google’s Pirate Penalty Adds Another Reason to Not Plagiarize Online
If you didn’t already know that it wasn’t a good idea to plagiarize content on the Web, you missed a lot of reasons to not do it.
Not only is it ethically dubious, almost always illegal and prone to serious duplicate content penalties from Google, but it’s also a quick ways to make enemies of people you should probably be trying to work with rather than fighting against.
However, if none of those reasons are compelling to you, then Google has provided yet another. Late last week, the search engine announced that it will begin factoring in copyright notices it receives, a so-called “pirate penalty”.
What does this mean? Simply that Google will begin demoting sites that are the subject to a large number of copyright notices. This makes it so that copyright holders, in addition to possibly being able to shut down your site, they can also seriously hurt your search engine ranking more broadly.
Though the move is largely targeted at websites that traffic in pirated content, plagiarists and spammers should be given at least some pause for concern as this new clampdown could easily impact them as well.
The devil is in the details and Google has been very stingy with those to date. However, there is a little that we do know. [Read more…] about Google’s Pirate Penalty Adds Another Reason to Not Plagiarize Online