Mobile SERPS & Usability
Aug 31st
Posted by Suzzicks
So here is the deal: Traditional websites frequently rank in mobile search results – especially if you are searching from a SmartPhone. What you may not realize is that the converse is also true – mobile pages can rank well in traditional search. This is quite an interesting phenomenon, and something that we need to address strategically.
All One Index Soon?Why does this happen?
Well, Google has said that they really don’t want to index two versions of the web – one mobile and one traditional. Even though they do have different mobile-specific bots, they want those their bots all to feed into one index. Hmmmm….Is it just an interesting coincidence that they just launched the multi-format site mapping in Google, where you can combine all the different types of sitemaps that we previously had to submit separately? Possibly. At least it that could indicate a shift away from multiple indexes.
Did anyone notice that this shift happened pretty soon after Caffeine, as did the re-launch of Google Images, and some significant changes in Google Places?
Hmmmm…..It seems that now things might be all moving to one index with different types of ‘indexing attributes’ that will replace the need for different indexes More >
7 Different Visualisations of Link Profiles
Aug 30th
Posted by Tom_C
We all love backlinks. We all love visualisation. Boom! Let’s mash those two things together. In this post I’ve collected a bunch of different techniques for visualising your link data. Some of these are useful for analysis, some are useful for management and some are useful for keeping Dr. Pete entertained……
Which Are My Top FoldersThe top pages function of OSE is one of the most useful features ever. Ever since I saw the first incarnation in labs I’ve been a heavy user of this tool but Rich Baxter has taken things one step further yet again and given us a way to see the top linked to folders on a site. Here are the most linked to sub-folders and pages on www.google.com:
Get the step by step walkthrough to creating your own version of this over on seogadget.
Creating Geo Link MapsYes, I know that this involves a competitor. But the graphs are too super cool not to share! Take a look at the geomap of Distilled’s backlinks:
Anyone would think we have a presence in the US or something! To learn how to make your own version of this go check out Wiep’s wonderful article. You never More >
Is 2011 The Year of the Social Media Bubble
Aug 28th
by Eric Brown
Several camps are starting to chant that 2011 may well be the year of The Social Media Bubble. I would not proclaim to be able to predict the future be any means, but it sure seems more probable than not. While having little experience predicting the future, we have had an up close and personal relationship with the real estate bubble. Developing real estate used to be a pretty fun endeavor, however the past couple of years of operating our boutique apartment rental business in SE Michigan has had more challenges than we ever imagined. But as with all struggles, there has been a bright side, a bubble burst quickly trims out the weeds and the low hanging fruit.
Perhaps a Social Media Weeding is forthcoming, 2010 has been the year that many small and mid size businesses have taken the plunge, and embraced the throws of Social Media Marketing. With that nearly every unemployed straggler has hung out their Social Media Consultant shingle. As reported in the Harvard Business Review, “During the subprime bubble, banks and brokers sold one another bad debt — debt that couldn’t be made good on. Today, “social” media is trading in low-quality connections — linkages More >Dear Google: Big Brands Aren’t Enough
Aug 26th
Posted by Dr. Pete
Google’s recent brand update has gotten a lot of buzz this past week. Previously, the best a single domain could hope for was one listing in the SERPs with possibly 1-2 indented listings. Now, a large brand can completely dominate the top 10 with a single website. Let’s look at the case many people have been citing – a search for “apple”. Here’s a summary of what that results page looks like today:
Apple.com dominates the 1st page, holding slots 1-7, with a few other big brands finishing up the top 10. Google’s argument seems to be that this is good for consumers, but is a SERP monopolized by a single website really what search users are looking for?
Unraveling Search IntentOne of the ways you can tell what a searcher is interested in is by looking at the way they refine that search. It’s nearly impossible to sort out the intent behind a search for “apple” by itself, but if you look at follow-up searches, they start to paint a clearer picture.
Thanks to a Twitter shout-out from Dave Naylor, the folks at Hitwise (thanks, Matt) were kind enough to pull some data from their Search Term Sequence tool More >
Yahoo Completes Bing Transition for Organic Results (in US and Canada)
Aug 25th
Last week, Yahoo announced that it had begun transitioning Bing results into Yahoo results – a product of the Search Alliance between Yahoo and Microsoft. Now, the companies have announced that the transition of organic results in the U.S. and Canada is complete.
This applies to web, image, and video search on Yahoo for both the desktop and mobile experiences of Yahoo Search.
“With this week’s milestone behind us, Yahoo! will continue to drive technology innovation in the search experience to bring more value to users and advertisers alike,” says Yahoo SVP of Search Products, Shashi Seth. “We are focused on creating rich, immersive experiences that foster serendipitous discovery for people across the Yahoo! network. As we shared last week, we are also working hard on finalizing our revenue model for the Yahoo! Search BOSS program going forward, and will be offering other search-related tools for publishers in the months to come.”
“We continue to work hard on the migration to adCenter, and are optimistic about completing this phase later this fall,” says Microsoft’s SVP of Online Services, Satya Nadella. “As we have said all along, our primary goal is to provide advertisers with a quality transition experience in 2010, while being mindful More >
How to Train Your Content to Get Your Audience’s Attention
Aug 24th
by Stoney deGeyter
In my last post, I talked about training your text to “engage”, “inform”, “speak” (call to action), and “convert”. The first step is to make sure the content doesn’t overstay it’s welcome. In this post, I’ll provide some of the tricks you can teach your content; training it how to do all of these things by making it skim-able, scan-able and provide exits to where the visitor needs to go next.
Teaching tricks the audience likes
There are two kinds of tricks you can train your text to do: the kind of tricks you like or the kind of tricks your audience likes. Obviously, training your text to do the tricks you like will make you happy… but it won’t make your audience happy. You think the tricks are cool, but nobody else does. And… that’s just not cool.
Most people who visit websites scan them first, then skim the text. But, they only skim read if they get intrigued by their initial scan, and they read it only if they find something compelling and interesting that warrants their full attention. There are four easy ways to train your text to be scan-able:
Paragraph headings: Your page should have a proper heading and your content More >
Google Activity That May Have an Impact on Rankings
Aug 24th
There are currently some interesting happenings with Google search that webmasters may want to pay attention to. The company, which is always busy, has been making moves, which may greatly affect its flagship product – search. This is all in addition to everything the company is doing in social media, mobile, gaming, advertising and everything else (which all may have their own separate impacts on search).
Algorithm Change Google makes changes to its algorithm all the time, but when a change comes with an announcement, you know people are going to talk. On Friday, Google announced a tweak designed to surface multiple pages from a single site for relevant queries.
“For queries that indicate a strong user interest in a particular domain, like [exhibitions at amnh], we’ll now show more results from the relevant site,” says Google software engineer Samarth Keshava. “Prior to today’s change, only two results from www.amnh.org would have appeared for this query. Now, we determine that the user is likely interested in the Museum of Natural History’s website, so seven results from the amnh.org domain appear. Since the user is looking for exhibitions at the museum, it’s far more likely that they’ll find what they’re looking for, faster. More >
The Muddled World of Mobile Carrier Search Results
Aug 24th
Posted by Suzzicks
When I am thinking about mobile SEO, I pay specific attention to the order of the results and the inclusion of Universal Results. In their nature, Universal results are infinitely more clickable, as we know from traditional SEO. But in the mobile world, Universal Results are the fun results – because they are often have more potential for interaction with the phone than they would on a traditional computer. You can click on a phone number to place a phone call, click on a map to get walking directions, click on a song to buy it or play it, and you can even click on an app to download it directly to your phone from the search results.
Interactive and fun, but so far, it is hard to predict when you will get a certain type of Universal Result and when you won’t, and there have been lots of major algorithm tweaks with little attention or fanfare. For example, I have screen shots taken in the past year comparing the search ‘Britney Spears’ on an iPhone and a traditional computer. The traditional computer had music downloads near the very top of the page, but the iPhone didn’t. Why? The More >
Investing in Link Building
Aug 19th
Posted by MikeCP
There’s no such thing as a free link. Whether it was the time taken to craft that blog post, the cash used to film that viral video, or even just the opportunity cost of thinking about how to build links, there is an investment involved. For my first post here at SEOmoz, I want to talk about how a small business might approach the investment into link building.
To make this post a little less hypothetical, we’re going to set a budget of ,000 and/or 60 hours. This isn’t to say that one needs ,000 to build links, but for the purpose of this article it helps to keep things in perspective. And for those big business readers out there, I’m sure you could just ratchet up the investment by whatever order of magnitude you’d like.
The Budget is SetSo let’s imagine your client or boss (if you’re in-house) has promised to commit some time and money into a link building campaign. Huzzah! Finding yourself in a position to invest in SEO both financially and resourcefully is a great place to be, and these opportunities don’t grow on trees. So it’s tremendously important that this sum of money (and time) More >
10-Minute Missing Page Audit
Aug 18th
Posted by Dr. Pete
Some of you know that I spend a lot of time behind the scenes here on Pro Q&A. One of the challenges of Q&A is that we often have to tackle complex problems in a very short amount of time – we might have 10-15 minutes to solve an issue like “Why isn’t my page showing up on Google?” with no access to internal data, server-side code, etc.
Of course, I’d never suggest you try to solve your own SEO problems in just 10 minutes, but it’s amazing what you can do when you’re forced to really make your time count. I’d like to share my 10-minute (give or take) process for solving one common SEO problem – finding a “missing” page. You can actually apply it to a number of problems, including:
- Finding out why a page isn’t getting indexed
- Discovering why a page isn’t ranking
- Determining if a page has been penalized
- Spotting duplicate content problems
I’ll break the 10 minutes down, minute by minute (give or take). The mini-clock on each item shows you the elapsed time, for real-time drama.
0:00-0:30 – Confirm the site is indexedAlways start at the beginning – is your page really missing? Although it sometimes gets More >
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