Posts tagged SERPs
Creating Mobile SERPS for Usability
Suzzicks over at SEOmoz recently posted about the phenomenon of mobile sites ranking in traditional search results as well as the inverse, traditional sites ranking on mobile devices. She argues that it’s something we need to explore and address as SEOs and we’ve summarized her points for you here.
Will everything be on one index soon?
Google obviously doesn’t want to have to index two totally different versions of the web, and creating one giant index with a multiple host is the clear solution. Multi-format site mapping may be a precursor to the merge, and Google themselves have said that they intend to use mobile bots to search everything soon. Interestingly, the site mapping changes occurred around the same time Caffeine kicked in as well as some major Places pages and Images updates. It seems like Google’s getting even further away from indexing multiple formats and moving to one, streamlined solution.
Certain types of phones getting certain results?
It’s impossible to know for sure if there are in fact different “mobile” indexes, even though Google had confirmed that there were in the beginning. These old results used to be terrible and Google’s been playing around with tons of different domain formats to serve up mobile results.
Mobile bots definitely make differentiations for different handsets and some serve up mobile results better than others. Doing a quick search for mobile results right on your desktop shows you the standard “SmartPhone” results served up by Google. Change the attribute at the bottom of the page to include Feature Phones, and you can see what others are seeing on various types of devices.
Tell the Search Engines You’re Mobile Friendly
The best way to tell the engines that you’re ready is to actually provide a page that is designed for mobile. You can use style sheets and mobile sitemaps to describe to the engines how you want your page to be displayed. Make sure to check your pages to see if they show up properly on mobile devices and also set you systems to ensure that the right pages are being served up to the right devices.
Here are Your Different Mobile Usability Types:
- Mobile/Traditional Hybrid Pages
- Traditional Computer Pages and Mobile Pages for Phone
- Mobile/Traditional Pages (Hybrid) for Computer and Smartphone
- Traditional Pages for Computers
As SERPs Get More Complicated, Focus on Relevant Elements
At SES Chicago last year, Yahoo VP of Consumer Products, Larry Cornett suggested that blended search results bring businesses a broader range of SEO opportunities, a chance to take control of their brand, and a potential increase in qualified clicks. While these blended results can tend to divert users away from organic listings, as SEO Dave Naylor pointed out at that same conference, Cornett does have a point.
Blended search results offer ways to get to the front page of search results beyond just the highly more competitive organic rankings. Sites have opportunities to show up for:
- real-time results
- news results
- image results
- video results
- shopping results
- local results (customers don’t even need to go to your site in some cases)
At the recent Online Marketing Summit in San Diego, WebProNews spoke with Conductor CEO Seth Besmertnik, who says companies should still build a foundation in organic rankings before trying to conquer other areas:
That said you can break these different elements of blended results down one by one, and look at ways to have your site perform well in each particular one. Here are tips for image search optimization, for example. Here are some for video. Here are some for real-time search. Here are some for news search.
Back to Cornett’s point about qualified clicks – focus on what makes the most sense for your site. Is focusing on real-time search worth your time? With Google, at least, even if you show up here, your presence will quickly give way to the next in line, and you will be off the page momentarily (although there still may be times when it makes sense to be seen here).
If you don’t have quality video content, video search optimization is not bound to be a very practical use of you time. However, if you do have some good stuff, perhaps you should be heavily focused in this area. I think you get the point.
Of course there are plenty of other factors of today’s search results page that drive users away from the “ten blue links” of organic results. It’s not just the blended search elements discussed above. You’ve also got search suggestions, related search links, location, mobile use, paid listings, search options, and various other elements of the user experience that compete for user attention. This is one reason why the lines between search marketing and other types of marketing continue to blur (consider that users of Google or Yahoo can customize their home pages to accomodate many of their favorite sites, making those just a click away).
Still, that foundation in natural search that Besmertnik mentioned is definitely a big part of the overall picture. I suggest taking advantage of your listings here, and maximizing those, regardless of how well you rank. Things like site links and breadcrumbs come to mind.
Google Changes its SERPs in a BIG Way
Originally published in May of 2010, WebProNews’ piece about Google’s updated SERP results page really hit home for a lot of users, so we’ve summarized it for you here.
Google’s new SERP page first and foremost makes the search options tab much more prominent than in the past. Users will find it hard to ignore how many different options they now have when searching including language, location, and type of results shown. In this regard, Google’s now not all that different from Yahoo or Bing.
So what does this mean for SEO hosting? Well, it’s definitely going to impact how users experience search, mostly because now they’re going to have the option to display many totally different sets of data – a craw in the cap for SEO. To prove this theory, Yahoo confirmed to WebProNews that when they added similar search options to their page a few months back, engagement increased dramatically.The trick for SEO now is going to be to figure out which result page they’d like to rank for then go after those particular results.
Social media is also going to become even more important in search since Google’s new options are going to draw from “everything” on the web, including social media results. Once limited to news outlets, status updates are now providing some of the information searchers see, and SEOs are going to have to figure out how to include themselves in this social dialogue.
Social interactions are becoming more important, too, as now Google places a lot of emphasis on context and relationship between sites and social outlets. They’ve begun ranking Tweets and placing additional relevance on things like Facebook Likes.
Local is also going to grow with the implementation of these new options, mainly because the “nearby” option is more prominent. The idea to take away is that now it’s more important than ever to rank in all of Google’s sources, not just as a standalone site. That’s just not going to cut it in today’s informational search age.
Thanks to Heather Hendrick
Recent Comments