Homepage Sliders: Bad For SEO, Bad For Usability. 7 Ways to Improve Your Landing Pages Today - SES Toronto Presentation. What Do Google's Smartphone Ranking Changes Mean For Marketers? For nearly eight years now, I’ve been talking to marketers about the value of presenting usable content to mobile users. Throughout that time, there have been naysayers (of course) who were reluctant to recommend creating mobile-friendly content because Google didn’t seem to prioritize the experience of accessing content on a mobile device.
I’ve heard everything, from “desktop and smartphone search results are the same” to “the best mobile SEO strategy is not to have a mobile SEO strategy,” and everything in between — all because, to the average user, it didn’t seem like having content that provided a good user experience for smartphone users mattered to Google. All this changed with Google’s announcement of smartphone ranking changes on June 11. According to Google, in the near future they will start demoting sites within mobile rankings that provide a poor user experience to smartphone searchers, starting with any sites that exhibit any of these common smartphone configuration errors: Google's Cutts Talks Structured Data Beta, Mobile Site Speed Need, Penalty Notices To Get Example Links & More.
Last night at SMX Advanced, Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts was on stage to answer questions about Google search and webmaster topics with Danny Sullivan. We covered the session in live blog format and pulled out several key points. Of all my years watching Matt Cutts talk, I believe it has been over ten years now, I have never seen Matt reveal so much new information and announce so many new things in a single hour at a conference. Here are the highlights from last night, with links to those individual stories: Finally, here is the full hour video of the chat with Matt Cutts and Danny Sullivan. Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Google: Mobile | Google: Rich Snippets | Google: SEO | Google: Web Search | Google: Webmaster Central | Top News.
The Hitchhiker’s Guide To Internal Linking Strategy. It’s not the first thing you think of when you hear “link building.” It’s definitely not the sexiest aspect of link building. But, I’d argue it’s among the most important components of a solid link building strategy. That’s right, folks: today we’re going to chat about internal linking. Cue the communal groan. It’s okay! I’m not going to talk about anchor text.
Why An Internal Linking Strategy Important SEO is a multifaceted endeavor comprised of many different parts of varying levels of importance. Internal linking helps lay the foundation of your SEO efforts. In the limited time that Google spends on my site, the last thing I want is for it to be confused about where I want to be ranked and which pages are high priorities. Thinking Logically About Internal Linking Most people see internal linking as something like this: I know — I’m not a designer. The result is one hot mess. In general, e-commerce sites do this really well. Thinking Technically About Internal Linking Conclusion.
The Anatomy of a Perfect Web Page. Google: In Future, Pages With Bad Mobile SEO Won't Rank As Well In Mobile Search. Is your site not doing a good job for mobile visitors? Better get that fixed. Sites with mobile experience issues won’t rank as highly in Google’s mobile or smartphone search results, in the future. Bad Mobile Site? Fewer Smartphone Search Rankings, For You Google’s Yoshikiyo Kato and Pierre Far said about the change in a blog post today: To improve the search experience for smartphone users and address their pain points, we plan to roll out several ranking changes in the near future that address sites that are misconfigured for smartphone users. They followed by sharing two common mobile configuration mistakes of many and suggested these search ranking changes will help import the smartphone search experience for Google users. Faulty Redirects The first issue is called a “faulty” redirect, when a page listed in search may redirect all smartphone users to the same single mobile page, rather than to a mobile-optimized version of the page they’re after: Credit: Google Smartphone-Only Error.
The Website Owner's Guide to Working With Web Designers. The following are slides and the transcript of the presentation I gave at Wordcamp Seattle 2013. Transcript: Before I dive into the full presentation, I should mention that we are not a web design company – almost all of our clients come to us for marketing services or website management and they have preexisting websites, and that’s how we like it. So, we tend to handle a lot of handoffs from the original web designers – some are graceful and pleasant, others are trainwrecks that involve burnt bridges and many unpleasant emails and phone calls.
The difference is usually a result of the website owner making a poor choice of web designer, or something circumstantial where the website owner doesn’t have proper ownership of their own website. What To Expect When You’re Expecting A Website Now, when I first submitted my Wordcamp topic, it was basically a couple paragraph concept with a title. “What to expect when you’re expecting a website” Choosing The Right Web Designer 2 – Price vs. Photos. For The Best Marketing ROI, Eat Your Veggies. Your web site design presents two options after marketing it. Invite, browse, and leave.
Or, invite and guide to revenue oriented tasks. Most web sites do the first one. The investment goes into promoting, not the user experience. Commonly Heard Feedback Selling user experience and usability services such as audits and user testing is the equivalent of making kids eat their vegetables. That tactic works because they can hold their nose to gobble up 5 peas and the reward is chocolate ice cream. They don’t see the value in it.They believe their site is working fine. Return on Investment Every excuse for not including usability audits along with an Internet Marketing strategy is tied to ROI.
Losing all that potential business is worth investing more marketing dollars into fighting Panda and Penguin and buying ads on Facebook? And my favorite one of all. Hiding the gem. If you eat a few peas, we’ll reward you with a hefty conversions lift. Image courtesy of FreeDigitalPhotos.net. SEO Opportunities Begin Well Before New Website Development. Launching a new site, or any major site update, for a large enterprise comes with some unique challenges. A short summary of some of the most common include those listed below. SEO Challenges: New Site Launch Or Major Updates Too many decision makers. This is one of the more basic headaches. The above misinformation deserves its own brief discussion. There are many other types of problems, but you notice that none in my above list have anything to do with the actual execution of the new website project.
Ideally, it starts months before. Getting the best result depends on educating the people involved, and getting their incentives aligned properly. In addition to what you see in those two articles, below are two more ideas about speeding up the education process. Show Them Examples Of Failure I wrote about one example of this in my last Enterprise SEO column. As you can see, Pampers and Huggies are far and away the biggest brands in this space but do not rank prominently. Responsive Site Redesign: 4 SEO Considerations. Whether you've already decided to go responsive or you're still considering a responsive site redesign, there are some things you'll need to look out for from an SEO standpoint.
Above the fold issues, content strategy, internal links, and mobile specifics can trip you up. Before we begin, there's an important distinction between cosmetic and full redesigns. This distinction primarily comes down to one thing: are URLs on your site changing? Changing URLs is a game changer and adds a number of steps that you need to take in order to have a successful transition from an old site to a shiny new one. The following analysis focuses on common issues with cosmetic redesigns, moving from a non-responsive site to a responsive website design 1. Homepage Above The Fold Area (Desktop) This is where it starts to get awkward with the web designers. Responsive design, kind of like the blow out, has it's own style and look, which may at times conflict with some best practices for SEO. 2. 3. 4.
Why You Should Map Out Your Site's Information Architecture.