Title Tags & SEO: 3 Golden Rules. It used to be conventional wisdom that title tags should be between 65 and 70 characters in length. Early this year Google began experimenting with a new search layout design that reduces the number of characters shown to lengths between 48 and 62 characters. The title tag remains an important part of SEO for one basic reason – it is the overall label for the content of a page, and because the number of characters is limited,there isn’t much room to do that much with it.
Here are three golden rules of title tags. Rule 1: Have One Distinct Page for Each Major User Need You Address This is one of the most common mistakes that people make with their sites. Ideally, there are many stages in this process, such as getting your key team members together and brainstorming, polling users on their needs, studying competitive sites, and then supplementing that with keyword research. To do this I pulled a keyword report from Wordtracker, and after some examination I noticed some patterns. Summary. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Best Practice Guide.
About this guide At more than 400 pages long and almost 140,000 words in length, Econsultancy's SEO Best Practice Guide contains everything you need to know about search engine optimization, whether you work for an in-house client team, independently or for an agency. Built on the foundations of our previous, highly-renowned report, this document will help you understand search marketing like never before. The SEO Best Practice Guide is invaluable for anybody working in internet marketing, or looking to appoint an SEO agency, or simply trying to secure better search engine rankings.
It has been created with the help of globally-esteemed SEO practitioners, in order to provide front-line insight and give you the edge in your natural search marketing activity. Make no mistake: this guide contains lots of actionable, real world insight. Topics covered Inside the guide, you will find: Best practice success factors Key recommendationsSEO tips for success These sit across six main areas: Contents. 5 Bad Habits of Experienced SEOs That Hurt Online Marketing Campaigns.
Habits get a bad rap. They aren’t bad on their own. We develop them so we can get more done without having to think carefully about everything we do each day. What SEO bad habits do you need to break? Photo by Rhys Stacker. After any substantial amount of time in the SEO industry, you develop certain habits. Many of those habits are born of necessity, others reinforced by positive experiences, still others implemented for the sake of convenience.
Here are 5 habits that even the most experienced SEO analysts can fall into that could be harming your ability to successfully direct and manage a client’s online marketing campaigns. 1) Signed in searching – you never do it One of the first things you’re taught as an SEO analyst is to limit personalization when viewing search results. Seeing the impact that localization and things like Google+ and blended search results can have on a SERP page can be exceedingly useful for an SEO. 2) You check rankings daily 4) You’ve seen your site too many times. Shady Marketing Firms Are Still Quietly Bribing Bloggers. God, this brings back (unfortunate) memories of when I was desperate for cash after moving to another city and began writing these effing SEOd articles. Trying to churn out at least 10 articles a day while shoehorning in awkward phrases like "hotels resorts in Geelong (Australia)" at least 10 times in each article.
For someone who used to write actual articles with important stuff like facts and grammar it was akin to someone from PETA being told to feed a cat Chicklets instead of actual cat food. And that example from the "book marketing specialist" at Examiner.com (which I did too)... it took me one minute to find the payola sentence: Vacationing is great for family fun; however, the expenses can add up quickly. Some use services such as HOTEL FINDERS in order to find discounts. Ugh... Also there's this: "search for someone to work with on the Gawker.
" The Gawker?? Yahoo! announces last hurrah of ancient AltaVista search engine. High performance access to file storage Fans of the venerable AltaVista search engine – whomever they might be – have just a little over a week to comb the web like it's 1996, because Yahoo! Will soon shut down the service along with 11 other unloved offerings. Seemingly taking a page from rival Google, which regularly mothballs batches of its less successful products, Yahoo!
On Friday announced that it is retiring a selection of older services, tools, and APIs. Among them is AltaVista, now slated to go dark on July 8. You can be forgiven for thinking it died a long time ago, but Yahoo! Has actually been operating it since acquiring its former parent, search-marketing firm Overture Services, in 2003 – though of late its search results have been identical to Yahoo! ' AltaVista won't be the first to go, though. Yahoo! Joining AltaVista on the chopping block on July 8 will be Yahoo! Next, the lights will go out at Yahoo! On July 31, Yahoo! And finally, on September 28 Yahoo! 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. 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. Product marketing, engineering, PR and the executive branch can all weigh-in in ways that can have you ripping your hair out.Many development priorities. This is often the most frustrating challenge, because it is the hardest one to combat. 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.
Show Them Examples Of Failure I wrote about one example of this in my last Enterprise SEO column. Time to Retire Individual Keyword Rankings as a KPI. Duncan Heath director of search strategy Once upon a time clients would come to us and would express an unwavering desire to rank their site in the top organic positions of Google SERPs for a narrow selection of keywords. Through a mix of onsite optimisation, content production and innovative link building, we could close-to-guarantee those rankings. We don’t make such guarantees anymore, nor would we want to, and this article discusses the main reasons why. Why we don’t obsess over individual rankings Rankings now fluctuate more than ever - individual ranking data for many search terms is next to useless these daysGoogle penalises narrow-focus keyword targeting - Panda and Penguin changed the game for good, but also helped show us the lightYou don’t see the bigger picture - We digital marketers were selling ourselves short for many years by being so obsessed with the tips of very large keyword icebergs Google rankings like a good dance these days Over-target specific keywords at your peril.
SERP Ranking is Too Inconsistent to Determine SEO Success - SEO Video Lesson. BBC links warning opens the door for more Negative SEO theories, daft…? by LeeColbran >> SEO4EGG. Does the link warning received by the BBC open the door for more Negative SEO theories? I found the unnatural links warning thread on Google Product Forums to be extremely interesting for a number of reasons: How could the BBC ever get an unnautural links warning? Was this really a representative of the BBC on Google, I mean really? Good to know the Google can detect unnatural link patterns on one of the biggest websites in the world #NoOneIsSafeThe fact the problem had been scaled across to high-ranking Google fellows (you get that sort of attention if you are a large enough organisation)Hello, 2012 Olympics, the BBC was the centre of the Olympic world – of course the website took a surge in links in July 2012 If you are even slightly interested in SEO and natural search you really do need to go and read the full thread on Google Product Forums, it is a fascinating read.
Is Negative SEO alive? The ‘YES’ campThe “In Denial” Camp The response made by John is as follows: Wow – thanks. Q. Why Google Modifies Your Title Tags - MattPolsky. Google Webmaster Central describes the site title, or title tag, as a quick representation of the content of a result and its relevance to a specific query. Sounds basic right? However, one thing you may not know, or dealt with, is the fact that Google reserves the right to alter a title tag if they feel it isn’t the best representation of a page.
Over a year ago, Pierre Far – a Google Webmaster Trends Analyst – explained that algorithms will generate multiple alternative titles so that pages aren’t constrained to having the same static title tag for every search query. The basic thought behind this to increase click-through ratios by displaying a “better,” more concise title tag or change the tag for semantic terms allowing users to easily recognize a relevant page. Yes, anyone who has ever written a PPC ad can tell you that a relevant, concise ad leads to an improved CTR, but what happens when the title isn’t a “better” choice for the user, or when it makes a site look incompetent? Optimising Bees for Google Image Search using CSS to Show Part of the Image.
Google has changed the way image search results are presented. This is having a major impact on traffic driven to sites from image search results. With Google trying to keep visitors away from your site, what can be done ? This post shows one way to make the most of the space Google now gives an image. The idea is to modify the images on your site so that: enlarge the image to include a call to action in the borderthen use CSS to show only part of the image on the site When Google crawls the image, it will take the entire image including the border and calls to action within. This will enable both brand impressions and marketing messages to be shown to people using Google image search, so even if you can’t get the visit, you can at least claim some mind share. [An alternative, is simply to add a 'watermark' to all of your images, however that doesn't look so good on your site.]
The CSS used for the following image ensures that only part of the image is visible on page: Using CSS to clip images. Introducing Quality Impact – A New Way to Measure the Impact of Quality Score. “What do I get out of improving my Quality Score?” Is a common question among advertisers; soon Bing Ads will answer this question via a new feature named . Based upon the competition for the targeted traffic and the traffic volume, we will advise you the additional impressions you could gain by improving your Quality Score. At its debut, Quality Impact analysis focuses on keywords having a Quality Score less than 6 where return of improving campaign quality is normally higher. The incremental impressions that projects are what you could gain if the Quality Score improved to 6 or more. You can access this new feature through the KW Performance Report or its API, it’s available under every view and you will receive the most up-to-date data from each view. Step 1 – Choose Keyword Performance Report from Reports tab Step 2 – Add “Quality Impact” from CHOOSE YOUR COLUMNS Quality Impact analysis has four different outputs Gain less than 100 additional impressions a day Keyword Relevance.
How to Set Up Your Very Own Cloud Windows Server for SEO. Provisioning a Server in The Good Old Days SEO Tools, particularly website audit ones like Xenu Link Sleuth or PowerMapper SortSite, can sometimes take a long time to run when examining particularly large websites. Occasionally you may even need to reboot your machine for some other reason, which then ruins some particular run of these tools, forcing you to start over. I recently got frustrated with this (and my laptop hitting near-Fahrenheit-451*-levels when doing site audits) and began looking for cheap solutions for running Windows software remotely.
*R.I.P. Why Cheap “VPS” Services Seem Like a *Really* Bad Idea My understanding of most VPS (virtual private server) services is, they aren’t necessarily virtual private servers in actuality – most are merely an *account* on a virtual private server, so you’re essentially one user among several who are sharing a “virtualized private server” itself. There are many of these VPS services out there, but many of them look kind of sketchy to me. Home. Careers. Imagine there’s a new invention with the power to transform lives. Or an organization that can help people achieve their dreams. When the only obstacle to making an impact is getting the word out, we step in.
SEER believes every great idea deserves the chance to be found. SEO and SEM are the tools we use to make that happen. And we’re on the lookout for amazing people to join us in our mission. Could you be one of them? What a SEER Associate Looks LikeInnovative – Does the phrase “outside the box” make you cringe because it’s too inside the box? It Doesn’t Have to Feel Like Work Changing the world is hard. A big part of digital marketing is creating interactive experiences worth sharing. Read More You’re smart, creative and pretty damn cool. Read More Read More Read More Read More We prides ourselves on innovation; on standing out among the rest and enabling our clients do to the same. Read More Read More Check out the new digs!
No search agency is an island. Personalization In Search - Discussed By Eric Enge and Bruce Clay. The Neil Walker #SEO Mad Daily. Going on a date with Google - SEO Editors. It’s all about the first date… and this post covers some of the devious lengths Google will go to to get it. Why does Google want to get a date out of you? Time is generally accepted as an essential ingredient in the calculations of relevancy in SERPs.
Some events will be promoted in SERPs because they are news, others, such as recurring events, may well appear in results at appropriate times. Updates and edits to site content can help revive an older story. To try to benefit from these changes, many site owners looked for ways to touch up older pages and content to make it at least look more current. But what is Google looking for? With the drive to discover fresh content and attempts to improve the understanding of timelines, Google will try to ‘datestamp’ everything it finds… and it can make mistakes when generating a datestamp for your content that impacts your relevancy to search, especially if ‘date order’ is selected as an advanced search option.
Unique IDs as Dates Dates in Content. SEO. Occam's Razor by Avinash Kaushik - Digital Marketing and Analytics Blog. Official Google Webmaster Central Blog. Google Analytics Blog. Google Analytics France Blog. Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Paid Search Advertising (PPC) & Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Search Engine Land: Must Read News About Search Marketing & Search Engines. SEO by the Sea. SEO Software. Simplified.
SEO Editors - Search Optimisation.