30 (New) Google Ranking Factors You May Over- or Underestimate. SEO is a fast changing discipline.
What worked 5 or 10 years ago might be completely unnecessary these days or even bad for your site’s ranking. Thus leading search industry publications publish the most probable Google ranking factors each year. Nonetheless many webmasters prefer to stick to the past or follow wrong advice from bloggers who just repeat SEO myths. In recent years, Google has not only included lots of new media types into Universal search results; it has also added numerous ranking factors while rethinking many old ones. I made a list of new or current ranking factors that get underestimated by webmasters and neglected because of this. These ranking factors are gaining importance or haven’t been as popularly accepted as they deserve Site Speed – site speed is an official ranking factor that Google has been pushing quite hard for a while. The Web Developer's SEO Cheat Sheet.
10 Ways to Get More Traffic, Attention and Higher Rankings Through Social Sharing. Are Your Titles Irresistibly Click Worthy & Viral?! Recently, Rand did one of the best Whiteboard Fridays I've seen in a while (I do watch all of them) about increasing the likelihood of your content going viral. He touches briefly upon the importance of your title for click through rate and sharability, but in this post I'd like to take a more in depth look at titles and how they help spread your content.
(By the way, this is my first YouMoz - woohoo!) In my opinion, the elements of writing click worthy titles deserve more attention. In the wonderful marketing book "Made To Stick", the Heath brothers note that any good news or editorial writer may spend 80% of their time crafting the title (or "lead") and then whatever time they have left on the body of the content. For those familiar with 80/20, what this means is, the size of the title compared to the actual content (and time spent crafting it) disproportionately affects the success of that content.
Note: to clarify, I am not necessarily referring to the title tag exclusively. Also; 1. Rel="Author": How To Implement Google Authorship Markup. Overshadowed by the Google+ launch was the implementation of the rel=author markup in search results.
Once implemented, authors are given a very prominent treatment on search results. It doesn't reorder the results (yet) but it certainly highlights that result and likely drives a much higher click through rate. I was already interested in rel=author, but this was enough to get me off the proverbial couch and try it out myself. Unfortunately the authorship directions provided by Google, while probably comprehensive, are confusing. Thankfully, Louis Gray got me into Google+ and it was there that I put out the bat signal for a rel=author expert.
A big thank you to Googlers Pierre Far, Daniel Dulitz and Jeremy Hylton for their assistance. Three Link Monte The TL;DR version for implementing rel="author" is that it requires three specific links. Read on for specific directions on how to get rel="author" up and running on your own site or blog. How to Create an Effective Google+ SEO Content Strategy. I’ve recommended from the beginning that businesses should use Google+, but with the launch of Search Plus Your World, the web marketer’s game has changed… And getting that Google+ account is critical.
WordPress Landing Pages Made Easy! By Premise But just having an account will not help you. You must optimize it to get the best results from Search Plus Your World. Google+: Why you can’t ignore it anymore Search for “social media” on Google and you will get these results: The results on the right…the sidebar “People and Pages on Google+”…that’s what’s really important. Here is another set of results: Same thing…but different. See, Search Plus Your World is an intentional strategy for Google to lead people to join Google+.
That leads you to a button to sign up for a Google+ account: But just signing up for the account won’t make you leap to the top of the sidebar results. Let’s explore each in detail.