Page Layout Algorithm update to affect a small proportion of sites
Value/Importance: [rating=2]
Recommended link: Google : Page Layout Algorithm improvement
A minor update compared to the major announcement last week of Google Search Plus Your World update (still only available on Google.com). This release seeks to penalise sites which have a high proportion of ads above-the-fold, according to Google:
“This algorithmic change does not affect sites who place ads above-the-fold to a normal degree, but affects sites that go much further to load the top of the page with ads to an excessive degree or that make it hard to find the actual original content on the page.
This new algorithmic improvement tends to impact sites where there is only a small amount of visible content above-the-fold or relevant content is persistently pushed down by large blocks of ads”.
This change is expected to effect…
Part 5 in James Gurd's website optimisation series
In Part Five of this SEO series, I'll show how to improve page titles and meta descriptions to increase traffic from natural search. This type of testing should be an integral part of any optimisation program and these two elements are often overlooked.
As many of you will know, there are two key elements that appear in every listing, regardless of whether or not you have optimised your webpages to display targeted content:
Page title
Meta description
Why is this important?
It's simple, the words that people see on search engines results pages (SERPs) influences their click decision. The more persuasive the copy and the closer it appeals to the needs of the searcher, the greater the propensity to click. Google rewards pages which have a higher relative click through rate since this is a positive relevance signal. Furthermore, the title…
Currently available on Google.com only
Importance: [rating=5]
Value: [rating=1]
Source: Google Official Blog annoucement
Make no mistake, Google's bold start to 2012, announced this week will have a massive impact on digital marketing in the years ahead if it retains its current form. Although the change has been widely covered, even in the main stream media, you may not have seen it yet since it's not available, in local engines the UK, Europe or elsewhere. We will let you know when it is.
How big a change is this?
If you've seen the Google.com site you'll know it's a big change for the user experience and the way companies gain visibility - so it will have big marketing implications we think. But in our discussions at Smart Insights, we've been arguing about how big the impact will be. It does depend on the type of search…
A roundup of what the experts say
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It's the end of the first week January and most of the influential bloggers / "experts" have published their predictions for what will change in the world of SEO in 2012. Rather than add to the noise and because most of the authors are far more knowledgable than I am I have decided to filter the predictions and give you the 3 most likely predictions of 2012 (in my opinion)
These are four best SEO 2012 roundups if you missed them:
Econsultancy
Search Engine Land
Search Engine Journal
SEOMOZ
1. Social Media Influence Will Impact Search Results
It will come as no surprise to most, indeed looking back, it's over a year since I reported "Official: Facebook and Twitter do influence rankings". Still, in 2012, precisely how metrics and engagement…
Part 1. Using web analytics to benchmark website performance and drive insight through data
This is the first in a 12 part series on website optimisation to boost natural search traffic. The series started in 2011 and will continue into 2012. We're featuring it as a part of a series of posts about optimising marketing in 2012. You can see all my posts in the series here.
I hope these articles will provide you with a solid framework to review and improve your current approaches to SEO or to apply SEO to a new site. I've discussed this advice with Dave Chaffey and Dan Barker who write for Smart Insights too, so I'd like to thank them for their input.
As this data on site visitor traffic sources shows, search engines are still one of the major drivers of visitor traffic to sites, so there's good potential for driving more visitors…
5 DIY options for identifying duplicate content to improve SEO
SEOs talk a lot about why duplicate content matters and what to do about it, marketers don't tend to.
I think an understanding of duplicate content is important to all marketers who manage SEO so they can ask the right questions of their search specialists or agencies or fix the problem themselves. So to help bridge the gap, this is first of two posts explaining what duplicate content is, why it matters and what to do about it.
What is duplicate content
Duplicate content is where a search engine identifies different pages as similar. As a result it either doesn’t include them in the index or down-weights their importance. So you may have pages that you think are unique and should attract visits, but the search engines don't see it that way and pages identified as…
A survey of the most popular SEO tools
I found this infographic really interesting since it shows the range of tools available for SEO. It also shows how other people approach managing SEO and the kind of reasons they choose to use software to help.
I think software that helps review and improves SEO is great, as long as it is not trying to help cut corners, such as automated link building!
I have used a majority of the software mentioned in the infographic below and we have paid subscriptions for Majestic SEO (Backlink analysis) and Screaming Frog (Managing internal links).
Our reviews of SEO services:
Over the last eighteen months we've introduced the main types of SEO tools for marketers - here are the options:
Rank checking
Google Webmaster Tools
Keyword research and specifying target keyphrases to monitor
Monitoring competitor activity
Backlink analysis
Link-checking tools
Here's the infographic from Search Engine Journal:
…
4 Things to consider when writing page titles
In our recent post giving 21 simple SEO ideas we said how important titles are. Here we go into a bit more depth to show how non SEO specialists writing web copy can improve SEO through refining their page titles within the SERPs.
Titles are undoubtedly a primary signal for each page that search engines use to determine the focus of a pages content. There is no real black vs white hat techniques when it comes to optimising page titles, but there is a suite of best practices you should follow to ensure you are making the most of this element of a page.
Page titles often become the problem of "SEO teams" or agencies which tend to be technically led than creatively.
However, there is an argument that some of the best people to work on page titles (and meta descriptions) should be those that were highly…
A five step tutorial for better SEO targeting
This is Part Four of a 12 part guide to Website Optimisation. In Part Three, I explored the Google toolset that can help you with keyword research and planning. In Part Four we take that a little further and look how you can target relevant keywords to cover the tail of search, including head, mid tail and long tail search terms.
It’s never an exact science, but with a little patience, you can identify keyword sets that represent logical targets for your search optimisation.
Why is this important?
Because not everybody converts from the first search query they make. You might have heard of the “long tail of search”. There are many visualisations of this; the basic premise is that the volume of searches for a keyword/phrase is dependent upon how specific that keyword query is.
If a keyword query is highly generic (e.g. “moisturisers”), it is indicative…
And the 3 you need to action
Value/Importance: [rating=4]
Recommended link: Official Google Post from Matt Cutts
Our commentary
With the sheer volume of search engine algorithm updates that take place on Google alone its difficult to keep a track on amends you need to make to your tactics / strategy. This recent post from Matt Cutts (Google Engineer) highlights 10 of the more significant changes Google has made recently, well worth you taking the time to ready through them! The top 3 most actionable / useful for me are:
This change helps us choose more relevant text to use in snippets. As we improve our understanding of web page structure, we are now more likely to pick text from the actual page content, and less likely to use text that is part of a header or menu.
Extending application rich snippets: We recently announced rich snippets…
