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It is well-known that huge amounts of effort put into SEO can bring significant rewards. However, it should also be noted that there are a number of quick tasks that you can carry out to keep your overall SEO effort ticking over.
Writing for Search Engine Watch, Josh McCoy, has highlighted a number of these tasks – which can be done in under 15 minutes.
Here are just a few of those tasks in a summarised form:
- Review your Robots.txt file; assess your Meta Robots tagging – This can be done by checking /robots.txt. In the process of doing this you may find that images, folders and pages on your site are being withheld from search engines – preventing traffic from being driven to your site.
McCoy also recommends running “a site scan with a tool such as Screaming Frog to assess if there are any pages on your site you are excluding via a meta robots tag.”
- Review your site for duplicate title elements – Checks for duplicate title elements can be carried in Google Webmaster Tools.
McCoy adds: “Checking this Google property feature can quickly show you these issues and give insight into whether you need to spend the next 15 minutes writing unique title elements, creating redirects, or thinking about which of the multiple pages should include a certain keyword term.”
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Traditionally social media rivals, Facebook, Myspace and Twitter have grouped together to create a new tool, aimed at drawing users’ attention to the “biased” results provided as part of Google’s Search Plus Your World, according to an article published by the Telegraph.
Entitled “Don’t be evil” (a nod to one of the search engine giant’s early mottos), the browser add-on is currently only compatible with Firefox.
The tool has been created to prevent Google searches returning content that’s been ‘ranked up’ by Google from its own social network, Google+.
A recent change has seen Google searches return Google+ content at the top of search results – a change previously announced as part of Search Plus Your World – at the expense of results from Twitter and Facebook.
Google has explained how the new update – which could affect SEO – worked.
A post published by Google read: “Starting today, if you search for a topic like (music) or (baseball), you might see prominent people who frequently discuss this topic on Google+ appearing on the right-hand side of the results page.”
The search engine giant has yet to respond to the launch of ‘Don’t be evil’ – which is currently only available in America. However, Google did previously say it had tried to strike a deal with both Twitter and Facebook to include their results in a prominent position – but wrangles over cost and privacy scuppered such a move.
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In recent times, search engines have made a number of advancements that allow them to look at and evaluate the content featured on websites in a much more comprehensive manner.
Gareth Owen, writing for Search Engine Watch, has attempted to pinpoint the ten elements of a “perfectly optimised page.”
Here are just a few of the elements highlighted by Owen:
Title Tags – Owens states that while title tags are important, it is vital not to “over optimize them.”
URL – The URL should ideally mention the keywords determined in your overall SEO strategy.
Content – Rather than featuring multiple keyword mentions, Owens states: “Content is now about semantically relevant supporting keywords.”
Using a recipe as an example, he adds: “In order to make béarnaise sauce there are specific ingredients that are 100 per cent relevant to the eventual outcome. One way of checking what keywords Google might consider as relevant is to do a ‘~keyword’ (or tilde) search.”
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Thanks to tools such as Blogger and WordPress it has become very easy for SMBs (small and medium-sized businesses) to set-up and create a blog to increase their exposure.
However, it is much more difficult to make that blog successful and draw in an audience.
Writing on the SEOmoz blog, Rand Fishkin, has produced a list of 21 tactics that can be used to increase the amount of traffic a blog receives.
Here are just two of those tactics in a summarised form:
Get involved in the communities where you audience is – Forums, social media pages and other blogs that are focused on a similar topic to those featured on your own blog should be targeted.
Fishkin states that when you’ve determined where your audience is, start getting involved.
Set up an account on a forum or social media site and use it to get involved in the conversation; however, only involve yourself when you feel you have something useful to say, otherwise your comments could come across as being spam-my – which isn’t something you want to be associated with.
SEO-friendly content – SEO is fantastic for getting your blog more views if done correctly. Make sure your content is rich in keywords as this will increase its visibility to search engines.
Fishkin also adds that: “SEO, when done right, should never interfere with great writing,” and that spammers and bad press should not deter you from putting an SEO strategy in place.
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As the new year starts to get further underway many businesses will be taking the time to ensure that their current search engine optimisation strategies are up to scratch.
Checking over each element of an SEO strategy can be time-consuming; and in business, spare time isn’t going to be there in huge blocks.
Writing for Search Engine Watch, Josh McCoy, has produced a number of quick tips which can be used to keep the strategy on track.
Here are a few of those tips in a summarised form:
Refer back to your overall site mission – What is the main aim of your website? Look into this aim, as well as the key performance indicators (KPIs) and determine whether the site is still on the right track – this will give you an idea of any potential changes that need to be made to the overall SEO strategy.
Assess you top keywords – Take advantage of what Google Webmaster Tools has to offer by looking at the top keywords featured on your website. Also take time to look at variations to these keywords.
Doing this will give you an overall view of “what Google understands you site to represent,” McCoy states.
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Personalised search has long been mooted as the future for many search engines; Google is set to become the first to implement such a feature, according to an article published by the Financial Times.
The search engine giant will be taking a new approach that takes the personal and social information featured in a users Google+ profile to create a comprehensive personalised search engine – which will provide results related directly to the things that interest them.
Search Engine Land editor, Danny Sullivan, commented on Google’s new Search plus Your World.
He said: “They could’ve done this for Facebook and Twitter and they didn’t. That will probably make some antitrust people even more anxious over what (Google) is doing.”
This anxiousness has already been reflected in the response of others.
Twitter’s general counsel, Alex Macgillivray, commented in the form of a tweet, stating: “A bad day for the internet. I can imagine the dissension @Google to search being warped this way.”
As well as having an effect on its social media rivals, Google’s new approach could also effect the climate of SEO.
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Many businesses operate some kind of presence on a social media platform – such as Facebook or Twitter. In order to get the most out of having a social media presence, pages and accounts must be correctly optimised.
Writing for Search Engine Watch, Eli Goodman and BrightEdge Technologies have created a list featuring three social SEO practices that could improve the ranking of social media pages.
Here are those aforementioned practices in a summarised form:
Provide a link on your homepage: Although extremely obvious, six out of the top 20 most searched retail brands don’t have any kind of social media integrated into their homepage. Take advantage of your brand by linking the two together; Goodman pledges that it will have an “immediate impact.”
Mention the brand name in posts: Whether on Twitter, Facebook or Google+, be sure to mention your products and brand name in posts. URLs matching search terms having an SEO advantage – social posts are exactly the same.
The power of likes: Follows, Likes and +1’s are all having an increasing impact on rankings, with search engines seeing them as a sign of trust. By gaining a greater popularity on social networking sites, you could be improving your ranking at the same time.
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Recent research released by Experian Hitwise has revealed that the percentage of one-word search queries has increased, according to an article published by Search Engine Watch.
Hitwise’s data has shown that one-word queries previously accounted for 20.3 per cent of search activity in January 2009; this figure now stands at 27.7 per cent in October 2011 – a significant increase.
This has led Paul Burani, writing for SEW, to attempt to provide an explanation behind the increase in one-word search queries.
He firstly attributes the rise to the growth in mobile search – with around a quarter of those making searches on mobiles inputting just a one-word query. However, this theory can be discounted as Hitwise’s data excludes mobile devices.
Burani also offers the increase in URLs being used as keywords as an explanation, as well as improved geographic targeting – which has impacted on SEO.
Despite this, Burani eventually concludes that: “We can deconstruct these trends until we’re blue in the face, but in all likelihood the behavioral insight here has less to do with the search engine, and more with the resulting action.”
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In the past it was possible to convince any search engine that the content produced by your website was of a good standard – providing that it was jam-packed with keywords.
However, recent improvements to algorithms – such as Google’s Panda update – mean that it is much harder to achieve a good ranking through rehashed content, according to Kevin Gibbons, writing for Search Engine Watch.
Gibbons has produced a ten-point list detailing the ways in which publishing rehashed content can impede your site’s success.
Here are just three of those points in a summarised form:
Point 1 – No social buzz: A number of recent studies have displayed that there is a “clear correlation between ranking and social signals,” Gibbons writes.
Therefore if your site is publishing content that is dull, boring and generally of no use, the chances of it being shared on social media sites are extremely low; this means that the likelihood of it ranking is also diminished – meaning that any implemented SEO strategies could be going to waste.
Point 2 – Google doesn’t like rehashed content: Google’s Webmaster Tools provides an insight into what has to be done to rank well. If you publish content that isn’t original or is auto-generated there is a good chance that your site will be punished with no ranking – without you even knowing about it.
Point 3 – Nobody will bother to comment: Comments can be start of a good conversation with your readers. They can help to create discussion which in turn can help gain a loyal fan base. Encouraging people to comment can be extremely difficult though; there’s also a fine line to toe between publishing content that is just controversial enough to get people talking and publishing material that is simply offensive.
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With the amount of time spent browsing the Internet on mobile devices on the increase, it has become important to ensure that the mobile version of a site has been correctly optimised.
Writing for Search Engine Land, Bryson Meunier, has created a list detailing seven mobile SEO myths that many have fallen into believing.
Here are just a few of those aforementioned myths in a summarised form:
Myth 1 – Metatxt must be included in Mobile SEO:
Metatxt files aren’t supported by either Google or Bing; as the two aforementioned search engines currently dominate the mobile market, this means that even if you implement metatxt files, they won’t increase your site’s visibility in an SERP (search engine results page).
Whilst metatxt files can help with indexing, if your content is already well indexed, there isn’t much point.
It has also been shown in a Resolution Media study that none of the sites that ranked in Google had metatxt standard.
Myth 2 – Queries made on mobiles are shorter:
Google research, released back in 2009, revealed that searches made on mobile devices were not that much shorter than those made on a computer (around 2.44 words in mobile queries compared to 2.93 words on a computer).
It has also been revealed that users of the iPhone use exactly the same number of words on average in queries as computer-based searchers (2.93), Meunier adds.
Myth 3 – Your mobile site must have a sitemap:
Mobile sitemaps are useful – as an indexing tool and making Google aware that you want your site’s content to be listed in an index of accessible mobile content.
However, when indexing smart phone content, it isn’t needed, a point provided by Google’s John Mueller.
Providing further proof, Muenier references the Resolution Media study, stating that none of the ranking sites in that study use mobile sitemaps.
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