Category: Google

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What to Know About Google’s Structured Data

Google recommends that website owners start to provide special XML code snippets to assist it in sorting and categorizing their website data. This is called structured data and is usually done in a format known as microdata.

This new format is not hard to understand nor is it hard to implement, but it is important to know that Google considers its use important and is making it fairly simple for website owners to add these code snippets.

First, not all data on your website can be marked up as structured data. For now Google is only using code for products, local businesses – including address, phone, and other information, articles, software applications, reviews, events, and movies.  Each year Google has added new categories as they expand the types of data that they are integrating into search results.

Use of special tags:

Coding a review will need special tags that denote rating, vcard, title, name, locality, and region. This is all a part of sorting the data for Google in their approved and specific format. Google makes it pretty easy for website owners to start using structured data and has even provided some great online tools.

Here are a few additional resources for you to consider:

Google’s blog post on the topic:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2013/05/getting-started-with-structured-data.html

Structured Data Markup Helper:

https://www.google.com/webmasters/markup-helper/

Embedding Structured Data for Gmail:

https://developers.google.com/gmail/actions/embedding-schemas-in-emails

Google Webmaster Tools Data Highligher:

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/home?hl=en

Structured Data Bread Crumb Snippet:

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/185417?hl=en

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Google States They Do Not Use Facebook or Twitter for Ranking

Matt Cutts, the lead Spam Engineer at Google revealed just this last week that Google is not using Facebook or Twitter posts or profiles for index ranking. This is very big news and a change in what Google has stated about how social impacts their algorithm.

You can watch the full YouTube video here.

Here’s the bottom-line about using social media and Google rankings:

1. Google is not ranking your site based on the activity you have on social media profiles like Facebook and Twitter.

2. Google does look at links that are shared on these social sites just like they look at content pages when they can spider the content.

3. Google is concerned about using social profiles to create “identity” as this may change or be blocked over time.

4. Google is not recording, for their algorithm, the number of likes or followers a social profile has.

5. Matt Cutts states that he personally likes social profiles for sharing and driving traffic, but does not recommend using them as an avenue to impact Google search placement.

This is an interesting change for Google as previously Google has stated that it did include likes and follower numbers as part of social signals and that these social signals impacted organic placement.

My recommendation is to continue to use Twitter and Facebook if it makes sense to do so. Some businesses have a rich forum on Facebook and should not abandon their followers just because they now don’t get SEO juice from activity there. But for SEO’s to encourage social media interaction now appears to be just one more SEO tactic that Google is clearly disavowing as a way to get organic placement.

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Why Does Your Page and Website Fluctuate in Organic Placement?

Build web authority and trust to place better on Google.com.
Build web authority and trust to place better on Google.com.

It is not unusual for a new page on your website, or for that matter a new website to place, well initially in the organic search results and then drop in placement over time. Why?

Matt Cutts at Google explains why there are fluctuations in organic placement on Google.com in this video found on YouTube http://youtu.be/BzfK6isC7CA.

Here’s a synopsis of his comments as to why there is fluctuation:

  • As Google spiders the Web, it may find similar content knocking down your placement.
  • New content may be created over time that is more recent and knocks down your content’s placement.
  • Google initially boosts the page and then drops it if over time it does not garner backlinks.
  • Google is initially guessing where a page should place and then understands later due to links and co-citation if the page should continue to stay highly placed.
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Google AdWords Remarketing Strategies

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McCord Web Services is a Google Partner.

AdWords remarketing has been around for a while, but AdWords has made some nice changes recently and if you haven’t tried remarketing or tried it previously and did not have success, it is time to try it again.

Remarketing audiences are easy to set up. You’ll access the audience creation feature from the slide out library menu on the left of your Google AdWords control panel. Go to the Shared Library and then Audiences. Build a new audience for your needs. I recommend one to target the whole website and then refine to specific audiences using tag rules.

Once your audience is set up, AdWords will generate code. Get your webmaster to install the code in all pages of your website. Make sure to update your privacy policy as you need to be transparent on what you are now doing and allow people to opt out of remarketing. There are some good privacy policy examples out there already for you to use as a starting point for your updates.

Then create a new Display campaign. At set up, select remarketing as your option and the steps are very simple you will select your audience (pulled from your shared library) and then create text and display ads using the Display Ad Builder.

Once your audience lists hits 100 people, Google will start to serve ads. I have to say from experience that this process is now so simple and streamlined that it should be used by every account using AdWords. I like to set the daily budget at about $10 a day and pay about $.79 a click for most account initially. I have found that nearly all account are having conversion success with remarketing.

If you haven’t given AdWords remarketing a look, now’s the time to check it out to see if it would work for you