News & Trends – Page 15 – The Web Authority

September 12, 2013September 19, 2013

Structured Data Gives Google What It Wants

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, and movies. Each year Google has added new categories as they expand the types of data that they are integrating into search results.

Here’s an example of coding for a review:

<div><img src=”http://www.mccordweb.com/images/five-stars.gif” alt=”Five Stars” height=”20″ width=”83″ align=”absmiddle” border=”0″ /> Overall Rating 5 out of 5 "Very Professional and helpful. Quality of the writing was excellent."

Neil Primack, Owner, Florida Health Insurance Broker Jupiter, Florida</div>

Notice that the review has 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 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

July 8, 2013July 5, 2013

Google Introduces Consumer Surveys

Google has just introduced a new program to track consumer satisfaction with your website. You can read the full announcement on the Google Blog. Personally I feel that this is another Carrot and Stick application from Google. The carrot will be you get free code and information about how your own visitors feel about your website. Google gets information that it may use to rank your website organically.

To me it sure looks similar to Friend Connect which had been retired. The more information that we willingly give to Google about our own website visitors the more Google knows about our traffic. It would be very naive to think that Google will not use this information we give it using Consumer Surveys for anything but its own use to know the mind of our own site visitors.

Does it cost money? Here’s the pricing:

“The default questions are free and you can customize questions for just $0.01 per response or $5.00 for 500 responses.”

Do I recommend that website owners use Consumer Surveys? Not at this time until we know more about what Google is doing with the information.

July 5, 2013June 29, 2013

Google – First the Carrot and Then the Stick!

If you’ve been in the web industry as long as I have (since 2001) you would have seen Google’s purchase of Urchin Statistics which became Google Analytics. It used to be that a website owner very carefully guarded their website activity; what generated clicks, page paths, traffic, and trends. When Google offered Google Analytics to the world for free, nearly every website owner flocked to implement this free application that previously was only available to those willing to pay $500 a month for a subscription. Voilà the carrot!

Google gave us the carrot with Google Analytics. The Stick?

Little did we know that sharing our website statistical information would in the long run impact our own organic placement on Google.com. In this age of Snowden and the NSA and the harvesting of big data, one would have to be very naive to think that Google, having access to all this previously closely guarded information would not include some of this data into their algorithm to determine organic placement. Personally based on patent disclosures over the years, I could see that Google was patenting using click through rates to help to determine organic page rank. With over 200 factors impacting organic placement and Google having data from Google Analytics available for their own purposes, it only makes sense that by taking the carrot we’ve allowed Google to use the stick on us in regards to our own website placement.

By potentially using our own data as well as click through data from Google.com activity to rack and stack websites is not that far of a reach in today’s world. Although I don’t believe that our own data is being used maliciously to hurt our own placement by Google, it makes sense that Google is using aggregate data by industry and possibly even our own website statistics as just one piece of their own racking and stacking algorithm.

It all started with Google Analytics, when we as webmasters shared this private information with Google. Little did we know years later that this same information might be used to lower or raise our own rankings. I do not have definitive information that Google is using Google Analytics data in their algorithm, but it would make sense for them to use aggregate data to develop benchmarks by industry so as to evaluate the importance of websites and rankings within that industry; just my thoughts for today.

June 21, 2013May 20, 2013

Working with WordPress Backbone Websites

I am in the process of finishing up and readying for launch a new website built on the back bone of WordPress. I have to say the website has turned out nice, but I wanted to share with you a few of my thoughts on using website built like this for search engine placement.

I think that if you want to save money on webmaster services, like the control of being able to add and update your content at will; a well designed website using WordPress has no comparison. But for people, like me, who are used to full and complete source code control for SEO purposes a website built with WordPress leaves much to be desired.

Professionals in my industry know that template based websites (and that is really what a WordPress built site is- a custom template) do not allow you full source code control. Although the designers that have worked with me on building this site have really done a great job, there are instances when I wanted to name my uploaded images my own way; I wanted to custom design my site architecture and be able to change the names and structure easily if I needed to down the road; I wanted to add special design or style elements to my pages without having to create hacks to make the page work the way I wanted it to within the template constraints. In other words, there is an element of control, subtle though it may be, that is simply missing with a WordPress site versus a custom created, built from the source code up, website.

I guess with all new improvements to allow customers to control their own content there are trade offs, but I’m not sure that I want to lose that control for every customer.