Google – Page 18 – The Web Authority

November 5, 2014October 31, 2014

On Page SEO Demystified

Image of a laptop — Craft better page content and user experience for on-page optimization.

If you thought that organic placement was all about keyword density you’d be right on one count, it is the keyword but no longer the density; search engines are just too smart to accept spoon-fed content.

Welcome to the world of advanced keyword tactics and how search engines are using them today.

1. It’s no longer density or repeating keyword phrases in your content, it is about natural language and keeping one page on one topic. The actual terms are TF-IDF (term frequency – inverse document frequency) and semantic distance and term relationships. What this means if that Google understands what your entire website is about by reading all your pages. They understand synonyms and the phrases that you use. This makes it key to organize your website into smaller blocks of content; stick with one topic per page. Not only will this work better for search engines, but mobile users will love you too.

2. Page segmentation is important. Understand that what you put in sidebars, navigation, headers and footers is less valuable for Google ranking that what you put in the page’s main body content. Help Google to understand your page’s content better by using only one H1 tag per page and breaking the content into subheadings and bulleted text sections. Know that your main theme should be mentioned in the first sentence, or at least the first paragraph, so that Google understands clearly the importance of your terms or concepts. Write with style, following the guidelines of using an introduction, body, and conclusion when you create your content.

Even if your page has been crafted to these specifications, there are off-site factors that will impact where you appear in the search rankings, number of links, number of links from authority sites, and relevancy of your content to the user’s search query, just to name a few. Google has over 200 signals that it evaluates as part of positioning your website in the organic search results; some are known and some are not.

The first step is to build the best content-informative site you can that answers questions that readers would want to know about your products and services.

If you need help identifying areas of opportunity for your site, I offer a paid site evaluation and report. Use my experience to create a roadmap to identify areas of opportunity for your website as you plan to position it in the organic results.

November 3, 2014October 31, 2014

Google Means Business on Forcing You to Have a Good Mobile Website

Just this last week Google announced that it was ready to start penalizing websites that did not offer a good mobile web experience. Here’s why:

• Mobile devices have been a driving factor in an increase in time spent online. In fact, since 2010, the time the average individual spends online has doubled.

• 91% of adults in the United States own a phone; 61% of those phones are smart phones.

• In 2012, marketers spent $4.4 billion on mobile advertising in the United States alone. By 2013, that number doubled to $8.5 million. By 2017, the figure is expected to fall around $31.1 billion. Search and PPC advertising accounts for nearly half of this budget.

• 25% of adults in the United States only use a mobile device to access the Internet. PCs have become tools of the past.

• Organic search results matter now more than ever before. In fact, one-third of all search clicks go to the top organic result; this means that the mobile icons Google is testing could play a larger role than you’d imagine going forward. Read the full article online.

Beautiful young woman talking on mobile phone — Smartphones are no longer a luxury but a necessity.

What Google is doing about this important trend is very important. In the search results, Google has been testing aggressively just how it will be notating information about your website. It has tested a variety of icons that are cues to readers that they experience when they click into a particular site will be mobile read friendly since September with testing continuing.

The next step most SEO’s feel is coming in the near future is an update in the Google search algorithm to penalize sites that do not offer the “right” experience, from Google’s point of view. Remember, Google is all about relevancy. If it stops keeping its eye on that mark, its own share of the market will change.

Already it is predicted, with Facebook’s strong growth this quarter in the mobile arena, that Google share will drop below 50% of mobile search activity. So, Google must stay focused on making sure that its search results for the mobile space are the most relevant and easiest to use in the search world for this growing audience of mobile search users. If it does not, it will lose advertising dollars and its place in the marketplace as the top search engine.

If your website does not have a great mobile experience, you may want to consider our mobile and device responsive websites that are strong on content and SEO for your next upgrade.

October 29, 2014October 22, 2014

The Problem with the Google Knowledge Graph and the Carousel

: Knowledge Graph of a Search on Pope Francis

Make sure to read my blog post from Monday about eye tracking studies as this will help you to understand this information.

As Google works hard to keep users on the search results page longer in order to not lose relevance but also to have the opportunity to serve more advertising and make more money, it becomes harder for business owners to get Google.com searchers into their website to see their full range of services, products, and marketing information.

How is Google keeping searchers all to themselves?

The Knowledge Graph

Although you may not know the name of this feature, surely you have seen it in action when you have done a search recently. The image at the top of this post is of one such knowledge graph boxes that pop up on a search I did recently on Pope Francis. Google chooses when to show this additional content which is gleaned from a variety of sources. In many cases the information is supplied by Wikipedia or other relatively authoritative websites. One will not typically find content from business websites but rather news, Wikipedia, .org, Google images, or authoritative sites supplying the content found in the knowledge graph.

In some cases the knowledge graph may show results from your own Google+ contacts – another reason to start building your empire on Google+ to benefit your own business.

In many cases the reader simple gets the information they want from the knowledge graph and does not even leave Google.com for more information.

The Carousel

Just like you’ve seen the knowledge graph, you’ve seen the Google Carousel as well. Typically this black background slide show pops up for restaurants and hotels when you query a specific location.

By interacting with the ribbon you can see images pulled from the business’ Google My Business page, get directions, read reviews and even click into their website. Typically Google will preferentially show the business’ Google My Business (aka Google Places page) in the top organic spot in the organic search results with a map and a knowledge graph on the right. The actual business website may or may not appear at all in the organic results in the first ten results.

The Quest for Organic Placement Just Got Harder

Based on all these features that Google is loading into the search results page, it is getting harder and harder for a business owner to appear in the organic results. Just another reason why so many businesses are now flooding into Google AdWords in an effort to appear on the first page of search results.

All these changes are great for Google, making their search engine results page becoming a destination into itself and making it much more difficult for a business to garner traffic organically.

If there is one important take away from this information it is that a Google My Business page is now key for your business in order to be competitive and to potentially appear in the “local” knowledge graph and in the carousel and location specific results. With Google showing fewer website results you’ve got to use Google’s own products to leverage your exposure for desktop and mobile searches.

October 27, 2014October 23, 2014

Google’s Golden Triangle is Replaced by the Vertical Slash

Eye Tracking Studies Show How We View Google SERPs Have Changed

Much has been written about eye tracking studies and the importance position in the organic results plays, but with the advent of the smartphone how readers view and react with organic results is drastically changing.

In 2005 an eye tracking study was published and widely shared on the web. The pattern the test candidates repeated over and over as they scanned Google.com’s organic results became known as Google’s “Golden Triangle”. Named for the triangular shape repeated over and over with the test candidate’s eyes typically starting at the top left in the first position of organic results, then moving down to the second position of the organic results and then to the far right to the top paid search results, this pattern shaped how SEO’s tried to position client websites in the SERPs.

Much has changed and the Golden Triangle has now been replaced by a Vertical Slash in a report recently done by the MOZ blog. The MOZ article writer, Rebecca Maynes, states that with the strong use of smartphones eye tracking moved to a more vertical line and started to encompass a wider set of listings in a rapid scanning fashion.

However, with a vertical scan of the Google results page as the preferred method of viewing, the actual length of time the typical person takes reviewing the Google search results is now even shorter than previously recorded in 2005. Google has done much in the last year to counteract that trend!

So we’ve moved from a Golden Triangle to a Vertical Slash that actually is more like a slash and grab as your eye travels the page rapidly scanning for the information you want.

You’ll want to click in and read Rebecca’s excellent article that is complete with images to get a better view of how eyes now travel Google in the search for the best search result.

The key takeaways are that with Google adding more information to the search results page like local listings, the carousel and the knowledge graph, readers are having to search further down the results page to find what they want in a strong vertical fashion that encompasses much more than three site listings. And in some cases readers are never even leaving the search page, but rather interacting with content in the form of the Google knowledge graph (info box that appears on the right with more details, questions and info on a topic) or using the carousel (a black strip of images typically shown for restaurants or hotels that point to Google+ local pages) to find out more about on their information search.

Although this action of trying to keep a reader longer on the search results page is a boon for Google (as it will be able to serve more advertising), it is a bane for business owners who are hoping to use Google organic search results to drive traffic to their website. This means that your meta description tag and title tag have to now work even harder to try to grab attention quickly to get a click in to your website.