Category Archives: SEO
Microdata Google is going to be pushing a lot of focus in 2014 on ‘rich snippets’. “Snippets—the few lines of text that appear under every search result—are designed to give users a sense for what’s on the page and why it’s relevant to their query. If Google understands the content on your pages, we can create rich snippets—detailed information intended to help users with specific queries” – via Google. Do you have rich snippets and schema mark-up for your name?[...] Continue Reading
Over the next few days, you will notice your Google+ Page looking quite a bit different. There are a number of reasons Google is doing this. First and foremost, Google wants the Plus Pages to be consistent across all devices, large and small. These changes make the flow much more cohesive, no matter what device you are using. Your Google+ Page can now have 1, 2 or 3 columns to it, with the emphasis being on larger sized media content[...] Continue Reading
Find the Meta Keyword Tag and stuff it full of keywords, dozens of them, and be sure to put them in every page of your site. This will certainly get you to Page #1 of Google, Bing & Yahoo, right? Yeah, if it was 2006…the fact is, keywords and the Meta Keyword Tag are a thing of the past. Using them not only brings no benefit to speak of, they can actually now hurt your website rankings. Google’s own Matt[...] Continue Reading
Google announced that they are penalizing websites for using spammy structured data markup. The big controversy is that Google will be applying this penalty based on incorrect usage of markup, REGARDLESS of whether it was actually spam or just user error. This is the warning you will see in your Google Webmaster account: “Markup on some pages on this site appears to use techniques such as marking up content that is invisible to users, marking up irrelevant or misleading content,[...] Continue Reading
Whether you realize it or not, your business tells a story. It’s telling one right now. All businesses tell stories. Not tales, or lies, but real stories. Stories tell your audience who you are, what you stand for, why your offer and the way you offer it deserves attention, and how your product or service will make us feel. Stories are the reason why some people drive a Mercedes over a Honda Civic, even though the Civic costs less, gets[...] Continue Reading
THE ANSWER from Matt Cutts, head of Google’s Webspam team: The amount of Twitter followers and Facebook likes you have does not matter in search rankings. HOWEVER, producing INCREDIBLE content that people will want to link to will help drive traffic to your website and build up your personal brand! In a video released this week, Cutts explained the reasoning behind it. “Facebook and Twitter pages are treated like any other pages in our web index so if something occurs[...] Continue Reading
Video Snippets for SEO By Nick Spears – Follow me on Google+ Let’s first start by asking the question “What is a video snippet?” A ‘video snippet’ is the same as a ‘rich snippet’, but specifically for video. A rich snippet allows Google to better suck info from your site. You’ve most likely seen new looking website results within the Google results, these are usually some form of a rich snippet. These new results display things like a rating, thumbnail[...] Continue Reading
Google just recently announced that Google Places will now have a Reviews tab, which will allow business owners to see all their customer reviews in one place. Businesses will also be able to respond to the reviews directly from the new Reviews tab. Google said: “Today, we’re introducing Reviews in Google Places for Business. Now you can learn what your customers are saying about your business on Google and across the web, in one place. If you have a verified[...] Continue Reading
Here are 5 tips to adjust to Google’s new data blackout! As any search specialist would tell you – it was bound to happen. As of immediately, Google has shut down access to organic keyword tracking information. Online marketers have thrived for over a decade in knowing where traffic was coming from and how a specific keyword played into delivering traffic. In other words, we used to know what keywords drove the most traffic to your site, and now we[...] Continue Reading
Recently, a WebmasterWorld thread had claims from multiple webmaster’s stating that non-explicit images are being filtered from image results in SafeSearch mode. This has been an ongoing issue since back in 2007. At that time, Barry Schwartz, of Search Engine Roundtable, stated: “What we have been noticing is that Google has been a bit more sensitive on image filtering recently. This has impacted a lot of webmaster’s, where they have noticed a major decline in image search traffic” Earlier this year, Google[...] Continue Reading