Since Google officially introduced page speed as a ranking factor in 2010 I thought I’d put together some of the things we do when optimizing a website for better performance. As a starting point (besides of actually accessing the site and get a feeling on how fast it really is) I’d usually go with the Google Webmaster Tools > Labs > Site performance tab: (more…)
Apparently some SEOs believe that optimising a site for long tail traffic is not really SEO. I disagree, and below I will explain why.
First of all, let’s define what we mean by ‘long tail traffic’. It’s one of those often bandied phrases that tends to mean slightly different things for different people. Wikipedia isn’t much help here: “The long tail in keyword research is basically an expansion of a core, generic, high volume keyword phrase to include numerous combinations and permutations of the keywords and their associated or relevant phrases.”
Not sure I agree with that entirely. Another popular definition of long tail traffic is any search engine traffic that arrives on your site using 4 or more keywords. That too doesn’t sit well with me, as many 4+ keyword phrases are actually very popular and can generate substantial volumes of traffic. (more…)
This is a guest post by Hannah Smith, SEO Consultant at Distilled Ltd. in London.
Geotargeting for International SEO isn’t a new topic by any means; however the question of how to get the right geotargeted content ranking for each particular country continues to rear its ugly head. Here I’ll be covering the options, the pros and cons and my views on how best to deal with it.
When it comes to geotargeting (i.e. if you want specific content to rank in different countries) essentially you have three options:
1) Create separate sites for each ccTLD e.g. domain.de (for a site targeting Germany); plus you should write the site in your target language, and host it in the country you are targeting too.
2) Create sub-folders (e.g. domain.com/uk) for each of the countries which you are targeting. Here, make sure all content in the sub-folder is written in your target language and then geotarget the sub-folders to your target countries within Google Webmaster Tools.
3) As per option two, however instead of creating sub-folders, create sub-domains (e.g. uk.domain.com) (more…)
Panel – Richard Baxter of SEOGadget, Jonathan Stewart of ReviewCentre and Will Critchlow of Distilled.
Richard steps into Jon Myer’s shoes to help moderate as well as speak, so starts with the intro:
Information types are understood by humans in a certain way. Address formats, time and date formats are instantly recognisable to us. Not so for machines. Micro Formats, therefore, mark up code in such a way to make such data types instantly recognisable as that type – to be thus understood and presented in a more useful way.
Rich shows us an example of marked up html using hCard – which is used for understanding address data. (more…)
What’s the biggest threat for Google? Bing? Wolfram|Alpha? Facebook? Twitter? Or is it something completely different? It could be the accessibility of information on the internet. While Google is trying to index more existing (offline) information with programs where they digitize information from libraries all over the world, more new information that is created isn’t created within the ‘open’ world wide web. A new threat is forming for Google.
The internet consists of several resources of information, the world wide web is just one of them. Search engines basically try to crawl and index the world wide web, which mainly consists of a collection of HTML documents. And that’s exactly where Google reigns. But since 2000 the web is in decline, as the chart below shows. Other parts of the internet are becoming increasingly important sources for information. At the same time within the web there are always old and new obstacles that obstruct search engines form either crawling or indexing the published information. (more…)
So now that we’ve thoroughly established that SEO is not dead and we all still have jobs, livelihoods, and incomes, let’s get back to actually getting some SEO done, shall we?
I caught a tweet last week of a fellow in Northern Ireland who, in all seriousness, described himself as a ‘seasoned SEO guy’. In this tweet he advocated the use of PageRank Sculpting. Naturally I felt inclined to put the matter straight and educate the poor chap on his dependence on outdated info. Unfortunately this is wasn’t the only case of ill-informed SEOs using outdated practices that I’ve come across recently.
So let’s discuss a few contested SEO issues and try to sift through the disinformation to distil some proper best practices. (more…)
Last week Jeroen van Eck and Bill Slawski lamented the lack of a solid guide to image search optimisation. Bill threw down the gauntlet, and I picked it up. Here’s my Definitive Guide to Image Search Optimisation.
First, what do we mean with image search? Simply put it’s the vertical search option that allows you to search for images on the web. Google has an image search, and so does Bing, and there are several other specialised image search engines around.
For the purpose of this blog post we’ll focus on Google’s image search, though I reckon most of what follows can also be applied to other image search engines.
(more…)
This is part two of the post Information Architecture: Common pitfalls. The first part was published yesterday, find it here.
And if you’re done with that it’s now time to move on to re-organizing the contents. Things you might consider:
Flattened site architecture
Considering the facts that there is a limited amount of links each page can carry (in the webmaster help center Google states that it should be not more than 100 links – however this very much depends on the authority the domain has) and that it is important how many steps down a page resides within the domain (aka how many clicks from the homepage does it take me to get to that specific page?) there really is one problem to tackle: Keep the “depth” to a reasonable number. There is a great visualization on this over at webmasterworld.com: (more…)
Almost everyone is touting HTML5 as the flash killer and a new horizon for web development. I wanted to take a slightly closer look at the HTML structure and possible implementations to see the effect on SEO.
Initial predictions were late 2010 however the first public working draft deadline was missed by 8 months and it is currently still in the working draft stage at the present time. Ian Hickson now expects the specification to reach candidate recommendation by 2012. It is expected that many parts of the specification are stable and may be implemented in products well before then though so best be ready for the inevitable questions. (more…)
I’m super excited to be discussing Microformats with industry luminaries Joost De Valk and Bas van den Beld on Tuesday 15th June at 8pm in Europe, 7 in the UK, in the US at 2pm on the East Coast and 11am on the West Coast on the State of Search radio show on Webmasterradio.fm.
Microformats are an extension to xHTML to allow us to highlight (mark-up) items of data in a web page such as addresses, reviews, locations and even recipes! Think of them as a way of attaching extra meaning to the information published on a web page. Love them or hate them, Microformats are here to stay and the chances are you’re already using them. Rel=”nofollow” is an elemental Microformat, used (as we know) to show a search engine that you don’t editorially vouch for a source of information you’re citing as a link on a webpage. (more…)
AJAX, along with Flash the ugly kid of web development for SEO, was introduced in 2005. The expectations were high but it never really got popular. A survey in October 2008 reported that 3.20% of the web pages tested used the XMLHttpRequest DOM object, an important part of AJAX.
The combination of AJAX and SEO has never been a good one. SEO has a strong fundamental basis in the document structure of the web. AJAX creates possibilities to discard the document structure of the web and offers a way to create single page websites. Gmail for example is a single page website.
AJAX and SEO seem like two worlds which cannot be united, or can they? While extensive use of AJAX should be a threat to SEO it doesn’t get that much attention. A search for ‘AJAX SEO’ in Google returns mainly articles dating from 2006, 2007 and 2008. Time for a little update. (more…)
I’m due to give a talk at one of those surprisingly fun crowdsourced unconferences – BarCamp Belfast. My talk will be about what web developers can do to ensure the websites they build are search engine friendly. Too often I’ve had to work with websites that seemed built to thwart search engines instead of welcome them, so it’s a topic dear to my heart.
I’ve had some great input from the members at the SEO Training Dojo and have a clear idea of what I want to discuss in this 30-minute talk I’ll be giving, but I figure it never hurts to get some extra input. I’m sure the the State of Search audience has their own horror stories about SEO-unfriendly websites to share.
(more…)
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