Posts Tagged Google
Is Your SEO Still on Track with Google?
Posted by Rory Martin in Search Engine Optimization on February 20, 2013
SEO is a rapidly changing business for international and local Seattle industries. Google, Bing, Yahoo, and other search engines are constantly updating their policies, but Google, which controls more than 70% of traffic, updates most of all. If you haven’t been keeping up with Google’s SEO trends your website might not be on track, which means that you could begin to see your ranking and your traffic drop whenever your website is scanned! Check your Seattle SEO against these recent SEO changes to make sure you are headed in the right direction.
Images No Longer Help With SEO
In the first month of 2013, many website owners saw their traffic soar as Google’s new image search policies directed more and more visitors to properly tagged images. As a result, many SEOs began using targeted photos as a form of SEO. Now, Google has changed their image policy so that the searcher does not actually have to visit your website to get the full size image. This change took place during first week in February and it’s definitely a game changer. While you can still benefit from having keywords as your image title and alt tags, it probably will not increase your SEO.
What about Headers?
Headers are great to include in your blog because they help organize it (and Google loves organization), but they don’t help with your SEO very much. The old rule of putting one keyword in the title and one in a subtitle no longer works because Google isn’t really paying attention. Using the right keywords in your content lets Google know what it is you are talking about without using it in a header. Importantly, your title should include your keyword or a variation of your keyword. However, this is for the readers benefit, not Google’s.
How is Your Social Doing?
If you really want to dominate Google in today’s market, you have to pay attention to your social. New updates are placing even more focus on social responders including how much, and how quickly, you get social shares and likes. While a good post doesn’t necessarily need a lot of attention from social to come up in search, it does help if you have a competitive keyword. Look around, check anyone competing for your Seattle SEO keywords and see how they are doing. If their SEO is as good as yours and you are doing worse than they are, the answer is likely in social. Similarly, if you aren’t participating in Google’s Authorship program, you might want to start because it makes your post larger in search and can help you to get more prominent positions once you start to build your author rank.
Backlinks
You might already know this but now, more than ever, a surge of artificial backlinks can kill your ranking. Google has caught on to spam techniques like automatic link building, link submission, and even mass guest posting on low PR blogs. Now if you want your backlinks to be beneficial to your site, they must publish quality content, not have a history of spam, and usually be at least PR2 or hire. While there are a lot of variables, the moral is that you should choose your backlinks slowly and build to your site from quality links and articles.
Want to know more? Keep following Rory Martin to stay on top of the latest Seattle SEO that will affect your ranking. Google is changing quickly which means that it is important to stay on top of the factors that affect your SEO.
Seattle Social Media: What is Google Authorship (And How to Set It Up)
Posted by Rory Martin in Social Media Marketing on January 7, 2013
What is Google Authorship? And how does it affect your Seattle social media? Google authorship is a markup that you can insert into a blog or website to claim ownership, get extra stats, and use for a few interesting features. There have been many changes in recent Google search algorithms, and one of the biggest will soon be the implementation of authorship into search results. But first, let’s learn a little bit about Google Authorship itself.
Google Authorship uses a rel tag, which is part of HTML5. This tag can be utilized in author boxes, most web pages, blogs, and pretty much anywhere you can place content. Before you get started, make sure you have a Google + profile (it doesn’t matter if it’s active) and then proceed. If you don’t have the profile, you can sign up for free by creating or using your Gmail account.
Setting up Google Authorship
There are two ways to set up Google Authorship with a few special considerations if you have multiple people posting on your site. You should also use a clear headshot on your Google + profile (Google does not like their authors to be ‘companies’ so no logos if possible).
Method One: Use or set up an email account with the domain server that you have (For example info@RoryMartin.com) , then check to make sure each page of work that you intend to claim contains a clear byline (for example ‘Written by Rory Martin’) Check to make sure your byline name and your Google + profile are the same (I.E. you can’t use Rory Martyn and Rory Martin). Finally, visit the ‘Authorship’ page of Google and submit your email address, confirm it, and from then on, anything you publish on that page will automatically show up with your Google + photo in search.
Method Two: If you do not have an email with the domain you want to claim, you can use the Google authorship markup to claim the content as well. For this method you will need the link to your Google + profile to an individual page using the Google markup.
<a href=https://plus.google.com/109325933900468965289? rel=author>Rory Martin</a>
Edit the markup to include your Google + profile, and if you like, edit the tag, for example,
<a href=https://plus.google.com/109325933900468965289? rel=author>Rory Martin</a>
Minus the space, it would appear as
<a href=https://plus.google.com/109325933900468965289?rel=author>Rory Martin</a> <a href=” https://plus.google.com/109325933900468965289?rel=author”>Rory Martin</a>
Next, visit your Google + profile, click ‘Edit’ and scroll down to the ‘Contributor’ section. Add a link with a title to the site you’ve added your markup to, and you are all done. Websites who post work from multiple authors and who use an author bio box can actually include the markup in any author bio plugin that supports HTML5. This can save time because you won’t have to post the markup each time that person posts a blog.
Joomla: For Joomla sites you can choose to use an HTML5 reader, install a rich snippet reader, install author link, or edit your CSS ‘Written by’ to include the authorship markup. You could also directly modify the author link to any pages of individual authors to include the ‘rel=author’ markup. Not sure your rich snippets are right? Check them here with Google before posting them on your site.
What does Google Authorship Do for Your Seattle Social Media?
Social media helps drive traffic to and from your content, and as Google’s baby, Google + and therefore Google authorship are tools that you cannot afford to ignore. In the first eight months of authorship alone, more than 17% of Google search results for articles and websites consisted of pages with Google Authorship markups. Considering that during that time, Google Authorship was only being used by about 3% of web publishers, which shows a definite lean towards favoritism. If you want your content to come up in search, Google authorship is a great addition.
What else does Google authorship do? Each time your post shows up in search, it will have a link to your Google + profile, the headshot that you provided Google, and the number of Google + followers you have. You’ll also be able to view statistics for your work no matter where it is on the web. Logging into Google Webmaster Tools, going to ‘Labs’ and clicking on ‘Author Stats’ will take you to a dashboard where you can view everything from average views, to click through rate per article, per day! Essentially, Google Authorship helps your Seattle Social Media by allowing you to claim your content, increase traffic by giving it visibility and an author, and of course, great free stats that you can use to see how your content is doing.
Have You Gone Overboard on Your Search Engine Optimization?
Posted by Rory Martin in Search Engine Optimization on May 3, 2012
The rules of search engine optimization are always changing, and at RoryMartin.com we keep on top of those changes, for your benefit. Recently, Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts, made a comment about how the search engine will soon be penalizing sites which go overboard on their SEO. Some typical ways of improving rankings will now be responsible for pushing your site off the front page; maybe it won’t even appear at all.
Previously, search engines have assumed that a website or blog post which mentions certain words, over and over, will be relevant to that word, which seems logical. However, some SEO practices repeat certain words more than necessary, to the point where the website content becomes useless, but ranks highly. We are assured that keywords are still important, but optimization tricks such as duplicating content and writing repetitive post and page titles will be no-go. Primarily, the search engine will be looking for signs of life.
We’ve compiled a few tricks of our own to help your website and social media strategies stay afloat as the changes roll out.
To begin with, try to consolidate any duplicated content. For instance, if you have one page on ‘Decorative Lights’ and one page on ‘Fairy Lights’ with similar general product descriptions, this could work against you.
Too many links in your website could become a problem as well. It can be difficult to know where to draw the line, especially if you sell a main product and accessories – you will need a thoroughly linked website – but a footer full of arbitrary links is a distraction for the user and a point against you from Google.
Even too many links into your website can now affect you negatively, although this is mainly a problem if they come in from penalised websites. Instead of arranging linkshares with websites, try to cultivate a social media presence; Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn links are all being integrated into Google search algorithms and are seen as more trustworthy – social media is all about people sharing useful links rather than bots spamming keywords, after all!
We want to help you improve your search engine optimization strategy, so if you’ve noticed a drop in your traffic, or if you’re just starting out with your website, get in touch and let us give you the advantage of our expertise.
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