Fanatically Digital

Category: SEO News and Information

  • Business to Business Sales & Website Strategy

    We all like to think that we, or at least our functions, are critical to the success of our company. In fact, our roles should be, or the roles should not exist. The question many companies face is one of emphasis; where do we put our budgets.

    Companies that have a long history of direct or premise sales teams often put a great deal of weight on the impact of an independent sales department. And in many industries, that is still valid. The question the companies need to answer for digital marketing, first and foremost, is what role the website plays in the overall sales strategy?

    Understanding the role of the website is pivotal to developing the site’s strategy and how you engage in SEO and digital advertising.

    Websites and the sales process

    Websites As Sales Support

    When sales departments focus on networking, cold calling and relationship development, they develop prospect lists the old fashion way. They are pounding the pavement, hitting the phones, and shaking hands.

    The role of the website tends to be in support of the sales efforts. It often becomes the repository of product information, technical specs, and event presentations. It is a place that salespeople can direct prospects to for more information and even walk them through materials. The material is not gated (no email or form submission required), it is made to be easily accessible.

    This type of site can help with SEO, but the intent is not lead generation. The purpose of the site it to help salespeople close business. The site content is written in a way to help buyers understand the product more deeply, understand the company better, and move forward in the sales process. Writing content for this type of user is quite different than writing content for people just entering the market.

    Websites as Lead Generators

    Even for heavy industry clients, websites are becoming a source of valuable leads. By using tools like Pardot or Adobe Marketing Cloud, companies can set up their websites to quantify and qualify lead quality. When the prospect submits her information or request for more information from the company, good lead scoring schemas can help prioritize and direct the lead to give it the appropriate attention.

    When writing content for a site intended for lead generation, then you are writing for people toward the top of the purchase funnel. The content is often less about the details of a product than about the applications of it, categorical content, and attributes that may be searched for by potential buyers.  This is a very different way to approach website content.

    Often, lead generation sites will gate some content. When this is done, companies have to be sure that the content is truly valuable to the buyer. The last thing you want to do is frustrate a person by wasting their time before you even have a chance to speak with them.

    Content for Both Lead Gen SEO  & Sales Support

    With the basic premise of marketing being that you know your audience and cater your message accordingly, you can develop parts of your site for sales support as well as lead generation. Before the time is invested (and money), to cover the spectrum, be sure of two things:

    1. That the sales organization will support and use the tools. Creating a sales support site to which salespeople don’t direct prospects is clearly a waste of resources. The same goes for leads that the sales team does not take seriously. Make sure you have buy-in, particularly if you have a strong cultural leaning one way or the other.
    2. Develop and write for the sections of your site specifically for the target group. Slapping a submit form on a page does not make it a lead gen page. Be sure content, structure, and functions are geared to the audience for whom the section of the site is intended.

    Once you have acceptance from the sales team for your strategy – sales support, lead gen, or both – you can start your website project. Keep the sales team involved as you do this. Salespeople are notoriously focused on the next opportunity. If you are out of site, you will soon be out of mind and you will risk losing their support. Find opportunities to involve them at various points in the process; keep them engaged.

    By determining your website strategy upfront and getting buy-in from the sales team, you’ll find it is easier to develop content and prioritize your SEO strategy and tactics.

  • Top 6 SEO Things To Discuss with WordPress Developers For A New Site

    WordPress is a great CMS. But, if it is not setup properly, there can be a lot of SEO “fixes” that agencies have to do in order to get programs started. By talking with the developers well before they start customizing and developing, you will end up with a site that looks great and is SEO friendly.

    Creating Websites

    It helps to understand that good website creation is a multi-disciplinary project. There are four primary areas of responsibility.

    Business owners, these are not necessarily the legal owners of the company, but the people who are charged with understanding the objectives of the site and the target markets.

    Designers are creative and user experience (UX) specialists who ensure the site looks good, key functions are accessible, and it is easy to navigate.

    Developers are a crucial component from a technical perspective; they do your coding and make sure the site works.

    And SEO is a fourth specialty needed to ensure the site can index properly in search engines.

    One of the strengths and simultaneous weaknesses of WordPress is that it is easy to launch a site without having any of these expertise. With the myriad of templates, novices can launch a halfway decent looking site without knowing anything about design, development, or SEO. But, therein lies the problem.

    If you are launching a website that is intended for more than just a couple hundred visits a month, at the very least, you will want to get a developer who specializes in WordPress. They can ensure your site is setup to scale with the proper plugins and customizations. If you don’t do this, your site may look okay, but it will slow down and some functionality may stop if there is too much traffic. The developers however, may need to be reminded about SEO functionality as you work with them.

    SEO Issues in WordPress

    One of the first things to understand about SEO is that it is not static. A given page will be edited over time (maybe over short or long periods, but it will change). So, when your developer tells you they’ll “SEO the site” when they are developing, don’t stop there. The site must be developed in such a way that you can edit the key SEO areas easily.

    In our experience there are six areas that are frequently overlooked when developing for SEO. Talk with your developer before they start work and be sure they cover the following:

    Title tags

    Title tags provide the content that the search engines typically show on the first line of the search results. It is also the first level of content indicators for the search engines. What you put in the title tells the search engines the subject matter of the page. All things flow from this.

    Meta Descriptions

    This is a block of text that the search engines usually display in the search results right below the title and URL. While the search engines don’t use this for ranking, it is your “sales” message to the searchers… why they should click on the SERP for your page.

    We cover more about the SEO of these areas here. These are really your first pitch (and perhaps only pitch) to prospects using Google, Bing, Yahoo! or other engines. You will find yourself changing the Meta Description and Title to increase clicks, experimenting with different messages and calls to action.

    If you don’t designate these tags, the engines will populate the SERPs dynamically, giving you no control. Our favorite plugin for this part of SEO is Yoast. Have your developer install the plugin.

    H1 Tags

    This is a big one. The H1 tag, like the title tag, provides another indicator to the search engines as to the subject matter they should expect. For many WP templates, the Page Name is pulled into the page and make the H1 tag. We like this.

    Here is Where H1 Tags Go Wrong.

    We see sites with no H1 tags and we see sites with multiple H1 tags on a page. There should be only one (1) H1 tag per page.

    No H1 tag and you miss an opportunity. More than one, and you confuse the content indicators.

    When developers create or edit templates, they either don’t pull in the Page Name as an H1 (they’ll use “Strong” or custom CSS), or they use H1 in the template in multiple places. Sometimes the default style of the H1 looks good as a section title, so they use it there.

    Have your developer use the H1 tag only once on a page and implement in a way that you can easily edit it. The Page Name is a good field to use for editing this.

    Image Alt Attributes

    Images are a great way to enhance the content on your web pages. But, search engines are not great at determining the content of images. So, each image tag has an “alt” attribute. This is simply a description of what is in the image. It is a great way to provide more signals to the search engines about the subject matter on the page and to improve image search results.

    When customizing WordPress, developers often forget to pull in the alt attribute that is entered when you first upload an image to the media library. Be sure images that are programmatically set have the alt attribute as well. (For images that you add manually, you can add the alt attribute to the tag.)

    Navigation Menus

    WordPress has a great menu functionality built into it. It provides the ability to create and edit multiple menus, changing anchor text, links, ordering, and menu placement on the site. When you work with a developer, you may unwittingly request functionality that causes them to bypass the native menu functionality in WordPress. Be sure you will always have control of the menus.

    XML Sitemaps

    Sitemaps are lists of the pages on your site. They also have other information about relative page priority, update frequency, and other metadata. This is a good way to keep search engines up to date on site content.

    WordPress does not automatically create sitemaps. But, the Yoast SEO plugin mentioned above can do this, as well as other plugins. Just be sure that if you have two plugins installed that are capable of creating the XML Sitemap, only one is actually doing so.

    If you work with your developer to ensure you have flexibility to edit these key areas, you will be able to optimize your pages easily and quickly. While not exhaustive, this list provides a good starting point for creating a WordPress site that you can get to index and rank with the search engines.

  • Writing for SEO

    We have long known that search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo! have moved beyond the single keyword. Semantic search has been part of the dialogue for quite a while now. But what does that mean for good SEO page content? Well, it means good content got more complicated, yet still logical.

    Google has said, for years, that we should write for the users, not the search engines. At the beginning (15+ years ago), that was difficult. When search engines rewarded keyword stuffing and single-term focused page content, they put good SEO in direct opposition to quality writing. With semantic search, that changed.

    Write Naturally

    When we speak about a topic, we rarely use the same word too repetitively. For most topics there are multiple ways to refer to the subjects, and we tend to pepper our speech with these variations. When writing for almost anything other than SEO, our natural tendency is to also vary the way we reference ideas, items, or people. This same approach is critical for creating content on the web site; it reads better and is better for organic search.

    If you are not sure where to start, think back to how we learned to write papers in grammar school. We started with an outline, and worked our way to an essay or report by working through the elements of the outline. For the search engines, a page on your website is structured in exactly the same way.

    Logical Content Structure

    Every page starts with an overarching topic. This topic can then be divided into subtopics that help explain or elaborate on the overall content theme.

    In school, we created outlines. In HTML structure, we use Title and H tags.

    1. Title:   Only 1. Main theme, content area
    2. <h1>:  Only 1. Different words, same theme as Title
      1. <h2>: sub header
      2. <h2>: sub header
        1. <h3>: sub header
        2. <h3>: sub header
      3. <h2>: sub header
        1. <h3>:sub header
        2. <h3>: sub header
          1. <h4>: sub header

    The html Title and H tags are not something you see as a reader, but you do see the content. These tags “wrap” the content so the search engines can see the structure of your page.

    For each H tag header or subheader, we write content directly related to the topic. A small paragraph can be sufficient, but there should be enough content to make your point.

    What if a single subheader has a lot of content unto itself? This is not uncommon, and usually indicates that you have another theme to explore. In these cases, you write a small bit of content for this page, and link to a new page that elaborates on the sub-topic as it’s main theme.

    As an example, if your content is about employee productivity, many of the subtopics are worthy of their own pages. Worker productivity increases with training or improved morale. Certainly these are proper subtopics to productivity as well as worthy of their own pages.

    So, how much subtopic material should be on this page? This is where your qualitative assessment must come into play. As a reader, if you begin to wonder if the topic is about productivity or about employee morale, then you’ve diluted the primary topic too much with subtopic content. There is no magic formula, so use your judgement or ask others to review the article.

    Creating Quality Content

    You have your outline, and you’ve created decent blocks of content, but you’re not done yet. The search engines are grading your content on several levels, and one of them is quality of writing.

    No one is looking for Pulitzer level writing, but you have to have the basics covered. Google is able to assess spelling and grammar in page content. While we can’t say how much weight is given, and how “wrong” it can be before it’s a problem, Google has indicated that the quality of the writing is part of the overall page assessment.

    Let’s face it, what the search engines are asking from us is that we create relevant content that users can easily consume. Their algorithms are simply now aligning to the goals that they’ve been articulating for the past 15+ years.

  • Search Engine Strategies: 8 Tips to Boost Search Rankings

    Every day, you check your page rankings on Google, and every day, you come up a little short of that first page.

    You’ve been optimizing keywords, so what gives?

    Well, guess what? You’re not the only one who knows the importance of keyword optimization. Your competition does too.

    And while keyword optimization can certainly help improve your site’s ranking, it’s only one small piece of the puzzle.

    Search engine algorithms also take into account other factors such as bounce rate, inbound links, outbound links, broken links, user experience, and pages viewed, just to name a few.

    In order to see a big boost in your ranking, you need to be employing other search engine strategies.

    In this article, we’ll take a look at the top 8 tips for boosting your search ranking.

    Tip #1: Create High Quality, Relevant Content

    When it comes to boosting your rankings, getting visitors to your site is only half the battle.

    You also need to get those visitors to stay on your site and browse. This is known as “dwell time.” The longer the dwell time, the higher the ranking.

    So how do you increase dwell time?

    While the right keywords may draw a visitor to your site, content is what makes them stay.

    Nobody cares about keywords unless those keywords are surrounded by actionable, useful content.

    Most of this content will take place in the form of blog posts. Typically, you’ll want your posts to be at least 1,000 words.

    Why so long?

    Longer posts give you the opportunity to include more keywords, more inbound and outbound links, and provide more valuable content. And of course, longer posts take more time to read, which can increase your site’s dwell time.

    Plus, every time someone bookmarks your content to Chrome, it improves your ranking on Google.

    Tip #2: Focus on Link Building

    Google’s let the cat out of the bag: content and links are the two most important factors when it comes to boosting your site’s ranking.

    Your link building strategy should focus on three areas:

    • Inbound links- links created on other sites that link back to you
    • Outbound links- links you create to other websites
    • Broken links- links that don’t work (get rid of them)

    However, you need to make sure you choose your links wisely. A link from a highly-trafficked, authoritative site goes a lot further than a bunch of links from small, unknown sites.

    In order to get these authoritative links, you can pitch to online magazines or news sources or partner with popular blogs. Usually, these partnerships have an “I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine” mentality. They’ll link to your site only if you’ll link to theirs.

    Tip #3: Increase Page Load Speed

    In the world of the internet, waiting a few extra seconds for a page to load is like waiting an eternity.

    If your site’s taking too long to load, users are going to peace out and move on to someone else’s site.

    Not only does this reduce your dwell time, it also increases your bounce rate.

    Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who come to your site, view the landing page, and then leave without viewing anything else. Average bounce rates are somewhere around 50 percent. But no matter where you fall, you should always be looking to lower that number.

    And increasing your page load speed is one of the best ways to do this.

    Here are a few ways you can increase your page load speed:

    • Optimize image sizes
    • Reduce the number of plug-ins
    • Minimize redirects
    • Enable compression
    • Enable browser caching

    Tip #4: Optimize Long-tail Keywords

    Okay, you probably already know the important role keywords play in search engine strategies.

    But, many people are going about their keyword strategy all wrong.

    If you’re a new site, you’re going to have a tough time competing for top keywords. That’s why it’s best to go for long-tail keywords- ones that are three words or more.

    Long-tail keywords have less competition, and therefore, are easier to rank for. Check out Google’s keyword planner to find the best ones for your industry.

    Tip #5: Use Different Multimedia

    Visual content is an excellent way to improve user experience and enrich your written content.

    Videos, slideshows, infographics, and audio files are all great ways to deliver information to users in a unique and engaging format.

    In fact, adding videos to landing pages can increase conversion rates by 80 percent.

    Plus, multimedia also signals to search engines that your site contains quality content. Which, as well all know, is key to boosting your rankings.

    Tip #6: Optimize for Mobile

    Google will penalize your site if it’s not mobile optimized.

    More and more people are conducting searches on their mobile devices these days. And if you’re site isn’t optimized, it will negatively affect user experience.

    Google is all about providing the best user experience, so make sure your site’s optimized so you don’t receive a penalty.

    Tip #7 Update on the Regular

    Boosting your search rankings is a marathon, not a sprint.

    You can’t expect the quality-content you created last year to help you in your rankings this year.

    Google prefers updated, new content over stale, old content. It lets them know that your site is relevant, fresh, and still in the game.

    Plus, popular keywords change over time. You want to make sure you’re always creating content that uses the hottest keywords.

    Tip #8: User-friendly Formatting

    Formatting that is user-friendly can help improve your rankings.

    If your site contains huge walls of text, you’re making a huge mistake.

    You need to break that stuff up so it’s easy for your readers to scan and digest.

    Here are a few other ways to make sure your formatting is user-friendly:

    • Use fonts that are easy-to-read
    • Use bold types and colors only sparingly to call out useful info
    • Use bulleted numbers and lists
    • Break up sections with headings and sub-headings
    • Use short paragraphs- 2-3 sentences is ideal

    Search Engine Strategies Wrap Up

    We hope these search engine strategies helped paint a clear picture for what you need to get done in the coming weeks.

    But, implementing these search engine strategies on your own can be a tough feat. If you’re looking for some help, contact us today.

  • How Much Should I Pay For SEO Services?

    I’ve been in the digital market space for 20 years and this question, “how much should I pay for Search Engine Optimization?” is perhaps the hardest to answer. The elements that go into SEO are highly dependent on variables that agencies or SEO service providers need to identify before they can provide a valid estimate. SEO variables can be overt or hidden and defining them is key to establishing a fair price.

    Some of the common variables in SEO

    • Level of Competition
    • State of current website technical issues
    • Current content
    • State of Google’s assessment of site issues (ie, manual actions)
    • Dynamic nature of subject area
    • Internal support level at client
    • Goals and objectives

    There are cases of “unknown” variables. These are things that pop up during our scoping process that do not fall into the “normal” bucket and can have a big impact on the work effort for SEO.

    Ranking for some industries or products can be exceptionally difficult while others have very low barriers to good rankings. Even with all other aspects being equal, the difference in the subject matter can have a significant impact on the effort necessary to get and improve page rankings on the search engines. Until the SEO provider examines the competitive landscape, it is impossible to know what you are up against; are you competing against the little league or pro players? Is it a tough industry? If so, do you have a lot of niche opportunities? Developing a price is heavily dependent on your competitors’ strength in organic search.

    Is the industry dynamic? If the content is developed at a high velocity, then keeping pace in SEO requires more resources. New products, research, news stories, and other related topics can push their way to the top of the SERPS (and your site out). In industries where fresh content is the norm, staying competitive requires new, quality content is added to the website on a regular basis.

    We have seen some great websites come to us that required very little cleanup. But, we have also seen some that require extensive work. In some cases, the base condition of the site was so poor that we didn’t even quote the project, we directed the prospective owner to scope out a complete site rebuild (we don’t handle sites builds of that size, so it was not a self-serving suggestion.) The point is, the condition of the website has a big impact on the cost of SEO, particularly for “setup” fees.

    You should always write content with the intention of helping your target audience. Some sites have great content that needs some adjustment for SEO or needs better sharing activity. On the other hand, we may need to re-write entire pages or even sections of sites to improve their quality as well as their SEO visibility. Depending on the budgets, objectives, and timeframes, the content may be cleaned up all at once, or it may be spread out over months. Either way, the cost for the content clean up has to be covered.

    Sometimes clients have great support for their websites and we only need to pass on the direction. Other times, the clients need us to implement all our recommendations, manage the site, and deal with any technical issues. The more the client relies on us to do this, the more resources we need to commit. It makes no sense to pay an SEO provider for recommendations that are not implemented.

    We usually start the conversation with goals and objectives, as do most ad agencies. This gets us aligned with the client, and it also gives us an idea (along with all else) what resources are needed. Do we want to double the leads in 1 year or in 1 month? Huge difference. It may be the difference between reasonable, difficult, and impossible. If you are shopping for SEO services and you are quoted a firm price prior to a discussion of your goals, be sure to understand what the deliverables are.

    So, clearly, I can not tell you exactly what you should pay for SEO services. But here are some things to expect

    Setup fee

    As I alluded to above, there may be a lot of activities that take place at the beginning of the engagement. For websites that are already well tuned, with analytics properly setup, GSC connected and with little technical cleanup, the setup fee can be nominal, or non-existent. There is setup for keyword tracking and reporting depending on reporting requirements. The extent of effort will depend on the size of the program.

    What is tricky about the setup fee is that the on-going program cannot kick in until the setup is complete and this typically takes 4 – 6 weeks. Since most ongoing activity waits for this, the agency should not be adding setup resources on top of the monthly ongoing to determine the first-month fee. So, be sure that the fee for month one is truly the setup activity and not double dipping.

    Ongoing SEO Activity

    In today’s SEO, content for your site and for guest posting/sharing are some of the most resource intensive. Link building outreach is the second big consumption of resources. The more competitive your niche, the more content and content distribution will be required. This is not a 2 or 3 month activity. It is absolutely ongoing.

    I bring this up because I am often asked if we can reduce the cost after month 4,5, or 6, because the ‘heavy lifting’ is done in the first few months. I’ve heard this referred to as “maintenance mode.” In SEO, there is no such thing as “maintenance mode.” You are either fighting to maintain position, fighting to gain position, or you will lose position.

    SEO price range

    Setup – $0 – $5,000.

    Ongoing – $1,500 – $7,500.

    I’ve seen SEO for less. I’ve worked on programs for less. These are the exception. The client has 100% technical support, has content creation is taken care of in-house, is not in a competitive marketplace…. Every one of the “hard” things is not hard.

    That, or…

    They are paying so little that there will be no traction.

    For more competitive categories, or programs with a lot of rich, quality content development, the upside cost can be much higher. But, these are unusual and are part of larger efforts for big companies.

    Long term SEO

    Many people look at the monthly commitment. This is convenient for cash flow purposes. But, SEO is a long game. Commit to 12 months, things do not happen quickly in SEO. There may be the fluke “big hit”, but that is unusual. I know this is cliche but think in terms of investments, not expenses.

    Pricing estimates for SEO will vary a lot. When an agency or SEO provider is quoting the service, be skeptical if they did not first ask you a lot of questions. If they don’t, they will be surprised in a short time and so will you.

  • Google Dropped Organic Site Links & Some impressions dropped

    Google Organic Search Metrics
    Google Search Console (GSC)/ webmaster tools provides insights into the way users see your organic Google SERPs. Unfortunately, the dashboard data only goes back 90 days, so when Google makes a change, it is difficult to normalize the data.

    So, here is what changed:

    For some websites, Google displayed site links under the primary listing. So, one search with one listing provided multiple Landing Page impressions in the GSC. Google removed this late last year. So, sites for December and January that had a lot of impressions due to site links, suddenly say their impressions drop. In some cases drastically.

    The good news is that Google dropped organic site links because they were getting minimal clicks. So the actual site traffic should not have been measurably impacted. But if you keep track of up stream metrics, this throws a wrench in your data.

    (google also delivers multiple listings for a site in one search, legitimately creating multiple landing page impressions for one query).

  • Google’s Penguin Goes Real Time

    Last month Google hit us with two pretty major changes to the search algorithm.

    The first was a straightforward update in early September. When this hit, we saw most programs take a slight dip and then recover after about a week. But, then Google announced that they will incorporate Penguin into the core algorithm as well, applying it to every query. This caused a lot of consternation as things fluctuated wildly for a couple of weeks.

    If you are not familiar with Penguin, it is the part of Google’s system that looks at the quality of backlinks – those links to your site from other websites. Until September of this year, Google would run Penguin periodically, assess the quality of the backlinks and then stick you with a score that stays with you for months until the new update is run.

    Now, every search has a real time backlink quality assessment. What this means for your SEO:

    1. If your category in search is very active in SEO / link building, you will see more volatility. As site managers expand their linking partners, the impact will be seen more quickly
    2. There is still NO quick fix to link building, or quick kills. When new links are created, Google still needs to crawl and index pages. Additionally, even with on page changes, we see a lag time between changes and Google’s (apparent) incorporation in search rankings. I suspect the same will be true with backlinks.
    3. Your competitors’ moves will be more quickly felt. This means that your rankings may go up or down based not on what you do, but what a competitor has done. While this has always been true, this change means we will see that impact more quickly and more often relative to what we’ve seen in the past.
    4. For categories in which there is little activity on link building, this is an opportunity to get ahead by moving aggressively into a quality link building program.

     

    Over the years, since Google has removed visibility into organic keywords to a large extent, I have encouraged clients to view rankings as a lesser metric and focus on organic site traffic and quality. Keyword rankings can fluctuate quite a bit day-to-day and the incorporation of Penguin into the real time ranking will exacerbate this. Looking long term, improving visibility is the upstream indicator to growth in site traffic. While we keep an eye on the rankings /  visibility, the our purpose should be to find early indications of problems and not create an environment of knee-jerk reactions to rank changes.
    Bottom line, if you’ve had a good SEO program going, this change by Google should not lead to substantive changes in what you do. But, if you’ve not focused on SEO, your site may have trouble ahead.

  • Content marketing has made SEO link building harder

    Yes good content should generate links back to your website and improve SEO perfomance. The challenge is in helping people differentiate between content marketing strategy and SEO link building tactics, and their respective control.

    Content marketing starts with a broader marketing objective, using distributed content to help achieve goals, and in some cases linking back to the website is not even part of the implementation. Our focus is on the marketing, with branding, customer development and relationship nurturing as integral components of the campaigns. Content, well controlled and distributed, is king, this is a strategy.

    For SEO link building, there is very little, if any direct control of the general content. Yes, you can have some influence with provided content, but the final call is the publisher’s (the more control to exert, the closer you push link building toward content marketing.) This can lead to some odd pairing of relevant content for SEO that does not necessarily play into the brand’s narrative. And this is where folks can get uncomfortable.

    Here are some elements of SEO link building that marketers should become comfortable with:

    First, the final call is the publishers. You can negotiate to a certain point, but publishers have their own brand and narrative to follow. If they give into the whims of every link partner, the site will lose continuity and eventually lose audience.

    Second, a variety of content and sites is a good thing. While all must be relevant to your respective pages, the internet is a tapestry of interests and points of view. Tying into this helps strengthen your pages inbound linking. Remember that this in someone else’s voice connecting to your brand, it is not your brand.

    Third, some sites look cheap, but this should not preclude them from consideration. As long as the site is not being dinged by Google and the content is relevant, don’t sweat the aesthetics.

    Keeping a focus on link building’s purpose, to show Google that other sites “like” you, understand that this is a popularity contest. While having some high profile, great looking sites should be part of your program, the vast majority of votes will come from sites that are average or below. They still count.

  • AMP – Accelerated Mobile Pages

    The Problem AMP and FIA Fix

    Behind the scenes a browser sorts through a whole bunch of code that tells it how to present the content. This code is an agreed upon standard. Unfortunately, it is not really designed for easy mobile access to information such as news stories or blog articles.

    Standard html and the associated scripts, styles and other bits of code take a lot to process. We don’t notice it too much on desktops and laptops because our computers have become extremely powerful and can easily handle all that code and present the web pages to the users.

    The complexity allows web developers to create very elaborate websites with a great deal of functionality. But when we are simply looking for information, all this elaborate foundation just gets in the way. This is particularly true on mobile devices that are not powerful enough nor do they have the screen real estate needed to process and present the pages well. Responsive design only addresses part of the problem, arranging elements or hiding them for mobile presentation- but they are still there taking bandwidth and time. Often mobile users will simply back out of the page rather than wait for it to load.

    The AMP and FIA solution(s)

    The answer to this issue is to streamline the content and the code that is used to present the content, and eliminate the unnecessary functionality.

    AMP – Accelerated Mobile Pages – is the Open Source project (backed by Google) designed to help companies make their website content more accessible for mobile devices.

    Facebook’s approach to this is Facebook Instant Articles which does the same thing, but for now is focused on the Facebook ecosystem.

    The focus is on the unique article content. By using the amp method, you process and display just the information unique to that article and do so in a simplified way. Below is the regular page next to the amp version of one of our posts..

    page without am coding

    page with amp coding

    Using this method lets the content be streamlined for faster processing and makes it easier for the information to be cached on the different servers. This has two great benefits. When the content is indexed it is stored on the servers (in this case Google, but any server can do this because it is an open source effort) so the server does not have to always come back to the site every time a person wants to see the information. The trip to get the information is shorter. Secondly, the format is something that mobile devices can process very quickly, eliminating a great deal of the wait time.

    AMP and SEO

    Duplicate Content?
    If executed properly, this is not an issue. On the amp page, standard canonical ref will tell the engines the original page sources (standard practice).

    <link rel=”canonical” href=”https://fd.idatatools.com/blog/2016/02/google-compare-shutting-down/” />

    While the original page provides a reference to the amp page so the indexing site can pick up the mobile friendly (amp) version.

    <link rel=”amphtml” href=”https://fd.idatatools.com/blog/2016/02/google-compare-shutting-down/amp/” />

    As Google pushes further down the mobile friendly path, more weight will be placed on content that delivers quickly and easily to mobile devices. For those companies that rely on their blog and news content to attract more people, this will have a significant impact. AMP was initiated in October of 2015 and you can see in GWT / Search Console what pages on the site are being ‘flagged’ for not being AMP friendly. While we have not yet seen a degradation in the results directly tied to this, it is just a matter of time.

    At the moment the SEO landscape does not have a lot of competition with AMP pages. That will change and when it does, the search engines will have a choice between your content and content that is “AMPlified”. Guess who wins.

  • SEO: Don’t underestimate the basic practices

    SEO: Don’t underestimate the basic practices

    Over the years SEO tactics have evolved to try to keep up with the changes in how Google ‘enforces’ what it considers to be quality websites and content. As we engage with new clients we see that many of the problems are related to ignoring the basics in favor of chasing the latest tactics. It is not that we should put aside these tactics, but they should be employed judiciously and only when the basics are covered. It is what we refer to as good SEO hygiene. Keeping your site clean helps avoid surprises and saves time in the long run. While SEOs can argue over priority, here are the areas we usually address first either because of their volume or their importance.

    Image alt elements are a lost opportunity for most sites

    The base intent of the “alt” elements(alternative text) is for a better user experience for the visually impaired users, as the alt text is used to say what is in the image. Search engines also use this information to identify the image content, as well as affirm the connection to the content on the page itself. Additionally, should the image not load in the browser, the alt text will appear in its place.

    Key to good alt text is an accurate description of the image content. Without spamming the text, it should provide the subject description and setting of the image. Chances are, if the alt text is one or two words, it is not enough to provide useful information for the users or the search engines. Keep the description focused and thorough to give the search engine enough to connect the image content clearly with the page content. (google on image optimization)

    H1 tags: none or too many

    H1 Tags (and subsequent H tags) are your way to indicate the primary subject area of the page. It should be a few words covering the broadest scope of the page content, using lower Hn tags to indicate sub-content. Generally, the more focused you can make your content subject matter while providing useful information, the better.

    We tend to see one of two errors. First, no H1 tags. This is a relatively simple fix provided you’ve done the keyword research to identify the best way to identify the content.

    The second issue is too many H1 tags. We see this when developers / designers decide to take a shortcut and use H1 tags because of their styling. Take the time to create a css style that will be used for paragraph or content area titles instead of using the H1 tags.

    Duplicate content on… everything

    From page titles and meta descriptions to page content duplication, we see this a lot. The culprit is typically a CMS that was not configured or implemented properly. The CMS may use categories and tags that create folders. If you apply more than one tag or category to a page, there will be more than one url leading to the page. There are other causes, but these tend to be among the most frequently seen.

    Duplicate content is not good, but engines have a tolerance for it when it’s on your own site. However, the issue is that the inbound links to your site on a given topic are diluted if they are spread among duplicate pages of the same content. By directing the inbound and internal links to a single source page, you increase the juice or PageRank of that page relative to the topic.

    Take the time to understand the CMS implementation and plan your categories, tags or other content organizational standards, and prioritize or eliminate components (use 301s if you eliminate). If you cannot eliminate duplicate content, select a primary page source and use canonical ref of all other pages to it, so the search engines know which page to give the ‘juice’ to.

    Broken Links lead to 404s and empty images

    SEO broken links chain demonstration
    Companies have to move fast nowadays and sometimes that means never looking back. But, when this happens we often see things break, but prospective clients didn’t notice. You’re giving up historical benefits and potential content validations when links break. Perusing your site, if it is not too big, or using SEO audit tools can help keep you on top of broken links.

    Counting for, not against

    We have seen some SEOs dismiss issues like this on the basis that the engines can be forgiving as long as the ‘important’ content is clean. However, overall site quality will eventually be affected, which will impact your rankings as user experience deteriorates. On the other side, you are foregoing the benefits derived from juice flowing freely through your site. While the algorithms change and the weight given to anyone aspect of SEO alters, keeping your basic site hygiene up will decrease the impact of any algorithm changes.