Some images have been floating around today which give us reason to believe that Google might be looking into changing its search engine results page (SERP) layout. The design, which has slowly but surely changed over the years, has never really changed like this, well, not that I’ve noticed at least.
Take a peak:
I’m not sure whether this is real or speculation, but I can definitely see Google looking into something like this.
Is it time for a change?
What happens when you visit a website which is incredibly slow? In most cases you get annoyed and leave, looking for an alternative site. This happens fairly often and if you’re the website owner, you don’t want this happening to you, that could be a sale loss right there!
Google Analytics has launched a new metric – site speed. Site Speed allows you to measure and view latency for a number of pages on your website. Because it’s Analytics, there’s tons of information available to you, such as seeing which pages are loading the slowest, your overall site load times as well as other important dimensions. If you think a little further, this would be incredibly useful for seeing how long it takes users located in another country to view your site. Another useful addition is the ability to see load metrics relative to the browser, operating system and so forth.
Optimizing your website for speed these days is crucial for several reasons. Google takes site speed into account for search engine optimization purposes, people on mobile devices have slower lines and thus cannot be expected to wait around and if you’re running an e-commerce website, you don’t want your shoppers to wait around whilst a cart updates or a checkout processes.
Robert Kingston wrote a great article on this topic and outlines that currently Google does not allow for sampling rates to be changed just yet, which means that only around 2% of the page views will actually be measured. This is obviously a really small sample size and measuring against this might not be completely accurate, so right now I think it’s great to explore, but perhaps we should wait before implementing.
Setting up Site Speed on your website does require you to add some code to your pages. It’s a pity that it isn’t included in the normal tracking code for Analytics, and then have an option in Analytics to turn it on and off, but that’s just not how they did it. If you want to look into adding Site Speed to your website, Google offers a guide on doing this.
This is an important addition for any website owner, be sure to explore this and understand it, decreasing your load speeds will keep your visitors and customers happy.
If you have a website and you haven’t considered creating a mobile version of your site, then you’re potentially missing out on a huge amount of traffic and could be missing out on some sales. Mobile is huge, I don’t need to harp on about that, I think most of us know that by now, but how many of us are gearing up correctly for it? Evolving in the direction that consumers are moving is essential.
There are a few ways of creating mobile versions of your website, here are three which come to mind:
Each of these has a place, but when it comes to Search Engine Optimization (SEO), it’s essential to know what you’re doing. Let’s take a look at each of the three scenario’s above in the eyes of SEO:
It’s important to look a little further than just creating a mobile version of your site, keep these points in mind and if you’re hiring an agency to create your mobile site, be sure to check that they understand all of this.
Got any tips on mobile and SEO? Please share them in the comments, I’d love to discuss this topic!
Right, so Google’s rolled out its Panda search algorithms and already I’m seeing people frantically surfing the Internet and complaining about lost rankings, lower page ranks and complaining clients.
What is the idea behind Panda? Well, quite simply, the aim of Panda is to weed out content farms and websites which don’t publish fresh content. Google wants to display results which benefit the searcher, rather than leading them to potential rubbish.
So two things immediately come to mind: produce fresh content, and produce it first!
What can you do to make sure that your site isn’t the next one to fall of the search ranking pages? Well, there are a number of things, but these are the ones that I feel are really wise moves:
This algorithm change is no laughing matter, this is the biggest change Google has performed in the last decade and already 16% of search queries have been affected. You ignore this and you could see your site losing its position completely and you’ll be back at scratch again.
Another tip.. if you’re worried about duplicate content, check all your pages and see which ones aren’t indexed. If they aren’t indexed, change the content and resubmit them.
This is a serious change folks, keep locked in and I’ll keep you posted!
When it comes to SEO, I’ve been involved in a number of situations where business owners have a list of keywords they feel are best, but what they don’t understand is that keyword research is an art and that without proper research a few difficult scenarios are possible:
1. It could take up to 6 months to even start ranking decently for a keyword because the keyword is so competitive
2. Less obvious keywords, which are far less competitive, could be used to attract the same amount of traffic if it more. This traffic also often converts far better, because it’s less competitive.
3. The keyword might receive very few searches, meaning that it might be a waste to spend time trying to rank for it.
So, when you realize that it’s time to invest time into SEO, hopefully you’ll realize this sooner than later, then you must put a lot of time into keyword research. The correct keywords will save you a huge amount of time and money.
Here are 3 keyword research tools that I feel everyone should use:
1. Google Adwords – Probably the most obvious one. I use this tool on an almost daily basis, it’s free and it’s very powerful. The tool allows you to see estimated searches for keywords and it provides an easy way to look for alternative keywords. When you run a query on a keyword, it’ll show you suggestions, traffic estimates, competitiveness and a number of other things. All results can be exported, which is really useful for post research tracking.
2. Traffic Travis – This PC software popped up about a year or two ago, if I remember quickly, and offers users a piece of downloadable software, which runs off your desktop. This tool doesn’t only offer keyword research tools, but an assortment of other useful tracking tools as well as PPC tools. The software is free, but the paid version does offer you more functionality if you’re a power user.
3. Keyword Spy – Another piece of software, which gives you information on competitors, Adwords information and a knowledge base with updates daily with fresh results, to ensure that your results are accurate. Like Traffic Travis, it’s free, but there is a paid version with more options.
Have a look at these options and decide which one is best for you. Don’t try and use all of them, find one, pay for it if needs be, and learn it. Like all software, there’s a learning curve, take your time and master the software so as to extract its full potential.
Do you have a different tool that you use? Let us know!
Broken links are a huge fail when it comes to search engine optimization (SEO) and making sure that you’re not linking to incorrect websites is something any website author should be doing. Today I’ve got three free tool for you, which will assist you on checking your broken links.
I use all three of the tools, as I find each one picks up something that the other one doesn’t, but if you don’t have time for that, then select just one. Google Webmaster Tools is a cloud application, so you can access it anywhere and you should be using Google Webmaster Tools anyway. If you’re a WordPress user, then download the plugin and take a look, it’s a very quick and simple process that’s worth investigating. If you’re really keen on ensuring that your links are good, Xenu will give you everything you need and I’d recommend it for power users.
Good luck nailing those broken links and enjoy watching your rankings increase ;)
When it comes to business, I’m a firm believer in charging for consultations. Sure, the first meet and greet doesn’t need to be billed for, but if a second meeting is held or any meeting is held, which involves useful information being exchanged, then I feel invoices should be delivered. A typical non-billed meeting would be a meet and greet, and perhaps a discussion around how a certain service might assist the other party’s company. Anything more than that and valuable information is being exchanged, and this is what should be billed for.
Whilst thinking about this, I actually came across a great article by the SEO Chicks, entitled, “3 Industries SEO should learn from“. In this article, Sarah talks about 3 industries that do specific things, which she feels SEOs should learn from and implement. In her first example, she says the following:
“When was the last time your solicitor offered to spend an afternoon looking at something for you for free? When was the last time a solicitor felt guilty about charging for their time (do solicitors feel guilt? maybe that’s a question for another time). As SEO’s we need to learn to appreciate just how valuable our time is, it doesn’t mean that we can’t give things away now in return for future reward, but we have a very specialised, difficult to learn skill set, and we need to start acting like it. This doesn’t just go for free v’s paid either, it means that we need to put an accurate value on our time, and having come across some SEO’s pitching at less that 2000 a month for clients that are easily going to require 40+ hours work I think we still have a long way to go with this one.”
What she says sums up exactly what I was thinking – Most SEOs don’t value their time enough and it’s not about just one or two valuing their time, it’s about all SEOs clubbing together and changing how things work. If all SEOs start being more business focused in terms of time vs money, then a standard will be set and charging for initial consults will become something of the norm, just like a solicitor.
This is something I stand strongly by and by blogging this, I hope that other SEOs will think about blogging it too and so the word will start traveling. This isn’t about suddenly being able to charge more and make more money, it’s about being appreciated and valuing your time more!
Here are some answers to 5 common SEO questions that get asked:
Came across this awesome function for WordPress. Basically, you can set up your site to replace certain words with certain “things”. So, looking at the bolded line below, what this function will do is replace the word ‘wordpress’ with an actual link to WordPress.com. As you can imagine, this can be used to save you a huge amount of time, it could be used for SEO purposes in that you could always link certain words to the root domain name (that gets your brain ticking doesn’t it? ;)) and so forth.
Simply manipulate the code below and place it into your functions.php file.
function replace_text_wps($text){
$replace = array(
// ‘WORD TO REPLACE’ => ‘REPLACE WORD WITH THIS’
‘wordpress’ => ‘<a href=”http://www.wordpress.com”>wordpress</a>’,
‘excerpt’ => ‘<a href=”#”>excerpt</a>’,
‘function’ => ‘<a href=”#”>function</a>’
);
$text = str_replace(array_keys($replace), $replace, $text);
return $text;
}
add_filter(‘the_content’, ‘replace_text_wps’);
add_filter(‘the_excerpt’, ‘replace_text_wps’);
[Hat tip WPRecipes]
These days, a lot of people seem to think that link building is a synonym for search engine optimization. I’ve got no idea why people are thinking this, perhaps it’s ignorance, perhaps it’s what someone’s told them, but the truth is that there’s a great deal more to it than just building links. I received an enquiry from a company that wanted to hire me to purely do link building as their SEO strategy and I explained to them how there’s more to it in order to maintain rank and build someone sustainable. Long story short, I turned the work down as I knew better and they didn’t seem interested in listening.
This brings me to the point at hand. Link building does play a big role in search engine optimization, but there are good ways of doing it and of course, there are bad ways. It’s incredibly important to understand what a good link is and what a bad link is in order to build links that are going to have longevity! I’m not going to go into that right now, but what I am going to look at is something I came across online which I found highly interesting: what happens if you build hundreds of bad backlinks to a website?
Take a look at this graph, it’s been taken from Google Analytics and represents the unique site visits relative to time:
As you can see, backlinks started being build towards the beginning of November and by early december, traffic was getting high, but then, come mid December, everything dropped; dropped so badly that the after effects resulted in less traffic than before! Why did it drop? Simple.. Google caught on and put an end to this. Let me say that again, Google caught on and put an end to it! And you know what happens from there? The domain gets flagged and is basically destroyed and turning it around into a position where it’s trusted again is hugely difficult, it would be easier to get a new domain and start again. I think that paints a picture of how careful you need to be when building links.
What I can tell you though, is that building backlinks in large quantities even if they aren’t the best backlinks can turn into great results if you balance other areas of your website. Don’t get me wrong, if you’re building really bad backlinks, then you are going to have big problems, but if they’re not the greatest links and your other areas of search engine optimization are in good shape, then you can succeed, but getting the mix correct isn’t a simple job.
Building backlinks is an art, and only a piece of the puzzle when it comes to search engine optimization. Hire a professional to optimize your website, don’t ruin your domain and don’t assume that backlinks are the be all and end all.
[Hat tip SEOptimise for inspiration & graph]
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