SEO News

What is SEO?

Very simply, it’s an umbrella term for all the methods, tactics and processes by which you can increase the likelihood of your website appearing, and possibly ranking highly in the organic (non-paid for) search engine results pages (SERPs).

There are black-hat (bad) and white-hat (good) practices, and it’s easy to think of SEO as a manipulative exercise in artificially raising the profile of your site.

In actual fact, good SEO requires a level of attention to detail that will only improve the functionality and usability of your website. If it’s easy to access, navigate and search around then it’ll be all the more appealing to your visitors. 

Appearing higher in the SERPs is a positive by-product of this ‘best practice’ and the benefits to you will be even higher levels of traffic.

Don’t think that because you’re ‘just running a blog’ that traffic from higher SERP rankings is a fanciful notion. 

With a regular routine of link-building within the site, optimising headlines, permalinks and images, and writing relevant content, it didn’t take long for my music review blog to appear in the first couple of SERPs under certain search terms, and my chosen subject is quite a highly competitive area.

There are some bad practices too, such as artificial link-building and keyword stuffing, just bear in mind that Google is quite good at catching you in the act, and is not only quick but severe in its punishment.

As with the previous posts in this series, I am writing this for the benefit of a WordPress.com user. 

If you’re a WordPress.org user there are some great plug-ins available in the dashboard that will automatically assist your SEO. However in WordPress.com there are no plug-ins, but a lot of the work is done for you automatically in the backend. 

That doesn’t mean that ALL your work is done for you though.

Let’s take a look at some best practice tips for SEO.

Content

Yeah that old cliché. 

If you’re not producing good, relevant, entertaining, helpful content at a regular rate, then all of the added SEO tricks won’t help you one little bit.

How does Google know whether you’re producing good, relevant, entertaining, helpful content? It just does, okay.

Well actually it’s a complicated and ever-changing algorithim that’s impossible to second-guess or predict. All you can guarantee is that no matter what Google and the other search engines are also looking for in terms of ‘site health’, the value of your content will always be the top priority.

Good quality content gets recognition. That recognition will come in repeat traffic, social shares and links within other websites. This will drive traffic to your site and improve your chances of being found not just within organic listings but also through social media and peer recommendations.

The most important point here is this: write for human readers not search engines. 

If your content reads like a robot wrote it, nobody will stick around on your site, nobody will revisit and nobody will share it. Search engines will see this lack of interest and high bounce rate and rank you in the toilet-end of SERPS accordingly.

Regularity

Producing content, regularly and as often as you can is also a must for appearing in the SERPs. When it comes to my own blog, I have a policy of publishing at least one article a day during the week. I take the weekend off. As should you.

Blogging is a time-consuming art but does benefit from taking a day or two off to refresh the creative juices. Plus there are cats to feed and social circles to remind that you still exist.

Anyway, write as regularly as you can, and you’ll soon see that within a few months you’ll start to appear in SERPs and therefore pick up some organic traffic. If you don’t update regularly, search engines will view your site as irrelevant over time and rank you lower.

Length

Don’t be too concerned with the word-count. 

If you remember padding out university dissertations with overly rambling sentences just to achieve the 15,000 allotted word-count, do not worry about achieving a similar thing here.

Whether you’ve been recommended that a post should be at least 300 words long, or 500-1,000 words if your blog is new, try to resist padding it out with waffle. 

Be as concise as possible. A reader would rather read a shorter article that gets to the point then a long-winded epic.

That being said, if you’ve written a 1,000 word masterpiece stuffed with fascinating, completely relevant and helpful content, where you’ve been as tightly controlled and clear with your prose as possible, search engines will prefer this to one that’s half the length on the same subject.

The likelihood of you being penalized for writing a 290 word post instead of keeping to the often recommended 300 word optimal length is very low.

However if you’re struggling to fill a 300 word post, perhaps the subject you’re writing about isn’t quite suitable for you, or may require some more research.

Headlines

Keep them as concise as possible, although not to the point of making them too obscure or meaningless.

“A beginner’s guide to SEO best practice for new WordPress bloggers” is descriptive and accurate. However, to benefit your readers and because search engines tend to give keywords at the beginning of a headline the most attention it might be best to rework it.

“SEO best practice: a beginner’s guide” may be better as the most important words are at the front. ‘Beginner’s guide’ remains as it’s an accurate decription of the content, but then you also don’t want to limit your audience. 

I’ve excised ‘WordPress’ and ‘bloggers’ as these tips are universal in regards to most blogging platforms and content management systems. I’ve also removed ‘new’ as it duplicates the meaning of ‘beginner’s’.

It’s quite a dry headline though. It doesn’t feel very “Upworthy’ or ‘Buzzfeedy’. By all means try the technique of mixing SEO with more emotionally responsive language.

“10 electrifying SEO tips that will charge your blog with awesome”.

Hmm, I wish I hadn’t wasted that one in the body of this article now. 

Just realise that headlines like this are great for quick wins. A large amount of traffic may haul its way to your site in one big spike in the short term.

However, in order to be useful in the long term and strengthen your position in the SERPs, it’s best to create ‘evergreen’ content that sticks around forever that will always provide you with traffic.

Permalinks

These are the permanent URLs to your individual blog posts. This is the link that you’ll share when you wish to direct people towards that particular page.

You’ll notice that when you write a headline in the ‘Add New Post’ section of your dashboard, a permalink will be automatically created underneath it.

This will automatically copy exactly what’s written in the headline.

There are a couple of things you need to be mindful of here.

WordPress will automatically save what’s written in the headline field as soon as you click anywhere else on the screen, whether you’ve finished writing the headline or not. Also WordPress won’t automatically update the permalink if you change your mind on the headline.

Thankfully the permalink can be edited at any time. Just make sure you check it’s correct before clicking publish. 

It’s not necessarily best practice to copy exactly what’s in the headline directly to the permalink, even though this is done automatically. 

Google has stated that it’s best just to use three to four key words in your permalink, and that you should put the most important keywords first.

“10 electrifying SEO tips that will charge your blog with awesome” would benefit from a permalink that reads “SEO blog tips”.

It’s best to remove any numbers that form part of your headline from the permalink itself as these are considered valueless by search engines.

It’s also good to remove ‘stopwords’ such as ‘a’, ‘and’ and ‘the’.

Excerpt

This is known elsewhere as the ‘meta description’. This is normally generated automatically by WordPress, but it’s a good idea to craft your own manually.

The excerpt or meta description is the snippet of descriptive text that appears beneath the URL in SERPs. 

And also when sharing the link on social media platforms such as Facebook.

You want this to be less than 150 characters long, with your keywords as near to the front as possible, but still make sense as a readable sentence.

Search engines will not raise you higher in the rankings because of the quality of the excerpt, but it will increase the likelihood that someone will click-through to your article based on how interesting, relevant or entertaining the excerpt is.

Images

An important part of SEO is how you name and tag your images. With accurate tagging, you will increase the likelihood of your post being found through image searches.

Simply uploading an image and leaving the complicated file name as it is just isn’t good enough.

You need to complete the Title, Alt Tags and Description fields when uploading an image for full optimisation.

The Title section provides the text that a visitor sees when they hover their mouse over the image.

Alt Tags are necessary because search engines can’t see your images, but they do read your tags. You want to add your keywords here.

The Description section is where you want to describe your image as accurately as possible. This helps the accessibility for those who are using ‘image reader’ software.

Categories and tags

Once you’ve finished writing your article, add it to a relevant category. Try to keep the category title as broad as possible.

Then comb through the post to pick out all the relevant keywords to add to the Tags section. These should be more detailed than the category.

Much like the excerpt, tags don’t improve your chances of ranking higher in the SERPs. In fact if you overstuff your post with tags, whether they are related to the content or not, search engines may see this as manipulation and you may be penalised. Google and other search engines have stopped recognising keyword tags all together. 

Categories and tags however make it easier for your visitors to navigate your site, and therefore improve its usability, tying together relevant content.

Approach tagging with caution. Be short, relevant and sparing just to be on the safe side.

Further WordPress reading…

This is the sixth post in my WordPress series. Here are the others:

• The first few steps involving sign-up, the differences between WordPress.com and WordPress.org, and your social media presence.
• Writing your first post using the WordPress content management system (CMS), in which I gave some helpful writing advice for first-time bloggers.
• Using the WordPress dashboard and its diverse world of widgets.
• An in-depth look the art of customising your existing WordPress template. 
• The 10 best responsive customisable WordPress themes.

For more information on SEO, download our complete 400 page Search Engine Optimisation Best Practice Guide.

For more guidance on blogging check out these seven useful Google tips for bloggers.

Posted by Cyrus-Shepard

Link building is hard, but it’s not the only way to make traffic gains in Google’s search results.

When I first started SEO, building links wasn’t my strong suit. Writing outreach emails terrified me, and I had little experience creating killer content. Instead, I focused on the easy wins.

While off-page factors like links typically weigh more heavily than on-page efforts in Google’s search results, SEOs today have a number of levers to pull in order to gain increased search traffic without ever building a link.

For experienced SEOs, many of these are established practices, but even the most optimized sites can improve in at least one or more of these areas.

1. In-depth articles

According to the MozCast Feature Graph, 6% of Google search results contain In-depth articles. While this doesn’t seem like a huge numbers, the articles that qualify can see a significant increase in traffic. Anecdotally, we’ve heard reports of traffic increasing up to 10% after inclusion.

By adding a few signals to your HTML, your high quality content could qualify to appear. The markup suggested by Google includes:

• Schema.org Article markup – NewsArticle works too)
• Google+ Authorship
• Pagination and canonicalization best practices
• Logo markup
• First click free – for paywall content

While Google seems to favor authorities news sites for In-depth Article inclusion, most sites that may qualify don’t have the proper semantic markup implemented.

2. Improving user satisfaction

Can you improve your Google rankings by improving the onsite experience of your visitors?

In many ways the answer is “yes,” and the experience of several SEOs hints that the effect may be larger than we realize.

We know that Google’s Panda algorithm punishes “low-quality” websites. We also know that Google likely measures satisfaction as users click on search results.

“… Google could see how satisfied users were. … The best sign of their happiness was the “long click” – this occurred when someone went to a search result, ideally the top one, and did not return.”

-Stephen Levy from his excellent book In the Plex

The idea is called pogosticking, or return-to-SERP, and if you can reduce it by keeping satisfied visitors on your site (or at least not returning to Google to look for the answer somewhere else) many SEOs believe Google will reward you with higher positions in search results.

Tim Grice of Branded3 reports a saying they have at their SEO agency:

“If you have enough links to be in the top 5, you have enough links to be position 1″

While we have no direct evidence of pogosticking in Google’s search results, we’ve seen enough patents, interviews and analysis to believe it’s possibly one of the most underutilized techniques in SEO today.

3. Rich snippets from structured data

Google constantly expands the types of rich snippets it shows in search results, including events, songs, videos and breadcrumbs.

The first time I heard about structured data was from a presentation by Matthew Brown at MozCon in 2011. Matthew now works at Moz, and I’m happy to glean from his expertise. His Schema 101 presentation below is well worth studying.

If you’re just getting started, check out this amazingly helpful Guide to Generating Rich Snippets from the folks at SEOgadget.

Two of our favorite types of markup for increasing clicks are videos and authorship, so we’ll discuss each below.

4. Video optimization

Pixel for pixel, video snippets capture more search real estate than any other type of rich snippet, even more than authorship photos. Studies show our eyes go straight to them.

Eye-Tracking Google SERPs – 5 Tales of Pizza

Unlike author photos, video snippets are often easier to display and don’t require connecting a Google+ account.

Video snippets generally require creating a video XML sitemap and adding schema.org video markup.

To simplify things, many third party services will take care of the technical details for you. Here at Moz we use Wistia, which creates a sitemap and adds schema.org markup automatically.

Pro tip: Both schema.org and XML sitemaps allow you to define the video thumbnail that appears in search results. As the thumbnail highly influences clicks, choose wisely.

Recommended reading: Getting Video Results in Google

5. Google authorship

Scoring the coveted author photo in Google search results doesn’t guarantee more clicks, but getting the right photo can help your click-through rate in many results.

What makes a good author photo? While there are no rules, I’ve personally tested and studied hundreds of photos and found certain factors help:

• Use a real face, not a company logo, cartoon or icon
• High contrast colors. Because the photo is small, you want it to stand out with good separation between the background and foreground.
• Audience targeted. For example, young Disney fans are probably less likely to click on an old guy in a suit who looks like a financial adviser.

Google recently got more selective about the author photos it chooses to show, but if you implement authorship correctly you may find yourself in the 20% (according to MozCast) of all search results that include author photos.

6. Improving site speed

Improving site speed not only improves visitor satisfaction (see point #1) but it may also have a direct influence on your search rankings. In fact, site speed is one of the few ranking factors Google has confirmed.

One of the interesting things we learned this year, with help from the folks at Zoompf, is that actual page load speed may be far less important than Time to First Byte (TTFB). TTFB is the amount of time it takes a server to first respond to a request.

As important as page speed is for desktop search Google considers it even more important for mobile devices. Think about the last time you waited for a page to load on your cell phone with a weak signal.

“Optimizing a page’s loading time on smartphones is particularly important given the characteristics of mobile data networks smartphones are connected to.”

– Google Developers

Suggested tool: PageSpeed Insights

7. Smartphone SEO

Aside from speed, if your website isn’t configured properly for smartphones, it probably results in lower Google search results for mobile queries. Google confirms that smartphone errors may result in lower mobile rankings.

What is a smartphone error? It could include:

• Redirecting visitors to the wrong mobile URL
• Embedding a video that doesn’t play on a particular phone (Flash video on an iPhone, for example)
• Pop-ups that aren’t easily closed on mobile
• Buttons or fonts that are too small on a mobile device

Google recommends making your site responsive, but many of the top brands in the world, including Apple.com, don’t have responsive sites. Regardless, a good mobile experience is imperative.

8. Expanding your international audience

Does your website have traffic potential outside your existing country and/or language?

Our international experts like Aleyda Solis know this well, but folks inside the United States have been slow to target specific languages and countries with SEO.

Oftentimes, the opportunities for appearing in international search results are greater than staying within your own borders, and the competition sometimes less. To see if it’s worth your while to make an investment, check out this International SEO Checklist by Aleyda (who is also a mobile SEO expert—it’s so unfair!)

9. Social annotations with Google+

When you share content on Facebook and Twitter, your network basically sees it only when they are looking at Facebook and Twitter.

On the other hand, when you share content on Google+, your network can see it every time they search Google.

Google’s own research shows that users fixate on social annotations, even when presented with videos and other types of rich snippets.

The easiest way to take advantage of this is to expand your Google+ network and share good content regularly and often. Rand Fishkin elegantly explains how to use Google+ to appear in the top of Google results every time.

Additionally, content shared through Google+ often ranks in regular search results, visible to everyone on the web, regardless of their social connections.

10. Snippet optimization

This goes back to basic meta tag and title tag optimization, but it’s a good practice to keep in mind.

In the past two years, Google changed the maximum length of title tags so that it’s no longer dependent on the number of characters, but on the number of pixels used, generally around 500 pixels in length. This keeps changing as Google tests new layouts.

Because 500 pixels is difficult to determine when writing most titles, best advice is still to keep your titles between 60-80 characters, or use an online snippet optimization tool to find your ideal title tag length.

Google also updated its advice on meta descriptions, further clarifying that duplicate meta descriptions are not a good idea. Matt Cutts tells us that if you can’t make your descriptions unique for each page, it’s better to have none at all.

“You can either have a unique meta tag description, or you can choose to have no meta tag description.”

Google’s Matt Cutts

Given that duplicate meta descriptions are one of the few HTML recommendations flags in Webmaster Tools, does this indicate Google treats repetitive meta descriptions as a negative ranking factor? Hmmm….

11. Updating fresh content

Websites that stop earning new links often lose ground in Google search results. At the same time, sites that never add new content or let their pages go stale can also fall out of favor.

Freshening your content doesn’t guarantee a rankings boost, but for certain types of queries it definitely helps. Google scores freshness in different ways, and may include:

• Inception date
• The amount (%) your content changes
• How often you update your content
• How many new pages you create over time
• Changes to important content (homepage text) vs. unimportant content (footer links)

Recommended reading: 10 Illustrations on How Fresh Content Can Influence Rankings

12. Ongoing on-page SEO

The factors listed here only scratch the surface of earning more real estate in search results. Issues such as indexing, crawling, canonicalization, duplicate content, site architecture, keyword research, internal linking, image optimization and 1,000 other things can move ranking mountains.

The job of the Technical SEO becomes more complex each year, but we also have more opportunities now than ever.

It’s easy to think nothing is new in SEO, or that SEO is easy, or that Google will simply figure out our sites. Nothing is further from reality.

The truth is, we have work to do.

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