Search Engine Optimization | SEO | Paul Vesely

The moral of this story

When Google wants you to do something, they will request it, blog about it, make video’s about it. But eventually – they will even make a user friendly tool to allow you to do something technical – very simply and hence compel you to do it. Lastly they will change their algorithm to benefit those who do what they say and to punish those who do not adhere.

This is exactly what Google have done with their new structured data markup helper tool. It allows you to use rich text and schema text in the code of your webpage with little or no technical knowledge of coding.

What’s the benefit to you as a webmaster or site owner?

Your website will be ranked higher and get extra traffic with more click throughs. Read on to hear how and why.

What’s the benefit to Google creating this New Structured Data Markup Helper tool?

It helps the search engine results page (SERP) look more attractive and engaging hence giving the Google user a better search experience by providing ‘rich results’. Rich results are displayed in the form of product ratings, author names and pictures, even recipe details displayed right within the SERP before clicking on the actual result. This makes the SERP (in this case Google) more appealing. It directly impacts on more people using Google, possibly clicking on their ads and yes, you guessed it KACHING $$$ – Google wins as always. So sit back as I take you on a journey through this new tool.

What’s so great about this tool for webmasters?

Firstly, note that you do not have to be a schema markup language expert to use the new Google structured data markup helper tool. You simply need to have website access to upload the new HTML code generated by the tool, to your webpage. That’s it, and it’s so simple. Thank you Google!

Secondly this ‘helper’ tool is in addition to Google’s first tool that allows anyone (no need to be a webmaster) to test how the markup language on your page will be displayed in a search result. This tool is called the structured data testing tool. This is not to be confused with the new Google structured data markup helper tool which is the topic and main discussion point of this blog post.

More details of why should you use schema markup language?

Google (and other search engines) have explicitly said that they use the data that you have ‘signaled’ out to the crawlers in order to make your result on the SERP more appealing for a click. Really anything that helps the crawler know and classify a piece of information on a webpage will allow it to display the webpage as a result in a better way and drive more direct traffic to that webpage. To see my previous full post about advantages of using schema markup language you can click here.

So lets take a look under the hood

Go to the new Google structured data markup helper tool and select your data type (being an article, event, movie, restaurant etc). Then you need to place the URL of the live webpage you wish to insert the markup language in the ‘URL text box’ below and then click on start tagging. Note that for more advanced webmasters you can paste the exact part of the HTML code of the page instead of supplying the live URL. Then the user is displayed the page and all you have to do is use your mouse and highlight parts of the text that appear in the left hand pane and then select from one of the options that automatically pops up. Its really that simple.

After you have completed ‘enriching’ ^TM your page with rich snippets (excuse the pun), the user clicks on the button ‘create HTML’ and the code is generated and ready for use on the page instantly.

Suggestions

My greatest suggestion is not to wait to use this. Jump right in. It’s free, very user friendly and no technical skills are required. Your website traffic will increase due to better rankings and better click through rates from the SERP. No need to deliberate. I wish you lots of extra quality traffic and SEO happiness.

As warned previously by Matt Cutts, Google has today launched a new update of their algorithm called Penguin 2.0 internally or Panda 4 by SEO’er in the industry since its the fourth change to the Penguin algorithm. You can read about what Matt Cutts says on his official blog about the roll out of the algorithm change. It seems to have been completed for the whole world today and not just certain locations.

Interestingly Google seems to be quite humble in revealing the fact that even though this update will impact on more than 2.3% of all searches on their search engine, they have still requested/allowed webmasters to submit any site that they think should have been impacted but was not impacted by Penguin 2.0 for a manual review. Simply click on the link to submit a site for a manual review by Google.

It is always the hours and days after an algorithm change that demand from webmasters close surveillance of their search traffic to see if they were positively or negatively affected by the update. I suggest strongly tracking changes by using the compare feature of Google Analytics for before and after the 22nd May 2013 to see differences. And dont worry – If you were affected negatively and ‘punished’ by Google – it will be a clear drop in traffic and you will see it, there will be no guess work involved to decide if your site was punished. For those who were not negatively affected by the change – Dont forget your competitors could be really suffering from a sudden drop in web traffic at this time as well and hencea drop in their business in the next few weeks until they sort their website out, so you could use this time to grow your business and re-enforce you new found high rankings for a variety of keywords. Dont just stop SEO work if things went well for your site with this update, invest more to solidify the gains.
 
By Paul Vesely

Every year or so, Google does a major algorithm change. Generally speaking they do not warn anyone about this. Google engineers sit and plan the algorithm change with the Google Management Team – most notably Matt Cutts who is the head of search quality. Then they do a lot of testing in the Google sandbox to see how search results are affected by the change and if the algorithm does in-fact ‘penalize’ the websites that Google deems less relevant and of lower quality. Then if all passes the sandbox test and after a lot of tweaking, Google slowly releases the new algorithm like a disease in different locations until the whole world is suffering under this new algorithm. Why suffering you ask? Because many decent and non-spammy webmasters and websites are usually hit or caught up in the penalties dished out by any algorithm change.

You should be asking yourself ‘How can I prepare my website for this latest algorithm change?’ Matt Cutts said in his blog on May 13^th 2013 that the algorithm change will be released ‘soon’.

You can see from the video above in which Matt Cutts explains the main focus of the algorithm update is to penalize sites using  “black hat web spam” tactics and he mentioned that this update is more comprehensive than Penguin 1. So what does that mean?

Lets look over the brief history of Google’s last 3 major algorithm updates and see the pattern of dates each algorithm update was released and what each update focused on:

• “Caffeine” Feb 2010 – speed and better indexing of blogs/news/new articles
• “Panda” Feb 2011 – focus on content and onpage quality
• “Penguin” Apr 2012 – over optimization

So according to dates and times of algorithm updates it does seem that Google are ready to release a new update shortly. And this update comes with warning shots fired by Matt Cutts and the Google team which usually does not happen. A lot of other algorithm changes were found out in hind sight by webmasters realizing a huge drop in traffic and rankings, but this one seems to be different. Google is communicating to webmasters and SEOer’s alike to prepare their sites and ensure all is white hat and clean (especially in certain industries such as pay day loans).

Why cant Google simply tell us the date of release of the new algorithm? Matt explains this is because many times, Google does not know when the testing will finish and the algorithm will be live. It has meant in the past that there was no way for webmasters to prepare their sites for such changes even if they were not using spammy or black hat tactics. With this official announcement by Matt, I hope that all webmasters will start to further ‘clean things up’ in preparation so as not to be balcklisted or penalized by Google.

I would like to finish with my recommendation of how to prepare for this update:

1. Check your Google Webmaster Tools account and ensure
   • Inlinks are not all using the same over optimized anchor text
   • Inlinks are coming from a large variety of quality and relevant sources
   • Contact webmasters to take off links pointing to your website if they come from low quality or irrelevant sources
   • Failing that use the disavow link tool
   • There are no messages or warnings

And in the future how to prepare for the inevitable future algorithm changes? Simply play by the rules if you like it or not. Read Google’s user guidelines and ensure you build and optimize your website in line with Google policies. Optimization is fine, SEO is fine, just do it in a white hat way and your site will rank highly on SERP’s and you will get the quality traffic that you deserve. Google makes the rules, so we all have to play by them until ICANN or other internet NGO’s take more control of the internet and create tighter regulations for these search giants like Google and Bing.

There is always a lot of talk about if a DMOZ listing helps your website rank and its SEO value. Google definitely uses the directory DMOZ to help it index new sites that may not already be listed in its results. The question is:

1. Is there any link juice generated?
2. Does a link from DMOZ ensure higher rankings?

One thing is for sure – DMOZ is a strictly guarded directory and Google gives any website that has editors and quality guidelines more respect and hence more weight in its algorithm. I have heard of people spending years trying to submit their quality website and constantly getting rejected. Rejections take months and there is no email notification of a rejected submission – just the fact that your website isn’t listed in the directory.

Matt Cutts made it clear in his video that Google notes that people rarely use directories anymore to search. Due to improvements in Google’s algorithm, people will generally type a search term directly into the search engine and not go through a directory like DMOZ filtering down through categories to find the results they desire. So that being said, it is clear that over the years Google has decreased the value of a link from any directory, including DMOZ, to your website.

In the end, the numbers speak for themselves – Research proves that most sites who are listed in DMOZ rank higher in SERP’s than sites not listed. Hence it is worth the 10 minutes to submit your site to DMOZ and hope for the best. But do not submit in bulk from the same IP address as this will not help you. And ensure that your website abides by the DMOZ quality standards and that you do not use any type of marketing slant in the title or description of your website during the submission process. That will give you the best chances of getting your website submission in DMOZ accepted and listed.

My final suggestion is not to build your whole inbound link plan’s reliance on getting a DMOZ inlink. If you do indeed get your website listed in DMOZ, that is a good thing, but you need to ensure you are gaining ininks form other sources too. The best way to ensure that is actively speaking to other webmasters to get links and also creating high quality content that organically attracts links.

Whats the best way to get a message out to tech geeks, computer freaks, hacks, developers, online junkies and anyone who thinks they know anything about technology?

MAKE A VIRAL VIDEO

And that’s exactly what Internet Explorer (IE) have done. On 29th November 2012 IE released a video which has already (as of today 2nd December 2012) had 1.5 million hits on youtube. It’s aim was to help convert all those ‘influencer’s’ back over to IE. If IE want to change perceptions so as to get more users to return back to using their browser – I can say that at least this is an entertaining way of starting that process. In a world of ‘don’t take yourself too seriously’ I respect the marketing angle IE have taken with this video.

At least it is entertaining but my opinion Chrome is much faster and smoother to use. Chrome uses strong caching and it has excellent free add-ons for those who want a bit more grunt under the hood. See my previous article about Chrome here and about browser wars here for full stats on people’s usage of different browsers.

See how the browser wars are playing out and who is on the rise and who is on the decline.

Many of you have blogs or update a news section of a website and want some SEO tips of how to optimize your blog post or article and increase the number of people clicking through to it.

One technique I would like to focus on is an on-page optimization technique using special code on the page to encourage search engines to rank your blog post or article higher on their results page (SERP). This special code is not a secret code but fairly well known to web developers and SEO experts and is called using ‘rich snippets’. Rich snippets encourage search engines to rank your webpage higher because it makes it easier for the crawler to index details about your page in an organized way.

What do I mean by using rich snippets?

Using a certain markup language (in the code of your website) you can have details like date of publishing, author name, picture and video tags and many more tags (also known as ‘rich snippets’) that will show up on the results page of a search engine. Google itself on its webmaster tools blogs says “our algorithms are more likely to decide to show a rich snippet in Google’s search results.” Wow! That’s encouraging and enough of a motivation to utilize rich snippets in itself.

There is another very compelling reason to use rich snippets and the correct markup language in the on-page coding of your website. It also encourages more clicks. And more clicks equals more traffic to your website.

Why is this?

When a searcher sees a page of results – they are more likely to click on a result that has more information about what they are about to see. Here is an example of what a rich snippet result on Google looks like as opposed to a regular result. Notice how the rich snippet result below has a picture of the author, the authors name and the date of the article. Not only does it give the searcher more information to see on the SERP but it also makes this result stand out more hence attracting more clicks than other results that are ranked higher.

Google have also developed a tool allowing webmasters to see if your rich snippets and schema tags are working correctly and how they will look displayed on the Google search results page. Use this link here: http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets

As with any type of markup language, you need to understand what you are doing when placing it in the code of your blog or website, but it will no doubt help your website rise in rank and also get more clicks and hence visitors from search engines. You can read about the Google rich snippets guidelines here.

I also strongly suggest understanding and utilizing schema markup on your website. It is the standard and accepted markup language for all search engine algorithms for indexing. http://schema.org/

Even if the code and markup language is too difficult for you to implement make sure your webmaster or web developer is utilizing it – in fact demand it. It will help you optimize your website and get your on page SEO in order and help you rank higher in SERP’s and also gain more visitors to your blog posts and articles.

Google recently introduced a tool allowing webmasters to essentially delete from their records or disavow inlinks to your website. In an ever increasingly competitive online world where websites viciously fight for top positions on Google (the major search engine used in the US and in many other countries), why would this tool be such a relief that it is finally offered? And how can this new tool help your website increase visitor traffic and help you sell more via your website?

A quick catch up for those unfamiliar with the Google algorithm that determines what rank (position) your website will be on its search engine results page (SERP):

Google has made many recent updates to its algorithm to include many onpage factors in deciding upon the ranl of your website for a certain search phrase, but a major factor that still affects your website rank on Google’s results page is the amount of inlinks your website has (the number of other websites having a link pointing to your website).

Now that we are all on the same page, let’s delve into this new tool that allows you as a webmaster to disavow and essentially delete inlinks from the Google algorithm counting them. Let’s also see how this tool can help your website improve in rank on Google and gain more traffic and hence hopefully more sales and conversions via your website.

There are many reasons why your website would have what is referred to as ‘link spam’.

1. Maybe you had a poor SEO person doing inlinking for you in a way that has now penalized your website because the links were seen as spam by the ever evolving Google algorithm. This could mean the links were all coming from one or a few websites or they all had the same anchor text or they were from totally unrelated websites or Google did a manual blacklisting of the links because they were found to be ‘purchased’ which is against Google’s TOS.
2. Maybe your competitor created links on blacklisted sites or link spammed intentionally to drop your website rank so they will rise on the SERP. The Google algorithm thought that it was you or your site doing this poor linking and hence your site was either blacklisted or penalized in rank in the SERP by the Google algorithm.

Either way this new Google tool allows you to disavow links. Of course you should first try to contact the websmaster of the site that has the problematic links that you have identified and ask them to take them down. If they don’t remove the links then you can simply click on this link: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/disavow-links-main and log into your Google Webmaster Tools account. Make sure you have the correct website selected and then upload the text file (one url per line) of all the URL’s of the links you want to disavow and delete from the Google algorithm that point to your website. It’s as simple as that.

Of course Google does not say how long it takes to process the request to disavow these inlinks or even if it will disavow all the links you listed – but it is finally an outlet to get the links disavowed if the respective webmasters of the other sites wont take them down.

For those unaware of how to find what sites link to you – the best and cheapest (its free) place is actually to look on Google Webmaster Tools. Simply scour over all the links listed – try to contact the respective webmasters to take off any links you think could be flagged as spam by the Google algorithm and if they wont take the links down – use this tool.

How will this help your website?

Firstly I wholeheartedly implore you not to abuse this tool (there is only one file allowed to be uploaded per website). Ensure you do not disavow good links because that will drop the rank of your websites on SERPs and have the opposite effect you want. The idea is to utilize this tool to ensure your competitors are not link spamming you and you have control over rouge inlinks that may have been created in the past and you don’t want related to your website anymore. To utilize this tool to its fullest to increase your rank on Google’s SERP I suggest you continue your on page SEO such as creating great content that is link bait. Continue your ‘white hat’ SEO techniques to gain more inlinks and your website will rise healthily through the SERPs to higher and higher positions for your targeted keywords. With proper researched keywords that you are optimizing your website for – the targeted traffic will flow more and more into your website allowing you to sell more and convert more visitors to your site.

With the much promoted arrival of Google Drive – which is Google’s attempt to enter the cloud computing/information storage and sharing market, many will be asking how does Google Drive’s cloud storage system allow me to better my business practices and make more money?

Google Drive allows you, your employees, your clients and your business to utilize its cloud storage product to enhance the way you all interact, share and save documents, access documents and change documents.

What is cloud storage?

Cloud storage allow users to upload files though the internet into folders that are not stored on a local computer but are stored and accessible via the internet. These files can be photo’s, word or excel documents, PowerPoint presentations, videos or just about any type of electronic file. The files can be accessed and shared via just about any device with access to the internet such as a tablet, smart phone or regular computer. Of course the files that are uploaded into your folders are all only accessible after typing in passwords and being ‘invited’ to view specific folders (for security reasons) meaning your files in the cloud are meant to be secure. And don’t worry if it is a bright sunny day – cloud storage works even when there are no clouds in the sky- ha ha ha. A few current cloud storage products that already exist and that you might have heard of or be using are: Amazon Cloud Drive, Dropbox, Microsoft SkyDrive and the Apple iCloud to name a few of the biggest ones.

How does Google Drive differ?

Full disclosure: I am a big fan of Google products. In general they are well integrated and very user friendly and I have found Drive to be an exceptional product. Of course when a Google product like Google+ is flopping– I am not scared to say it.

Google Drive differs from its competitors because firstly it offers all users a massive 5GB of free storage straight away. Just to give you an example of a close competitor – Dropbox offers all users 2MB free storage and then a bit of extra free storage for each friend you sign up. The prices of the larger storage packages of Google Drive also greatly out-price competitors in terms of value for money….or value for storage space as we say.

Another great feature is that Google Drive keeps track (up to 30 days) of all changes to a document so you can go back to past versions if need be (and we’ve all be there). It has a paid option for saving all version forever (well at least until a massive meteor smashes into the earth and kills all living things).

Lastly, but just as important, it is already well integrated into Google products like Google Docs and Google+ where there is easy upload of documents and pictures from these Google products to Drive. And in the future Google has announced it will further integrate Google Drive into Gmail allowing easy referencing of documents that are located in Google Drive in your Gmail emails instead of attaching heavy documents that need to have versions written to keep track.

All in all Google Drive seems like a great product and very useful for your business. It allows your employees/clients to share documents and work on the same one document and simply saves each version. It gets rid of thousands of kilobytes of wasted storage on your tablet, PC or smart phone that makes it operate slowly because you can now simply store it all in a secure folder in Google Drive for free or with one of their cheap monthly paid packages. And you can work smarter and better with Google Drive especially when  it is integrated into Gmail for your emails.

Have a look at this cool short promo video explaining Google Drive is:

What do you think about Google Drive? Feel free to comment below……

Recently Matt Cuttsreleased on the Google Webmaster Tools blog a warning that coincided with an upgrade to Google’s current algorithm regarding how they reduce the trust rank of websites with long histories of patterns that look like link spam.

Firstly you need to understand the Google Penguin update is an update in which Google is trying to increase the quality of their search results by filtering out spammy websites. The Penguin update focused on more quality and engaging onpage content plus attempted to ensure that links to your website looked natural.

This most recent update to Penguin focused solely on inlinks (meaning links to your website from any other website).  In the past a major tactic to rank highly on the search engine results page (SERP) of Google was to simply have as many inlinks as possible (preferably from websites that were related to you, but not necessarily). These links also included getting links from major online article websites, and online directories. Most of these links all used the same anchor text for the hyperlink – and of course that anchor text was your keyword(s).

Well Google have now released a game changer!

Is your website next to be penalized?

What to do to ensure you are not penalized:

Firstly ensure you constantly check the inbox of your Google Webmaster Tools account because Google has started sending out explicit emails to webmasters in which they state that their website has been blacklisted. And don’t worry, if you think it is unjustified, Google have an online process of appealing.

Why wait for Google to drop your website off its SERP’s? Why not be pro-active. I suggest you go through the list of all the backlinks that point at your site and check if there is too many using the same anchor text and of course if the link comes from a possibly ‘spammy’ place. Use the inlinks listed in your webmaster tools account and of course I suggest using SEOmoz’s open site explorer. If you find spammy links, simply contact the websmasters and attempt to get these links removed. But remember you should not go wild dropping lots of inlinks to your website without replacing them with other quality links so that you will remain in your positions on the SERPs.

In conclusion, when Matt Cutts wrote his blog entry about this last week, he did not want to stir panic, I believe he genuinely wants to pre-warn those blackhat SEO’ers and also tell the rest of us, to go over our inlnks, check they look natural, and ensure we keep a clean house.

With Facebook stating it has over 900 million monthly activate users, most companies simply open up a Facebook page about their business and hope for the best. But is this really utilizing the power of social media for your business?

Reports today (July 18^th 2012) by a Capstone report that says that Facebook is stagnating in growth. The Capstone report claims that in the last 6 months, Facebook’s user base decreased by 1.1%. This coupled with Google claiming it has 170 million users so far as part of its Google+ social network starts to beg the question, are the users moving over to Google+ or is there less engagement in social networks in general?

Many web users see the rise of Google+ from July 2011 with 10 million users to July 2012 with 170 million users as a big jump, but Mark Zuckerberg is not impressed. Zuckerberg says that the correct measure of a social network’s success is all about how many shares, how long users are engaged on the site or how many interactions between users. Neither company is releasing these detailed figures so it is hard to get a clear picture of which of these two giant social networks is truly gaining strength. It would be interesting to see how many actual ‘active’ users Google+ has and also what has caused the decline is users of Facebook in the last 6 months. Of course just because Google+ state they have 170 million users does not mean that all of these users are active and use the network, or are simply signed up and never spend time on there.

How does this affect your business’s SEO social media strategy?

In essence a good social media strategy involves creating a profile on as many platforms as possible. Of course Facebook is the big one, but there are many current and potential customers hanging out on a variety of other sites such as Google+, twitter, LinkedIn etc.

Once your company has a presence on these platforms, your branding should always stay consistent but the way in which you send out messages to your audience should suit the platform. Of course it doesn’t help having a very formal message on Facebook which is more of a casual network. It should be a fun and engaging message. The difference is subtle but the difference in response to your posts and page can be very large depending you’re your style of message. For example: when making a status update about an upcoming tradeshow you are attending, you can be formal: “Company XYX will be attending the Trade Show ‘Technology 2030’ in Las Vegas”. Or you can be more social minded “We will be at the trade show Technology 2030 and we’d love to meet up with you. Leave a message or like to be contacted”.

The next important social media strategy is not to go silent on your audience. A lot of companies start up social network profile and after a while stop posting and updating images, events etc. This is disastrous to your brand and it is best not to have a social presence at all, if you don’t have the time to keep up your communication through this channel.

Lastly, know that social networks are a place where you have the ability for your business name or product to spread virally. Do as much as you can to help this happen with engaging and interesting images, posts and videos.

Conclusion

No matter if Facebook user numbers are decreasing or it is still unclear if Google+ will succeed, your business needs to be listed on these social networks and it is best to stick to the best practices set out above to ensure that your listings on these social networks are successful.