Google is constantly tweaking and refining its algorithm, but a couple of times a year a significant enough change is made that webmasters really notice. This most recent change, called the “mayday” change due to it’s timing (around May 1st) impacted long tail searches the most. Some sites noticed, some did not. Matt Cutts in the below video explains more:
While wordpress.com has given you a way to blog under your own domain using custom mapped domains …. it hasn’t been a perfect solution. If you set it up right when you started blogging, there is no issue, your content gets out on the net under your own domain (eg. joesmith.com rather than joesmith.wordpress.com). But for those of us that have a subdomain well established under wordpress.com it was less than ideal. Why? Because the redirect from xxx.wordpress.com to xxx.com was a 302 redirect rather than a 301 redirect.
302 redirects, which means “temporarily moved” are treated by the search engines in an unpredictable manner, your original URL might get indexed or your new one .. who knows. In contrast, a 301 redirect, “moved permanently”, created a much better chance of your new URL getting the index and the traffic.
wordpress has fixed this now though, now the redirect from your wordpress.com subdomain to your custom domain is now a search engine friendly 301 redirect. Now, there is no excuse for me not to create a domain for my real estate wordpress.com blog.
Adding a listing to Google Local Business Center helps your local bricks and mortar business get found by web searchers. Google Local Business Center is integrated with Google local search – that list of results that show up as a map with locations. If you type in a search term plus a geographic term such as “Thai food Fremont” you will often get these “map” results.
Google Map Results
The problem has been that you needed a business address for this to really work for you. Many home based businesses don’t want to publish their home addresses and their service area may be different than where they live. Some home based businesses have gotten PO Boxes just to get a better listing in local search. But a pin on a map that points to a PO Box isn’t necessarily that useful.
Well a fix from google now available. In an indepth interview with Eric Enge, Carter Maslan shares the concept of service areas that google is introducing. If you are a dog walker that serves an area differently than where you live, this update is for you. You can now specify what area you want to appear in for a local search. Check out the service area help page for more info.
Part 2 of What are Meta Tags?
We now know what are meta tags (previous post) and that they are really only two that we care about (well most of us, there are some additional ones that should be in a webmasters tool kit). So how do search engines use meta tags?
Keywords meta tag:
It used to be that you could put the keywords you wanted to rank for into the keyword meta tag, and the more the better right? Then you could sit back and consider yourself done with your SEO efforts. This has not been true for a while. Google completely ignores this tag and has for years, and while yahoo and bing probably look at the tag, it is not clear that they give it much weight in determining how to rank your site. Regardless, do not put 30+ keywords into this tag, this is known as keyword stuffing and will only harm your page. Keep it to 10 at most. If you do use adsense or other context driven ads on your site, there is evidence that they use the tag to determine what ads to show.
Description meta tag:
Technically this meta tag doesn’t help your web page rank any better, but it is still important. Why? Because if this tag is set, google will often show it as the snippet underneath the title in the SERPs (search engine results pages) rather than grabbing some random chunk of text off your page. I’ve seen some funny snippets over the years, usually from sites that have no text, so you get a snippet that says “you need flash version xxx to view this site”. Is that going to entice you to click? You can think of your description meta tag as the “welcome” mat to your site. Put together a catchy description (no more than 160 characters as that is all that will show) that will invite your reader to click through to find out more.
I saw a blog post on when to use microsites vs. multiple domains. The blog post wasn’t that helpful, but reminded me that I wanted to sharpen my understanding of when:
In my corporate web job, we often used subdomains because we were hosting the new website (usually an application rather than a pure HTML site) on separate servers. But then we would often create a “vanity URL” on the main site that redirected to the sub site. Interesting, but not necessarily helpful to answering the question or when, from the marketing or SEO perspective multiple domains is called for.
I was confused on what the term “microsite” meant. The wikipedia definition: “cluster of pages which are meant to function as an auxiliary supplement to a primary website … most likely has its own domain name or subdomain” helped quite a bit. From both the technical and user experience perspective, it makes sense to install something like a forums, catalog or other separate feature on a subdomain, like maps.google.com .. or even on a completely separate domain. And if it will have a distinct brand identity, a separate domain is called for. One more reason, mentioned by the wikipedia entry, is that it can help target your PPC keywords more accurately.
Subdomains appear to be treated similarly to sub-directories by search engines per Matt Cutts, which means you may not get much SEO benefit for the added complexity.
So microsites usually mean additional domains. However just because you want to expand your web presence into a related but different topic than your web site already covers, doesn’t necessary mean a new domain. A new domain adds management and other costs, and you might have to start from scratch to get it indexed by the search engines. You are also missing out on the opportunity to get your original site to rank for more searches because it has more content.
However, I’ve seen creation of a blog on wordpress.com or blogspot.com with links to a main site be quite helpful for ranking for desirable keywords. A specific tactic to keep in mind.
I have been blessed with some modest athletic abilities. When I was playing a lot of volleyball, I achieved moments of pure perfection on the court. The spike I put away that rocketed past two defenders. The dig I got that ended in a roll, due to the stretch and momentum it took to get there. After that perfect dig one of my teammates said, “That was beautiful”.
These moments are so wonderful when they happen that sometimes they blind us to how to win the game. Which is … consistency and high percentages of not necessarily winners but keeping the ball in play.
Consistency is what we all need to do more with in our jobs and our businesses. Would you rather have a site that was a flash in the plan and earned a lot of money in one week or the site that is a steady if not spectacular earner for years?
Think of this in the context of PPC vs. SEO as a SEM strategy. While arguments can be made to the contrary, PPC in general is better for quick results and SEO is slower and works best with consistent efforts. Which one do you prefer?
According to a seomoz.org article, page title, or the title tag, is one of the top five SEO ranking factors. After experiencing several phone conversations having to explain what a page title was, and more importantly, helping them locate it (… no higher, above the URL box … at the very top … see it?). I thought I would upload a hastily thrown together image as a reference for future conversations.
Title Tag encircled in red above
But before I did that, I realized I should eat my own dogfood and install the All in One SEO Pack in this wordpress blog. This allows the title tag to be set to something other than the blog post title as well as setting the meta keyword and description tags, eliminating the conflict over choosing a catchy blog post title that is devoid of keywords in favor of a well optimized one. An action long overdue, especially given that I had installed it on quite a few other blogs already.
However to be honest I have spent very little time on SEO of this blog, the subject matter is frightfully competitive and my SEO efforts are better spent elsewhere. But it’s just one of those wordpress plug-ins you should just install.
I am always amazed at the number of small businesses centers that do not know about Google Local Business Center. The word is getting out there but slowly.
If you search on a keyword phrase that includes a geographic term, especially a city name, you will likely get a list of several results (often 10) that click into a map results. These are local businesses that have a physical presence and relevance for the term you typed in.
The idea was to give local brick and mortar businesses visibility in the SERPS. Usually these businesses have no or an inadequate web presence and can certainly use the help.
Registering with Google Local Business Center is free. You can add pictures and video to your entry. Make sure you have your physical address on your web site and participate in the verification that google will do when you add a listing into the LBC. Check out the below video for more:
Everyone wants their site to be found by google, right? Who wouldn’t want more free traffic delivered to their site? The goal of getting onto page 1 of the SERPs (search engine result pages) is such a holy grail, that a whole service industry called search engine optimization has come into it’s own.
But traffic doesn’t always come from the search engines. And some online businesses are not at all interested in marketing to just anyone, but rather just to a targeted clientele that comes to them virally rather via search.
Meet invitation only sites such as Rue La La a luxury e-tailer that seeks to promote an air of exclusivity. To become a member, you have to be invited, and only then can you have access to its discounted designer goods.
Putting your site behind an authentication prompt, which Rue La La has done, is one way to hide your pages from the search engines. Another is through directives in a file, robots.txt, you place on your site. Sites such as Gilt Groupe, another invite only site have excluded many of their site’s directories from the spiders.
So if you are searching for a killer deal on that Gucci bag online, be aware there are certain sites that are completely hidden from you unless you are “in the know”.
Unless you can put a tick by most of the elements in our list then your web site is NOT very search engine friendly.
If a search engine is to regard your web site as truly search engine friendly it must be able to tick a lot more of the items in our list than was ever previously the case.
If you can not in all honesty tick enough elements on the list below, then you have some catching up to do, especially when this is not a complete list.
You might also like to try our optimization tutorial quiz to see how search engine friendly your website is compared to our full list of fifty factors.
There are ten questions in our online search engine optimization tutorial quiz that cover all the essential aspects for a search engine friendly website and cover the essential elements of optimization that you should have on your own web site.
An optimization tutorial following the quiz explains why all of the elements are important in making your site well optimized and search engine friendly.
To determine how well your site is optimized take our search engine optimization tutorial and see what you could do to improve it.
You will not be asked to sign-up for anything, or provide any personal details.
About the Author:
Andy Theekson has 8 years of experience in web site design and search engine optimization and offers free advice and a wide range of website optimization services.