January 6, 2023 / Search Engine Optimization / by Kathy Alice
Category Archives for Search Engine Optimization
November 17, 2021 / Search Engine Optimization / by Kathy Alice
You never know what’s going to happen when it comes to SEO, but 2021 stands out. Compared to 2020, we had more than 6 confirmed Google Updates and even more unconfirmed updates. Google also made some refinements to rankings and to how the SERPs (search engine result pages) work.
This post was updated December 30, 2021 because even more Google Updates occurred after it was first published!
“Summer of Updates”
Not only did we have the two back to back Core Updates in June and July, we got several Spam Updates, the Product Review Update, and the Page Experience rollout for Mobile for a busy 2021 “Summer of Updates”.
Per SEMrush, desktop results for January 2021 through October 2021 had 68% more high volatility days than in 2020. Mobile was even tumultuous with 84% more volatile days.
Google Search keeps evolving
2021 also saw Passages Ranking, the final phase of Mobile Indexing, and a change in how Google generates web titles.
The latter caused consternation among SEOs and a flurry of tweets showing examples of crappy web titles in the Google SERPs snippets. Below is an example where Google got it wrong even for its own web site.
Fortunately Google adjusted the system in September and it has been performing better.
Google 2021 Updates
So much happened in 2021, I found myself losing track. Accordingly, I created this post as a reference for myself and others.
- February – Passage Ranking
- March – Mobile Indexing for the whole Web
- April – Product Review Update
- June – June Core Update, Page Experience, and Spam Updates
- July – July Core Update, and Spam Updates
- August – Change in generated web titles
- October – Continuous scrolling
- November – Another Core and Spam Update
- December – Another Product Review Update and a Local Update too
(Literally as I am pushing the Publish button on this post on November 17th, there is another Core Update rolling out …)
September 16, 2020 / Core Web Vitals, Geek Corner, Search Engine Optimization / by Kathy Alice
So Google Search Console has told you you have pages with poor LCP. Or you have run Google Lighthouse on a page that complains of a LCP longer than 4 seconds.
LCP, Largest Contentful Paint, is one of the new Core Web Vitals, which include FID (First Input Delay) and CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift). The Core Web Vitals are part of Google’s new ranking factor: Page Experience that will be implemented in 2021.
But which element on your page is the LCP?
August 7, 2020 / SEO Guides / by Kathy Alice
The HTML title tag is a HTML element that defines the title of a web page. HTML document titles are used in a number of ways, including by the search engines such as Google.
Title tags are significant for SEO because:
- They are used as a ranking signal by search engines
- They appear in the search engine result pages as the clickable headline of a search listing (commonly called snippets).
Title tags are different than, and should not be confused with the H1 tag which also sometimes is referred to as the title of a page.
Unlike a H1 tag, you won’t find the title tag appearing anywhere on the web page. Like HTML meta tags, the title tag is part of a collection of tags that convey information about the page rather than containing the text that is visible is on the web page.
Also Known As
- Page titles
- SEO titles
February 17, 2019 / Search Engine Optimization / by Kathy Alice
How many times have you heard or read that it is critical for SEO to have keywords in your title tags? And that you want your keywords in the front of the tag?
There’s no shortage of advice out there about title tags and keywords, many advocating a “keyword first” title tag rule.
… “Having the keyword first means better rankings” …
… “inserting your keywords at the start of your title tag will enable search engines to crawl those words faster.” …
… “keywords closer to the beginning of your title tag may have more impact on search rankings” …
So after seeing this good advice, a site owner then pops into a keyword research tool and looks for the most relevant and highest volume keyword they can find that is a match for their page. And they create a title tag that looks something like this:
Home Workout Equipment – Sitename
I hope you agree, this is not a winning title tag that get clicks.
October 4, 2018 / Search Engine Optimization / by Kathy Alice
If you are a SEO you know of Screaming Frog, a tool used to analysis a website by crawling each page on the site as a search spider would. Screaming Frog just released version 10, a major enhancement that just may make it my new favorite toy.
Embracing the Concept of Indexable
One of my biggest beefs with Screaming Frog has been that it didn’t have the concept of indexability. Let me illustrate what I mean by this with an example.
When you crawl a website with Screaming Frog, it organizes the results into tabs that align with on page elements important for SEO. The titles tab lists the URLs and the title tags found on the page which then can be filtered for potential SEO issues such as duplicate title tags.
It’s frustrating to see a list of pages with duplicate titles only to investigate and find out they have been addressed with the canonical tag. If only Screaming Frog understood the concept of indexability and showed me only duplicate titles that have not been addressed. Other crawlers such as Deep Crawl and OnCrawl do this, why not Screaming Frog?
In version 10 Screaming Frog has addressed this shortcoming. In most of the tabs you’ll find two new fields, Indexability and Indexability Status. The first field is set by the crawl to either “Indexable” or “Non-Indexable”, the second field will tell you why Screaming Frog considers the page Non-Indexable. For example the status field could be set to “Canonicalised” (Screaming Frog is a British company, hence the “s” instead of “z”) indicating that the page is not indexable because there is a pointer to a “canonical” (or representative) page of a group of pages.
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