April 21, 2014 / Search Engine Optimization / by Kathy Alice


If you do on page SEO work on a regular basis, you need some key tools to give you information about the page you are looking at. Some, but not all, of the information you need can be obtained by viewing the HTML source, but these cool Chrome extensions make a lot easier to review key SEO on page settings such as the title, meta_robots and canonical tags as well as viewing the HTTP response headers from a page and even to diagnose a slow performing page. And if you don’t use Chrome? Not to worry, many of these are available as Firefox add ons as well.

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June 24, 2013 / Search Engine Optimization / by Kathy Alice


bingMany SEOs will tell you to focus on optimizing your site for Google and that will be sufficient to rank well in other search engines such as Bing. But there are times where it’s useful to look at how your web pages are ranking in Bing, as there are times that pages rank differently in Bing than in Google.

Recently I took a look at a case of a site that was ranking in position #1 for a search term on Bing – but was not even on the first page in Google. The question from my client (who consistently had the number one spot on Google but ranked third or fifth on Bing) was “why is this site beating me out?” I did a comparison of the two pages to see if I could figure out the answer.

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June 2, 2013 / Search Engine Optimization / by Kathy Alice


Three years is an awfully long time ago in the internet age. Let’s take a trip in the Internet way back machine to see what SEO used to be. That’s when we used to think of SEO of as a two pronged discipline, namely on-page optimization and off page optimization. Off page optimization, or linkbuilding has been replaced by inbound marketing. On page optimization is still very valid, but its boundaries have gotten rather fuzzy.

It used to be all about keywords, keywords, keywords. Keywords in your title tag, keywords in your header tags, keyword density. Keywords are still really important, but so is engagement and user behavior as signals the search engine algorithms pay attention to. It’s not just about getting the traffic, it’s winning the hearts and minds of the user once they are on your site.

You want to take that optimization and conversion mindset and apply it to the little welcome mat that Google builds for your page when it ranks for a search query. Known as a snippet, this is the listing that appears in Google’s search results pages, called SERPs for short.

Rich Video Snippet
Rich Video Search Snippet from AllRecipes.com
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May 14, 2013 / Search Engine Optimization / by Kathy Alice


UPDATE: January 13, 2014. On December 31, 2013 Google updated GWMT search query data to be “less rounded”. If you visit GWMT you’ll see a line marking where the change took place.

UPDATE: September 30, 2013. Last week we found out that Google is extending SSL protection to users that are not signed in. This means that for ALL organic search traffic that Google sends to your site, the keywords will be removed and replaced with “not provided”. At this point in time, Bing is continuing to provide webmaster keywords in the referrer string.

Starting in October 2011, keywords used in secure searches are now hidden from webmasters by Google. This means that in Google Analytics (or in any other analytics tool), keywords from these searches show up as not provided. A secure search could mean the user is logged into a Google account, is using Firefox 14 or is just explicitly using secure search. A lot has been written about this controversial move, which was done ostensibly to protect privacy but did not extend to Adwords.

not provided in Google Analytics
More than 60% of the keywords used to find my site are hidden from me

Although Google initially stated that the change would affect 10% of queries, there are many sites where the percentage is much higher. In WebEnso’s case, keywords for 62% of searches fall under not provided, and the percentage is still climbing. 62% is a huge percentage. This means that more than two out of three keywords used to find my site is hidden from me. So what to do?

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April 1, 2013 / Search Engine Optimization / by Kathy Alice


GoogleAs a SEO consultant you develop certain filters, some might even say blinders. You look at websites differently than other people. Some aspects of a website you ignore, but others, like the user experience and the content you pay close attention to. A good example of this is site search, the search functionality you find on many sites.

WordPress SEO search page on webenso.comA routine technical SEO recommendation is to noindex any search pages that are crawlable on a site.

If you are not sure what I mean by search pages: go to the search box on this site, webenso.com and type in “wordpress seo” you’ll get a page that looks like the below and has a URL that has a
?s=wordpress+seo query string in it.

Either you don’t want Google to find those URLs or the pages should have the meta robots tag on it set to noindex.

But I’m not here to dive into the details of noindex and technical SEO. My point is that as a SEO you disregard the search pages once addressed and forget about them. This is what I mean by blinders. We SEOs are so focused on Google search, with an occasional journey into Bing search, that we don’t always see the potential that the other search engines have to disrupt the search industry.

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January 31, 2013 / WordPress / by Kathy Alice


This post was originally published March 6, 2011. In it I published a WordPress ping list and an explanation on what I had done to vet it. However 2 years later I drastically reduced my ping list when I found out that pinging many (and potentially spammy) services might actually hurt your Google rankings.

What is a WordPress Ping List?

Whenever you publish a new post or make edits to your existing ones, WordPress will send a notification (called a ping) to the services on your ping list to let them know about your new or updated post. It’s been a good way to get the word out about your blog.

WordPress out of the box comes set up to notify one service rpc.pingomatic.com, and users can add to the list in the writing settings, as many bloggers have. However there are much better ways to notify Google of your new page or post.

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