luni, 11 februarie 2013

SEO Blog

SEO Blog


3 Social Media Bloopers & What You Can Learn From Them

Posted: 11 Feb 2013 10:13 AM PST

You wouldn't think it, but you can do a lot of damage in 140 characters or less. There are some people who know this too well – the offenders who have committed social media bloopers that were so damaging that their stories live on the Internet to this day. While...
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Tips For Keeping Your Web Users Interested

Posted: 11 Feb 2013 10:07 AM PST

According to recent studies, it takes a web user only seven seconds to decide whether he/she wants to browse a certain website. This means that if your website does not give off an alluring first impression, your web users will not bother to browse it. Your useful content may, therefore,...
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What Social Media Products Can And Cannot Do For Your Business

Posted: 11 Feb 2013 09:57 AM PST

Whatever your business, these days you cannot run a successful marketing strategy without involving social media in one way or another. There are many different facets to the use of social media for marketing purposes, including creating brand awareness, influencing brand perception, increasing traffic to your website, conducting research about...
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Top 5 Topics To Know Of SEO

Posted: 11 Feb 2013 09:52 AM PST

Search engine optimizing is a complicated and large topic to cover. There are many aspects of this subject. Books could be written on all the ins and outs of making one's site more search engine friendly. However, there are a few main topics of SEO that are worth knowing. Once...
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How To Become A Social Media Application Developer

Posted: 11 Feb 2013 09:49 AM PST

A lot of people are getting excited over social media. Social media has allowed people to communicate with each another from all over the world. Not only that, social media outlets have provided businesses with a place to engage their customers. With social media comes a lot of solid job...
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Should You Still Believe In SEO?

Posted: 11 Feb 2013 05:45 AM PST

Depending on who you talk to, SEO is either thriving more than ever before or on its last legs. Of course there have been many changes in the world of SEO lately, most of which being a result of Google’s big algorithm changes ‘Penguin’ and ‘Panda’; but whether or not...
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New Social Media Platforms You Should Know About

Posted: 11 Feb 2013 05:42 AM PST

Lately there have been some newer social media platforms that have been working their way up around the internet, gaining the interest of many and gaining it fast. Facebook and Twitter may still be a couple of the better ways to get your businesses name out there, but they are...
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What Are The Advantages And Disadvantages Of Video Blogging

Posted: 11 Feb 2013 03:42 AM PST

Video blogging is a popular form of blogging where a video is made and subsequently posted on the internet to elicit a response from the viewers. This form of a Web log is also known as vlogging. A video blogger generally puts out a series of blogs on the internet...
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URL Structure AND SEO Friendly Naming Practices

Posted: 11 Feb 2013 03:10 AM PST

The term 'search engine optimisation', SEO for short, covers a wide range of website practices. The aim of SEO is to allow search engines to easily locate, 'read' and rank your website which results in it being easily found by your visitors or customers. Website owners go to great lengths...
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Unique Marketing Strategies For Local Businesses

Posted: 11 Feb 2013 03:02 AM PST

With the economy as it is today, many people are very passionate about shopping at local businesses to support small, family-owned companies and young start-up shops.  But how do you catch the attention of this potential client base?  You can draw these new patrons to your local business with creative...
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How To Write SEO Content?

Posted: 10 Feb 2013 09:59 PM PST

One of the most common questions that will come up when it comes to SEO is the following – how to write SEO content? Well, anyone who knows anything about SEO will tell you that ranking high in search engine results is all about creating fresh, unique content that attracts...
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Are You Tuning In?

The White House Your Daily Snapshot for
Monday, February 11, 2013
 


Awarding the Medal of Honor: Tune in to WhiteHouse.gov/Live at 1:45 p.m. EST to watch President Obama award Staff Sergeant Clinton Romesha the Medal of Honor.

Are You Tuning In?

Tomorrow night, President Obama will deliver his State of the Union address to the nation, and we'll have something you can't find anywhere else: an exclusive, enhanced version of the speech that offers charts, facts, and other information as the President speaks.

Want to learn more? Visit WhiteHouse.gov/SOTU.

Find out how to watch State of the Union 2013

In Case You Missed It

Here are some of the top stories from the White House blog:

State of the Union 2013: President Obama's Speech is Just the Beginning
Check out all the ways you can get involved with President Obama's State of the Union Address.

Solving the Sequester: The Facts
With less than three weeks before devastating, across the board cuts—the so-called "sequester"—are slated to hit, affecting our national security, job creation and economic growth, we must make sure we are having a debate over how to deal with these looming deadlines that is based on facts.

Weekly Address: Averting the Sequester and Finding a Balanced Approach to Deficit Reduction
President Obama urges Congress to act to avoid a series of harmful and automatic cuts—called a sequester—from going into effect that would hurt our economy and the middle class and threaten thousands of American jobs.

Today's Schedule

All times are Eastern Standard Time (EST).

10:10 AM: The President receives the Presidential Daily Briefing

11:00 AM: The Vice President holds a roundtable discussion with law enforcement officials and Members of Congress on gun safety

12:30 PM: Press Briefing by Press Secretary Jay Carney WhiteHouse.gov/live

1:45 PM: The President awards Clinton Romesha the Medal of Honor WhiteHouse.gov/live

WhiteHouse.gov/live Indicates that the event will be live-streamed on WhiteHouse.gov/Live

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When Responsive Design is Not an Option: a Checklist for Optimizing Your Mobile Site

When Responsive Design is Not an Option: a Checklist for Optimizing Your Mobile Site


When Responsive Design is Not an Option: a Checklist for Optimizing Your Mobile Site

Posted: 10 Feb 2013 05:34 PM PST

Posted by bridget.randolph

Kristina Kledzik recently wrote a post here on the SEOmoz blog about responsive design and why it’s often the best option when creating a mobile-friendly online experience. She discussed its advantages in dealing with usability issues, duplicate content, mobile search rankings, and link building. Google recommends using a responsive website design where this makes sense from a user perspective, and Bing encourages a "one URL per content item" approach.

Kristina makes a compelling case for responsive design. However, responsive sites can be tricky to develop, especially if the original desktop version has lots of content and/or navigation options. If you have a business or a client whose site has hundreds of thousands, or even millions of pages, it may be difficult to redesign the entire site with a responsive design. A separate mobile site, however, can start with fewer pages, and you can add more as you have time. For some businesses, responsive design is simply not the best option because their mobile visitors' needs are so different from desktop users, and thus require drastically different content. So we can’t always rely on the advice that responsive design is the preferred solution.

Aleyda Solis recently created this flowchart to illustrate the decision-making process for choosing a mobile-friendly option. Below, I’ve highlighted the "separate URL versions" option, which Aleyda recommends for when ‘you cannot implement’ a single URL/responsive design.

If your site (or your client’s) falls in this "separate URL versions" category, you’re in good company. Among the UK’s top 20 retailers, only 14 have mobile-friendly sites, and 13 of them have separate mobile sites. The pattern is similar in the US, with MongooseMetrics reporting that 73% of websites ranked in the Quantcast Top 100,000 sites used URL redirects to a mobile specific URL.

Here are a few examples of major retailers' different approaches to mobile:

      

Apple doesn’t have any type of mobile site; Ebay uses a separate URL mobile site; Currys uses a responsive design.

The good news is that mobile sites, when done correctly, are certainly able to handle these same issues of usability, duplicate content, mobile search ranking, and link building.

So, how do you optimize a mobile site to work as well as implementing a responsive design? You must ask yourself a few questions before reaching your final goal.

Information Architecture

When you’re just starting out, the first thing you need to think about is information architecture. One benefit of a mobile site (over a purely responsive design) is that you can provide the user with a drastically different experience from the desktop version. First, you need to ask some questions:

1. Does your mobile site reflect mobile users’ intent?

When structuring a mobile site, one of the first things to ask is whether mobile visitors are interacting with your site differently than desktop users. If so, your mobile site design needs to reflect this.

If you’re not sure how your users are interacting with your site, have a look at your analytics and segment out the mobile traffic. Google Analytics already has "advanced segments" for mobile and tablet traffic. The mobile segment includes traffic from tablets, though, so you may need to create a custom segment in order to view only non-tablet mobile traffic.

This can be slightly tricky, as you’ll need to use a regular expression (‘RegEx’). The setup I’m using is:

  • Name: ‘Mobile - no tablets
  • Include: ‘Mobile (Including Tablet)’ containing ‘Yes’ AND
  • Exclude: ‘Screen Resolution’ Matching RegExp (1\d|[7-9])\d\d+x.*

What this regular expression means is that this custom segment should include traffic from mobile devices but exclude traffic from devices with a screen resolution of 700+ by anything. You may decide to tweak the RegEx depending on how large (or small) a device you want to include. (Some of the larger smartphones also fall in this range, but then again, maybe these should be seeing the desktop version, as well.)

Once you have the data, focus on landing pages (are people entering your site in the right place?), conversion rate, and where people leave the conversion funnel (where are they getting stuck?); bounce rate (are people not finding what they’re looking for?); and, if possible, site search and organic search keywords (what are people looking for to begin with?). If you have analytics set up for your mobile site, you should use that data in order to see which mobile site pages are performing above or below average. For a detailed overview of what to look for, see Section 3.1: Your Mobile Users in this great article by Aleyda Solis.

2. Have you designed for the user?

Once you understand your users’ goals, you should design your site to reflect the most common reasons for visiting the site on a mobile device. An obvious example of this is using a mobile phone to find a store location near you. This feature might be less prominent on the desktop site, but for a mobile user, it should be very easy to find on the homepage.

You can also take advantage of mobile-specific features to improve the user experience. Using the same example, you could offer the option of store lookup by postcode, but also by geolocation ("use current location"). When the "nearest store" results come up, include a phone number that is click-to-call.

(Screenshots from m.primelocation.com)

3. What about tablet users?

The current recommendation from Google is to serve tablets the desktop site, rather than the mobile site. This is because user browsing patterns and screen size on a regular-sized tablet like the iPad more closely resemble desktop browsing than smartphone browsing. Also, a site that looks great on a small smartphone browser will appear too big and annoyingly grainy on the much larger tablet screen. Be sure to test the touch screen capabilities of your desktop site.

An exception to the current guideline would be if you want to provide a tablet-specific online experience, in which case you might decide to use a third subdomain (t.domain.com). As tablet sizes become more varied, this guidance may change.

Let's check out some examples of tablet-specific domains:

Example one: Colbert Nation is the official site for Comedy Central show, The Colbert Report.

Example two: Mail Tribune is a news publisher.

It's important to make sure your mobile visitors are being served the correct version of your website. My best advice is to use redirects based on user agent. If you're not redirecting based on user agent, you should set up redirects based on user agent detection, so that when someone visits the desktop site on a mobile, they are redirected to the mobile version. If possible, use server-side redirects (301s or 302s) rather than Javascript redirects; JS causes a lag in the load time (because the page has to load and then parse the JS), and a page with a Javascript redirect is less likely to be cached. Also, make sure that if someone on a desktop PC clicks a mobile link, they will be redirected to the desktop version.

A few quick tips for handling redirects to mobile site:

  • Google’s most recent guidance states that either a 301 or 302 may be used.
  • When using user agent detection, be careful of cloaking.
  • Don’t redirect all desktop pages to the mobile homepage; instead, use a mobile page which is relevant to the original. If you don’t have a relevant mobile page, consider creating a page which explains this and offers the option to view the desktop version of the desired page and/or alternate pages on the mobile site.
  • Be sure to include a link to "view desktop version" on your mobile site (and vice versa). Use cookies to ensure that if a user clicks on this option the user agent detection will be overridden and they will not be redirected again (unless they choose to switch back via the "view mobile version" option).
  • Try to use ‘mirrored’ URL structures (so that www.domain.com/hello redirects to m.domain.com/hello, not m.domain.com/xi3l3kxd. This may not be possible, however, if there’s not a one-to-one relationship between desktop and mobile pages.
  • For more information on mobile site redirects, see Cindy Krum’s article on ‘generating mobile redirects properly.
  • To avoid the appearance of duplicate content, you should use a special mobile rel=’canonical’ tag. This will be covered in more detail later.

Google Analytics

Once you’re happy with the structure of your site, you need to be able to track its usage. Jeff Tirey at Mongoose Metrics recently wrote about their fantastic study which found that on 37% of websites that are a) using Google Analytics, and b) also have separate mobile versions of their site, the mobile version is not being tracked! This is craziness. And it’s simple to fix.

1. Is your tracking code implemented properly?

If you simply haven’t added the tracking code to your mobile site, go do it now. If you aren't sure whether to use the special non-Javascript version, keep in mind that you should be able to ignore the special "tracking a mobile site" option. Instead, you should use the same Javascript code that you use on your desktop site.

The (rare) exception to this would be if you have a disproportionately high amount of traffic from feature phone (non-smartphone) users that you need to track. Feature phones don’t support Javascript, so the normal tracking code can’t track these visits. However, this is an unlikely situation, as most websites don’t see much traffic from these types of phones. If you are worried about it, you can check the site’s server logs for visits from feature phone user agents.

2. Is your mobile site data being tracked through your primary domain?

You should track your mobile site on the same web property (i.e., using the same UA-XXXXX-Y account number) as your desktop site. This requires a simple tweak in the code on both versions in order to indicate to GA that your m.domain.com site is a subdomain of your main site. You should also set up a special profile exclusively for traffic to m.domain.com. To learn more, check out these tips from Google:

Technical SEO

1. Do you have a mobile XML sitemap?

Even if you have a mobile HTML sitemap, it is best practice to create an XML sitemap for your mobile site, and submit it to Google and Bing. To learn more about how to create a mobile sitemap, check out this these instructions from the Google Webmaster Tools blog.

2. How will Google know it’s a mobile site and not duplicate content?

To make sure Google know's your mobile site is a separate entity from your main site, it's best to implement the special mobile rel=canonical tag. In order to indicate to Google that your mobile site isn’t just duplicate content, you can use a special version of the rel=canonical tag. On the desktop page, add the rel=alternate tag:

< <link rel="alternate" media="only screen and (max-width: 640px)" href="http://m.example.com/page-1" >

This tag will point to the mobile version.

On the mobile page, add the rel=canonical tag:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/page-1" >

This tag will point to the desktop version. Simple as that!

3. Make sure you’re not blocking the ‘Smartphone-Googlebot’ from your desktop version in robots.txt, and don't block regular Googlebot from the mobile version.

Bing is a bit more ambiguous in their advice (from March 2012):

"Occasionally, it may make sense to keep some URLs targeted at specific clients (e.g. mobile devices), which you can opt to block from us via the usual methods (robots.txt, webmaster tools) or not." (The emphasis is mine.)

Since the guidance is unclear, I would recommend the less drastic approach. My advice is to allow Bing to crawl your mobile and desktop sites. You can opt to follow my recommendation...or not.

On-page Optimization

1. Are your meta tags mobile-friendly?

Since mobile screens are smaller, there are fewer characters displayed in the SERPs. To adapt to the smaller screen size, it's important that your meta tags be formatted in a mobile-friendly style.  

For the best results, your title tags should be kept within 40-60 characters. Similarly, meta descriptions should be kept within 90 characters.

2. Are you targeting mobile-friendly keywords?

It's becoming increasingly important to do your keyword research specifically for mobile traffic. Mobile visitors will likely be looking for different results than desktop visitors, so you must lay the groundwork properly.

Optimizing the content on your mobile site for mobile keywords is also a great way to rank highly in the mobile SERPs (this may or may not be necessary, depending on whether they’re different from your desktop site).

3. Is your site load time too slow?

The goal for your site load time should be around 2-3 seconds. After waiting five seconds for a page to load, 74% of mobile users bounce.

You can check your page load time in Google Analytics. Use your mobile site profile (often the desktop load time is vastly different, which will mess up the averages). If you don’t yet have the data in a separate mobile site profile, you can also check this using your custom segment for non-tablet mobile devices.

Another way to increase you site load speed is to compress large images. Be sure to check other on-page elements, such as Javascript and videos, with a mobile emulator like Google’s Gomometer. Remember that certain formats, such as Flash, aren’t displayed on most mobile phones, so be conginzant of what works and what doesnt.  Also, remember to be careful with Javascript  in order to use the correct approach for your design.

Extras 

I've thrown in a few extra pieces of advice for those of you who made it this far. Keep on reading!

1. Are you missing out on easy eCommerce wins (if applicable)?

To keep your conversion rate optimization on track, here are a few points to consider:

  • Ensure the checkout/shopping baskets on your site sync across all platforms.
  • Implement larger on-site buttons so that visitors don’t have trouble clicking the correct one on their device.
  • Feature a "find-a-store" option.
  • Use click-to-call for any phone numbers listed on your site.
  • Ensure an easy, ideally 1-click checkout for customers to complete their orders.

2. Where appropriate, are you using structured data markup?

Where it makes sense, use appropriate markup on your desktop and mobile sites. This should allow rich snippets to appear in mobile SERPs.

3. Is your mobile site optimised for local search?

Approximately 40% of mobile search is local. There are two big ways to take advantage of this fact:

4. Is your video content optimised for mobile viewing?

Video is one of the most common things people do on their mobile devices. To make the process as easy as possible, consider the following:


Well there you have it, folks! Hopefully this list will come in handy for those who want to optimize a mobile site.

Did you find this information helpful? What kinds of experiences have you had in this area? What other tips and tools would you add to this list? Leave your thoughts in the comments below!


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