miercuri, 20 aprilie 2011

SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog

SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog


8 Easy Wins for On-page SEO

Posted: 19 Apr 2011 11:17 AM PDT

Posted by Dr. Pete

Even the best advice is useless if you can’t put it into play. As a consultant who started his professional life as a coder, I always try to consider the effort and cost of implementing any changes I advise. Don’t get me wrong – some difficult changes have to be made, despite the pain. Usually, though, there are a few easy wins that won’t take days of development or thousands of dollars to put into play. I’m going to give you 8 fixes to on-page SEO problems that I see pop up regularly…

“Easy” Isn’t Always Easy

A quick disclaimer – what’s “easy” for one person or on one platform might not be so easy on another. Sitewide changes (TITLE tags, for example) can be tricky, but they’re generally a lot easier than a complete redesign or a switch to a new platform. One area I won’t mention in this list is improving your URLs. Although that can be a powerful tactic, I’m seeing too many people who want to make relatively minor changes to URLs for SEO purposes. Sitewide URL changes are risky and often difficult to do correctly – they aren’t worth it to go from “good” to “slightly better”. The changes I’m proposing here are generally low-risk.

1. Canonicalize Internal Duplicates

While there may not be a duplicate content penalty (with a Capital “P”), there can be serious consequences to letting your indexed pages run wild, especially in a post-Panda world. Google often does a poor job of choosing the right version of a page, and low-authority sites can end up diluting your site's index and pushing out deeper, more important pages (like product pages).

There are three common varieties of internal duplicates, in my experience:

  1. Duplicates caused by session variables and tracking parameters
  2. Duplicates caused by search sorts and filters
  3. Duplicates caused by alternate URL paths to the same page

If search spiders see a new URL for the same content (whether that URL appears static or dynamic), they’ll see a new page. It’s important to canonicalize these pages. When the duplicates really are identical, using the canonical tag or a 301-redirect is often the best bet. In some cases, like search sorts or pagination, the situation can get more complicated.

2. Write Unique TITLE Tags

The TITLE tag is still a powerful ranking factor, and it’s still far too often either abused or neglected. Pages that you want to rank need unique, descriptive, and keyword-targeted TITLE tags, plain and simple. You can easily track duplicate page TITLEs through the SEOmoz PRO Campaign Manager, including historical data:

Duplicate Titles in PRO App

This data is available from multiple locations, including the Campaign Dashboard and “Crawl Diagnostics” tab. You can also track exact duplicates in Google Webmaster Tools. You can find it under “Diagnostics” > “HTML Suggestions”.

The solution here is simple: write unique TITLE tags. If you have a huge site, there are plenty of ways to populate TITLE tags systematically from data. Writing some decent code is well worth it to fix this problem.

3. Write Unique META Descriptions

While the META Description tag has little or no direct impact on ranking these days, it does have 2 important indirect impacts:

  1. It (usually) determines your search snippet and impacts click-through rate (CTR).
  2. It’s another uniqueness factor that makes pages look more valuable.

Again, there are plenty of ways to generate META descriptions from data, including just using snippets of product descriptions. Try to make descriptions meaningful and attractive to visitors, not just pseudo-sentences loaded with keywords.

4. Shorten Your TITLE Tags

Long TITLE tags tend to weaken the SEO impact of any given keyword, and can also turn off search visitors (who tend to skim results). The most common culprit I see is when someone adds their home-page TITLE to the end of every other page. Let’s say your home-page TITLE is:

 “The Best Bacon Since 1983 | Bob’s Bacon Barn”

Then, for every product page, you have something like this:

 “50-pound Mega-sack of Bacon | The Best Bacon Since 1983 | Bob’s Bacon Barn”

It may not look excessive, but you’re diluting the first few (and most important) keywords for the page, and you’re making every page on the site compete with your home-page unnecessarily. It’s fine to use your company name (or a shortened version, like “Bob’s Bacon”) at the end of all of your TITLE tags, but don’t repeat core keywords on a massive scale. I’ve seen this go to extreme, once you factor in long product names, categories, and sub-categories.

5. Re-order Your TITLE Tags

On larger, e-commerce sites, it’s common to list category and sub-category information in TITLE tags. That’s fine up to a point, but I often see a configuration that looks something like this:

 “Bob’s Bacon | Bulk Products | Bacon Sacks | 50-pound Mega-sack of Bacon”

Not only does every TITLE tag on the site end up looking very similar, but the most important and unique keywords for the page are pushed to the very back. This is an issue for search usability, too, as research has demonstrated that the first few words in a title or headline are the most critical (possibly as few as the first two). If you’ve got a structure like the one above, flip it around:

 “50-pound Mega-sack of Bacon | Bacon Sacks | Bulk Products | Bob’s Bacon”

It’s a relatively easy change, and it’ll put the most important keywords up front, where they belong. It will very likely also increase your search CTR.

6. Add Direct Product Links

On sites with 100s or 1000s of pages, a “flat” architecture isn’t possible or even desirable. So, you naturally end up taking a hierarchical approach where products are 3+ levels deep. I think that’s often fine, if the paths are clear to crawlers and visitors, but it can leave critical pages with very little ranking power. One solution is to pull some of your top sellers to the home-page and link directly – this effectively flattens the architecture and pours more link-juice where it’s needed. Don’t go overboard, but a “Featured Products” or “Top 10 Sellers” list on the home-page can really help boost important deep pages.

7. Re-write Internal Anchor Text

I’m amazed how often I see internal links, even main navigation links, given cryptic, vague, or jargon-loaded labels. If you’re trying to rank your category page for “kid’s clothing”, don’t label the button “Apparel (K-12)” – it’s a bad signal to search engines, and it probably doesn’t make much sense to visitors. Your internal anchor text should reflect your keyword strategy, and your keyword strategy should reflect common usage. Use labels people understand and don’t be afraid to be specific.

8. Remove 10 Low-Value Links

There’s an old adage in copywriting – say what you need to say in as few words as possible, and then, when you’re done, try to say it in half that many words. I think the same goes for internal linking. If most of your inbound links are coming to the home-page, then your site architecture is the single biggest factor in flowing link-juice to deeper pages. It’s natural to want to link to everything, but if you prioritize everything, you effectively prioritize nothing. Find 10 links on your home-page that are either low priority for search or that visitors never click on (a click-mapping tool like Crazy Egg is a great way to test this), and remove them. Focusing your remaining link-juice is an easy way to boost your most important pages.

I’d love to hear any tips you may have for easy wins on-page. I’d also recommend Rand’s post on building a perfectly optimized page. While link-building is critical, fixing on-page issues is often a lot easier and can have an immediate impact, so it’s important not to ignore either front of the SEO battle.


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Open for Questions: Earth Day Live Chat from the South Lawn

The White House Wednesday, April 20,  2011
 


Open for Questions: Earth Day Live Chat from the South Lawn

In honor of Earth Day, Nancy Sutley, Chair of the Council on Environmental Quality, and Heather Zichal, Deputy Assistant to the President for Energy and Climate Change, are hosting a special Open for Questions event live from the South Lawn of the White House.

If you’ve got questions about what the Obama Administration is doing to protect our air and water or how we’re building a clean energy future, be sure to tune in:

  • When: Thursday, April 21 at 4:30 p.m. EDT
  • Where: Streaming live from the South Lawn of the White House at WhiteHouse.gov/live and on Facebook
  • Who: Chair of the Council on Environmental Quality Chair Nancy Sutley, Deputy Assistant to the President for Energy and Climate Change Heather Zichal, and YOU!
  • Get Involved: You can submit your questions via our Facebook chat application during the chat or submit them in advance on our webform

White House Highlights

We're in the Global Clean Energy Race to Win: Federal Investment in California Solar Energy Plant
April 18, 2011
Energy Secretary Steven Chu talks about the important work the Department of Energy is doing to support American innovators creating clean energy here at home.

Connecting with Each Other, Connecting with our Great Outdoors
April 18, 2011
Amy Salzman, Associate Director for Policy Outreach at the Council on Environmental Quality, blogs on the first America's Great Outdoors Council Meeting.

Building a Greener Tomorrow
April 15, 2011
Kimberly Lewis from Greenbuild talks about the work her organization is doing to improve energy efficiency in U.S. buildings, and what she learned from the Champions of Change: Clean Energy roundtable at the White House.

Window to An Energy Efficient Future
April 15, 2011
As part of the Champions of Change roundtable, Pella Windows and Doors was able to offer their suggestions on making America more energy efficient by replacing single-paned windows.

Training Workers of Today for the Clean Energy Jobs of Tomorrow
April 14, 2011
Jon Boggiano, the co-founder of Everblue Training Institute, reflects on the White House Champions of Change roundtable, where clean energy leaders were able to get together to provide feedback on policies and learn from one another.

Champions of Change: Harnessing the Power of Community and Clean Energy
April 13, 2011
Will Byrne, co-founder of The DC Project, explores the ways in which the clean energy economy can not only encourage our economy but also our home-grown ingenuity and entrepreneurship.

United Streetcar Putting Americans to Work, Putting America in Position to Win The Future
April 12, 2011
Secretary Ray LaHood highlights how grants from the Federal Transit Administration are supporting a number of streetcar projects across the country; projects that are providing American jobs and easing the burden of rising gas prices.

Partnerships and Innovation in Colorado
April 11, 2011
Thirty public schools in Jefferson County are using federal and state incentives to start and maintain a solar project, enabling the school to reallocate resources and strengthen its curriculum.

Weekly Wrap Up: America’s Energy Future
April 8, 2011
The President continued to focus on building a clean energy economy with a tour of a shipping facility in Maryland and a wind turbine manufacturer in Philadelphia.

What You Missed: Open for Question on Energy Security with Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar
April 7, 2011
Secretary Ken Salazar took questions from online viewers and college students who attended the event on President Obama’s Blueprint for a Secure Energy Future.

Reducing Oil Imports and competing for the Jobs of the Future
April 6, 2011
The President talks with workers at the Gamesa wind turbine manufacturing plant about how wind energy will help achieve his goal of reducing our imports of foreign oil by one third by 2025.

How Energy Efficiency is “Lighting Up” the Streets of Philadelphia
April 6, 2011
The spotlight shines on Philadelphia, who used Energy Efficiency Block Grant funds to replace all of the city’s traffic signals with LED lighting, creating jobs and reducing long-term energy costs.

Winning the Future in our Research Laboratories and Facilities
April 4, 2011
Chair Nancy Sutley highlights the important new energy projects taking place at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, including innovative solar panels and a new facility for researchers to develop solutions and technologies to increase building structure safety.

Weekly Address: Gas Prices & Energy Security
April 2, 2011
The President speaks from a UPS customer Center to discuss his Blueprint for a Secure Energy Future and how we can move away from foreign oil and boost the economy.

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Today: President Obama’s Facebook Town Hall

The White House Your Daily Snapshot for
Wednesday, April 20, 2011
 

Today: President Obama’s Facebook Town Hall

Today, at 4:45 p.m. EDT (1:45 p.m. PDT), President Obama is holding a “Shared Responsibility and Shared Prosperity” Facebook town hall event and you are invited! You can watch the event live and submit your questions on the White House Facebook page:

http://facebook.com/WhiteHouse

After the event, be sure to stay tuned for our Women and Technology panel with White House Senior Advisor Valerie Jarrett and the Startup America panel with Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers Austan Goolsbee. Learn more about these events and find out how you can get involved.

Photo of the Day

President Barack Obama is introduced during a town hall meeting at Northern Virginia Community College in Annandale, Va., where he spoke about his vision for reducing the debt and bringing down the deficit, April 19, 2011. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

In Case You Missed It

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

President Obama in Virginia on Our Fiscal Future: "We Are Going to Have to Ask Everybody to Sacrifice"
The President takes questions on his plan to get our fiscal house in order while maintaining key investments, keeping our commitments to America's seniors, and ensuring the burden is shared by the wealthy, not just foisted on the middle class.

Working Together to Create a 21st Century Immigration System
Part of President Obama's plan to help America win the future is reforming our immigration laws to make sure the world's best talent can live and do business in America.

Do you have the White House app for your phone?
Yesterday, we announced two new developments for the White House's mobile apps.

Today's Schedule

All times are Eastern Daylight Time (EDT).

9:20 AM: The President receives the Presidential Daily Briefing

10:05 AM: The President departs the White House

10:40 AM: The President departs Andrews Air Force Base en route to San Francisco, California

4:30 PM: Countdown to the Facebook town hall with President Obama WhiteHouse.gov/live

4:45 PM: The President participates in a Shared Responsibility and Shared Prosperity town hall hosted by Facebook to discuss his vision for bringing down our deficit WhiteHouse.gov/live

6:15 PM: Women in Technology panel WhiteHouse.gov/live

7:20 PM: Startup American panel WhiteHouse.gov/live

9:15 PM: The President delivers remarks at a DNC event

11:30 PM: The President delivers remarks at a DNC event

WhiteHouse.gov/live Indicates events that will be live streamed on White House.com/Live

Get Updates

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Seth's Blog : Do the Work is out today

Do the Work is out today

Steve Pressfield's new book is available today.

It's a prequel, sequel and manifesto-companion to one of the best books I have ever read, The War of Art. This new one is the one you can hand out to your co-workers and your students and even your boss. I'm thrilled that Steve entrusted this book to my new venture, the Domino Project.

Of course, subscribers to the Domino blog already knew about the new book and got it for free in digital form. In fact, it's already a bestseller. Not too late to join in...

No matter how you get it, I hope you'll read it, absorb it and share it.

For thoughts about the book and exclusive interviews, check out these blog posts: Communicatrix, Pam Slim, Chris Guillebeau, Adam Baker, Danielle Laporte, David Garland, Barry Moltz and Mario Schulzke.

 
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SEOptimise

SEOptimise


Google Test: Multiple Meta Descriptions Work as Expected, Social Search Does Not

Posted: 19 Apr 2011 08:37 AM PDT

A few weeks ago Shark SEO posted an intriguing experiment about multiple meta descriptions. To be more exact, he experimented with adding more than one meta description into a single meta description tag.

One or more actual meta descriptions would exceed the meta description display character limit of approx. 165 characters. Why would you want to do it? Well, usually search users are seeking more than one aspect of your site or service. Thus it would be an advantage to serve all of them the perfect meta description.

Expanding on this concept, I wanted to test whether you can add more than one or multiple meta description tags.

I wondered whether Google would accept more than one meta description tag. Also, I wanted to find out which one it would take – the first one?

In the test performed by Shark SEO, both descriptions contained in one tag could be triggered to appear in the search snippet depending on the keyphrase used in the search query. Would it be the case here as well?

To test, I used three different meta descriptions of the same length each. I also added a unique series of characters and digits to the page. This combination did not appear in the Google index before the test. I made sure that the text appearing on the page itself did not match the meta descriptions, and that at least one unique term did appear in each description.

So what did I find out?

  • Only the first meta description gets shown
  • Some of the words contained in the first meta description will get highlighted
  • Terms contained only in the meta description won’t show up in search

So it’s everything as expected. The outcome does not contradict what we know or what Google has said for years.

  1. Google ignores the additional meta description tags. There is no way to make them appear in search results.
  2. Even the first one that gets indexed does not appear in the search results beyond the search snippet.
  3. It’s not a ranking factor. So in a way you can’t even say it’s indexed. Google is just aware of it but it doesn’t count.

 

Google Social Search

On the other hand I was quite surprised about the way (Google) social search does work or not.

I tweeted the links from my ”power account” and expected it to get indexed immediately these days. What happened instead?

It took Google several minutes or maybe even a quarter of an hour; I didn’t check every minute to find it and it only showed up in “social search” results, not in regular Google results:

OK, I expected that the link would get indexed a bit later, but instead it not only didn’t, but it even vanished from my social search results as well after approx. a day.

After a week I gave up, and as the page still wasn’t in the main Google index I tweeted it again, and this time I asked for retweets from my followers. A few of them, I think five exactly because no tool has counted them, helped and retweeted it. After that, the URL appeared instantly in the main Google index, not just in the social search results.

So you need at least a bunch of retweets to get indexed by Google if your link solely appeared on Twitter, as was the case here. There may be a few reasons why my first link wasn’t used to index it at once:

  • Google knows that I’m the proprietor and webmaster of onreact.com, so they don’t count my own Twitter mention of it.
  • Google does not consider my Twitter account to be reliable and authoritative enough to show up new pages in Google results.
  • Google has a “first link does not count” rule when it comes to indexation of pages mentioned on Twitter, no matter who tweets it.

To be honest all three options sound realistic, but I’d rather expect a more complex combination of all three and some additional factors to play a role here. Nonetheless, the outcome is clear: just tweeting a link once is not necessarily enough for the page to appear in Google’s results.

 

Twitter people search

It’s also worth mentioning that neither Bing nor Ask have been able to index the page at all. Even Twitter can’t find, it while at the same time some of the users who tweeted show up in the people search for the unique phrase.

So the good old link is still important when it comes to indexation. Don’t rely solely on tweets to succeed in search engines.

Visit http://onreact.com/mmdst1.html to take a look at the page I used for this SEO test.

© SEOptimise – Download our free business guide to blogging whitepaper and sign-up for the SEOptimise monthly newsletter. Google Test: Multiple Meta Descriptions Work as Expected, Social Search Does Not

Related posts:

  1. 30 Social Search Tools & SEO Resources for Power Users
  2. SERPd Review – The New Search Marketing Social News Community
  3. 10 Tips to Improve Your Social Graph for Google

Seth's Blog : Get better at buying

Get better at buying

There's incessant pressure on B2B sellers to get better at it. The boss wants the sales force to figure out how to approach, educate, close and support big companies and get them to buy their products and services.

But what about the big companies (not to mention the smaller ones) that are doing the buying? Ruth Stevens reports that the typical company with more than 1,000 employees has, on average, 21 different people involved in each sale of over $25,000.

Having made sales (when I was younger and more foolish) to ten of the thirty biggest companies in the country, I can testify that 21 might be an understatement. The typical big company's org chart is a mystery, the process is a mystery and there never seems to be an end to the roster of meetings and people. It's almost as though these companies don't want to buy anything.

Of course, the salesperson isn't the enemy, and buying from them isn't charity. The transaction happens because it benefits both sides, yet the byzantine maze, lack of information and endless circle is a real barrier to success for both sides.

First, this is screamingly inefficient. Second, it drives away the great opportunities, leaving the companies with no one but the sales-focused, uber-patient companies willing to put up with 21 different people and a million meetings.

If you want to increase productivity and discover new opportunities, you're going to need better vendors. One way to do that is to streamline your buying process and let the folks selling to you know how it works. They're not the enemy. In fact, they're your best source for off-the-shelf improvements and innovation you can start using tomorrow.

Whoever buys the best, wins.

Your purchasing department shouldn't be a backwater... it ought to be an engine of innovation for the rest of the organization.

I'd start by reaching out to companies that might be able to help your company. Give them an org chart. Give them an overview of the best way to sell to you. Issue a newsletter outlining regular news about successful sales and how they were made. Reward your employees when they help a new vendor make a sale that really benefits you. Hassle your employees if they hassle or lie to your vendors.

If a vendor asks, "are you serious about buying from us," the answer should either be, "yes," or perhaps, "no, thank you." But we're all too busy for power games.

 
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