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marți, 17 iunie 2014
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Feeding the Hummingbird: Structured Markup Isn't the Only Way to Talk to Google
Feeding the Hummingbird: Structured Markup Isn't the Only Way to Talk to Google |
Feeding the Hummingbird: Structured Markup Isn't the Only Way to Talk to Google Posted: 16 Jun 2014 05:04 PM PDT Posted by Cyrus-Shepard I used to laugh at the idea of Hummingbird optimization. In a recent poll, Moz asked nearly 300 marketers which Google updated affected their traffic the most. Penguin and Panda were first and second, followed by Hummingbird in a distant third.
Unsurprising, because unlike Panda and Penguin, Hummingbird doesn't specifically combat webspam. Ever wonder why Google named certain algorithms after black and white animals (i.e. black hat vs. white hat?) Hummingbird is a broader algorithm altogether, and Hummingbirds can be any color of the rainbow. One aspect of Hummingbird is about better understanding of your content, not just specific SEO tactics. Hummingbird also represents an evolutionary step in entity-based search that Google has worked on for years, and it will continue to evolve. In a way, optimizing for entity search is optimizing for search itself. Many SEOs limit their understanding of entity search to vague concepts of structured data, Schema.org, and Freebase. They fall into the trap of thinking that the only way to participate in the entity SEO revolution is to mark up your HTML with complex schema.org microdata. Not true. Don't misunderstand; schema.org and structured data are awesome. If you can implement structured data on your website, you should. Structured data is precise, can lead to enhanced search snippets, and helps search engines to understand your content. But Schema.org and classic structured data vocabularies also have key shortcomings:
This presents a challenge for search engines, which want to understand entity relationships across the entire web - not simply the parts we choose to mark up. In reality, search engines have worked over 10 years - since the early days of Google - at extracting entities from our content without the use of complex markup. How search engines understand relationships without markupHere's a simple explanation of a complex subject. Search engines can structure your content using the concept of triples. This means organizing keywords into a framework of subject → predicate → object. Structured data frameworks like schema.org work great because they automatically classify information into a triple format. Take this example from Schema.org. <div itemscope itemtype ="http://schema.org/Movie"> <h1 itemprop="name">Avatar</h1> <span>Director: <span itemprop="director">James Cameron</span> (born August 16, 1954)</span> <span itemprop="genre">Science fiction</span> <a href="../movies/avatar-theatrical-trailer.html" itemprop="trailer">Trailer</a> </div><br> Extracting the triples from this code sample would yield: Avatar (Movie) → Has Director → James Cameron
Subject → Predicate → Object The challenge is: Can search engines extract this information for the 90%+ of your content that isn't marked up with structured data? Yes, they can. Triples, triples everywhere
Ask Google a question like who is the president of Harvard or how many astronauts walked on the moon, and Google will often answer from a page with no structured data present. Consider this query for the ideal length of a title tag.
Google is able to extract the semantic meaning from this page even though the properties of "length" and its value of 50-60 characters are not structured using classic schema.org markup. Matt Cutts recently revealed that Google uses over 500 algorithms. That means 500 algorithms that layer, filter and interact in different ways. The evidence indicates that Google has many techniques of extracting entity and relationship data that may work independent of each other. Regardless, whether you are a master of schema.org or not, here are tips for communicating entity and relationship signals within your content.
1. KeywordsYes, good old fashioned keywords. Even without structured markup, search engines have the ability to parse keywords into their respective structure. But keywords by themselves only go so far. In order for this method to work, your keywords must be accompanied by appropriate predicates and objects. In other words, you sentences provide fuel to search engines when they contain detailed information with clear subjects and organization. Consider this example of the relationships extracted from our title tag page by AlchemyAPI:
There's evidence Google has worked on this technology for over 10 years, ever since it acquired the company Applied Semantics in 2003. For deeper understanding, Bill Slawski wrote an excellent piece on Google's ability to extract relationship meaning from text, as well as AJ Kohn's excellent advice on Google's Knowledge Graph optimization. 2. Tables and HTML elementsThis is old school SEO that folks today often forget. HTML (and HTML5), by default, provide structure to webpages that search engines can extract. By using lists, tables, and proper headings, you organize your content in a way that makes sense to robots. In the example below, the technology exists for search engines to easily extract structured relationship about US president John Adams in this Wikipedia table.
The goal isn't to get in Google's Knowledge Graph, (which is exclusive to Wikipedia and Freebase). Instead, the objective is to structure your content in a way that makes the most sense and relationships between words and concepts clear. For a deeper exploration, Bill Slawski has another excellent write up exploring many different techniques search engines can use to extract structured data from HTML-based content. 3. Entities and synonymsWhat do you call the President of the United States? How about:
In truth, all of these apply to the same entity, even though searchers will look for them in different ways. If you wanted to make clear what exactly your content was about (which president?) two common techniques would be to include:
Using synonyms and entity association also has the benefit of appealing to broader searcher intent. A recent case study by Cognitive SEO demonstrated this by showing significant gains after adding semantically related synonyms to their content. 4. Anchor text and linksLinks are the original relationship connector of the web. Bill Slawski (again, because he is an SEO god) writes about one method Google might use to identity synonyms for entities using anchor text. It appears Google also uses anchor text in far more sophisticated ways. When looking at Google answer box results, you almost always find related keyword-rich anchor text pointing to the referenced URL. Ask Google "How many people walked on the moon?" and you'll see these words in the anchor text that points to the URL Google displays as the answer.
Other queries: In these examples and more that I researched, matching anchor text was present every time in addition to the relevant information and keywords on the page itself. Additionally, there seems to be an inidication that internal anchor text might also influence these results. This is another argument to avoid generic anchor text like "click here" and "website." Descriptive and clear anchor text, without overdoing it, provides a wealth of information for search engines to extract meaning from. 5. Leverage Google LocalFor local business owners, the easiest and perhaps most effective way to establish structured relationships is through Google Local. The entire interface is like a structured data dashboard without Schema.org. When you consider all the data you can upload both in Google+ and even Moz Local, the possibilities to map your business data is fairly complete in the local search sense. In case you missed it, last week Google introduced My Business which makes maintaining your listings even easier. 6. Google Structured Data HighlighterSometimes, structured data is still the way to go. In times when you have trouble adding markup to your HTML, Google offers its Structured Data Highlighter tool. This allows you to tell Google how your data should be structured, without actually adding any code. The tool uses a type of machine learning to understand what type of schema applies to your pages, up to thousands at a time. No special skills or coding required.
Although the Structured Data Highlighter is both easy and fun, the downsides are:
Even though it's simple, the Structured Data Highlighter should only be used when it's impossible to add actual markup to your site. It's not a substitution for the real thing. 7. PluginsFor pure schema.org markup, depending on the CMS you use, there's often a multitude of plugins to make the job easier. If you're a Wordpress user, your options are many:
Looking forwardIf you have a chance to add Schema.org (or any other structured data to your site), this will help you earn those coveted SERP enhancements that may help with click-through rate, and may help search engines better understand your content. That said, semantic understanding of the web goes far beyond rich snippets. Helping search engines to better understand all of your content is the job of the SEO. Even without Hummingbird, these are exactly the types of things we want to be doing. It's not "create content and let the search engines figure it out." It's "create great content with clues and proper signals to help the search engines figure it out." If you do the latter, you're far ahead in the game. Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read! |
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Bulk Update Ad Group Labels with an AdWords Script
Bulk Update Ad Group Labels with an AdWords Script |
Bulk Update Ad Group Labels with an AdWords Script Posted: 17 Jun 2014 12:55 AM PDT AdWords Labels! They're so useful! At least they are once you've got them applied. You can use them to segment ad groups by product types, or tag recently changed bids, or see how a multi-ad-group ad test is going with ease… but for some reason, two years after their announcement, you still can't bulk edit labels. You can't even see them in Editor. You've got to manually add them in the online interface. You could use comments in Editor instead of labels, but it's hard to make this work if you're in a team: comments aren't shared automatically. Also you can't see totals, and there isn't an easy way to get a time series. There is, however, an alternative: AdWords Scripts can read data from Google Doc spreadsheets, and they can create and apply labels – so all you need to do is have a bulk sheet in a Google Doc and let a Script do the hard work. Here's how to do that to apply labels to ad groups. The Google DocJust go to Google Drive, create a spreadsheet, and fill it in a bit like this: Leave the 'Notes' column blank – it isn't for your notes, it's where the Script will say if it's applied the label, or if there's been a problem. The AdWords ScriptIn your AdWords account go to 'Bulk operations', then 'Scripts', then click the red '+ SCRIPT' button. Name it something sensible (like 'Ad Group Labeller') and copy and paste in this code:
//Change this to your spreadsheet's URL! var inputSheet = SpreadsheetApp.openByUrl(spreadsheetUrl).getActiveSheet(); //The sheet in the Google Doc while (i <= numberOfLabels) //This loops through all the rows var labelCampaignName = inputSheet.getRange("A" + i).getValue(); var printToSpreadsheet = "-" var adGroupIterator = AdWordsApp.adGroups() //Finds the ad groups with the specified name and campaign name if (adGroupIterator.hasNext()) //If there is an ad group then the label will be applied inputSheet.getRange("D" + i).setValue(printToSpreadsheet); //Writes into the Notes column in the spreadsheet }//End 'if there are notes' i = i+1; }//End while loop Remember to change the spreadsheet URL, so that it looks at the right spreadsheet! You need to click the 'Authorise now' button before the Script can run (don't worry – it won't make changes aside from adding labels). Then you can click 'Run script now' and see if it works. The ResultsCheck your ad groups – they should be labelled! Also check the Notes column in your Google Doc: Here you see there's been a problem with the last ad group – it looks like I've mistyped the ad group name. So I can either add a row to the bottom of the spreadsheet with the correct ad group name, or I could apply the label manually. If the Script timed out then there would be rows without anything in the Notes column: in that case you can just try running the Script again. And next time you want to label a bunch of groups, you can replace the contents of the Doc with the new set of groups to label and run the Script again – without any more messing with code. Note – You're Likely to See Errors in the SummaryWhen you run this Script there's likely to be errors saying "You’re already using this label name". That's because AdWords needs you to create a label before applying it to something, and I haven't worked out an efficient way to check if a label exists: so the Script just tries to create a new label every time, and if it already exists then there's an error message which is just ignored. If anyone has a better idea how to handle this, please comment! On the other hand, you won't see errors in the summary if ad groups haven't been found: you need to check the Google Doc for that. AlternativesPPC Hero also have a Script for applying labels to keywords, but it applies the same label to a list of keywords (and the label text is hard-coded, so you'd need to change the code manually to make different labels), and it doesn't have a way of coping if the Script times out. Also it goes through all keywords and then checks if they match one in the list – I'm not sure if this is more efficient in general than my 'grab the data lots of times' approach, but I suspect it's not as good if you only want to label a few keywords in a large account. Scripts for Labelling Keywords and Ads Coming Soon…So, does this Script work for you? Are there other similar Scripts I haven't found yet? Have you found a more efficient way to work with labels? If you've got any comments then write in below… Image credit: Tagged by JD Hancock The post Bulk Update Ad Group Labels with an AdWords Script appeared first on White.net. |
Posted: 13 Jun 2014 09:48 AM PDT What a great week this has been! Why you may ask? Well this week I attended SMX Advanced over in Seattle, one of the most talked about and recommended search marketing conferences in the world. The week started off with a trip to the Moz office for a look around, followed by the SMX Advanced conference and networking sessions, ending on Thursday with me and Stuart beating Matt Cutts and partner in a game of pool. But it was the conference that I was here for, and I wasn’t disappointed. The content that was available was great from some very good marketers. The calibre of the attendees was also extremely good, with some interesting questions being asked and some great conversations had during the networking sessions. In this post I have provided my thoughts and some key points from a selected number of sessions that I thought you would be most interested in, and would provide the most value. The Periodic Table of SEO Ranking Factors in 2014.The very first session of the conference was extremely interesting with some of the points that came from it. With Marcus Tober, Marianne Sweeny and Matthew Brown providing some valuable insight from there own experiences and survey data. One of the biggest take-aways from the session was to make sure that what ever you do, whether it is from a marketing or UX point of view make sure it is done for the user. All three of the speakers spoke about the importance of site speed, and ensuring that both the user. Here are some of the key points from this session:
Keyword research on Roids!For me, this session was mainly about the second talk with Rae Hoffman (@sugarrae) talking about how she uses SEMrush alongside other tools to find opportunities for optimisation and content. Now I am not saying the other talks weren’t great, I just felt that they were more talks about what you could do rather than providing actionable data. Here are some of the key points from this session:
During the Q&A of the session, there were two questions that drew quite a bit of discussion. The first was “what is more importaint in keyword research, search volume or conversions?” This was a relatively straightforward question in my opinion, with the answer being conversion first, utilising conversion rates to understand the potential money that you are going to receive, but if that isn’t possible then revert back to potential traffic. The second question was how to utilise keyword data within GWT. The panel agreed that utilising the data was important but that the data is lost on a regular occurrence because GWT only shows 90 days worth.
and here are the slides…What SEMs should do for Mobile.A theme in a lot of sessions at SMX Advanced was that mobile is coming quickly, and the majority are not ready. Go and have a look at the Apple website on a mobile? Did you know that they don’t have a mobile website? Do they actually need one? Well that is another question but it goes to show that if one of the biggest companies in the world don’t have it nailed down, then what hope do the others. For this session, the main focus was on strategy and advertising but one point that stuck with me is that people are having issues with tracking. We use many different mobile devices before we make a purchase, which makes attributing a purchase extremely difficult. This problem is something that will continue, but we would hope to be solved in the very near future. Here are some of the key points from this session:
One bit of information that shocked me the most was how quickly the click through rate changes from position one to two when comparing it to the current desktop studies.
Creating blockbuster contentAs you would expect with the changes over recent times, content has been a big part of all the sessions that I attended. There was a constant message throughout that content that goes viral will not happen each and every time. It takes time to understand what works for each audience, what piece of content is relevant to the consumer at the right time, and is different or better than anything else that is available. Here are some of the key points from this session:
and here are the slides…Executing a Flawless Content Marketing StrategyHere are some of the key points from this session:
and here are the slides…You&A with Matt Cutts & Danny SullivanAs you would expect this was by far the most popular session of the conference with so many attendees wanting to quiz Matt about what is going on at Google, and what is coming next. Once this session got going it was extremely fast paced, so I am afraid I haven’t got many notes to share, however Rae Hoffman did an amazing job of tweeting and then fleshing out the content, so I would recommend going to have a read here. ConclusionWas it worth it? Yes! Most definitely. I have learn’t and picked up a lot of useful information whilst also meeting new people within the industry on the otherside of the pond. Now that I have experienced it, I am hoping that I can go back in the future, possible as a speaker… The post SMX Advanced 2014 – Seattle appeared first on White.net. |
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