4 Steps to Maximize Local Search Success
Extending a local experience throughout the entire process should be the goal of all local marketing campaigns. Relevant search ads, localized landing pages, owned and earned media, and a blended cost analysis all provide a recipe for success.
Google’s Prototype Self Driving Autonomous Cars
We’ve covered many topics on the Google self driving car here before but now, Google is working on building out their own car for it.
The car, as you can see from the picture above, looks cartoon like, but it works…
Bing: Webmaster Forums Closing Down, Go To WebmasterWorld Instead
Duane Forrester from Bing announced on the Bing Webmaster Blog that they are closing down the Bing Webmaster Forums in the upcoming days.
Honestly…
Google: Adult Web Sites Are Not Automatically Spammy Web Sites
Some folks in the search space feel that adult sites, pornographic sites, are automatically considered to be spammy by Google. Truth is, while there is a ton of spam in those industries, not all adult sites are spammy.
Google’s John Mueller said so i…
Google Webmaster Tools Adds Block Resources Debug With Fetch & Render
As expected, Google has introduced a new tool to help webmaster determine what JavaScript, CSS, and other resources they are blocking from GoogleBot’s crawl…
Google May Be Pushing Out A New Update: Possibly Penguin?
I am seeing very early signs of another possible Google update both based on chatter at the WebmasterWorld and in other forums and social media spaces. I am also getting private data shared with me by those who are tracking this closely…
What SEO beginners need to know: a basic skills guide
What is SEO?
SEO is the acronym for search engine optimisation. Search engine optimisation is the process of optimising your website and its content so that it can easily be indexed by search engines.
Using this indexed information about your website, search engines can provide searchers with the most relevant results based on their search terms. These listings are known as organic search results.

The results above these and to the right are paid-for ads. For this article we’ll be talking about your web page’s appearance in organic listings, however paid search is a fundamental part of search marketing and can be used in combination with SEO. For more info check out What is paid search (PPC) and why do you need it?
Making your web page more visible to search engines
The following on-page techniques can help make your web pages more accessible to search engines and rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs). Further down we’ll discuss off-page SEO, the content itself and improving click-through-rates.
On-page SEO
These are all the elements on your web page that you can control in order to make it visible to search engines. For instance: the use of a search engine friendly URL with relevancy to the content, good internal linking, fast loading pages, logical and clear navigation and the use of Sitemaps.
Here’s some basics for improving your website’s visibility using on-page SEO.
Internal linking
Linking to content within your own site is a great indicator to search engines that your site has value.
Google sends out Googlebots (or Spiders) to fetch information on new and updated web pages. This is known as crawling and will lead to your website’s inclusion in search results. Internal links are a great way to help Googlebots search and index your site.
Internal links help you to rank for certain keywords and helps to distribute ‘link equity’ across your site. Some pages on your site may have more link equity than others, so it’s important to pass some of that equity onto pages you’d like to improve rankings for, or pages that are more likely to convert visitors.
Internal links help reduce bounce rates. If people arrive at an article and you give them some related content and somewhere else to go once they have read it, then it gives them a reason to stay on the site a little longer.
Try to avoid over-stuffing paragraphs with internal links, as readers will either consciously or subconsciously assume the piece is a mere ‘link-building exercise’ and trust the content less. Search engines will make a similar assumption.
Two or three good quality internal links to relevant content, using accurate anchor text, spread throughout the article is best.
Anchor text
Concise yet descriptive anchor text helps search engines better understand your content. This is also very useful for users. When you add a link to a piece of text, make sure the text is completely relevant to the link and avoid phrases like ‘click here’.
Some SEO experts also advise that anchor text should be varied as many pages linking to one page using the same anchor text may look suspicious to search engines.
Headlines, titles and title tags
Keep them as concise as possible sticking to the 65 character rule, although not to the point of making them too obscure or meaningless.
“A beginner’s guide to SEO best practice for bloggers” is descriptive and accurate. However, to benefit your readers and because search engines tend to give keywords at the beginning of a headline the most attention it might be best to rework it.
“SEO best practice: a beginner’s guide” may be better as the most important words are at the front.
Search engines regard metadata and meta keywords as less important than they used to, thanks to years of black hat misuse, however the title of your page and its relevancy to the content will always be a highly important factor in SEO.
Choose a title that accurately reflects the topic of the page’s content. Create a unique tag for each page on your site. Avoid using extremely lengthy titles and stuffing irrelevant keywords in your title tags.
XML Sitemap
This is a document hosted on your website’s server that lists every page on your website. It’s a way for webmasters to inform search engines when new pages have been added or updated.
This is particularly useful if your site has pages that aren’t easily discoverable by Google, such as pages with few links or pages with dynamic content such as Flash.
If you have a WordPress site, you don’t need to do a thing as a Sitemap is automatically generated and regularly submitted to search engines for you. If you need to make your own, here are some formats and guidelines that will help you.
Navigation
Create a naturally flowing hierarchy. Make it easy for users to journey from general site information to more specific information. Provide breadcrumbs so users can easily navigate back and forth, and so users know where they are in the general layout of your website if they’ve arrived on page via other means.
Make sure you use text links to for navigation rather than animation or images. Search engine crawlers find text links easier to understand, as do users.
Comments
Prevent and remove spam from the comments sections of your site.
Ensure that ‘nofollow’ is implemented within your comments, so crawlers won’t assume that spam comments with links to erroneous or harmful websites are validated by your otherwise ethical site.
The controversy of how beneficial the practice of nofollow really is can be debated until your throat is sore or until Twitter has exceeded its capacity, however it’s what Google says is best practice and this section is all about playing by the rules.
Here’s Chris Lake on why Econsultancy has implemented nofollow for guest blogging.
Content
We can take it as read that the quality of your content is the most important ranking signal for all search engine algorithms.
If you’re not producing good, relevant, entertaining, helpful content at a regular rate, then all of the SEO practices in the world won’t help you in the long run.
Google has an algorithm that’s complicated, ever-changing and impossible to second-guess. All you can guarantee is that no matter what Google and other search engines are looking for in terms of ranking, the value of your content will always be the top priority.
Write for human readers not search engines. That way your content is more likely to be read and shared, helping to drive more traffic to your site and your audience will grow.
Regularity
Producing content, regularly and as often as you can is also a must for appearing in SERPs. When it comes to my own personal blog, I have a policy of publishing at least one article a day during the week.
Write as regularly as you can, and you’ll soon see that within a few months you’ll start to appear in SERPs and therefore pick up some organic traffic. If you don’t update regularly, search engines will view your site as irrelevant over time and rank you lower.
Length
Don’t be too concerned with the word-count. Whether you’ve been recommended that a post should be at least 300 words long, or 500-1,000 words if your blog is new, try to resist padding it out with waffle.
Be as concise as possible. A reader would rather read a shorter article that gets to the point then a long-winded epic.
That being said, if you’ve written a 1,000 word masterpiece stuffed with fascinating, completely relevant and helpful content, where you’ve been as tightly controlled and clear with your prose as possible, search engines will prefer this to one that’s half the length on the same subject.
The likelihood of you being penalised for writing a 290 word post instead of keeping to the often recommended 300 word optimal length is very low.
Improving click-through rates
There are many ways to make your search result appear more appealing to searchers. Here are some of the key recommended ones.
Meta description
The meta description is the snippet of descriptive text that appears beneath the URL in SERPs and also when sharing the link on social media channels such as Facebook.

This is what searchers will read and their decision to click-through to your site will largely be determined by how relevant and readable this description us. You want this to be less than 150 characters long, with your keywords as near to the front as possible, but still make sense as a readable sentence.
Search engines will not raise you higher in the rankings because of the quality of the excerpt, but it will increase the likelihood that someone will click-through to your article based on how interesting, relevant or entertaining the excerpt is.
Authorship
Although there is no evidence to suggest that authorship helps your result rank higher, it certainly creates a more appealing and trustworthy listing that stands out from the other purely text based results, which can lead to higher CTR.
If you want your smiley little face to appear next to your content in search results like mine does…

All you need is a Google+ profile, a recognisable headshot and then follow these simple steps from Google.
Schema markup
Pages with Schema markup rank four positions higher in search results than pages without.
Schema markup gives webmasters all kinds of options to make their site’s listing on a SERP look all snazzy and relevant to your business or service.
It’s the difference between this…

and this…

Schema is basically a type of ‘rich snippet’, a HTML markup that adds extra detail to the text underneath the URL in a search result.
As you can see from above, if you’ve searched for ‘tiramisu recipe’ you are far more likely to click on the result that includes an image, a starred rating, a calorie count and various other bits of information that a webmaster can provide to make a result look more appealing.
Rich snippets are a way for you to tell search engines directly who you are, what you do and and to give precise information as to the product, service or content you’re providing.
For more detail on how to implement Schema mark up, read What is Schema markup and why should you be using it.
Images
Image search is an important driver of traffic, but often images themselves are not optimised to their fullest potential.
Use brief but descriptive file names for your images, rather than ‘image0057’.
Always fill in the ‘Alt’ attribute. Search engines can’t see your images, but they can read the ‘Alt’ text. It’s important to describe your image as accurately as possible as this may not only improve your ranking in image search but also improve the accessibility for those using ‘image reader’ software.
You need to complete the Title, Alt Tags and Description fields when uploading an image for full optimisation. This won’t ‘do’:

Off-page SEO
These are methods that you can use to raise the ranking of a website through off-site, promotional means beyond its code or design. For instance…
Natural link building
Google treats a link from another website to your site as a vote of confidence. Google will therefore rank you higher based on that vote. Therefore the more links the better.
These links should be relevant though and of an organic quality. Not paid-for or gained through artificial, unrelated means.
Social media
It’s vital that any content that you create is pushed out through your social media channels. For many companies, businesses and publishers it’s one of the key drivers of traffic to their sites.
As personalisation and relevancy play increasingly important roles in governing exactly what a searcher sees in their search results, it’s crucial that all of your social channels are optimised to include all of the relevant keywords, contact information and a clear description of what you do.
In turn, all of your social channels should be clearly accessible from your website along with the ability to share your content with relevant share buttons.
Nearly every article we read is connected with an author, whose face, profile and social handles are visible for all. You can be sure that this personalisation facilitated by social will continue to factor highly in all current and future SEO activity. The importance of Google+ to Google SERPs can’t be underestimated. I’ll assume that you already have a Google+ Business page, right?
For much more in-depth information on SEO, download our latest 400 page SEO Best Practice Guide.
The Recirculation Gap: Why Google Sends More Traffic Than Its Search Market Share Suggests
How can publishers receive a greater percentage of search traffic from Google than the market share Google has in the US? It’s likely due to what I call “The Recirculation Gap” and how Google probably “recirculates” searches back into itself less than Yahoo and Bing….
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
Google Now Testing Knowledge Graph Popups In AdWords Ads
Back in January, Google formally rolled out popups with Knowledge Graph information about certain sites in the organic search results. Now it appears these popups are being tested in ads. Arianna Wolf, a search strategist at 90 Octane, provided screens…
5 Reasons to Include Polling in Your Social Media Strategy
Polling is one of the most powerful tools brands can incorporate into a social strategy. Here are five reasons why you should consider adding polling into your next marketing campaign, plus a few recommendations for tools to use for polling.
How To Create an Award Winning Campaign – #EUSearchAwards
Jo Turnbull interviews Haukur Kristjánsson, at Nordic eMarketing who shares tips on how his team won the best PPC Campaign at the EU Search Awards 2014.
Post from Jo Turnbull on State of Digital
How To Create an Award Winning Campaign – #EUSearchAwards
Take the SEO Expert Quiz and Rule the Internet
Posted by Cyrus-Shepard
You are master of the keyword.
You create 1,000 links with a single tweet. You rank for the word “rank.” Google engineers ask for your approval before updating their algorithm.
You, my friend, are an SEO expert.
Ready for fun? Here at Moz we gathered our wits (it didn’t take very long) and created a new quiz to test our SEO knowledge.
Based on a quiz that our co-founder Rand first published back in 2005, at the dawn of electronics and lighter-than-air travel, we now present to you the new and improved
SEO Expert Quiz.
The quiz contains
50 questions and takes about 15 minutes to complete. The questions are randomized so no two people will get the exact same quiz with the same order of questions.
Here’s what to expect.
1. The quiz is hard!
Like, astronaut training hard. Very few people score 100%. The breakdown of performance looks like this:
- 0-40% SEO Newbie: You rank on page 7, but are aiming to move up.
- 40-60% SEO Novice: Young, but strong in the ways of the Force, you are.
- 60-75% SEO Pro: The traffic is pouring in!
- 75-90% SEO Expert and Formula One race car driver
- 90-100% Lord of the Internet, Master of the SEO Realm
2. For fun only!
The Expert Quiz isn’t meant to be a rulebook of the Internet. You may even disagree with some of the answers—and you may be right!
We work in a constantly evolving field with lots of room for interpretation at the top levels. Discussion and debate between very smart people is how we learn and grow our expertise.
The only reward for finishing in first place is supreme bragging rights. If you win your office pool, you may get free lunch for the next month. Please participate and help our knowledge grow, but don’t take it too seriously.
3. MVP: next steps
We built this out of passion for testing our SEO knowledge. If you like the quiz, we’d love to build a more robust version that saves your score, and even gives you a badge to display on your user profile. Let us know what you think.
Ready to get started?
Don’t forget to show off your score when you finish. Let us know in the comments below! What surprised you, which question did you totally ace, and what should we ask next time?
Rock on, SEO Sensei.
Big thanks to Devin, Derric, Josh, Carin, Shelly and Rand for the hard work putting this together.
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!
Google Hits eBay With Manual Penalty In Search Results
“What really happened to
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Model Battles Google, Yahoo in Court Over Images Linking Her to Porn Sites
A lawsuit by Argentinian model Maria Belen Rodriguez alleges that the search results have ruined her life and damaged her reputation. Google counters that “search engines are neutral platforms that do not create nor control content on the web.”
Adapting to Change, Harnessing New Trends, Eyeing the Future Search Engine Land Summit
You deliver results daily, but staying successful means identifying opportunities, implementing new technologies and processes, developing great people, and preparing for the next big thing. Invest a day in Search Engine Land Summit and hear from thoug…
Basic Stats for Marketers: Skewness & Kurtosis
As someone who spends a lot of time dealing with maths (the joys of data vis development!), I spend a lot of time entrenched in statistics. Whilst that’s great fun, or so I like to think, I’m always aware that there’s a lot of people out there who were never really taught the why behind […]
The post Basic Stats for Marketers: Skewness & Kurtosis appeared first on Builtvisible – A Creative Digital Agency.
Are Your Google Display Network Results Damaged By AdSense For Mobile?
Have you checked your Google Display Network (GDN) campaign placements recently? If the answer is no, then I would take a look ASAP — chances are, you’re appearing on a hell of a lot of apps now, and you might need to make some adjustments to your campaign in order to improve your…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
Actress Sues Google For Indexing Porn Search Results Tied To Her Name
Maria Belen Rodriguez is an Argentina-born model, actress and TV personality who now lives and works in Italy. She successfully sued Google and Yahoo in 2006 in her native country, alleging that her likeness was wrongfully appropriated by porn sites and then indexed/republished or disseminated by…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
Rachel Louise Carson Google Doodle Honors Marine Biologist, ‘Silent Spring’ Author
Today’s Google Doodle honors marine biologist Rachel Carson, who was born on this date 107 years ago. Google’s special logo depicts Carson in a field with binoculars and a notebook, surrounded by several types of birds and wildlife.
Hummingbird & Entity Search – #SMXSydney
A roundup of talks at SMX Sydnay 2014 relating to the impact of the Hummingbird algorithm on your SEO strategy, both desktop and mobile.
Post from Annabel Hodges on State of Digital
Hummingbird & Entity Search – #SMXSydney
