Changes of Domain

Domain changes can be worrisome from an SEO perspective. This is only natural as we spend our time building up the strength of particular domains so that they can compete with others. Will Google recognize the old site at the new domain? Will all of the link equity carry over to the new domain?
By considering the problems involved with a change of domain before you execute, it is possible to alleviate many concerns. There is no guarantee that everything will go perfectly, but a little preparation will go a long way to making your transfer as successful as possible.
URL Mapping: Where are we going?
If the change of domain is the only action occurring, then it is likely that a one-to-one redirect, page-to-page, will be sufficient. This may not be the case, though, if the structure of your site will be simultaneously changing with the domain.

Architecture Adjustment

If you will be implementing any changes in site navigation resulting in new URLs, or will simply be changing the URL structure on the new site, this issue must be carefully considered. Test all redirect rules on a stage server before committing a domain change to be as confident as possible that there are no 301 loops or 404 errors. Many of the other items in this blog post are potential problems surrounding this one action: messing up the redirect rules is the only method guaranteed to turn your change of domain into a disaster.
And, naturally, make sure these redirects are implemented as permanent redirects (301 status codes) for optimum link juice channeling.
Measuring Change

Different place and different face.

While changing some site elements at the same time as the domain is unavoidable in most cases, be careful about too many simultaneous changes. If things like design or content are changed at the same time as site location, it will become much more difficult, and perhaps impossible, to tell whether any issues with indexation or rankings are caused by a problem with the site move or the other changes that occurred at the same time.
Webmaster Tools: Before, During, After.

What Webmaster Tools theoretically looks like.

Before making any changes, ensure that all applicable domains are verified in Google Webmaster Tools. This includes both www. and bare versions of the domain where possible. It can be painful to have to go back and verify an original domain after redirects are already in place.
During the change (i.e. immediately after redirects have been put in place) submit a change of address in Webmaster Tools. If your domains have been verified, this is quite straightforward.
After the change, be sure to submit your new sitemap to Webmaster Tools if it has not been picked up already by Google. Monitor for crawler errors and indexation. If you desire a more granular assessment of indexation through sitemaps, see Rob Ousbey’s post on indexation problems.
Links

A link.

Juice passed through redirects decays over time. In order to prevent this where possible, any internal or external links under your control should be change immediately after the redirects to your new domain are implemented. In other cases, you may be able to outreach to other sites linking to your domain in order to get links changed. Prepare a list of sites beforehand for this outreach in order to get this done as quickly as possible.
Another good practice is to have link bait prepared to launch immediately following your move. This will help create an influx of links and social signals to your new domain, hopefully jump-starting crawling and indexation of the new site.
Daily Check Up

The fabled checklist.

After all is said and done, not everything is said and done. A bit of daily monitoring is in order. Some of these things are essentially noted above, but as a checklist of sorts:

• Monitor Webmaster Tools for 4xx/5xx errors.
• Check 301s (i.e. not 302s) and 301 loops. Obviously 301s don’t magically change into 302s, but with a lot of changes happening things can fall through the cracks.
• If you have access, monitor crawl rates for old and new domains.
• Monitor indexation via sitemaps in WMT.
• Monitor traffic via Analytics.

By: Benjamin Estes

Source - Changes of Domain | Distilled blog

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PPC Can Improve Organic Search Conversions

When formulating strategies and tactics for organic search, some of the most difficult questions that arise are related to conversion of organic search traffic.
Are you targeting keywords that will bring not only traffic, but converting traffic, to your site? Is your page meta data optimized not only for high rankings, but for high clickthrough rates when your site’s snippets do appear highly in organic search results? How can the target page for any given keyword be manipulated to improve conversions from organic search?
Data from paid search campaigns can help answer all these questions. PPC data can be invaluable both in initial SEO planning and for optimizing existing pages for improved conversion, largely because paid search can provide information on keywords for which a site does not currently rank.

Keyword Targeting

One of the most difficult things to assess in organic search is which keywords to target for optimal conversion. Or, more precisely, trying to determine which keywords will deliver a reasonable amount of traffic at a reasonably high conversion rate.
All keyword tools provide an estimate of the number of searches a keyword is likely to receive in a given period, but this says nothing about the conversion potential of those queries.
On one hand, a presumably high-traffic keyword may not actually deliver large numbers of visitors, because your site is a poor match for the intent behind the query. If you were to successfully optimize for that keyword, your site would appear in many search results, but few users would click through to your site from them.
On the other hand, a high-traffic keyword may actually drive large numbers of visitors to your site, but upon arrival those visitors fail to purchase an item, fill out a form, signup or otherwise complete a website goal. If you were successful in your optimization efforts for that keyword, you would drive large numbers of visitors to your site, but few users would end up converting (and as a result would be less likely to return).
Paid search can help define or refine your organic keyword targeting by providing data on both issues. The clickthrough rate on paid ad impressions can help you determine which keywords have a good organic traffic potential. This in itself can be extremely helpful for informational sites where ingestion of a single page is a valid conversion goal, and where other engagement metrics like time on site or pages per visit may not come into play.

Effective keyword targeting for SEO entails finding the sweet spot of relatively high traffic & a relatively high conversion rate – here, Keyword B

More obviously, the actual conversion rate of paid search keywords can provide an important data-based clue for organic keyword targeting. At a page level, trying to decide which of a number of topically similar, but semantically different keywords to target is made immeasurably easier when PPC data is available: focus on what paid search has revealed as the highest-converting keywords.
While this sounds simple in theory, it may be more difficult to accomplish in practice, particularly in the not uncommon situation where SEO is managed in-house, but PPC by an agency. And a certain amount of guess work and extrapolation is going to be involved in prying search terms from broad and phrase matched keywords in different ad groups. But this is effort well taken. Otherwise, you may only discover after months of effort that your ranking success for “blue widgets” hasn’t resulted in the sale of many blue widgets.
Even in the absence of a paid search program, paid search in the form of estimated cost-per-click (as reported by the Google AdWords Keyword Tool) may help inform your organic keyword targeting. It stands to reason that if an advertiser is willing to pay $2.00 for “widget killer” but only $1.00 for “widget zapper” then it is likely that the former has been demonstrated to convert better.
Estimated CPC is an extremely blunt instrument and should be used with caution for SEO, but it can be helpful when trying to set optimization priorities among a number of similar, high-traffic keywords.

The Perfect Snippet

The snippet for a page in your site in the search engine results pages is comprised of the linked page description for that page. This is roughly analogous to the elements of a PPC ad: the linked ad headline, the display URL, and the ad text.
A knowledge of which ads have resulted in the highest conversion rate for a keyword or ad group can help you craft meta data that will be more successful in driving clickthroughs from search engine results pages to your site.
While the longest allowable Google AdWords ad headline is shorter than the maximum title tag that will appear in Google without an ellipses (25 characters versus 70), and the ad text shorter than a fully-displayed meta description (70 characters versus 156), successful ads can give you an excellent idea of what sort of copy resonates with searchers. Using ad copy to help fine-tune page titles and descriptions is especially helpful because there’s no straightforward way of testing the effectiveness of different snippets in organic search.
In some situations, successful ad copy can also be leveraged to craft messages on the page that will result in higher conversions from organic search. While a successful ad headline might not be exactly appropriate for a page title tag, it might be an excellent candidate for the on-page title or subtitle. Similarly, the messaging in the PPC ad might be used to improve the wording of a call-to-action on a page.

Leveraging PPC Landing Pages For SEO

In the happy event that your company uses landing pages as paid search targets, you can use these landing pages to help build permanent pages that will do a better job of converting organic search traffic, and may even improve the ability of those pages to rank for their target keywords.
This is really an extension carrying over snippet messaging to your organic target page to improve conversions, but on a bigger scale. Aside from using ad messaging that’s proven successful in paid search, you can also carry over other aspects of a PPC landing page that have proven successful through testing, such as the content of text blocks and visual page design.
The beauty of using PPC landing pages to improve your organic search performance – rather than landing pages in general – is that there is a relationship between query keywords and the effectiveness of the landing page in paid search that can be carried over in the organic realm. Where the traffic source for a landing page is not search, such as display advertising or a television commercial, then the same parallels may not exist.
Manipulating your site pages in this manner may not, of course, be possible. A PPC landing page for an ad with the headline “Buy 2 Leather Chairs, Get 1 Free” may not be altogether helpful in manipulating your standing ecommerce category page for leather chairs, even though both target the keyword “leather chairs.” Even in this situation, however, lessons derived from testing elements of PPC landing pages aside from messaging can help improve the organic search performance of indexed site pages.
Google AdWords Quality Score data from PPC landing pages can also be brought into play when trying to improve the performance of a page optimized for similar keywords. Landing pages with a high Quality Score are likely to better models for an organic search target page than those with a lower score, as Quality Score takes into landing page quality into consideration. Information from the AdWords keyword diagnosis report can also be helpful in building better organic search target pages.
Whether you are using data from PPC landing pages and paid search ads to improve on-page SEO or better define organic search keyword targets, paid search can be a great help in your SEO efforts. The biggest challenge to using paid search data effectively for SEO may be uncovering that data in the first place, so don’t be shy in approaching your in-house or external provider of PPC services for the information that can be used to improve the performance of your optimization efforts.

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Know About Google’s Quality Score

Much has been written about Google’s “Quality Score” — how it’s calculated, how it works (or doesn’t work), which segments of your marketing efforts are affected by it, what are the myths, who’s happy and who’s not, what’s relevant, etc. Trying to sort through all the information can be a dizzying endeavor.
Quality score is increasingly important in Google AdWords. The Quality Score is used to assess the relevance of an ad to searchers based on ad click-through rate, engagement with the site and a measurement of the relevancy of the ad and landing page compared to the keyword associated to the search query.
So, if you’re managing your own pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns and want to improve on your ad position and Quality Score, you need to go straight to the source – Google itself, to view its current definition for Quality Score.
Improving Your Keywords’ Quality Score
Google’s recommendation for improving your keywords’ Quality Scores is to optimize the account. This involves making sure that each of the ad groups contained within your campaigns have ads that are closely tied to the same product or service that you are promoting, and that each keyword within the ad group closely relates to the ads (relevancy); therefore, organizing the ad group by topic, theme or silo is a highly recommended best practice.
A Quality Score is calculated every time a keyword matches a search query — that is, every time a keyword has the potential to trigger an ad. Quality score is used in several different ways, including influencing the keywords’ actual cost-per-clicks (CPCs) and estimating the first page bids seen in the account.
It also partly determines if a keyword is eligible to enter the ad auction that occurs when a user enters a search query and, if it is, how high the ad will be ranked. In general, the higher the Quality Score, the lower the costs and the better the ad position.
Quality score ratings can be viewed in account statistics as well as the keyword reports. Quality Score can also be viewed through the keyword diagnosis (listed under the “Status” column, mouse over the speech bubble of the Keywords tab) which reveals Quality Score details.
Quality score formulas vary by network (search and display — CPC or CPM bidding variables). The three most salient components of the Quality Score calculations are:

• Click-through rate (CTR): Higher CTR and Quality Score can lead to lower costs and higher ad position. As clicks occur, these help decide which ads best match search queries.
• Relevancy: Refers to the effectiveness of information to the users. How easy is it to find what the ad promises? Therefore, relevancy of the keywords to the ad text is important, as well as the landing page. The greater the match between the three, the higher the relevancy. The outcome of the match can impact the result of the ad performance and costs.
• Landing page quality: The three main components of a high-quality landing page and/or website are:

1. Relevant and original content: Relevancy already explained above. Original content refers to content that is unique and can’t be found on another site and provides substantial information.
2. Transparency: Refers to the nature of your business, how your site interacts with a visitor’s computer and how you intend to use a visitor’s personal information, if you request it.
3. Navigability: making it easy for users to find what they’re looking for.

Load time, or site speed/performance, impacts your landing page quality, vis-à-vis Quality Score. Therefore:

• Review your load times and look for these main culprits such as interstitial pages, multiple redirects (from bid management or tracking tools), excessively slow servers and heavy pages.
• Try optimizing your load times to speed up page download.
• Review your load-time evaluation published by Google.

Other relevancy factors may include the bounce rate of the landing page; so pages that don’t engage well relative to competitors will rate less high. You can lower bounce rates by tailoring landing pages to their associated ads and referral links and placing a clear call-to-action on each landing page.
The following table shows the Quality Score formula matrix:

The number depicted under the Quality Score column (once enabled), when you’re looking at your keywords or when you perform keyword diagnosis is the Quality Score detail.
This is a breakdown of Google’s standard quality scale of “poor,” “OK and “great.” On this scale, one is the lowest rating, while 10 is the highest.
The number is displayed as “X” out of 10, since 10 is the maximum. For instance, a Quality Score detail of 7 would be shown as 7/10.
The Impact of the Quality Score
Quality score can have a large impact on the performance of your account, when it comes to garnering additional market share and controlling costs. So it’s important to understand its impact and how to improve the Quality Score results.
Within the search network, Quality Scores can impact:

• Costs: The higher a keyword’s Quality Score, the lower the price you pay for each click (this means a diminished cost-per-click).
• The ad eligibility to show: Keywords that have been designated with a higher Quality Score will be eligible to enter the auction easier and at a reduced cost.
• Ad position (rank): The ad’s ranking on the page is based on the keyword’s Quality Score and CPC bid.

Within the display network, a high Quality Score can:

• Decrease your keywords’ cost-per-clicks.
• Increase your keyword-targeted ads’ position on the content network.
• Improve the chances that your ads will win a position on your targeted placements.

Quality Score: The Takeaways
Quality scores measures the relevancy of the keyword, ad group, and Web page in relation to a user’s search. It aids in determining when and where the ads should appear. When compliance to these guidelines is adhered to, the result and the reward is a higher keyword Quality Score, a better ad position and a lower cost-per-click. Remember:

• Build your paid search strategy around delivering relevance through targeted ads and landing pages which match searchers needs
• Strive continuously to improve your Quality Score by updating ad copy.
• Understand the factors that influence the Quality Score that determines relevance of an ad to a user and controls your position in the search results.
• Stay up-to-date on the latest innovations and act on the latest changes to the Quality Score criterion.

So if the account has a poor Quality Score, ad rank is suffering and you’re paying too much, it’s time for a tune up. Roll up your sleeves, pull up your socks, look under the hood and determine what’s causing the problem and make modifications. Look at your ad copy, landing pages and keywords; reassign ad groups to adjust your Quality Score.
On the other hand, if you have a poor Quality Score, but the conversion rate is good, the cost per conversion is acceptable and cost savings brought on by an improved Quality Score rating is not important, than this information is irrelevant.
As a final note, and in case you haven’t viewed it, refer to the video by Google’s chief economist Hal Varian, in which he explains the AdWords Ad Auction and how your max CPC bid and Quality Score determine how much one pays for a click.


Related posts:

1. Ads In A Quality Score World
2. Changes to Adwords
3. Music & Search Engine Marketing: Quality Score & The Volume Game — SES New York 2011
4. Decrypting Quality Scores
5. MSN Gives adCenter A Quality Upgrade

About the Author : Javier Ruesga joined Bruce Clay, Inc. in 2010, bringing with him years of experience in search marketing for companies like Yahoo! and others, where he served in multiple roles in leadership, sales, paid search, SEO and more. You can learn more about Javier at LinkedIn.

This post is taken from Bruce Clay Blog
Source - What’s All This About Google’s Quality Score? « Bruce Clay Blog

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Post-Panda SEO Tactics

“What’s up with Google now, post-Panda/Farmer/whaddayacallit? What am I supposed to be doing for SEO?”
(Usually accompanied with a deep sigh, aggressive hand gestures, and/or grimacing.)

It All Started With Caffeine

“Caffeine lets us index web pages on an enormous scale.” – Carrie Grimes, Google

If we look back a year ago, when Google rolled out Caffeine, which was (and still is) unprecedented in search, it was this infrastructure change that allowed for the dramatic algorithm improvements we’ve seen recently.
Caffeine was not an algorithm change but instead a massive improvement to the freshness of Google’s index and its ability to crawl and then index content nearly in real time.
But closely timed with these changes was the Mayday update, which specifically focused on returning quality results for long-tail queries. Ecommerce sites were impacted, as were any sites with an architecture built around item-level URLs standing on thin content and separated by several clicks from higher-authority pages (like home pages, major categories, or any URL with authority and unique content).
Then came Panda/Farmer. While Mayday appeared to hit a relatively small portion of the total query space, the latest version of Panda has a much stronger impact, hitting about 12% of all searches. As distinct from Mayday, which focused on long-tail quality and authority (penalizing shortcuts such as simply matching keywords to queries), Panda focuses on concepts such as quality, authority, trust and credibility, and also incorporates user signals.
So why does Caffeine matter so much? It seems that Caffeine, at least in part, has enabled these evolutions in the algorithm, through its ability to index such a massive portion of the web. Carrie Grimes from Google again:

“Caffeine lets us index web pages on an enormous scale. In fact, every second Caffeine processes hundreds of thousands of pages in parallel. If this were a pile of paper it would grow three miles taller every second. Caffeine takes up nearly 100 million gigabytes of storage in one database and adds new information at a rate of hundreds of thousands of gigabytes per day. You would need 625,000 of the largest iPods to store that much information; if these were stacked end-to-end they would go for more than 40 miles.”

In order to rank URLs appropriately, they must be in an index (after being crawled and fetched). These are distinct processes with their own sets of algorithms. Caffeine represents a new model in search, whereby the largest modern day index of the web has been created, in order to model the data accurately and rank pages based on content and social signals, as well as the PageRank equation signals Google has built its search engine upon.

What Does This Mean For SEO?

It has been common practice for many years to monitor overall site indexing in each of the major engines (mostly focusing on Google, naturally). Sites that weren’t being indexed deeply would need specific tactics to push that number up, and sites well indexed would be monitored closely to ensure that was sustained.
What’s different post-Panda is that indexing, as a metric or signal, is no longer viable, simply because Google seems to want everything it can get in its index. The index is not a signal of anything, anymore, except that Google has the URL in its databases.

We’ve seen several large sites which were impacted by Panda, and in each case, indexation remained fairly flat while traffic from Google organic search plunged 50% or more.
In her piece on Google confirming Mayday impacts the long-tail, Vanessa Fox reported:

“I asked Google for more specifics and they told me that it was a rankings change, not a crawling or indexing change, which seems to imply that sites getting less traffic still have their pages indexed, but some of those pages are no longer ranking as highly as before.”

This is precisely what we’re seeing with Panda, as well.

Recommended SEO Approach For Panda

While most of what works now, has always worked, there is at least one important change.
The SEO model has changed with Panda in that, rather than getting as many URLs as you can indexed, you now want only your highest-quality, most important URLs indexed. Consistent signals should be sent as to which pages are most important:

1. Decide which URLs are canonical and create strong signals (rel canonical, robot exclusion, internal link profile, XML sitemaps)
2. Decide which URLs are your most valuable and ensure they are indexed and well optimized
3. Remove any extraneous, overhead, duplicate, low value and unnecessary URLs from the index
4. Build internal links to canonical, high-value URLs from authority pages (strong mozRank, unique referring domains, total links, are example metrics)
5. Build high-quality external links via social media efforts

Pay special attention to number 3 above. If your properties have low-quality or significantly duplicative content, it is best to remove those URLs from the indexes. Even a site with some high-quality content and lots of thin or low-quality content could see traffic deterioration because of Panda.
The new SEO, at least as far as Panda is concerned, is about pushing your best quality stuff and the complete removal of low-quality or overhead pages from the indexes. Which means it’s not as easy anymore to compete by simply producing pages at scale, unless they’re created with quality in mind. Which means for some sites, SEO just got a whole lot harder.
by Adam Audette

This article is taken from here - 5 New Tactics For SEO Post-Panda

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Use Google Instant For Local & Mobile Optimization

Undoubtedly, you may have seen Google’s Instant Preview interface which provides glimpses for webpages listed in SERPs. What you may not be aware of is that they’ve added sophisticated code to make it unique on mobile devices. These Instant Previews provide compelling evidence that mobile optimization continues to be important.

Google rolled out Instant Previews in November 2010, and a number of marketers immediately began to try to tweak website elements to optimize the preview views and callout text.
Yet other types of sites, such as news publications, were slightly irked that Google deployed the feature without observing “noarchive” requests already programmed into sites (some sites have reason to opt out of allowing cached views of their webpages, and Instant Preview is yet another type of cached view, albeit in something of a large, graphic thumbnail format).
Still, relatively few marketers may have noticed that a discretely unique form of Instant Previews also rolled out for smartphones (supported for Apple iOS4 and Android version 2.2+ devices), and even fewer may have connected the dots to understand the implications of the mobile-only previews of webpages.
First, a few screenshots of the difference between web based Instant Previews and their mobile siblings.
In a regular websearch for “hotels, seattle, wa” on a PC, the instant preview magnifying-glass icons appear beside webpage links listed in the search engine results page (“SERP”):

If you click on the magnifying glass beside a listing, you can see an Instant Preview of the webpage. Here’s the one for the Expedia page in the results:

Here’s the Instant Preview for the Fairmont Hotel in the same SERP:

I discovered that these two pages have been optimized for mobile.
Incidentally, a quick way to see which pages are listed in a set of Google mobile search results is to search for them on Google’s legacy XHTML search interface — the mobile optimized results will have small cellphone icons adjacent to them:

Now, if you look at the Expedia and Fairmont pages, they’re pretty large and complex in layout, so viewing them on handheld devices would not be all that great. Yet, you can see from the cellphone icons that they have been customized for mobile phone interfaces.
If we pull up Google on a smartphone such as an Android, and search again for “hotels, seattle, wa”, this is what we’ll see:

You can see that the magnifying glass icon for the Instant Previews button in Google’s search results is a little bit different, having dots to either side, indicating that the interface allows a sort of pagination for the previewing of each of the pages in the search results.
Since the interface for mobile devices is necessarily small, this pagination functionality is very helpful and allows one to browse through the previews without having to flip back and forth from the regular web search results page.
What’s interesting when viewing the search results on a smartphone with an Android operating system (like I’m using here) is that you’ll get quite a different Instant Preview for the same webpage – in fact, you get the mobile version of the page, for those which have alternate versions for mobile.
Here are the mobile Instant Previews for the Expedia and Fairmont Hotel pages:

In each case, both Expedia and the Fairmont Hotel have optimized for mobile devices, paring down the pages and simplifying to fit a smaller interface.
The implication of Google’s differential Instant Previews for mobile versus regular version webpages is this: Google is still paying attention to whether a webpage has mobile-friendly alternative versions, and they may prefer that version of a webpage for users who conduct searches on mobile devices.
As cellphones have become more sophisticated, and they’ve grown better at interpreting regular webpages for viewing on handhelds, one could make the argument that the need for creating mobile-friendly websites has reduced. The advent of iPhones and Androids has certainly removed some of the pressure on companies to produce mobile friendly sites.
Yet, large/complex pages remain more difficult to use on cellphones, and they don’t look good in Instant Previews in some cases. An example of this is the site for the Edgewater Hotel, which is listed at the top of my search results for the “hotels, seattle, wa” search.
They apparently don’t offer Google a mobile optimized version of their homepage, because their Instant Preview on Android leaves a big blank area at the top of the image where their page has Flash content, which Instant Previews do not yet interpret:

Google’s attention to these details indicates that they have the perspective that optimization for mobile devices is important. The device view screens remain small, and the ways in which people use the devices are different — you’re less able and less willing to consume larger, more-complex media on your cellphones.
You’re less patient with navigating bigger webpages (zooming in and out and having to pan around overmuch), and you typically may not be looking to read lengthy amounts of text when viewing through cellphones.
The fact that there are still a number of different search interfaces for Google on various mobile devices shows that Google believes that user-experience and usability differ for mobile users. And, frequently in Google’s eyes, a more identifiably usable website is a better result for a searcher. Thus, mobile optimization may still lend some small advantage, at least in Google’s mobile search results.
A few years ago, I saw clear cases where mobile-optimized pages outranked non-mobile pages in Google mobile SERPs. The difference now is negligible.
However, I think the advantage to mobile optimized pages will likely be more in terms of ability to connect and convert consumers on wireless devices. This may give only marginal ranking benefit — or none at all compared with regular search on PCs — but it could help you to get someone to choose to click and then to buy.

This Isn’t Rocket Science!

Optimizing for mobile is fairly simple. In fact, it’s so simple that it’s surprising that more companies are not delivering mobile-friendly versions of their pages.
To optimize for mobile search, try the following:

• Perform content negotiation when a user lands on your site — if their accept-header indicates a preference for a mobile flavor webpage, deliver the mobile version of your page to them.
• Google has a separate bot for crawling/indexing mobile versions of pages. So, you can deliver both a mobile version page up on the very same URL you’re using for the regular, full-blown HTML page, as long as you’re performing the content negotiation check on the backend.
• Google has identified a few different mobile-friendly languages which they support, so you’ll want to use one of them: XHTML Basic 1.1, XHTML MP 1.2, cHTML, or WML 1.3.
• Disclose that you have mobile-friendly pages outright. Googlebot-mobile will eventually discover them, but it could happen quicker if you generate a mobile sitemap and then notify Google through your Webmaster Tools account.
• Let smartphone users choose formats manually, if they wish. Provide a link from the regular page to the mobile version, and vice-versa so users can choose to switch.
• WordPress has some plugins that may handle delivering up mobile-friendly versions of blogs.
• Similar to WordPress and depending on your content management system, or the programming language used to develop your site, there could also be freeware programs, modules or libraries that would make it easiest to get your mobile version set up. Using off-the-shelf code may get you up and running quicker, and save you time.

So, let Google’s distinct Instant Previews serve to encourage you to optimize specifically for mobile users. It’s simple enough to add to sites, so there’s really no excuse for neglecting it.

by Chris Silver Smith

Source - Google Instant Provides A Hint For Local & Mobile Optimization

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Optimize your Website for Local Search Results

Optimize your Website for Local Search Results :

• Use and select your main keywords with location, means if you are a SEO consultant from Washington, then use the keywords like ” SEO Consultant Washington, SEO Washington, Washington SEO services etc”. This will show the search engines that this page targeted for a specific place.
• Use the main key-phrase along with the location you are targeting in the file name of the web page.

• Use your local based keywords including language terms and grammar ( Some words vary in different locations ) in the Title and Description Meta tags on the page.
• Use one of your main keywords-phrase and the location in the H1 tag for the page.
• If your business delivers to the local area you may wish to include some of the suburbs you deliver to for some more local targeting.
• And also try to host the website in your targeted country or location, this can boost your traffic for sure.

Local SEO Techniques :

Choosing a Local Top Level Domain (TLD) :

Arrange for local domains and local hosting, your top level domain name or your website hosting must be within the country only, means for example if your are in USA, you can choose your top level domain (TLD) .us, this just another way to show the search engine crawler that your website is targeted for local country.
The Second thing is your web hosting, your website hosting must be in within your country, check whether your service provider hosted your website in any USA data center or something, and tell them to change it to the local country data center. This will power up the task that your website is ready to show on local country search only.

Target Geo-Location in Google Webmasters Tool :

Google Webmasters is the best way to tell the Google bot that what it has to crawl and where it has to target, in the Google webmaster you can set the Geographic location target for the website. This is really a simple way you can target the local website for local search engines.

How set Geographic target for a website in Google Webmasters Tool :

1) Go to Site Settings.
2) Now select settings under site settings.
3) Check the box Target users in. And select the country you want to target.
4) Save the changes, you are done.

Correct the Language Issues :

In targeting different countries, you encounter the problem of mirror content when you simply put the same content to your websites located on different domains. You might think Web pages translated into different languages avoid the mirror content problem. In performing local optimization, you need to adhere to local approaches.

Local inbound links & Directory Submission :

Search engine spiders consider the inbound links that form your link profile. Inbound links from local TLDs will help you to get into the top results of local search engines. Try to gain links from local business partners, chambers of commerce, government agencies, suppliers, etc.
You can submit to some local directory websites like, Listings in the regional sections of the DMOZ, Yahoo, and BestOfTheWeb global directories will also help to improve local link popularity.

Submit to Google Places (former Local Business Center) :

Google Places, offers a free listing on Google maps. When potential customers search Google Maps for local information, they will easily find information about your business: your contact details, hours of operation, even coupons to print out and bring to your shop.
Google’s terms of service restrict any misrepresentations of your business in the listing – the business’ title should be a direct representation of its name. Well you can add its city, such as “Omni Hotel San Diego,” to help your ranking for regional searches.

Posted by Arafath Hashmi

Source - Optimize your Website for Local Search Results

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Clever trick to make YouTube videos fill up the browser

If you're teaching with YouTube videos, you know the problem.  The student clicks on a YT link and see LOTS of stuff on the right-hand side or in the comments below the video.  

While those contents are important if you're browsing video, in a classroom setting, it's often distracting and takes students off-task.  The normal landing-page to a YouTube video looks like this: 

Great to browse, but a bit distracting when you're trying to learn something.  

So... how can you force the video to fill the browser and NOT show all the distracting 

If  the original YouTube video is located at ..

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNHR6IQJGZs  (This is the Matt Cutts video on “How search works”)

You can modify the URL to include the modified argument “watch_popup”  (as below)

http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=BNHR6IQJGZs

And the YT video will fill the browser.   Nice technique to use when creating links on educational materials to YouTube videos!   

Always searching for ways to improve your (and your students') productivity!

Posted by - Daniel M. Russell

Source - SearchReSearch: Clever trick to make YouTube videos fill up the browser

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Important Strategies for Organizing Your Match Types

When you have two or more keywords that can be triggered in your AdWords account from a search query, Google tries to show the most restrictive option. The constraints go beyond just match type to include geography, time of day, etc.
However, Google does not always show exact match over phrase match and phrase match over broad match. They also look at ad rank (max CPC x Quality Score). If you have an exact match term bid at $0.25 and the broad match bid at $1, Google will generally show the broad match term.
As an advertiser, you will find that your exact match converts higher than your phrase or broad match. You should control the ad serving so you know which ad copy and keyword will be displayed for any search query. You can control the ad serving through the use of bids or negative keywords.
There are several ways your can organize your match types within your paid search account. None of the strategies are better or worse than each other – they are just different. In today’s column we will examine the three most common match type organizational techniques and show the pros and cons of each.
For each of these scenarios, we will assume you are using multiple match types for the same keyword.

Adding Multiple Match Types to the Same Ad Group

With this method, you add a keyword to an ad group multiple times, each with a different match type.

Pros: The pros of this method is that you have less total ad groups to try and create and optimize. This saves on both creation and management time. If you have a limited amount of time (and/or technology) this is by far the easiest method to use.
Cons: There are several cons to this method. With exact match, you can make a good guess to the user intent of the word, so your ad can be very specific to the keyword. With broad match you know a lot less about the user intent, so you might write a more general ad copy that incorporates the keyword. This method does not allow you to write ads by match types.
The only way to control ad serving with this method is to make sure your exact match is the highest bid, your phrase match the second highest bid, then modified broad match. If your ad rank for your broad match trumps your exact match, then your conversion rates and other data by match types becomes compromised.

Restricting Match Types by Ad Group

With this method, each ad group will only contain one match type. If you want to advertise on both exact match and phrase match terms, then you will have two different ad groups. In addition, for each of your ad groups you will also use negative keywords to ensure the correct match type is being triggered. For instance, your phrase match ad group will contain exact match negatives of all the keywords.

Pros: There are a few advantages of this method. The first is that the proper keyword match type should be displayed in a search result. You do not have to ensure that your phrase match ad rank is higher than your exact match ad rank (however, it should be as the conversion rates for exact match should be higher than phrase match). This method also allows you to write ad copy by match type.
Cons: The biggest con is that your account can quickly be overwhelmed with too many ad groups to the point that you have to create new campaigns for all of your ad groups as there are hard limits on how many ad groups can be within a single campaign. This method takes a lot longer to setup, and a little bit longer to manage than grouping all of the match types in a single ad group.
Note: It is common to see this method employed where the long tail keywords are grouped by match type into a single ad group, and then the higher priced keywords or higher volume keywords are broken down by match type into different ad groups.

Restricting Match Types by Campaign

Brand that are successful with AdWords have a campaign just for their branded terms. This campaign is often one of the higher budget campaigns because it has the best conversion rates and lowest CPA.
A natural extension of that same logic is that exact match keywords have the second highest conversion rates and second lowest CPAs for most brands. However, there is a limit to how much you can spend on exact match each month based upon search volume. Therefore, you can put all of your exact match in a campaign with a budget to capture all of that search volume.
The next highest conversion rates come from phrase matched words. Group all of your phrase matched words into another campaign. Finally, have yet another campaign for modified broad match and broad match keywords. This last broad match campaign will use the last of the company’s budget. If the budget gets increased, then the broad match campaign’s budget is often increased. If the budget is being reached, then pull the budget from the broad match campaign which also has the lowest conversion rates of all the campaigns.
When you restrict match types by campaign, you also need to add negative keywords by match type (just like the method restricting match types by ad group) to ensure the proper keywords are being displayed.
Pros: The biggest pro to this account structure is that you can adjust both bids and budget by match types. This method also allows you to write ad copy for each match type and keyword organization.
Cons: The issue with this account structure is that you can quickly have too many campaigns. If you have multiple campaigns by match type, and each ad group only contains keywords of the same match type which cause you to also need more campaigns, and you are doing geographic targeting or the content network, you can quickly become overwhelmed by too many campaigns.
Each campaign must also have a budget. If you slice your budget too thin, then none of your campaigns will receive much traffic. In addition, this method takes more organizational and management time than the other structures. This method is not recommending for smaller budgets.

Conclusion

Each way you organize your keywords and match types has both pros and cons. None of them are better or worse for all accounts.
If you create so many ad groups and campaigns for the perfect organization, but then do not have the time to manage them all and some ad groups or campaigns fall into disrepair, then you should use a time friendlier organization technique.
For very small accounts with little time, organizing match types in the same ad group is just fine. If you have more time than money, and testing is essential to everything you do, then you will want to organize by at least different match types per ad groups, and possibly by campaign.
If you are working with a very large account that is constantly shifting budgets, launching products, and you have moving goal targets, organizing by campaigns is generally the best method to use.
When deciding how to organize your match types and keywords, examine your goals, time, technology, and budget. Map out various scenarios in how to structure your account. Then, pick the method that will allow you to attain your goals within the time you have to manage your account. A proper account structure is key to the long term success of managing and growing a successful paid search account.

by brad

Source : 3 Strategies for Organizing Your Match Types

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Pagination: Best Practices for SEO & User Experience

We've been getting a lot of questions in Q+A and on the road at events like last week's Miva Merchant conference, Online Marketing Summit and the YCombinator conference about how to properly paginate results for search engines. In this post, we'll cover the dangers, opportunities and optimization tactics that can best ensure success. The best part? These practices aren't just good for SEO, they're great for usability and user experience too!

Why is Pagination an SEO Issue?

Pagination, the practice of segmenting links to content on multiple pages, affects two critical elements of search engine accessibility.

• Crawl Depth: Best practices demand that the search engine spiders reach content-rich pages in as few "clicks" as possible (turns out, users like this, too). This also impacts calculations like Google's PageRank (or Bing's StaticRank), which determine the raw popularity of a URL and are an element of the overall algorithmic ranking system.
• Duplicate Content: Search engines take duplication very seriously and attempt to show only a single URL that contains any given piece of content. When pagination is implemented improperly, it can cause duplicate content problems, both for individual articles and the landing pages that allow browsing access to them.

When is Pagination Necessary?

When a site grows beyond a few dozen pages of content in a specific category or subcategory, listing all of the links on a single page of results can make for unwieldly, hard-to-use pages that seem to scroll indefinitely (and can cause long load times as well).

Clearly, I need to log into Facebook more often...

But, usability isn't the only reason pagination exists. For many years, Google's recommended that pages contain no more than 100 links (internal or external) in order to make it easy for spiders to reach down deep into a site's architecture. Many SEOs have found that this "limit" isn't hard and fast, but staying within that general range remains a best practice. Hence, pages that contain many hundreds or thousands of links may inadvertently be hurting the access of search engines to the content-rich pages in the list making pagination essential.

Numbers of Links & Pages

We know that sometimes pagination is essential - one page of results just doesn't cut it in every situation. But just how many links to content should the average category/results page show? And how many pages of results should display in the pagination?

There are a lot of options here, but there's serious danger in using the wrong structures. Let's take a look at the right (and wrong) ways to determine link numbers.

In some cases, there's simply too many pages of results to list them all. When this happens, the very best thing you can do is to work around the problem by... creating more subcategories! It may seem challenging or even counter-intuitive, but adding either an extra layer of classification or a greater number of subcategories can have a dramatically positive impact on both SEO and usability.

There are times, however, when even the creation of many deep subcategories isn't enough. If your site is big enough, you may need to have extensive pagination such that not every page of results can be reached in once click. In these cases, there are a few clear dos and don'ts.
Do:

• Try to link to as many pages of the pagination structure as possible without breaking the 100(ish) links per page limit
• Show newer content at the top of the results list when possible, as this means the most link juice will flow to newer articles that need it (and are temporally relevant)
• Use and link to relevant/related categories & subcategories to help keep link juice flowing throughout the site
• Link back to the top results from each of the paginated URLs

Don't:

• Show only a few surrounding paginated links from paginated URLs - you want the engines to be able to crawl deeper from inside the structure
• Link to only the pages at the front and end of the paginated listings; this will flow all the juice to the start and end of results, ingoring the middle
• Try to randomize the paginated results shown in an effort to distribute link juice; you want a static site architecture the engines can crawl
• Try to use AJAX to get deeper in the results sets - engines follow small snippets of Javascript (sometimes), but they're not at a point where this is an SEO best practice
• Go over the top trying to get every paginated result linked-to, as this can appear both spammy and unusably ugly

When in doubt, consider the directives you're optimizing toward - the need for fewer extra pages of pagination, the desire to make the browsing experience usable (many webmasters mistakenly think users will simply give up and search, forgetting that some of us can't recall the name of the piece we're looking for!) and the importance of maintaining a reasonable count of links per page. Also note that although I've illustrated using 5-10 listings (for graphical space requirements), a normal listings set could be 30-90 links per page, depending on the situation.

Titles & Meta Descriptions for Paginated Results

In most cases, the title and meta description of paginated results are copied from the top page. This isn't ideal, as it can potentially cause duplicate content issues. Instead, you can employ a number of tactics to help solve the problem.
Example of results page titles & descriptions:

Top Page Title: Theatres & Playhouses in Princeton, New Jersey
Top Page Meta Description: Listings of 368 theatres, playhouses and performance venues in the Princeton, NJ region (including surrounding cities).
Page 4 Title: Page 4 of 7 for Princeton, New Jersey Theatres & Playhouses
Page 4 Meta Description: Listings 201-250 (out of 368) theatres, playhouses and performance venues in the Princeton, NJ region (inclusing surrounding cities).
Alternate Page 4 Title: Results Page 4/7 for Princeton, New Jersey Theatres & Playhouses
Alternate Page 4: Description: -

Yes, you can use no meta description at all, and in fact, if I were setting up a CMS today, this is how I'd do it. A missing meta description reduces complexity and potential mis-casting of URLs as duplicates. Also notce that I've made the titles on results pages sub-optimal to help dissuade the engines from sending traffic to these URLs, rather than the top page (which is made to be the better "landing" experience for users).

Nofollows. Rel=Canonicals and Conditional Redirects

Some SEOs and website owners have, unfortunately, received or interpreted advice incorrectly about employing directives like the nofollow tag, canonical URL tag or even conditional redirects to help control bot activity in relation to pagination. These are almost always a bad idea.
Whatever you do, DO NOT:

• Put a rel=canonical directive on paginated results pointing back to the top page in an attempt to flow link juice to that URL. You'll either misdirect the engines into thinking you have only a single page of results or convince them that your directives aren't worth following (as they find clearly unique content on those pages).
• Add nofollow to the paginated links on the results pages. This tells the engines not to flow link juice/votes/authority down into the results pages that desperately need those votes to help them get indexed and pass value to the deeper pages.
• Create a conditional redirect so that when search engines request paginated results, they 301 redirect or meta refresh back to the top page of results.

The only time I recommend using any of these is when pagination exists in multiple formats. For example, if you let users re-sort by a number of different metrics (in a restaurant list, for example, it might be by star rating, distance, name, price, etc.), you may want to either perform this re-sort using javascript (and employ the hash tag in the URL) or make those separately segmented paginated results rel=canonical back to a single sorting format.

Letting Users Display More/Less Results

From a usability perspective, this can make good sense, allowing users with faster connections or a greater desire to browse large numbers of results at once to achieve these goals. However, it can cause big duplicate problems for search engines, and add complexity and useless pages to the engines' indices. If/when you create these systems, employ javascript/AJAX (either with or without the hash tag) to make the pages reload without creating a separate URL.

(the Google Analytics interface allows users to choose the number of rows shown, though they don't have to worry much about crawlability or search-friendliness)

Also remember that the "default" number of results shown is what the search engines will see; so make that count match your goals for usability and SEO.

Good Practices Of Pagination Design
(7 Aspects according to Faruk Ates)

1. Provide large clickable areas
2. Don’t use underlines
3. Identify the current page
4. Space out page links
5. Provide Previous and Next links
6. Use First and Last links (where applicable)
7. Put First and Last links on the outside

Related References

• An ultimate article about pagination, Pagination 101, has already been written by Faruk Ates.
• Style sheets freely available for free download: Some Styles For Your Pagination.
• If your weblog runs upon WordPress you can use WP-PageNavi plug-in to generate pagination “on the fly”. It’s easy to install, however, requires some changes in the source code of your WordPress theme.

Mistake #1: Navigation Options Are Invisible

Since pagination’s primary purpose is to serve as an improved navigation, it is supposed to make it clear for the visitors where they are, where they’ve already been and where they can go next. These three facts give users a complete understanding of how the system works and how the navigation should be used.
But most importantly, the navigation options should be visible. Hugg.com doesn’t follow this guideline. The color of the links has a very low contrast with the white background. The hover-effect isn’t provided.

The color of the links on Hugg.com has a very low contrast with the white background. The hover-effect isn’t provided.

Mistake #2: Pagination Isn’t Intuitive

If you have to decide between a quite complex (but beautiful) pagination and a simple one with necessary functionality always prefer the simple solution. If users don’t understand the mechanism behind navigation they won’t be able to use it and therefore won’t use your web-site.
Helium.com is a perfect example for this mistake. Take a look at the screenshot below: what do the arrows stand for? For the page you’ve already visited or for the page you are currently on? And why does the link to the second page have a white background color? Why do the arrows have different colors? This is unintuitive.

Unintuitive pagination design on Helium.com
Unintuitive designs result from the lack of structure, hierarchy and well thought-out design decisions. “Blank” pagination is as unintuitive as overcrowded design solution.

Our favourite example: Helium.com

Not spaced out page links are harder to scan and to navigate through. Make-Believe.org as an example. The design is unintuitive.

Creative Solutions Can Be User-Friendly

The more frequently a design element is used, the harder it is for designers to introduce some creative approaches without risking to make the design less intuitive. Consequently, pagination designs have rather a variety of different patterns — revolutionary approaches are used very rarely.
However, creative approaches can be user-friendly. E.g. Dirty.ru uses a slider-based pagination menu; users can drag it to get more available options, that means links to the older pages of the site.

A slider on Dirty.ru
Erweiterungen.de, the German version of the official Firefox extensions web-site, provides more navigation options once the visitor clicks on the “…”-button.

Further navigation options are displayed once the “…”-button is clicked. Erweiterungen.de.

Gallery

Although “standard” pagination — linked blue numbers following each other — is very common for most web interfaces, designers tend to experiment with colors, forms, backgrounds and shapes.
The pagination doesn’t need to look nice aiming to captivate users’ attention; as a part of site navigation it offers users an important functionality and as such has to be used effectively. Still, visual clues can be helpful. In most designs blue and grey colors dominate — colors traditionally used by services.

Simple Enumeration

Colors and Shapes In Use

Often designers use colors to highlight the current page and separate it from the other pages. The numbers of the pages are also given a shape: a rectangle, a circle or a button. The current page is usually not linked.

Pagination With Manual Page Input

In some cases users can provide the number of the page they’d like to see manually, via the input-element. This is common for paginations with the limited number of options — e.g. in these designs you can’t jump to the last page if you’d like to.

Unusual Solutions

Posted by randfish & Vitaly Friedman
Source - Pagination: Best Practices for SEO & User Experience
              http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2007/11/16/pagination-gallery-examples-and-good-practices/

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