Hottest SEO news: Moz upgrades their Domain Authority metric!

Moz’s plans to make improvements to its DA have been known for a while now. That doesn’t mean you won’t find this post helpful. DA is a very well-known and widely used SEO metric; any changes made to it are absolutely worth discussing if you have a website to run. So keep reading!

This post is for you if:

• You do SEO, but don’t usually follow SEO news;
• You haven’t heard about Domain Authority or don’t quite understand what it is;
• You want to know how exactly Domain Authority has changed and what it means for SEO.

Let’s dive in.

What is Domain Authority?

Domain Authority, or DA for short, is a metric invented by Moz. It looks at the backlinks pointing to a website (i.e. how many domains acknowledge it as an authority), then calculates the probability that it will rank well in Google, on a scale of 0 to 100.

In a nutshell:

• What Domain Authority is: a prediction that isn’t guaranteed to be 100% accurate. However, it does come pretty close, and it does its job well. There is a strong correlation between high DA values and high ranking positions.
• What Domain Authority isn’t: a Google ranking factor or any other sort of an absolute thing that you must always take into account when doing SEO.

I mean, if DA was infallible, there wouldn’t be any need to upgrade it now, would there?

DA is widely used by SEO tools other than Moz – for example, WebCEO displays it in the Competitor Link Profile tool.

Which is why this makes this post all the more relevant to our users.

How has Domain Authority changed?

The motivation for upgrading their site-evaluating metric is pretty simple: Moz simply wanted to make it more effective. How exactly? They did it in three steps:

• Changed their approach to link profile analysis;
• Expanded the list of factors DA looks at when analyzing sites;
• Scheduled daily updates for the new DA.

Now, a few words about each.

DA has become more scrupulous about evaluating linking domains and their authority. It takes into account the fact that all ways of acquiring backlinks are not equal. Certain methods – such as link spam and buying links – are frowned upon by Google, as it prefers links to be genuine and reflect honest feedback from users. Therefore, the new DA will lower the value of those “dishonest” links in its algorithm as well.

What’s more, the Moz people have increased their link index to a whopping 35 trillion. It will let them detect link manipulation much more effectively; in fact, such a drastic increase is a must if they want to be good at this job.

What does this all mean?

The obvious consequence of this upgrade is that many (if not all) websites are going to see a drop in their Domain Authority score. However, as stated earlier, DA does not affect Google rankings, so that’s nothing to worry about. At worst, everyone will start being pickier about who links to them… And that could make improving Google rankings more difficult.

Next, the newer and longer list of factors determining a site’s DA.

It’s actually way simpler than it sounds.

The new DA incorporates another Moz metric called the Spam Score. What is the Spam Score? It compares your site against other sites that have been penalized or even banned by Google. The more “spammy factors” your site shares with them, the higher your score, and vice versa.

In short, depending on how “spammy” your linking domains are, your renewed DA score could go either way. You might even find it hasn’t changed at all.

Daily updates: self-explanatory. Moz used to update DA monthly, so this is a step forward without a doubt.

What’s next?

This update’s consequences are surprisingly much less dramatic than the update itself.

The most important takeaway is this: carry on as usual. Only search engines can change SEO as we know it – for example, if Google alters its algorithm. For now, SEO remains the same, as does one of its core principles: build your backlinks wisely. Reliable, high-quality, authoritative and context-relevant websites are your best friends as always.

Are you still worried your Domain Authority is too low? In that case, I have good news for you. High-quality backlinks aren’t the only way to increase it – another way is to make a revision of your link profile. Test your site now and see if you feel you should remove any toxic backlinks.

The post SEO News: Moz Upgrades Domain Authority appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

2017 is nearing its end. Soon I’ll have to throw away last year’s Christmas tree and buy a new one. That physical work can wait, however, as for now, we should use what little brainpower remains in our heads before we can let them recharge over the holidays.

With the changing of yet another year, now is one of the best times to ponder the latest SEO trends. There are reasons to suspect 2018 will take us in certain new directions and some of our working principles will be reinforced. What SEO trends and techniques does 2018 hold for us? Let’s sneak a peek into the very near future and brace ourselves for it.

1. Voice search

Voice search makes up 20% of all online searches. By 2020, this number may very well reach 50%. We are standing on the precipice of a new era on the Internet, which means new things for would-be SEO experts like you and me to learn and master. The future is so unforgiving!

Optimization for voice search might require some getting used to because it’s different from your orthodox way of Googling things. Instead of disjointed words and incomplete phrases, users tend to speak using actual, proper questions which search algorithms will have to work with. In other words, you’ll need to start optimizing websites for this new species of ‘voice keywords’. Picture long-tail keywords, except with a head that comes in one of six different shapes (“who”, “what”, “where”, “when”, “why”, “how”) and a tail bent like a question mark. Those are voice keywords.

Get creative with variations of questions and look them all up in WebCEO’s Keyword Suggestions tool. The number of global and local searches for the keyword of your choice will tell you how competitive it is (you may not want it to be too competitive). And of course, don’t forget to follow up questions with valid, detailed answers so the Google app can read them out loud.

2. Even better user experience

As always, Google will favor websites that provide users with a nice, engaging experience. Conversely, the websites that fail to deliver will see a drop in rankings instead. As the quality of websites rises worldwide, user expectations will keep rising too, so be careful not to fall behind!

Using Google Analytics to monitor user behavior on your site, you can get an idea about how much they enjoy it. A high bounce rate may indicate that you might need to change something. You can improve the UX on your site by increasing its loading speed, making its design user-friendly, tending to technical issues and, of course, creating the best content for your visitors.

Keep an eye on your incoming traffic in WebCEO’s Web Analytics. If you notice that it has dropped overall or regarding some sources, it may be a sign that things have gone south and need improvement. A small leak can sink a great ship; don’t let this happen to you!

3. SEO-friendly content of the most interest to visitors

Content will continue to be one of the prevalent ranking factors. However, Google hates stagnation. Their policy is to give users the best the Internet has to offer, so the standards for what content counts as good are bound to rise again in the new year.

The best way to outdo the competitor websites now occupying page one is to, well, outdo them. Help your visitors better than those sites do. Content that gives users what they need, gives them answers and helps them solve their problems is the kind that Google values the most. Here’s a good analogy that comes to mind. If you want to beat athletes in a sports competition, train your body to rival theirs; if you want to beat websites to page one, create content to rival theirs. Makes sense, doesn’t it?

And of course, your content should be optimized for search engines. That means placing keywords moderately in all the right places:

• title tag
• meta description tag
• H1-H4 tags
• Image names and alt tags
• Text

Last but not least, consider diversifying your content with LSI keywords that are semantically related to the main keywords you use. It gives search engines a better understanding of what you are about.

4. More caution while building links

Businesses know the value of inbound links. Just look at SEO statistics: 20% of businesses dedicate over 50% of their overall SEO budget to link building. Backlinks are among the most powerful ranking factors and will remain so in 2018.

However, we may need to be extra careful about how we obtain them. Earlier in May, Google noticed an increase in spammy links from guest blogging and will likely keep a watchful eye on any guest contributions in the future. If we are lucky, we might see the birth of a new way to get on Google’s bad side – always a welcome change!

Of course, it doesn’t mean a farewell to guest blogging. You’ll just have to keep it within the limits of what’s allowed and not let it hurt your brand’s reputation (be sure the guest post you publish doesn’t have more than one link going to sites he or she wants to promote). Instead of picking a single method of gaining links and milking it until Google comes after you, spread out and get links from many sources (why not peek at your competitors’ backlink profiles for a start?). Google will appreciate such a link building strategy a lot more.

Be sure not to let any bad apples sneak into your basket of backlinks. Weed them out and keep your profile clean with WebCEO’s Toxic Links tool.

5. Seizing Position 0

Google is determined to make speed a factor in giving users the information they need. That’s why there’s so much extra fluff on page one: quick answers, carousels, “people also ask”… They are shown above the highest ranking results, this being the reason why their space is called “position zero” – which is de facto the new position one. If your site is already on the first page, it opens up a possibility to claim a spot at position zero, too.

To make it happen, use Schema code when you build your site. Since resulting featured snippets tend to provide answers to “who”, “what”, “when”, “where” and “how” types of questions, it predisposes them to be voice search material. Optimize for one, get one more for free!

6. Improving your click-through rate to compete against Position 0

Fight for and against position zero at the same time? Yes, you read that right.

Position zero offers a lot of room for all those ads and featured snippets. However, it causes problems for organic search results: they get buried under all the fluff and sometimes even pushed down below the fold. If you don’t occupy position zero yourself, your site can be pretty hard to find even if you are on Google’s first page at position #1. The competition is stark… but fortunately, not impossible to beat.

So the goal is to make your site more clickable in search results. Make it more attractive to users, so much that all those quickly available answers seem like low-hanging fruit in comparison. Here are a few helpful tips:

• Optimize your page titles and descriptions. Don’t make them so long that they get cut off when displayed in SERPs (and with WebCEO’s On-Site Issues Overview tool, you’ll always know when that happens). Have keywords in them, but also consider using power words that invoke emotion (e.g. “amazing”, “best”, “proven”) and promise quick solutions (“fast delivery”, “24/7”, “now”).
• Optimize the URLs. A string of random letters and numbers at the end of a URL looks messy. On the other hand, a readable URL, which describes what the page is about, is much more likely to catch the users’ attention and earn their trust in your content.
• Use numbered lists in your content, as well as numbers in titles. A research by Conductor found that numbers increase CTR by 36%; clearly, users see something in them. Magic numbers work because people believe.
• Use schema markup on your site. Extra HTML code on your pages turns into extra bits of information next to your site’s link in search results. That way, it looks more credible and just prettier in general (read: clickable).

7. Local SEO

For business owners, Position 0 is the most convenient place to be in search results. Featured snippets are like billboards: big letters, bright logo, address and phone number, a couple reviews as a bonus – all covering a large chunk of the screen and shamelessly in your face. Absolutely worth fighting for, too.

Of course, there’s more to local SEO than getting featured in snippets. You’ll need to submit your website on Google My Business and relevant business directories, optimize it for mobile devices, use location-specific keywords, include NAP citations on your and other sites; and if you are deft enough to create expert content that resonates with your target audience and shows them you aren’t new to what you do, that’s a massive bonus.

8. PPC in addition to SEO

Featured snippets aren’t the only thing stealing the users’ attention from organic results. There are pay-per-click ads, too.

Look at that page, so beautifully infested with ads. Hopefully their number won’t increase in 2018 as the space above the fold isn’t getting any bigger. How would it feel to finally rank number one and still be unnoticed thanks to paid ads and Google Maps? Almost beats the purpose of SEO, doesn’t it?

Of course, it depends on the search query. Plenty of them return organic results right away, making your site easier to find if it’s at the top organically. If PPC results are in the way, though, then you have two ways of dealing with this barrier: either try to rank for different keywords or embrace PPC. Google has the best of intentions when it shows them first, after all.

9. Monitoring and improving conversion rates

When your keywords are ranking higher than they did yesterday, it’s always a delight. This can be compared only to watching your conversion rates grow. To have an adequate image of how well your pages convert, you will need to attach UTM tracking code to each of your major links and watch everything closely in Google Analytics. That’s one part of the mosaic, now onto the next.

Heat map generators have proven to be a powerful asset in optimizing websites (we can attest to that). Tools for observing user behavior on-page are exactly what’s needed to complement rankings and GA statistics. You can look at a heat map and immediately see the weak spots in your site’s design. Maybe your calls-to-action don’t get enough clicks simply because they go unnoticed! They could be below the fold, or they don’t even look like something people are supposed to click on, or maybe they just aren’t actionable enough and need some extra oomph.

Keep in mind that no tool can solve problems with your conversion – that’s still up to you. But it can quickly point you in the right direction and save you a lot of time.

10. Fast and responsive mobile-friendly sites

The reign of mobile devices promises to be long and prosperous. They are here to stay, and be loved, and drive even more traffic to websites than they already are. I doubt large screens will ever go obsolete, but I can guarantee we’ll see more and more small screens in the future. With such a variety of sizes in place, it will be an obvious necessity to make websites look good on every kind of display.

There’s also the mobile-first index to take into account. It’s going to play a new, vital role in ranking websites. Once it’s out, they will be ranked depending on the user experience provided by their mobile versions. Not having a mobile version means not being indexed – a disaster for your SEO.

Therefore, give your website a responsive design and make it load as fast as possible. WebCEO’s Mobile Optimization tool will test your website’s mobile-friendliness and give you tips for improving on it, while the Page Speed tool will give you even more tips for – surprise! – speeding it up.

11. Accelerated Mobile Pages

A high loading speed is a fantastic thing in general, not just for mobile-friendly sites. Users are less likely to lose patience and more eager to stick around and lurk deeper instead. It’s a ranking factor for Google, too. Can you come up with a reason not to make your site load fast? If yes, please let me know, it’ll be great prank material.

In 2015, Google launched the Accelerated Mobile Pages project, and it’s been a great help for webmasters who want to speed their sites up. An AMP page is very light on code: a bare minimum of HTML, optional use of CSS, and no Javascript at all. Less code equals less work for browsers, thus a page made in this manner loads in the blink of an eye. If your site has pages that function without code that’s excessive by AMP standards, consider AMPing them up.

12. Image optimization for a new, powerful visual search

Most search engines have an image search function, but I’ve yet to meet anyone who believes it’s perfect. However, search engines are both able and willing to improve it, as evidenced by the steps they have made towards upgrading their visual search capabilities. Google Lens and Pinterest Lens are both capable of coming up with results based on as little as a photo of any random thing in your vicinity. That’s two more unique “search engines” to optimize for in the near future.

And while I mention Pinterest, consider making your images shareable on social media. That’s more exposure for you and potential backlinks pointing to your site. Remember that likes and shares and comments on social media posts that link to you will count for SEO purposes as backlinks.

13. Moving to HTTPS and leave HTTP behind

I’m surprised how many websites still haven’t done this. Google approves of secure connections and made them a lightweight ranking factor back in 2014. They went as far as to mark HTTP sites as non-secure in Chrome, scaring users away when they see this. Is your site still HTTP? Then your rankings aren’t as high as they could be.

14. Earning your audience’s trust through brand building

The majority of users don’t like looking past Google’s page one. If something isn’t there, it doesn’t exist to them. Does this mean your site will definitely start getting clicks once it makes it there? Not necessarily, as there are still other options on the same page. But your chances would improve greatly if your brand was more recognizable.

Brand building is an essential part of any long-term SEO strategy. It should be a part of yours, as well, if you intend to keep your site around for a long time. Content, products, service or what-have-you – put effort into giving the best to others and earn a good reputation in return. Social media is as great a place as ever for interacting with your audience for feedback and closer ties. And of course, keep track of your brand’s mentions online so that displeased words don’t escape your attention. WebCEO’s Web Buzz Monitoring tool will make sure that no negative remarks puncture a hole in the SEO balloon that’s meant to take you to the top.

The more people know you, and the more good things they know and say about you, the better for your business goals. Work to earn their trust.

15. Video content to be even more popular

The Internet is crazy about video content. A study by Hubspot indicated that 45% of users watch at least an hour worth of YouTube and Facebook videos weekly. What’s more, videos are expected to hog a staggering 80% of all online traffic by the early 2020s. If you still aren’t using YouTube and other video hosting platforms to build brand awareness and attract visitors, then make your debut now and start 2018 off with a bang. When the 2020s hit, you’ll be riding that gigantic tide of traffic.

Meanwhile in the present, YouTube has already become so big that people search for things there without turning to Google at all. Not wanting to be outdone, Google includes YouTube videos in its search results, and it’s not uncommon to see them on page one. In other words, you can make two powerful figures fight over you – morally questionable if they were people, but perfectly fine when they are search engines.

And since video content is so well-liked, you have options other than YouTube. You can simply embed videos directly on your site and make users spend more time on it – yet another reason for Google to rank your site higher.

And the most important advice of all: it will be an absolute must to use powerful SEO tools. Your campaign depends on your ability to measure progress and detect issues before they cause lasting damage. If there is one thing that will be the same in the new year, it’s WebCEO’s readiness to give you its full support!

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Brave the Future, Tame the Trends!

The post 15 Leading SEO Trends for 2018 appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

Happy Thanksgiving to all those of you, who regularly check your sites for issues and fix them, keep your backlinks clear and make customers happy. Here’s a brief recap of the latest SEO news so you can get back to enjoying family and friends.

Google News

Google has confirmed that a new Penguin Update 4.0 will go live by the end of 2015. Luckily for many webmasters, the upcoming Penguin iteration will process all the toxic and low quality links that you removed or disavowed after the previous manual penalty in real time. Do you remember that it took months to recover from the manual penalties of the previous Penguin updates? If you have not yet refined your backlink profile for the upcoming Google Penguin 4.0, be sure to check your backlinks for domains with a low trust level (0.30 or less) and then submit them in a list to the Google Disavow tool through the Web CEO Backlink Quality Check tool.

Google has officially rolled out its new artificial intelligence algorithm RankBrain. This new machine learning system is a part of the Google Hummingbird algorithm and the third-most important Google search ranking signal that helps to interpret and better understand non-exact match search queries on the level of an individual searcher’s intent. This means that SEO will see a shift from keywords to topic-focused research and optimization.

Google+ just recently updated its design with a heavy focus on Communities of Interests and Collections. Now the “ugly duckling” of the social media family strongly resembles the look of Reddit and Pinterest. With the new design, folks were saying that Google+ local pages forgot to add business reviews. Google then officially confirmed that business reviews will no longer be displayed on Google+ local pages, but they will be accessible when doing search via Google and Maps.

Yet again G+ received an enthusiastic response from users, but maybe not the response they had hoped for:

Yandex News

Yandex has announced that they will start to crawl CSS and JavaScript content, as a test in order to better understand the content of web pages. They are now informing webmasters to stop blocking their CSS and JavaScript files and resources. In the long-run, this will have an effect on Yandex SEO processes. Yandex has also added a mobile-friendly label to mobile search results and released a supporting mobile-friendly diagnostic tool for webmasters to make sure that their website pages meet mobile-friendly guidelines.

Facebook news

Facebook has launched lead ads! Yes, you heard right. Facebook now allows running lead generation ads (similar to Twitter lead generation cards) which collect user information, share lead capture content and make prospects complete a desired action without actual leaving Facebook. Read more on how to configure your lead generation program on Facebook here>> .

Now local businesses can promote their products on Facebook more effectively with local awareness ads. The new ad feature allows you to target groups of people who reside near your business neighborhoods.  Furthermore, Facebook has made the Instagram Ad Platform available to all marketers around the world. Now you can launch a photo or video ad campaign right from your Facebook ad management tools (Power Editor).

Twitter news

Twitter has suffered a lot of quality changes recently. One of the major updates of Twitter has been the change of the shape of its Favorite icon from a star to a heart.

Not long after this redesign trick, Twitter officially shut down its API that provides data on Tweet Share Count. Now you can’t see the number of your article Twitter shares in your social share button bar. This may have a negative impact on user interaction and social proof factors for your content.

For those of you who want to drive more user engagement and learn what followers think on this or that topic, you can now create polls on Twitter!

The post Happy SEO-News-Giving Day! appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

It’s almost time for summer vacation and all you can think about are beaches, forested mountains and cold beverages. But, there are also events in the digital marketing world you’ll want to think about before you hit the trails.

What’s new in SEO?

The search space has been lately engaged in an algorithm updates race.

On April 21^st Google hit mobile search with its long-awaited Google Mobile-Friendly Update and only the mice in the fields remain ignorant of this. The experts from Google pointed that Mobilegeddon was even larger than Penguin or Panda: twice as many non-mobile friendly pages lost rankings as gained after the Mobile Update. If you have not yet re-optimized your website to meet mobile-friendly guidelines, you’d better start working on it before you take that vacation.

Here is the Mobile SEO Issues Checklist you will need to check your website pages for in order to gain the rankings you may perhaps have lost.

But this is not the last Mobile-Friendly Update that comes into our view. At SMX Sydney, Garry Illyes (Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google) just said there will be another update called Platypus targeting slow page speed and app download interstitials usage.

In addition to all this noise, Google has confirmed that it is now official that there are more searches on mobile devices than on desktops. This is big news and, if you want to dominate on Google search, then the mobile search optimization strategy is in your first-rate priority do-to list.

On May 6^th, Google officially updated and renamed the Search Queries report in its Webmaster Tools. Now, in your Webmaster Tools you can find the Search Analytics report with more accurate data and filtering options.

On May 20^th, Google Webmaster Tools was rebranded into Google Search Console. Google decided to changes the ten year old name of the tool to a more universal because it is used not only by webmasters but also by website owners, SEO experts, marketing specialists, designers, web developers etc.

At the beginning of June, the Google team announced that they are going to rework the Penguin algorithm so it runs on a permanent basis. It means that there won’t be any manual actions toward ranking changes because the data will be refreshed all the time. It doesn’t mean that you can sit and relax because individual websites can still be hit with huge overnight ranking losses. This means that you will need to work towards keeping your backlink profile ever clean and genuine in the eyes of Google.

According to Search Engine Land this year the SEO Success Factors Table has been immensely updated and complemented by new factors such as the availability of Vertical Search, HTTPS and Direct Answers results. Greater Importance has been given to Mobile Friendliness and Structured Data etc.

To keeping up with Google’s updates, use WebCEO’s Online SEO tools to analyze your site’s SEO performance and ensure it aligns with the latest Google algorithms.

What is new in Social Media?

The fact that Social and Search have become more integrated and interlinked is proven by the latest Google-Twitter deal. Starting on May 19, users in the U.S. can see relevant and real-time tweets in their search results when using the Google search app on iOS and Android. That’s good news for search giants, users and for brands. Twitter promises to bring its real-time content on to desktop search and to more countries in the upcoming months.

Unlike with Twitter, Facebook doesn’t want to rely on Google and decided to build its own in-app search engine. Thanks to its own search team, Facebook is already testing the ability to crawl and return content for users without the need for them to search Google directly.

At the beginning of June, Instagram announced plans to launch InstaAds which will be labeled as “Sponsored.”

We wish you a happy summer and be sure to enjoy nature and the little extras summer brings.

The post The SEO News Recap You Should Read Before Your Vacation appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

Do you want to have an ear to the ground in the world of SEO, PPC, Email Marketing and Social Media Marketing? Then you should visit SMX, one of the top Search Marketing Events and SEO conferences attended by the high and mighties (the gurus) of the SEO world who will share their experiences, speculations, conduct workshops and divine upcoming trends in digital marketing.

This year, SMX was hosted in Sydney May 12-13. The expo was full of interesting takeaways pitched by such gurus as Garry Illyes (Webmaster Trends Analyst – Google Webmaster Tools), Behshad Behzadi (Director of Conversational Search – Google Switzerland) and other experts.

In a nutshell the highlights of SMX 2015 in Sidney were:

• According to Woj Kwasi (founder of KwasiStudios), Google will roll out another Google mobile search algo update dubbed “Platypus” (carrying on Google’s “P” animal tradition). This time Google will say a big no-go to websites that are too slow (page loading should take no longer than 2-5 sec.) and those who abuse app download interstitials. App interstitials are a kind of invisible app ad that can show up in Google search results behind the link to a website it was coded into. After clicking on specific search results, mobile users are often taken to an app interstitial or an app store where they are forced to download the app and this is really frustrating for a lot of people. A page’s slow speed can also be frustrating if users are forced to wait too long to see the whole of a page’s content. Platypus will deal with both of the above issues.
• According to Garry Illyes, User Experience (UX) is predominantly a mobile search algorithm signal and it is not yet considered when it comes to the Google desktop search results rankings. Garry explains that user experience is crucial for mobile searchers when they view and read your content on their devices while, with desktop users, the UX elements are often less relevant. It was pointed out that Google has different ranking algo systems for desktop and mobile but one index for both.
• According to Ian McAnerin (CEO of McAnerin International Inc.), Quick Answers in Google search will sooner or later be returned by Google in most cases. Only those websites that host actual data and facts and keep them well structured (with the help of Schema.org) will be embedded (mentioned) in Google’s Knowledge Graph and Knowledge Vault.

Please, let me know in the comment section if I missed anything from SMX in Sydney.

The post Platypus Unveiled at SMX Sydney 2015 as the Next Big Google Algorithm appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

The digital world is flooded with Mobile Spring Madness and the only way to overcome it is to fall for it.  Since the latest Google announcement about its intent to include mobile-friendliness as a ranking factor after an April 21st update, the mobile readiness of your site is no longer optional; it is imperative. In the new age when the average amount of traffic that comes from smartphones is from 30% to 50% (depending on business niche), the fact that your website rankings can benefit from mobile optimization is heartwarming and challenging. Sure, you don’t want your website visitors to take flight at the first sign that your mobile website lacks user-friendliness. This can prevent you from benefitting from a large portion of highly-converting mobile traffic. Just so you know:

The truth is hard to swallow and it depends on you what sugar will be added to the spoon.

While webmasters’ spring mobile usability cleaning is in full blast, Google is going the extra mile improving and synchronizing their mobile usability testing services and webmaster mobile optimization guidelines.

What makes the mobile version of a site different from the desktop?

In the mobile version it is critical to properly optimize font size, make links thumb clickable and buttons thumb-friendly, adjust your content so it easily adapts to different screen sizes and perfectly flows into a small viewport. When it comes to the mobile optimization of your site, there are two things that are crucial: user-friendly mobile design and mobile content optimization. The question is, in what case and why would the website be flagged as non user-friendly when considering its content and design parts.

We decided to test one of our client’s websites for how it works on mobile devices and how well it is ranked on mobile SERPs. The website Elegantflyer.com provides PSD templates for freebie flyers (handouts such as for events), premium flyers and the ability to customize them.  After I typed in one of the most popular query phrases “Free PSD Flyer Templates”, I found our website in question in the 14^th position on the second page of search results. Not bad given the fact the website has existed for less than a year.

Google has labeled it as a mobile-friendly website. However, when we checked all the important pages of the site on a mobile device, most of them seemed not to be as friendly as labeled by Google. We came across some critical issues with the unaided eye:

• long server time response,
• jittering of the content while scrolling,
• the content needed to be scrolled horizontally,
• though buttons were big enough and thumb-friendly, some of them hovered on each other.

The mobile SEO audit of Elegantflyer was run with the help of the Web CEO Mobile Optimization tool and the Page Speed tool. This helped us to identify technical issues that prevent the site from working well on mobile devices.

The initial mobile SEO report showed that the site is responsive, has no Flash content and its page speed score is 41/100.

In the detailed report, we found 5 critical issues, 5 issues considered to be fixed and 5 passed rules.

The question hangs in the air: “Why did Google label the website as mobile-friendly, while some of its pages were not mobile optimized and crammed with some critical SEO issues? Might it be that Google labels (ranks) the website taking into account the overall website usability score, not the page-by-page optimization score? We have delivered our recommendations to the website owner of the Elegantflyer website and will check it for any SEO improvements and its ranking position changes when the update rolls out.

No matter, what Google puts under consideration when assigning a mobile-friendly status, you should fix some of the common mobile usability issues and make sure each of your important landing pages meets mobile search standards. Otherwise Google may play with your pages in an Eenie-Meenie-Miney-Moe counting game.

Common Issues with NON-User-Friendly Mobile Design 

You chose a wrong mobile website configuration option.

Though Google doesn’t take into account responsive design, it highly recommends that you use a responsive design option as this is the most cost-effective and simple technique to adjust your website content to the screen size of different devices and keep both desktop and mobile content on the same URL for a better user experience. Another option that would perfectly work for both desktop and mobile is responsive design with adaptive features. The responsive design with adaptive logic is a great way to dynamically specify the form of content in order to maximize the usability (reading content without reordering and resizing) for mobile users. This is one of the dynamic serving design options. Here you can read about the pros and cons of all mobile site configuration options, such as responsiveness, dynamic serving, mobile site version, mobile app or WordPress responsive themes. 

Your mobile site has a lack of intuitive navigation.

Your mobile site navigation should meet the main mobile user experience principal:

less thinking, linking, scrolling – more traffic, conversions and sales.

Your top navigation menu should contain no more than 3-4 lines with drop-down pages to link. The search option glass and a quick home page link in the form of a logo in the upper left corner of the page are the default requirements.

Your mobile site uses an illegible font type.

Don’t wreck your users’ nerves and don’t strain their eyes by unreadable and tiny text size. Google recommends that you use a 16 CSS pixel font size. Use proper media query settings to make your fonts easy-to read and adjustable for any device screen.

Some of the CSS, JS elements and images are blocked from crawling because of the robots.txt. file configuration. 

Blocking CSS, JS, images and wireframes from your robots.txt.file is now considered a bad SEO practice. If the areas are inaccessible for Googlebots they will not be indexed properly. As a result you will lose additional rankings for these lost content pieces. Google has just added the Blocked Resources Report to its Google Webmaster Tools usability issues block.

Some of your pages are too slow.

The reasons for a slow page response may be different. Test your page speed score and eliminate all the issues that may decrease the quality of your users’ experience on your mobile site.

Common Issues with NON-User-Focused Mobile Content Optimization 

Mobile content is not properly adjusted to the size of a viewport.

Make sure you use a meta viewport tag in the head of each page’s code. The meta viewport value (width=device-width) placed within the tag will automatically instruct the page to fit any device screen’s width so the content is rendered with appropriate dimensions and scaling. 

Your mobile content “tap targets” are poorly optimized.

There are some above-the-fold content areas (buttons, ads, forms, links) on your mobile site that call for interaction with users. These tap targets should be large enough (48 CSS pixels or 7 mm) to meet mobile-friendly standards and should have enough room (32 CSS pixels or 5 mm) around to avoid frustrating the user experience. Read more about optimal tap target recommendations for a better user experience.

Your mobile site has too many non-optimized and time-consuming redirects.

There are 3 types of redirects:

• Canonical redirects – mysite.com→ www.mysite.com
• Secure page redirects – http://www.mysite.com→ https://www.mysite.com
• Mobile version redirects – http://www.mysite.com → http://m.example.com site

For the best mobile user experience, we recommend that you get rid of all the redirects. The worst scenario of using multiple redirect chains is the high bounce rate of your website. Time-consuming redirect lag times between user-agent and web server may add extra seconds to load a page. You will be very lucky if a user that landed on your site has good patience and a good temper. Learn more about mobile redirect optimization here.

Your website is weighted by unfriendly Flash content.  

The problem with Flash content is that it is impossible to index it organically. Mobile devices can’t render it at all. Moreover, Flash can cause multiple violations of modern search engine standards, including mobile usability and search indexing. It is recommended that you avoid building or embedding any Flash-based objects into your mobile site content.

Your content is filled with poorly optimized images.

Image usage in mobile search is crucial. Since images are among the most popular forms of content on the web, they cover a lot of space on websites. Make sure you follow the image optimization best practices from Google in order to reduce their size and keep them in high quality on any device type.

SEO and design recommendations for the sake of your mobile user experience and high rankings.

• Use a “Desktop (PC) site” (instead of “Full site”) link in the code of mobile pages of your site to provide users with optional access to a desktop version, because it may contain more information and provide a better user experience for those who choose this option.

• Keep calls-to-action centered and at the front. On the Elegantflyer site, the screen needed to be zoomed in so the mobile user could have a full view of a lengthy call-to-action button. This had to be changed.

• Make click-to-call buttons (for Skype or phone numbers) visible and easy-to-tap on your mobile site. This may increase your conversion rate.

• Compression of images can minimize the size of uploaded files, which makes the page easier and its speed optimal.

• Conduct detailed mobile-focused keyword research using the Mobile Trends Data from the Google Keyword Planner in combination with the Top Mobile Search Queries report of your Google Webmaster Tools account.

• Segment your targeted terms into 2 categories (desktop and mobile) and start tracking your mobile vs desktop rankings in order to take note of any fluctuations. Do side-by-side monitoring of your competitive mobile rankings. As soon as you notice any positive or negative changes, update your mobile optimization strategy to overperform your competition in mobile search.

Don’t delay your website mobile optimization or, if your website is already labeled as mobile-friendly, be sure to check your newly added, or updated website pages for mobile usability issues. You can get such analysis accurately delivered by the Web CEO Mobile Optimization reporting tool.

The post Mobile SEO Countdown: What Factors Will Google Use After April 21? appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

The SEO industry this autumn season was full of interesting, dramatic and influential updates and changes we should be thankful for and challenged about.

On September 25th, Google launched its regular Panda 4.1 Update; not as big as the previous one, but with new signals to detect low-quality content. Small and medium sites with high quality content were thankful to Google for being benefited with higher rankings in search results, while news, medical and download sites were bereft of their slices of cake.

At the end of September, Google unveiled a more sophisticated type of search result snippets parsed from the important meta data on your site. Internet users all over the world should be thankful for structured snippets, as they help to organize and enhance the search experience and provide users with relevant and accurate information at a glance.

On October 17th, Google continued to sanitize search results by cleaning out poor-quality sites. The Google Penguin 3.0 refresh had a smooth impact on search results and affected about 1% of US search queries. The websites that were hit by the latest update were Affiliates, Private Blog Networks and sites using grey hat 301 redirects. The long-running update continued to rollout up to the 27^th of November and ended in a Thanksgiving recovery mercifully provided to the Penguin-hit websites that took safety measures with their backlink profiles. To many, it seems unnatural that both a hit and a recovery took place within one Google Penguin Update rollout.

On November 18th, the digital world was excited about the news on mobile search experience practices by Google. Google has added specific labels to mobile search results for the websites with mobile-friendly interfaces and content. It was followed with an announcement about using special ranking for mobile-friendly sites. Awesome news! Thanks a lot to you, Google for your attention, incentive and the helpful webmaster’s mobile guide that make it easier to optimize our sites for a better mobile experience and rank higher in mobile search! BTW, WebCEO predicted these significant enhancements of the mobile search experience on Google’s part. We launched mobile search results rank tracking in October.

On November 19th, the number 1 web browser Mozilla Firefox announced the replacement of its default search provider from Google to Yahoo for U.S. mobile and desktop users. Well, from now on, Google rankings within the U.S. search results may lose their former value in favor of Yahoo positions.

We are done with the news. Now be prepared for our post about the best SEO strategies for 2015 year that will be published next week.

Have a Merry Marketing and a Happy New SEO Year!

The post SEO News of Autumn 2014: What We Should Be Thankful For appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

I love penguins and many of you do as well. They are cute, not aggressive and have a funny way of walking. But to those who do SEO, a penguin is a kind of monster pecking their sites and eating their rankings. No wonder most SEOs shudder at the thought of penguins. It’s been almost a year since the 2.1 edition of Penguin rolled out. Now, just in time for Halloween, the Google Penguin 3.0 Update is here.  It started its invasion on October 17^th and it is going to roll out across the globe over the next several weeks. People initially felt relief after John Mueller (the famous Google Webmaster Trends Analyst) said that the update had already been completely rolled out, but this was soon followed by an unexpected message from Pierre Far (another major Google Webmaster Trends Analyst) implying that the effects were yet to be seen in most cases.

The good news is that if you were hit by a previous Penguin update, you will probably see some positive shifts in your site rankings and traffic, *if* you responded to that previous update by cleaning up your link profile and assuming that you said good-bye forever to black hat linkbuilding tactics. If you did this, Google probably forgave and blessed you. However, folks are still confused at how smoothly the update is landing. Anticipation is high; the fear of a further heavy impact. SEOs want to know how things will be moving and in what direction.

To Update or Refresh? That Is the Question!

While the latest Penguin Update is rolling out, SEOs speculate on what Google has put into this. Is this a major update with new signals added to the algorithm or just a simple data refresh? How did it come about that two official spokespeople of Google failed to put out a unified message? Are there two Google “lobbies” or is it that we’re supposed to be a bit confused? It seems that the Google Penguin Update didn’t smoothly roll out entirely on October 17^th.  Why it was named Penguin 3.0 and not 2.1, considering the fact that it was officially named a refresh?

First, let’s follow Matt Cutts explanation of what an actual update is and what a refresh is.  Matt makes cute comparisons of an index update, algorithm update and data refresh with car parts.  However, the listener will still struggle with knowing what’s on Google’s mind.

What Are the Link Building Tactics Scorned by Penguin 3.0? The Key Takeaways.

Similar to the previous versions, Penguin 3.0 is trying to clean up the web from link spam on the one hand and, this time around, to also recover the positioning of good sites that were hit by Google Penguin 2.1 and then reacted positively.

Among the key takeaways of the Penguin 3.0 Update, the most noticeable at the moment are the following:

1. Google has now hit sites that use grey hat 301 redirects.
2. There has been a slight shift from site-wide to page-level impacts of the Google Penguin Update. While de-indexing home pages, Google Penguin 3.0 may allow internal pages to continue ranking on search results if they are free of spam links themselves.
3. There are now penalties for Affiliate sites and Private Blog Networks.
4. Google is now planning to run Penguin updates on a regular and frequent refresh basis with smaller impacts, similar to what they did with Panda Updates.
5. Link profiles similar to those of the sites penalized in the last updates are likely to be hit by the Google Penguin 3.0 Update. If you escaped with toxic links before, you may not be so lucky now.

Future Penguin Strategy Predicted by WebCEO.

The bad news is that it is too late to “hide” from Penguin 3.0. Penguin was at your home and if you had not already cleaned up your home from any backlink mess a month or so before the Penguin rollout, your home may not now be found on “1st page Google” street until the next Google Penguin comes by.

If you want to sleep well without spending restless nights with coffee, quivering as you create toxic link disavowal reports in GWT, you should follow the following simple strategy that will keep you away from problems with “Big Brother:”

Protect your site by conducting a detailed analysis of your current backlink profile using the WebCEO Backlink Quality Check tool and the step-by-step Backlink Clean-Up tutorial.

Filter external links to your site and refine those of high quality. Not all backlinks add value to your site, even if they pass link juice. Pay attention to the relevancy of a link, its provenance, their sourced domains and the pages they lead to, whether they have an exact-matching or a diversified and keyword rich anchor text.

Build your Penguin-proof link profile using some up-to-date link building techniques including implied links usage, trusted social citations and competitive backlinks analysis.

The post Google Penguin 3.0: The Key Takeaways And Penguin-Proof Predictions From WebCEO appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

What is a structured snippet?

Google web search has evolved in the last several years. With personalized and conversational search powered by Knowledge Graph Optimization, Google tries to pick the most relevant data from your site in order to return it to searchers under search query links.  It’s likely that newly designed structured snippets are the result of the long-term rollout of the Google Hummingbird enhanced algorithm.

The idea of extracting relevant information from your site comes from Google’s intention to deliver well structured results from unstructured content.

Structured snippets are snippets supported by a structured data rich description of a page that appears in the Google SERPs. Though Google is getting smarter, it uses bots to read and parse the important meta data contained in your content. Structured data is a general name that stands for all HTML markups determined by a predefined set of rules. To implement structured data on your site, you need to mark up aspects of your content (e.g. personal info, review details, product specs etc) with specific tags in your HTML code. There are several ways to add structured data on your site:

• Microdata (recommended)
• Microformats
• RDFa

It’s preferably using microdata, but you can go with any of the ways. Use the Google Structured Data Markup Helper to understand what properties of the content on your pages should be added to your structured data markup.

Let’s analyze the quality of well-implemented structured data on one of the structured snippets of the recipe of my favorite dessert, Tiramisu.

In the recipe snippet example we have some of the property tags:

1. Ratings
2. Photo
3. Name
4. Total time
5. Prep time (sorting ingredients, warming oven)

A perfect structured snippet of a recipe should include:

• Photo
• Review (ratings)
• Name of food/type of food
• Prep time and/or or total time
• Ingredients
• Calories

It would be great if the owner of Foodnetwork.com include in its structured data calories, ingredients and other property tags. I would definitely click on the query that listed such essential data.

How can my website get rewarded for using Structured Snippets?

The use of structured data will have a strong positive effect on your site. The most evident results will be an uptick in the click through rate that directly affects the boost of traffic to your site. After you have patterned your structured data markup, keep an eye on your global and local rank performance. By the way, WebCEO Online has just added to its Keyword Rank Checker the opportunity to monitor mobile rankings! Additionally, conducting a comprehensive Website Audit can ensure that your structured data is correctly implemented and functioning optimally, which is essential for achieving the best possible search rankings.

What information from my site should appear in structured snippets?

Google picks your most important HTML tags which include different content types like product specs, addresses, phone numbers, prices, recipes, reviews, personal info and other properties of your content. That being said, if your website is related to eCommerce, local services like restaurants and hotels or to sites with music and video content, you should pattern all the specific  properties of your content into table-based data markup. As for the format of pattern, Google now recommends that you use the Schema.org markup specification and Structured Data Testing Tool in order to avoid pitfalls.

The post Structured Snippets: How to Decorate SERPS With Structured Data Patterns From Your Website appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

While Matt Cutts is on his extended vacation, the Google team kept the SEO community busy. Summer was hot and eventful. Let’s recall some of the most dramatic updates that happened this summer in the world of SEO in order to make some amendments to your online marketing strategy.

It’s been almost two months since the latest Google Pigeon Update release. It caused a lot of business owners to overhaul their local business marketing strategy. Particularly, local business listing sites and review websites are now very much in favor with Google, so being listed there is now a must.

To effectively track how these changes impact your website’s visibility, using WebCEO’s Keyword Rank Tracker can provide valuable insights into your local SEO performance post-Pigeon Update.

We have highlighted the possible effects of the Google Pigeon Update on local businesses in one of our previous posts.

Another major update has been the recent fall of Google Authorship.  First, Google stopped showing author photos in search results in June; then they removed Author Stats in the beginning of August and now it’s been announced that they will stop showing authorship results at all in Google Search, claiming that the authorship markups had no direct impact on CTR… As per the latest Google+ post of John Mueller of Google Webmaster Tools, another reason for the author information removal is that Google wants to unify the user experience between desktop and mobile search. However, while Google Authorship is dead, Author Rank is still alive. Google assures that the end of the Google Authorship experiment will not affect authored stories. It highly suggests that you consider bylines as another method to establish authority in the eyes of Google and improve your Author Rank score.

Being active on Social Media is now, more than ever, critically important. Your social activity directly affects the success of your brand in the online world. The sooner you start to measure your Social Media activity, the better. The Social Engagement tool in WebCEO Online is targeted to simplify your understanding of what content is interesting to your customers and help you to outline the content assets which generate more perspectives. Use the Social Citation Report of the Social Engagement tools to fine-tune your content marketing strategy.

At the end of July Bing launched an up-to-date Bing Site Safety Reporting tool within the search results in order to better warn and communicate to both users and webmasters about safety problems on websites. In August, Bing announced the launch of Conversational Search which is still far from the functionality of the Google Conversational search.

Facebook has added a few changes to the Facebook News Feed.  The first change is related to click-baiting links to low-quality content. Facebook started to reduce the reach of posts that have scandalous titles and poor engagement.  The second change is targeted at boosting posts with links in the link format. It is a common practice that most of the companies share photo updates with links incorporated in them.  This is no longer an effective way to increase user engagement. Facebook has found that users prefer to click on links that are in the link format over those in the picture format. It is crucial now to share updates in the following  appropriate form: photo updates strictly as photos, posts with links in the link format with the descriptive text above.

Another much talked-of SEO headline this summer was the announcement of a new Google ranking signal. Google officially suggests that websites with sensitive personal data should consider switching to HTTPS in order to improve their rankings. Google has officially said that this can be a ranking signal. We have studied all the pros and cons of switching to HTTPS and shared them with you in our latest blog post.

WebCEO keeps pace with the latest SEO trends and aims to provide the most up-to-date and helpful SEO tool features, user-friendly reports, useful SEO guides etc. Shortly we will provide you with a Google Pigeon Update Guide to help you keep up with the latest Google Pigeon Update. Users who have local business websites and entrepreneurs who run brick-and-mortar businesses will find a lot of handy tips and recommendations on how to optimize their local business in order to receive good rankings.

The post Summertime SEOness: The Hottest SEO News Of Summer 2014 appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.