Set aside 10 minutes of your time to read the latest cutting-edge news in SEO, Tech and Social Media that happened this Spring.

Google News

Google has greatly improved its Analytics service. Dated March 9, Google announced a new report in Beta, called User Explorer, which can be found in the Audience section. It provides detailed insight of the number of sessions, bounce rate, revenue, transactions, and your specific goals conversion rate associated with an individual Client or User ID. Once you click a User or Client ID, you get an individual timeline view of this client behavior, including acquisition date, channel and device category, along with the history of activities and interactions with your site or service. The report is a goldmine for those who want to analyze prospects’ behavior and improve an overall customers’ user experience on a website. Learn from Google about use cases of the User Explorer report.

In May, Google made another change in the Google Analytics reporting features. Google made a deep  integration of its Analytics and Search Console services. Now, if you log into your Google Analytics account, you can find the Google Search Console metrics under the Acquisition tab, as the substitution of the Search Engine Optimization. There are 4 sections in the newly added Search Console report: Landing Pages, Countries, Devices, Queries. The Search Console reports are complemented by additional acquisition metrics like Impressions, Clicks, CTR and Average Position which help to analyze your organic traffic performance more effectively.

At the end of May, Google announced the expansion of ad texts and the ability to bid by device, which will be coming to AdWords platform in the next several months. In the new ad format campaigns advertisers will be allowed to compose:

–  2 headlines with up to 30-character limit for each title (instead of one 25-character limit headline);

–  A 80-character description line (instead of two 35-character description lines).

Will this update result in a higher click-through-rate? Yes! Early figures indicate a 20% increase in CTR.

Mobile Search News

A year ago, on April 21^st, Google rolled out its Mobile-Friendly Update, aka Mobile Apocalypse (targeted to the websites which don’t give due consideration of such things like responsiveness, mobile-friendly URLs,). One year on, Google announced that starting from May, they will boost the effect of the mobile specific ranking signal in order to bring more relevant mobile-friendly search results.  But this is not the last change made to the Mobile-Friendly Ranking algorithm. According to Gary Illyes, Google will add page speed as a mobile-friendly ranking signal.

Tip for SEO beginners: If you are a mobile device geek and in search for “FREE SEO tools” for your website from your smartphone, be sure to find our mobile-friendly website and service on the 1^st page of Google and sign up for a FREE forever plan:). Moreover, you can use our Website Audit Tool to check how well your website is optimized for mobile devices.

Bing News

Bing showed dramatic increase of the search market share in April. According to ComScore explicit numbers, desktop searches on Google sites dropped by 0,2%, while searches on Microsoft sites rose by 0,2%. The reason for the change in search market share may be the increase of Windows 10 usage with its Hey Cortana voice search feature. This means that those who bet money mainly on Google should reconsider their marketing strategy and include Bing advertising into their website search engine promotion.

LinkedIn will be integrated into the Microsoft Office ecosystem. The breaking news on Microsoft acquiring LinkedIn for $26,2 billion has caused a lot of discussions. But one thing is clear for sure, Microsoft wants to start positioning itself as a cloud-based software as a service.  In the joint presentation, Microsoft and LinkedIn reveal the following advantages of the acquisition which will make Microsoft users more productive:

• Access to an individual user’s profile data across all apps and programs, like Outlook, Skype, Office etc.
• Intelligent newsfeed that will help users to stay connected with their professional network, industry news and trends.
• More intelligent digital assistant (Cortana) at your disposal that will be help you connect the dots between your professional network connections and help you effectively manage your daily tasks and meetings.
• Deep integration of the Microsoft Dynamics CRM and LinkedIn Sales Navigator for effective sales management on LinkedIn.
• Integration of the LinkedIn Learning hub into the Office programs that will enable users to learn new skills at the right time without having to leave the Office workplace.

Facebook News

Facebook has reinvented itself from a non-profit Social Media network to eCommerce Digital Marketing platform by collecting 500 terabytes of personal data a day and juggling it to commercial ends. Facebook already provides comprehensive targeting options for advertisers, enabling publishers to hit local-specific audiences, retarget website visitor traffic, show ads to lookalike audiences etc. That’s seems not good enough for Mark Zuckerberg & Co.

On May 26, the company officially set Facebook ads float freely across the web. It means that if you are not a Facebook user, you will also be shown Facebook ads anywhere on the internet and 3d party websites. It’s a game changer for those advertisers who have non-Facebook users and want to retarget them outside Facebook.

Facebook introduced Facebook 360, a new option for publishers to upload 360 photo and videos. Moreover, Facebook allows running 360 photo and video campaigns.

We are done! Now it’s up to you to start exploiting the new trends we have shared with you in this post:)

The post Get Reading: Top 8 Internet Marketing Updates for Spring ‘16 appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

Today’s controversial (speculative) post is dedicated to Google services, specifically the Google Structured Data Helper tool and Google Analytics code and the issue that we faced in the process of using them. Before we discuss the problem, let’s provide explanations to some terms which might be new to you.

What is the Google Structured Data Helper tool and what does it serve for?

The Google Structured Data Markup Helper tool is a tool for the proper implementation of schema markup on your site which helps search engines better understand your content.

Structured data is sensitive information on your site organized and imbedded into the page’s HTML tags. Every time you search for something you can see search engine page results patterned with rich snippets (instant display of specific information near a search result) generated from structured data on sites. Structured data helps searchers evaluate a website’s credibility and get quick access to important information like addresses, phone numbers, ratings etc.

Put it simply, structured data helps your site listings look more attractive in search page results and increase the click-through rate to your site.  The information you can add to structured data patterns includes:

• Your business NAP (name, address, phone)
• Review ratings
• Video description and thumbnail
• People (name, age, photo, job title, address etc.)
• Recipe specs (preparation time, ingredients, ratings, image etc.)
• Product specs (name, description, product ID, color, model etc.)

Learn more on how to decorate SERPS with structured data from your site.

What is the Google Analytics Tracking code and what is it used for?

The Google Analytics Tracking code is a snippet of JavaScript that collects and sends visitor traffic data to Google Analytics from your website. This code is automatically generated in your Google Analytics account and you will need to copy and paste it into every page of your site in order to start tracking your website visitor traffic performance.

What a mess! Is the Google Structured Data Markup Helper tool incompatible with Google Analytics?

Considering the fact that Google may start using structured data in its ranking algorithm in the future, we decided to run an experiment in order to see if the rankings of one of our websites would improve in the long run.

We started to add schema markup to some pages of one of our websites via the Google Structured Data Markup Helper tool and found an unexpected flaw in the generated tags. The Markup Helper erased the Google Analytics snippet code that was inbuilt into the HTML head tag of pages.

In order to demonstrate the recurrence of the issue, we created an HTML sample page with the Google Analytics code. After having added the page to the Markup Helper we generated and inserted tags into our HTML page. The issue occurred again! The schema markup tag that we generated lacked the original GA code in the head.

The original HTML head tag with the GA code looked like this:

And here is what we got after generating a schema markup tag via the Google Structured Data Markup Helper tool:

You can see that one Google service gets pwned by another Google service. It seems like Google doesn’t care about the consistency and compatibility of its services? It’s not the first case of a Google services inconsistency. A similar problem occurs while testing websites via both the Google Mobile-Friendly tool and PageSpeed Insights.

Structured data markup improved our website rankings! Is it a coincidence or a pattern?

In the meantime, when we added schema markup manually, we also added a note about this SEO action as an SEO Event in the WebCEO Journal of Events. The event was automatically displayed on the Historical Data report graphs of the Rank Tracking tool, where it coincided with an uptick in rankings! With the help of the Journal of Events you can easily see how your SEO actions or Google Updates affect your website ranking trend. Have a look at an example of an SEO action marked as an event on the ranking data graph:

Pending issue

We tried to reach out to Googlers and webmasters in order to hear from the horse’s mouth about the inconsistency of their services but they have so far seemingly stonewalled.

Question to you, guys: Has anybody come across the same issue?

Question to Google: Let’s please see a recognition of the problem.

To monitor how changes to your website affect its performance in search rankings, check WebCEO’s Online SEO Tools to track your site’s SEO performance and make informed decisions.

The post How We Revealed the Inconsistency between Google Services appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

This autumn the James Bond movie franchise turned 50! Not bad for her majesty’s Secret Service agent with a licence to kill, philogyny and an undeviating loyalty to shaken (not stirred) martini. You would probably ask how the heck James Bond will help me with my SEO strategy for 2016. We mean to say that you should serve your customers like James Bond serves her Majesty.

Download our step-by-step Download the SEO Strategy Guide 2016  in order to succeed in digital marketing in 2016.

Moreover, using WebCEO’s Rank Checker to monitor your rankings is always a wise strategy:)

The post On Her Majesty’s Secret SEO Service 2016 appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

Have you heard about the Pareto Rule? This principle was named after Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, who analyzed the Italian land market and found that 80% of Italy’s land was owned by 20% of the population. Eventually people started to apply the Pareto principle to other spheres of life, including business, technology, culture, education, management etc. The rule helps in balancing your business inputs-outputs in the most effective way: set business priorities, find the 20% of the most profitable segments of your business, what your business is good at and minify your spends on the aspects which take a lot of your time and resources and bring less profits.

Here are some common 80/20 rules which construct a paradigm of success in the Business and Digital Marketing world:

• 80% of your website traffic come from 20% of channel sources
• 80% of searchers visit 20% of website pages
• 80% of traffic is generated by 20% of your content
• 80% of profits come from 20% of your clients
• 80% ofsales come from 20% of your products
• 80% of social traffic come from 20% of social media sites

What about the Pareto rule when applying it to SEO and Internet Marketing? Considering the correlation 80/20, the key objective that most of the webmasters face is the optimization of SEO activities in order to reach the perfect correlation – 20% of inputs should bring 80% of outputs.

Let’s focus on what 20% of your inputsthat result in 80% of outputs. The aspects uncovered below are not absolute numbers of the formula of success, but a rough concept that can help you set priorities for a successful SEO Strategy.

20% of Your Niche Keywords Drive 80% of Traffic

Mighty content dandelions grow from little keyword seeds. You should focus on the best…a few dozen keywords in order to build a strong and authoritative blog pieces or landing pages. If you have not yet performed detailed Hummingbird-friendly keyword research or did it too long ago, give it a second wind.

 Keyword Research 

Start with keyword research of your niche in order to pick a list of keywords and phrases that is highly descriptive and relevant to your website theme.

Help tools: the WebCEO Keyword Research Tool → Get Suggestions

 Competitive Research

Dig into your competitor keyword analysis in order to narrow your list of targeted keywords and enrich your keyword basket with the most popular terms you want to compete for

Help tools: The WebCEO Keyword Research Tool → Spy on Competitors

 Search Queries Analyitcs 

Strengthen your keyword pattern with the search queries your website is mostly searchable for.

Help tools: Google Analytics → Search Engine Optimization → Queries + Google Search Console → Search Traffic → Search Analytics.

Update your content and research new keywords once you see a decrease in traffic or once you see your competition performing better than you. Don’t bother to post 7 days a week. Focus on producing the 20% of helpful, creative and timely content that will bring 80% of targeted traffic, quality leads and loyal customers.

20% of Landing Pages Drive the Attention of 80% of Users

When optimizing your website, you should bear in mind that only 20% of your website pages will drive 80% of overall traffic. These 20% of pages are your landing pages, – targeted pages which are critical to the buying process. Landing pages are a kind of accelerant for users to take actions and the efficiency of this depends on the transparency of the areas that users interact with in order to complete actions. That’s why you should focus on optimization of key aspects of your landing pages such as user experience and on-page SEO (keywords and internal links).

Landing Page SEO

If your website already receives some traffic, sit and analyze what pages of your website perform better than others. As soon as you find the pages visitors are mostly engaged with, dive deep into their on-page SEO

Help tools: Google Analytics → Search Engine Optimization → Landing Pages + Google Search Console → Search Traffic → Search Analytics.

Bonus tool: Web CEO Google Search Analytics provides you not only with analytics on your top pages found in search, but also allows you to mark the best performing pages as landing pages in order to further work with them in the Landing Page SEO tool of WebCEO.

User Experience Optimization

The interface and design of a landing page plays a critical role in the customer acquisition process. In order to find what 20% of page areas cause 80% of user actions, conduct the visualization and optimization of a page heatmap with the help of website heatmap tools.

Help tools: Crazy Egg.

Internal Links Analysis and Optimization

The Internal Links Structure of a website is critical both in the context of user experience, search visibility and SEO. An in-depth and user-friendly internal links map can significantly improve your landing page click-through rate, help search enginesindex and understand deeper pages of your site quickly, and thus increase your visibility and rankings.

Try to improve your website navigation in order to tie visitors to each of your landing pages and help them take actions on your site with the help of a robust internal links optimization.

Help tools: the WebCEO Internal Links Optimization tool

20% of Your Inbound Links Pass 80% of Link Juice

The quality of content is responsible for the quality of your backlinks. The better the content, the better the backlinks. But you should be aware of the fact that only 20% of your backlink profile passes the 80% of link juice that really affects your SEO. Of great importance is the type of backlink, its placement, anchor text and the source it’s put on.

In order to gain more benefits from the backlinks you build, you should first examine which of your external links bring the most value to your website. Then you can try to earn more of this type of backlinks. Analyze your competitors’ backlink profile for further link prospecting

Help tools: the WebCEO Backlink Quality Check tool + the WebCEO Competitor Backlink Spy tool + Ahrefs

Sign Up for the WebCEO all-in-one SEO platform in order to minify your SEO inputs.

If you have applied the 20/80 system to your SEO and marketing strategy and are ready to share your experience, feel free to share it using the comments section.

The post Pareto Rule in SEO: What 20% of Your Inputs Bring 80% of Outputs appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

Today, we will talk about the evolution of Google SERPs, the extinction of organic listings, the onrush of vertical SEO and various ways to be visible on vertical search engines.

How often do you hear questions like “How can I get first page rankings in organic SERPs?” or “How can I rank #1?” These questions are asked by many of today’s marketing managers and SEO specialists look pretty silly in the era of the Web 2.0. Why? De facto, there are no first, second and even third positions on Google organic search.

Let’s have a look at a screenshot of the first page results for a keyword “string theory” query run on my laptop (res.: 1366×729):

You can see that the first organic listing (for a Wikipedia article) occupies only the #3 spot, but positioned by Google as the #1 ranking position. Organic listings are followed by image and video results. Totally we have 12 result positions per page and 8 of them are organic. So what is going on with organic search? It seems obvious that, under the guise of high-end user experience, Google is taking searchers away from organic search and pushing them to click more on paid (Google AdWords) vertical search results or Google products (Google Maps, Google Play Apps), or default (knowledge graph and direct answer boxes) listings which are all incorporated into a universal search results set.

For those who are not familiar to the concepts of organic, vertical and universal search, let’s go over this. We have Google search results that are split into Organic, Universal and Vertical SERPs.

Organic search returns naturally generated web page listings that are relevant to this or that search term.

Universal Search provides you with a blended set of organic listings (content sites), paid results (ads) and specialized results (video, maps, images, news, deep articles etc.) delivered for a given query.

Vertical Search returns specialized results which represent different types of content for a query. You can search for images in Image Search, for videos in Video Search, for news in News Search, and local shops or restaurants in Maps Search or specific search engines like Yelp, Open Table etc. Vertical results are returned by Google within universal search results.

Vertical search platforms are the new intermediaries for searchers to complete their desired actions, be it informational or transactional intent. Vertical search has a lot of advantages over universal search:

– There may be a specialized type of content wanted

– A faster indexation occurs

– There will be less competition within a specific category

– More accurate results ensue

Even taking all the advantages into account, there are no guarantees that you will get high rankings in vertical search. The problem is that some really big vertical sharks (producers or curators of content) who have gotten their teeth into their niche-specific traffic pie, which benefits them with direct traffic to their platforms. On YouTube, there are channels that practically own certain categories in terms of YouTube search results. Outside Google, searches are conducted directly on Amazon, eBay, Craigslist, Kayak, Trip Advisor, Yelp, Open Table etc. With the popularity of some vertical sites and platforms, Google loses a lot of search traffic. No wonder that Google wants to make an aggressive effort to retain users by providing them with more exciting search listings, including knowledge Graph, Direct Answers, Google Map and Places results etc.

Such a difficult multi-layered Google ecosystem structure didn’t happen in a clap. It took more than 20 years for Google to build the current search experience with a strong algorithmic ranking system and a user-friendly interface. Let’s take a glance at the evolution of Google search results.

Evolution of Google Search

1996 – Google’s birth as a research project.

2000 – Google launched Google AdWords and incorporated ad results next to organic SERPs.

2001 – Google launched Image Search with more than 250 million images available. In 2012 Google updated its image search engine by providing users with an image search where you drag and drop an image into the query field.

2002 – Google News was launched with 4,000 news sources.

2002 – Google launched Froogle (Lately renamed Google Shopping).

2004 – Google introduced Google Local with relevant neighborhood business listings, maps, and directions. Today, organic local listings are combined with Google Maps, a Local Carousel and local pack results.

2005 – Google added a Weather box and a “Google Q&A” box with direct facts on famous people, planets, places and landmarks, movies etc. Today, Google provides direct answers for many queries.

2007 – Google introduced universal search with verticals for video, news, books, image and local search results all integrated together into a single search result page.

2010 –Google Instant (lately Google Auto-Suggest) had been added. It supplies users with relevant suggested search queries as you type so you can quickly find what you need.

2012 – Google Knowledge Graph was launched.

2013 – Google announced app indexing.

The behavior of Internet users who conduct searches on Google has also changed drastically. In 2005, searchers viewed fewer search results but spent more time on each listing (circa 2 sec), while in 2014, searchers viewed more search results but spent less time on each listing (circa 1.17 sec). It means that users’ search behavior is tending towards vertical thinking and scrolling, especially when it comes to mobile search.

3 arguments in favour of Vertical SEO

In the course of Google SERP evolution, the term “organic listings” has become subtle, giving way to vertical, paid and default search results.

• Less than 15 % of purchase-oriented searches are run on classic search engines.
• By the end of 2014, 39 % of U.S. online shoppers started their purchase process searching on Amazon, while only 11 % of buyers did their transactional search on Google.

[Tweet “Less than 15 % of purchase-oriented searches are run on classic search engines. 39 % of U.S. online shoppers started their purchase process searching on Amazon. Only 11 % of buyers did their transactional search on Google. “]

5 Vertical Search Engines you need to optimize your content for.

There are many kinds of vertical search engines you can and should optimize your content for. However, there are several core vertical search engines you should generate and optimize your content for.

1. Image Search Optimization

Considering that image search is the most popular vertical after web search, one cannot miss the opportunity to win additional traffic and rankings on image search engines. There is a classic Google Image Search and there are vertical websites and mobile app platforms which have a huge number of active users continuously growing at an exponential rate. Pinterest and Instagram are perfect image platforms for you to raise your brand awareness and lead generation. Here is a handful of useful SEO guides for Pinterest, Instagram and Google image optimization.

2. Video Search Optimization

Videos are as popular as images and have their own rules for optimization. Everybody knows that Google Video Search is the synonym for YouTube Search. This is in fact the №2 largest search engine in the world, so you need to make every effort to succeed on YouTube and win more rankings on its engine for your top performing keywords. Here is a detailed list of advanced SEO tactics to become a million view leader on YouTube.

3. Apps Search

Today, in the era of mobile-friendly web search, the App Store Optimization (aka ASO) should be one of your top-level priorities on the way to website search engine domination. Make sure you have an effective ASO strategy following the ultimate guide to App Store Optimization.

4. Local Search

Local businesses can generate effective revenue only when business owners know the fundamentals of local SEO (these drastically changed after the Google Pigeon Update) and apply them for the effective online promotion of their product benefits. With this Local SEO Guide you can learn some of the core principals of up-to-date local SEO for small and medium businesses.

5. Shopping Search

Shopping is the most competitive market of all. If you run or plan to start your online business in this niche, you should be ready to compete with such mighty beasts as Google with its AdWords and its upcoming shopping platform, Amazon and eBay. You can benefit from running your advertising campaigns with the help of Google Adwords and selling your products via Amazon or eBay. Since Amazon and eBay are search engines themselves with their own system of SEO factors and hierarchies, you should take a nuanced approach to their vertical shopping SE optimization. While optimizing your eCommerce site, be sure to provide an intuitive, mobile-friendly interface and usability, since this is what makes Amazon and eBay do better than Google and other competitors.

What are medium sources I can benefit from other than Google and the leading vertical websites?

Optimizing for each of the verticals and for Google organic search may seem frustrating and time-consuming.

The SERPs game may take a lot of your effort to become a lord of the SERP kingdoms (Search Engine Result Page Kingdoms). But you should not forget that you can become a popular brand and attract a lot of traffic via alternative digital mediums like email marketing, social media marketing/remarketing, blogging and native advertising etc. For example according to research in 2013, 44% of email subscribers made at least one purchase via commercial newsletter. 

Is it possible to track all of my multi-vertical rankings from one single dashboard?

With Web CEO you can easily monitor your ranking success thanks to the cross-channel integration of most search engine verticals, including organic, paid, local, YouTube and image. Try the WebCEO Rank Checker for free in order to see how vertical search affects your rankings and traffic.

The post The Game of SERPs: Become the Lord of Vertical Search 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.

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.

A few weeks ago Google officially announced that HTTPS would now become a ranking signal, for now a very lightweight signal. This news provoked a lot of discussions in the industry.  Google has also updated Google Webmaster Tools to better handle HTTPS sites and the reporting on them.

We’ve investigated what are the pros and cons of moving your site to HTTPS, and are ready to share some good tips with you.

HTTPS ensures you can safely send personal data online (like credit card information, login details and so on) without a risk of its leaking to a third party, that is why Google, struggling to make the Web safer, likes it so much. For protecting transferred data, HTTPS uses SSL technology. So, to enable HTTPS for your website, you need to get an SSL Certificate (usually on a paid basis) and install it on your server.

Who Needs HTTPS?

• Any site that is taking transactions. If you have an e-commerce store, HTTPS has been a standard for a long time.
• Any website collecting personal data. If your site needs data for logins, comments or email subscriptions, it is a good idea to use HTTPS to build user trust.

Websites without any sensitive data to transfer have no direct need to switch to the HTTPS protocol. However, having the protocol can help to protect your visitors from phishing and it has now become one of over 200 ranking signals. To ensure that your site meets all search engine standards, you can use WebCEO’s Website Audit.

Pros of Switching to HTTPS:

• Security. HTTPS protects your users’ data from man-in-the-middle attacks.
• Industry Standard. As stated before, HTTPS is a must for any online business that handles cardholder information to comply with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard.
• Trust. With growing online security education, many users will trust websites with the HTTPS padlock icon in the address bar more.
• Google Ranking. Google says they now give preference to sites with HTTPS. This impacts only 1% of searches for the time being.

Cons of switching to HTTPS:

• Extra Cost. To move your site to HTTPS you need to purchase and install an SSL certificate on your server. SSL certificates have to be renewed and maintained.
• Site Slowdowns. Encrypting and decrypting information requires extra server processing power and thus can slow down your website.
• Duplicate Content Issues. Make sure you redirect all your HTTP pages to HTTPS. Be careful with absolute internal links within your website, they now need to be edited into the HTTPS URLs or into relative URLs.
• Crawling & Indexing issues. Don’t block your HTTPS site from crawling using robots.txt. Allow indexing of your pages by search engines where possible. Avoid the Noindex meta tag.
• Lost Social Signals. Be ready to lose most of the social signals your site pages had.

To summarize, moving from HTTP to HTTPS will not noticeably improve your rankings at the moment but it is clearly on Google’s radar. There is no penalty involved with running an HTTP site. However, most sites nowadays use the personal data of visitors (comments section, for example) and it is better to have this data encrypted.

The post Should You Switch to HTTPS right now? appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

Earlier in the previous post we talked about essential sources to mine hot trending topics which are the most engaging and sharable for your audience. Today, we would like to share with you some thoughts on the places you can take ideas and data for your visuals from, in order to give them a ripple effect as they spread via social media. It’s true that more than 50% of people are visual learners. IMHO, Numbers by themselves can be really frustrating, but if you implement them into structured infographics, it all sinks in better. That is why creative infographics and charts are so popular. Everybody creates them and you should as well. The question is where to source accurate and catchy data and turn that into trending linkbait?

Your Own Data

If you have stored valuable knowledge and experience taken from your customers’ data, make use of it. Transform it into an attractive visual form and use it as a hook for PR promotional and marketing campaigns. Pick up data on industry trends and interesting insights and make them the bottom line in your press releases, infographics, presentations, social media updates etc. Be careful when using your own data. Be objective.

Official Statistics

The best way to capture minds is to provide data sets based on government related scoring, surveys, researches etc. Source from the government website of a specific country to provide a grounding for some of your future visual content.

Your Partners Data

Consider your partners who you work with to see whether they have some valuable, relative data. They may cooperate on creating joint visual content. Share the costs, time and effort spent on the creation of visual assets with your partner and get the mutual benefits of double publishing and distribution results.

Social Media Buzz

Accurate data sourced from authoritative and solid websites and implemented into your visual content does not guarantee viral social engagement and distribution. One of the honey spot places to find hot topics and trends is in the social media realm. Get inspiration from surfing your Facebook, Twitter home feeds, or using Twitter and Facebook search. It is so easy to draw creative ideas for your own visualized content from viral images, memes and other visuals.

Use Google Trends to ease your brainstorming on what terms related to your business you can use for your visual assets. It is the right tool when you want to follow trending terms. In tandem with Google Trends, surf on the web in search of the latest news, blog posts and discussions relative to your business niche. The WebCEO Web Buzz Monitoring tool will help you to track and pick the latest killer content for your future visuals. Just enter your brand name, trending keywords and long tail phrases as well as competitor names and start your research about interesting topics that may become a theme for your visuals.

Sport/News Events

Play upon worldshaking events and sport news. It is most likely that your visuals based on content that appears on first page search results will get additional points after being indexed and shown in the SERPs. Be sure to distribute your newly created visuals via social networks and content submission sites. Read on the recent Klout blog post about how to increase your content engagement during the #WorldCup.

Start to appeal to your customers and targeted audience using the language of visuals that convey the most essential data taken from trusted sources. Most of us find content supported by true and valid data, provided in the form of creative image, infographic or presentation, is much more appetizing than hard, long-descriptive copy pushed down the throats of customers and perspective buyers.

The post 5 At-Hand Data Sources for Informative Visual Content appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

Yesterday, we gave you some practical advice on how to avoid the Google Panda Penalty. Today we would like to get a view of how some websites applied (or did not applied) the SEO tactics mentioned in the previous post.

The Google Panda 4.0 Update that was rolled out a few weeks ago has now shown some early results, which reveal both a negative and positive effect on the content shared on the web (depending on the point of view, a user’s or website owner’s).  Users are receiving more relative results for their queries. Given the first reports and complaints I would say that positive effects are greater than negative. Let’s have a quick view of the sites being penalized and rewarded by Google’s Panda 4.0.  The list is not comprehensive, but we can see a definite trend of search visibility losses/gains for some giant websites.

Among outsiders we can find websites which post and promote rehashed or duplicate information (Celebrity and Showbiz news portals etc.), create content that links to external sources (Discount Coupon & Codes websites etc.), or show skinny content from third parties (Weather and Price comparison sites).

We at WebCEO decided to take a closer look at those sites that were most affected:

Outsiders:

isitdownrightnow.com – 50%

aceshowbiz.com – 75%

starpulse.com – 50%

 Favorites:

Emedicinehealth.com 500 %

Medterms.com 500 %

Zimbio.com – 500%

Interesting fact is that very similar sites (starpulse.com and zimbio.com) appeared both in the lists of favorites and outsiders. But what makes them different? Is it really all about content quality?

I have made a quick competitive analysis of the backlink profiles of these two websites with the help of our Backlink Quality Checker. A website’s backlink profile is one of the main factors measured by Google, even if a Google update affects content only. Backlinks together with anchor texts linking to relative and useful content on other sites are considered to be part of the algorithm. This truth is confirmed by SEO experts like Jayson DeMers, Founder & CEO at AudienceBloom who has stated that one must: “Implement the three pillars of SEO: Content, links and social media, via a solid content strategy”.

In the Web CEO Online Competitor Link Profile report, we see few obvious reasons why the above two websites are on opposite sides of the Panda 4.0 fallout. Both of the sites have a high PR of 6. But a closer look reveals the factors that clearly caused starpulse.com to fall in the rankings and zimbio.com go up:

1. Zimbio had a greater number of backlinks.
2. Zimbio had more links with .GOV and .EDU link status.
3. Zimbio had more dofollow links as opposed to nofollow links.
4. Zimbio had a lower percentage of sitewide links which are considered more and more by Google to be more spammy.

Among absolute favorites there are websites which serve as original sources of interesting and helpful information. Their content is user-focused and that’s why they earn more points in the high quality content promotion battle.

The point is that you might source information from other related websites, but keep away from aping.  One of the winner sites with a well executed content strategy is buzzfeed.com. Though there is an excessive number of viral articles like “15 things you should avoid on the first date”, the content is diverse and fits almost everyone’s content needs. Are you raving for useful articles, would you rather read politics or business news, or do you just want to relax and look through interactive content? Buzzfeed gives people a variety of interesting content, fact and fiction, with strong visual assets here and there (video selections, quizzes, gif feed etc.).

Let’s take another one of the winner sites into consideration. Medterms.com has earned more Panda points (500 % improvement in rankings) than other websites. The SEO factors that might have taken them to the top of the favorites list are:

• Clear and clean navigation
• Well-implemented 301 redirects.
• User-friendly interface with a search box to provide quick access to desired content.
• Different types of content including original visual assets:  slideshare shows, image carousels, interactive content distribution like quizzes etc.
• Well-performed internal links optimization with diverse link text
• Strong presence on social media with a high social reach.

If you want to feel secure with the Google Panda 4.0 and become a favorite of users and of Google, be sure to implement the tried and true SEO tactics mentioned above.

The post Panda 4.0 Update: Favorites and Outsiders – What Are the Factors of Google’s Betting System? appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.