If you didn’t make it to our inaugural marketing conference, or even if you did and want to relieve all the excitement, read on to find out what went on at our one-day digital-marketing extravaganza!
What is Seerfest?No, it’s not a festival of all things Seer, but it is a gathering of some of our closest friends, colleagues, and experts dropping knowledge on some of our favorite topics like SEO, PPC, Analytics, automation, content marketing, and more!…
https://ift.tt/2Naq21qHostage negotiators at the FBI developed a model for creating a relationship between the bureau’s negotiators and their counterparts, which culminates in the FBI negotiator influencing decisions of his or her counterpart during the negotiation—like “let her go” or “put down the gun.” The bureau calls this the behavioral change the stairway model:
The model outlines a process for developing a relationship that flows through time, starting with the negotiator empathizing with his or her counterpart, then building trust and rapport before ever trying to influence or enact any sort of behavioral change.…
https://ift.tt/2lGl2VzMost of us have used location-based data to analyze performance at one point or another, whether it be using Google Analytics geographic data to see where your top performing cities and states are, or whether it’s using paid search data to look at which regions are driving the highest performance for your campaigns.…
https://ift.tt/2yTFyvrAffiliate marketing is a means to monetize your blog or website. You can recommend products on your site with a trackable link from your affiliate partner, or put that link in an ad. If someone clicks on the link and buys a product through your site, you’ll get a commission.
Especially if your site has many visitors and high credibility, you’ll have a good chance that your audience is willing to follow your recommendations. Still, it’s definitely a good idea to give some thought to how you implement affiliate marketing on your site. For instance, do you write blog posts to promote affiliate products, or create seperate pages? And if you choose the latter option, what’s the best way to do that? Let’s discuss in today’s Ask Yoast!
Davide Roccato emailed his question on the subject:
I want to create a number of landing pages on my news blog, targeted for affiliate marketing. What’s the best way to do this from an SEO point of view? Should I create them as pages or should I create a new custom segment so these are parallel to my blog post and pages?
Watch the video or read the transcript further down the page for my answer!
The best way to create landing pages for affiliate marketing
Info“Honestly, from an SEO point of view it doesn’t really matter. What works best for you in the backend it’s probably what works best. The only advantage that a custom post would give you is that you’d have a separate section in Yoast SEO to set the titles, a separate XML sitemap so you can see their indexation in Google search console a lot better, so you’d get slightly better handling on the SEO side. But I don’t think that it has to be a problem so just choose what works best for you. Good luck.” Ask Yoast
In the series Ask Yoast, we answer SEO questions from our readers. Have an SEO-related question? Perhaps we can help you out! Send an email to ask@yoast.com, and your question may be featured in one of our weekly Ask Yoast vlogs.
Note: please check our blog and knowledge base first, the answer to your question may already be out there! For urgent questions, for example about the Yoast SEO plugin not working properly, we’d like to refer you to our support page.
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We have been using Woorank for quite some time now, and we even wrote about how it audits websites in a quick and efficient manner. Due to its performance, we have added Woorank in our constantly expanding SEO toolbox, which already contains quality tools such as Link Cheetah, Ahrefs, and SERPED.net.
While we may have written about Wooranks standard review feature, one part that we were not able to cover was the Advanced Reviews feature, which is Woorank’s premium feature, which can only be used in a limited basis. This means that this feature is best suited for websites that need more monitoring and analyses in order to improve its performance. Let’s take a look at Woorank’s Advanced Review and find out what can it do for your website.
Starting upTo start a review for your website, all you need to do is to enter your website URL and click “Create Review”. Woorank will then start the process for the standard review, which takes a few moments.
After viewing the review, you now have the option to create an Advanced Review by clicking “Start Advanced Review”. After another few moments, you can now access the Advanced Review options for your website.
After starting the advanced review, you can take a look at the difference between the number of functions you can perform on a standard review compared to an Advanced Review. Whereas the standard review click options look like this:
Meanwhile, the Advanced Review has a few more additional options that you can utilize.
Now, let’s take a look at some of the advanced review options.
Advanced ReviewAt a glance, the Advanced Review looks very similar to a standard review, as you are able to access all assessments and reports in the same way. You will be able to view your SEO performance, Mobile friendliness, social media channels, and traffic locations, which we have covered previously.
One section that you can only see in the Advanced Review feature is the toolbar on the left which allows you to access even more features. The toolbar options include Website Review, which is the primary page that you are accessing when conducting a website audit, Keyword Tool, Site Crawl, and Settings. Let’s start with the Keyword Tool.
To start using the keyword tool, all you have to do is to choose which Google domain that you want your keyword to be tracked and add the keywords.
Adding keywords is as simple as adding them on Ahrefs, as you can enter as much as 250 different keywords. If you have entered all of the keywords you need, click apply.
After entering the keywords, you can now view their search volume and see if it is a keyword that can generate high traffic and compare it with other keywords. This handy feature allows you to track keywords without the need to use other keyword research tools.
Site CrawlAnother important feature in the Woorank Advanced Review is Site Crawl, which allows you to monitor elements such as title tags, meta descriptions, HTTP Status, Indexed pages, and even canonical tags.
This feature allows you to view each page of your website, and check for issues that need to be resolved, such as duplicate content, short meta description, and body content. While it may be a feature that simply lists down pages within your website, this comes in handy, as you have a ready-made database where your webpage data can be located.
With these two key features, Woorank becomes an even more versatile website audit tool that helps assess your website performance, while allowing you to track individual web pages and keywords as well. If you have a website that needs to be prioritized and optimized, Woorank is a tool that helps you take the best steps in improving it.
Key TakeawayWoorank Advanced Review might be a limited feature that can only be used for a specific number of websites, but it is surely a feature that makes Woorank one of the best SEO audit tools available, and a great addition to our SEO Hacker toolbox.
If you have questions and inquiries about SEO tools or SEO in general, leave a comment below and let’s talk.
https://ift.tt/2N8hpV3Last week, Google announced a new feature in their knowledge panels. You’re now able to verify your branded or personal panel and add or change some of the information in it. But what exactly are knowledge panels? Are these useful? Should your company have one? I’ll tell you all about it in this post!
New to SEO? Learn the Basics of SEO in our Basic SEO course »
Info What is a knowledge panel?
Knowledge panels contain information about businesses or people. Such a panel appears on the right in the desktop search results. It contains information about the company, for instance when the company was founded and where the company is situated. A panel also contains pictures.
There are two types of knowledge panels: local panels and branded/personal panels. Google calls both of these knowledge panels, but the process of verifying them is totally different. For the local panels, verification was already possible through Google My Business. The new feature actually only applies to the branded/personal panels.
If you want to be found on your brand or business name, a knowledge panel is really useful! If Google decides to show your knowledge panel, you pretty much dominate the search results on the right side of the screen in desktop search. In mobile, the knowledge panel will appear between other results but is pretty dominant as well. A knowledge panel will thus make sure your company or brand will stand out in the search results when people are specifically searching for it. That’ll give you lots and lots of clicks. And this makes sense too: if people are searching for your brand name, they want to find your website.
How do you get a knowledge panel for your business?As with other types of search results, Google will decide whether or not it’ll show a knowledge panel in the search results. If you’re a local business, you can do some things to increase your chances to rank with a knowledge panel. For the branded and personal panels, it is much harder to obtain such a knowledge panel.
Local panelsIf you want a chance of Google displaying a local panel for your business, the first step is to open a Google My Business account. You’ll then be able to verify that you are the owner of your business. After that, you can add or edit all relevant information about your business, such as address information, opening hours and photos.
In the end, Google will decide whether or not to show a knowledge panel. Relevance, distance, and the prominence of the business are all important aspects for Google in determining if it’ll show knowledge panels. Making sure your website is really awesome and working on a high-authority domain could enhance your chances.
Read more: ‘Improve your local SEO with Google My Business’ »
Branded/personal panelsIt is not possible to apply for a branded or personal panel. Google will decide whether or not your brand is worthy of a knowledge panel. If your brand has enough authority, a knowledge panel will appear. Brands and people who have Wikipedia pages, often have knowledge panels as well. For Yoast, we do have a knowledge panel. Joost de Valk also has a personal knowledge panel. I do not have a knowledge panel. I’ll keep working on that level of authority.
How to verify your panelSo, Google’s news from last week was that people could now verify their brand or personal knowledge panel. Verifying is not all that hard. If you have a knowledge panel, make sure to verify it. Follow the steps Google has outlined for you in this article. You need to log in to your Google account and sign in to one of your official sites or profiles to get verification for your business. For Yoast, it was pretty easy.
Once verified, you’ll be able to make changes in the knowledge panel and make sure it looks the way you want it to look.
Conclusion on knowledge panelsKnowledge panels are a great asset to have in the search results. For local panels, you should make sure you’re doing everything you can to get a knowledge panel. For branded or personal knowledge panels, it is much harder to influence your chances of getting one. It all depends on your level of authority, and that’s something that probably won’t be fixed overnight.
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“Single page websites are websites that have a single page, or one HTML page.” – Ritely
This means that all the information about the site can be reached on a single page, where you scroll down to the relevant part of the page that you need. Sections like contact, about us, products, can be found on the same page. There is the standard navigation links or buttons, but the navigation links or buttons allow the browser to jump to the needed section of the webpage. This navigation jump is known as parallax scrolling, and it can create some stunning and beautiful websites.
While this may seem like a good thing, and it is to some website owners and users, single page websites do have their drawbacks, five of which are listed below:
Keyword limitation
One of the most significant impediments to single page websites is keyword ranking. SEO, which stands for Search Engine Optimization, relies heavily on keywords, and any website page can most times, be only optimized for a single phrase. Single page websites are designed around a central topic or theme, so such single page websites can only target a single phrase.
Multi-Page websites, on the other hand, do not have this limitation and have more chances of ranking higher in search optimization due to the multiple pages it has. Each web page it has can target a keyword or phrase, increasing the chances of search engines displaying the site. This may be crucial for businesses that have a competitive web presence and every key phrase matters.
Lack of specific content
Single page websites are generally harder to find specific content, as there isn’t space or possibility to create a separate page for each topic; everything has to be shown on a single page. Should a visitor need to know more about a product, idea or content displayed on the site, it will be challenging for a single page website to show more needed content. This lack of relevant content can be frustrating for a visitor who may want to see specific information on the site. Another factor would be the metadata of a single page website.
A single page website has only one set of metadata, which gives you only one title tag and description. As there are no other pages on the site, the website is limited to creating a single title tag. This reduces the chances you have of getting visitors to your website as you only have one chance to grab their attention. This also limits the amount of specialized content the website can display or have. A multipage website, on the other hand, can have Metadata for the various web pages that are contained in the website, increasing the specialized content it may wish the web user to have access to.
Advanced SEO practices
Apart from the ability to create more specific content, multi-page websites can also break their web pages into sections (categories) and subsections to display content better. These subsections or subcategories can be other pages on the website, which can be further broken down into more subsections. This makes it possible to display all the information needed about an item, product or idea. This is done to give as much information as possible to the visitors or web users.
This process is called siloing’ and it is much easier to do on a multipage website than on a single page website. A single page website will find it difficult to display so much content on a particular topic if there are lots of topics to be covered or other contents to display. The single page website will become clogged and disorganized.
Loading time
Having flash videos and images, combined with texts, parallax effects and other content on only a single page means that the page can become heavy and will take a longer time to load than a website with multiple pages. This could be a turnoff to visitors and web users who may not have the patience to wait for the whole site to load via a single web page.
SEO will not rank sites that take a long time to load high on their search engines as loading time is one of their criteria in ranking websites. A multipage webpage, on the other hand, has information spread across many pages so this can make the load time a lot faster. Loading speed is a major ranking factor in the world of SEO, which means on-page optimization is key.
Lack of Links
SEO favor sites with enough links, both internal and external links. Single page websites are limited in their ability to include many internal links, as the website consists of only one webpage. The links on their page only have the ability to jump to another section of the same page. The ability to link to another page is not possible with a single page website. Single page websites also frown against having external links, as this could quickly take the visitor away from their website.
Multi-Page websites are not bogged down with this disadvantage as multi-page websites have the ability to include lots of internal links as they are not limited to the number of pages the site has. Also, having external links increases the sites SEO ranking.
Though single page websites can be patchy and are in vogue, they do have their place in the market, but it is important to note they are not so good for SEO. A lot of thought should be put into considering a single page website. Factors like the target audience, the market and the need for the website should be put into consideration.
Businesses like to be ranked high in search engine result pages as most web users rarely search more than the first or second search result pages. This means that if you don’t rank high in the search result pages, your presence on the web may not be felt.
Key TakeawayMulti-Page website are more SEO friendly as they are more flexible, can contain more content, should you wish to have them, and can reach a wider audience. You can be more detailed about a product, even dedicate a whole page to a product. This is something that a single page website will find impossible to do.
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The world of SEO has become increasingly diverse and vast over the years, with numerous algorithm updates and strategies being developed on a consistent basis. While every SEO Professional has their own go-to strategy that is similarly practiced by their peers on a regular basis, they also search for underrated and low-key SEO Strategies that gives them an edge in keeping their rankings up.
With SEO becoming more competitive than ever, having extra tricks up your sleeve can prove to be very helpful in succeeding in your campaign. We at SEO Hacker have crafted some helpful SEO tips and tricks over the years, and we continue to make sure we find the best strategies and techniques that can not only help our team but SEO professionals and enthusiasts as well.
When it comes to looking for low-key strategies, there are times that it can be a challenge, while there are also times that it can be something that you might have overlooked in the past. Either way, these low-key SEO strategies have proven to be quite effective in creating a more efficient process, or even help you generate more traffic for your website. Here are some practices worth trying out.
Skyscraper contentWhile this may be the most popular among underrated SEO practices, this is still a strategy that not many people use. Skyscraper content is basically looking for high-performing content and create similar content that will perform better. While it may sound simple, creating quality competitive content is a lot of work to ensure that it ranks well.
To start creating your own skyscraper content, you first have to do some research and look for high performing competitor content. It is best if you use tools like Ahrefs to see how much traffic these posts are receiving on a regular basis. Ahrefs not only allows you to view the performance of various blog posts, but also look for similar content that performs well, and use them as a reference to craft a high-quality post.
There are many ways that you can improve on the content of your competitors, such as add infographics, ask insights from experts, create more detailed explanations, or even add video content as well. We have created a good number of skyscrapers for our clients over the past few months, and we can say that these were able to generate great results and gain traffic.
Content TranscriptionWe have covered content transcription in our YouTube SEO guide, where we discussed that it is one way to help your videos become more searchable. While this has been discussed in detail a good number of times, there are still a lot of users that do not transcribe their videos or podcasts. While transcription may take a good amount of time to accomplish, this allows your content to become more accessible to users, especially users who have visual and hearing impairments.
Transcription also allows users to be able to use your content as sources for research work as well, as academic standards usually require their researchers to transcribe video and audio sources. This not only makes things easier for them but also turn your content into a legitimate and source that receives citations.
Transcription is also another way to optimize your content for voice search, which has become much bigger over the past year. Users and AI assistants would be able to make use of exact and phrased search terms that can help them access your content. With these AI-powered systems performing the search for you, it is best to make sure that they would be able to find you.
Translated ContentIf you have a website that receives a high amount of traffic from outside the country, it is best to translate your own content to improve website accessibility and user experience. This is an important international SEO practice, as you would be able to connect with more users as they can understand your content. Having foreign language content also means that the use of hreflang tags are another essential practice, as it helps search engines understand different languages, and allows you to receive traffic from non-local search engines.
While this may be something that every SEO professional does on a regular basis, the type of internal linking that will generate the best amount of traffic will come from your best performing posts. Quality internal linking means linking high performing posts to your content, which users would be more interested in. One question that would pop up on your mind would be: “What about my low performing content?”
Linking your high performing content doesn’t mean that you should only link the best content available, but it could also be a great way to increase the traffic of low performing articles by linking them within the same content. Having high performing content as your internal link makes your post more authoritative, while also an avenue for your users to discover more content that would have been more challenging to access.
Key TakeawaySEO is a diverse and highly competitive world filled with so many strategies that aim to get you on top and finding the best one to take you there is a journey that requires a lot of hard work and investment. With these low-key SEO strategies, you would be able to craft out advantages for your website that you would not have had before.
If you have questions and inquiries about SEO, leave a comment below and let’s talk.
https://ift.tt/2lyad81As performance marketers (and, frankly, as humans), we all lead busy lives. While we don’t have the magic formula for bending the space-time continuum, there are a few things that we’ve picked up along our way that have helped us get back some of that precious time.…
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Copyright © 2018 SEO by the Sea ⚓. This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at may be guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact SEO by the Sea, so we can take appropriate action immediately.Are you thinking about advertising on Facebook but hesitate because of all the recent targeting updates? Not to mention the prospecting capabilities that have been removed (i.e. job titles, companies & all third party data). Do you need a granular list guaranteed to contain highly-engaged users who are the most likely to convert?…
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Artificial Intelligence is a technology that has seen huge strides in its development over the past few years. This 2018, companies like Google have been developing the technology to improve user-friendliness and allow more functionality in the services that they offer, such as Google Assistant, Google Search, and much more.
These new developments have been headed by Google AI, which is their main research team handling AI technology development. This recently-announced division of Google has been developing an improved AI system, which they demonstrated in May 2018. The demonstration saw Google Assistant’s capability to make phone calls and respond naturally to conversational speech. This capability showcased how Google Assistant is able to handle tasks without the need for user supervision.
Google and other tech giants are currently developing their own sophisticated AI, systems, and these breakthroughs show that AI technology still has long ways to go, and new algorithms and features have yet to be refined for release. One of the latest findings from Google AI is the new Semantic Textual Similarity algorithm, which expands the ability for AI to understand various queries and interactions to create more diverse responses. Let’s take a look at these new updates and see how they can change things up for the future of search.
What is Semantic Textual Similarity?To set things straight from the get-go, Learning Semantic Textual Similarity is a new algorithm that enables AI system to be able to understand semantically similar queries from users and provide a uniform response. This algorithm aims to not only improve the quality of responses by services such as Google Assistant but also make these interactions feel more natural as well.
For example, if the user asks “How old are you?” or “What is your age?”, the user will expect the same response. The emphasis on semantic similarity aims to create a system that recognizes language and word patterns to craft responses that are similar to how a human conversation works. This algorithm is accomplished through a series of processes and systems that connect together to create an AI system that understands speech patterns. These processes are classified as models, and here are some of the ones that are used by Google.
Universal Sentence EncoderTo create authentic and natural response patterns, Google AI uses a system called a Universal Sentence Encoder that predicts sentences through the use of encode-only architecture that helps drive more predictive tasks that recognized text and creates responses. The encoder performs tasks such as custom text clarification, paraphrase detection, and clustering. This system works by using a deep average network encoder, which is an arrangement that is simpler and more straightforward in generating results. Meanwhile, another version of the Universal Sentence Encoder uses a more complicated network system called the Transformer, which is able to perform better and create quality results.
How will this affect SEO?The rise of AI assistants and mobile internet also saw the increase in the number of users using voice search on a regular basis. This also meant that applications that use voice search must be able to recognize a diverse array of words and sentence patterns to generate accurate responses. This quality is what makes AI Assistants like Google Assistant, Siri, Alexa, and Bixby some of the most widely used applications in the market, and can be accessed through mobile applications, laptops, and even smart furniture.
With this in mind, the best SEO strategies that allow you to take advantage of voice search is using exact and phrased search terms, long-tail keywords, and creating pages that answer commonly asked questions. Mobile SEO will also become a big part in the future of search as well, especially with more users browsing through mobile, and Google adopting a mobile-first approach.
Voice search optimization is quickly becoming an important practice in the industry, and it is best to implement these on your websites to future-proof your SEO and allow AI assistants to find your website much easier. Mobile optimization is another important matter, as mobile loading speed will not become an important ranking factor this 2018. Creating a user-friendly website through AMP and responsive design helps make the experience of navigating your website much better.
Key TakeawayAI technology may still be a growing technology that requires a lot of refinements and optimization for it to develop further, but what we currently have shows how much potential that it has in revolutionizing the SEO industry, and how users do search inquiries. Semantic Textual Similarity is just one of these ingredients that help make it work better, and one day allow AI assistants to have more autonomy in the tasks that they accomplish.
If you have questions and inquiries about AI technology and SEO, leave a comment below and let’s talk.
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In a search engine that answers questions based upon crawling and indexing facts found within structured data on a site, that search engine works differently than a search engine which looks at the words used in a query, and tries to return documents that contain the same words as the ones in the query; hoping that such a matching of strings might contain an actual answer to the informational need that inspired the query in the first place. Search using Structured Data works a little differently, as seen in this flowchart from a 2017 Google patent:
In Schema, Structured Data, and Scattered Databases such as the World Wide Web, I talked about the Dipre Algorithm in a patent from Sergey Brin, as I described in the post, Google’s First Semantic Search Invention was Patented in 1999. That patent and algorithm described how the web might be crawled to collect pattern and relations information about specific facts. In that case, about books. In the Google patent on structured data, we see how Google might look for factual information set out in semi-structured data such as JSON-LD, to be able to answer queries about facts, such as, “What is a book, by Ernest Hemingway, published in 1948-1952.
This newer patent tells us that it might solve that book search in this manner:
In particular, for each encoded data item associated with a given identified schema, the system searches the locations in the encoded data item identified by the schema as storing values for the specified keys to identify encoded data items that store values for the specified keys that satisfy the requirements specified in the query. For example, if the query is for semi-structured data items that have a value “Ernest Hemingway” for an “author” key and that have values in a range of “1948-1952” for a “year published” key, the system can identify encoded data items that store a value corresponding to “Ernest Hemingway” in the location identified in the schema associated with the encoded data item as storing the value for the “author” key and that store a value in the range from “1948-1952” in the location identified in the schema associated with the encoded data item as storing the value for the “year published” key. Thus, the system can identify encoded data items that satisfy the query efficiently, i.e., without searching encoded data items that do not include values for each key specified in the received query and without searching locations in the encoded data items that are not identified as storing values for the specified keys.
It was interesting seeing Google come out with a patent about searching semi-structured data which focused upon the use of JSON-LD. We see them providing an example of JSON on one of the Google Developer’s pages at: Introduction to Structured Data
As it tells us on that page:
This documentation describes which fields are required, recommended, or optional for structured data with special meaning to Google Search. Most Search structured data uses schema.org vocabulary, but you should rely on the documentation on developers.google.com as definitive for Google Search behavior, rather than the schema.org documentation. Attributes or objects not described here are not required by Google Search, even if marked as required by schema.org.
The page then points us to the Structured Data Testing Tool, to be used as you prepare pages for use with Structured Data. It also tells us that for checking on Structured Data after it has been set up, the Structured Data Report in Google Search Console can be helpful, and is what I usually look at when doing site audits.
Semi-structured data is self-describing data that does not conform to a static, predefined format. For example, one semi-structured data format is JavaScript Object Notation (JSON). A JSON data item generally includes one or more JSON objects, i.e., one or more unordered sets of key/value pairs. Another example semi-structured data format is Extensible Markup Language (XML). An XML data item generally includes one or more XML elements that define values for one or more keys.
I’ve used the analogy of how XML sitemaps are machine-readable, compared to HTML Sitemaps, and that is how JSON-LD shows off facts in a machine-readable way on a site, as opposed to content that is in HTML format. As the patent tells us that is the purpose behind this patent:
In general, this specification describes techniques for extracting facts from collections of documents.
The patent discusses schemas that might be on a site, and key/value pairs that could be searched, and details about such a search of semi-structured data on a site:
The aspect further includes receiving a query for semi-structured data items, wherein the query specifies requirements for values for one or more keys; identifying schemas from the plurality of schemas that identify locations for values corresponding to each of the one or more keys; for each identified schema, searching the encoded data items associated with the schema to identify encoded data items that satisfy the query; and providing data identifying values from the encoded data items that satisfy the query in response to the query. Searching the encoded data items associated with the schema includes: searching, for each encoded data item associated with the schema, the locations in the encoded data item identified by the schema as storing values for the specified keys to identify whether the encoded data item stores values for the specified keys that satisfy the requirements specified in the query.
The patent providing details of the use of JSON-LD to provide a machine readable set of facts on a site can be found here:
Storing semi-structured data
Inventors: Martin Probst
Assignee: Google Inc.
US Patent: 9,754,048
Granted: September 5, 2017
Filed: October 6, 2014
Abstract
Take AwaysMethods, systems, and apparatus, including computer programs encoded on computer storage media, for storing semi-structured data. One of the methods includes maintaining a plurality of schemas; receiving a first semi-structured data item; determining that the first semi-structured data item does not match any of the schemas in the plurality of schemas; and in response to determining that the first semi-structured data item does not match any of the schemas in the plurality of schemas: generating a new schema, encoding the first semi-structured data item in the first data format to generate the first new encoded data item in accordance with the new schema, storing the first new encoded data item in the data item repository, and associating the first new encoded data item with the new schema.
By using Structured Data such as in Schema Vocabulary in JSON-LD formatting, you make sure that you provide precise facts in key/value pairs that provide an alternative to the HTML-based content on the pages of a site. Make sure that you follow the Structured Data General Guidelines from Google when you add it to a site. That page tells us that pages that don’t follow the guidelines may not rank as highly, or may become ineligible for rich results appearing for them in Google SERPs.
And if you are optimizing a site for Google, it also helps to optimize the same site for Bing, and it is good to see that Bing seems to like JSON-LD too. It has taken a while for Bing to do that (see Aaron Bradle’s post, An Open Letter to Bing Regarding JSON-LD.) It appears that Bing has listened a little, adding some capacity to check on JSON-LD after it is deployed: Bing announces Bing AMP viewer & JSON-LD support in Bing Webmaster Tools. The Bing Markup Validator does not yet help with JSON-LD, but Bing Webmaster Tools now helps with debugging JSON-LD. I like using this Structured Data Linter myself.
Copyright © 2018 SEO by the Sea ⚓. This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at may be guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact SEO by the Sea, so we can take appropriate action immediately.Target CPA is a smart bidding strategy offered by both Google & Bing that optimizes data to get as many conversions as possible within the set goal of cost per acquisition. For example, if you set your target CPA (tCPA) to $100, the engines will make optimizations to get as many conversions that have a CPA of $100 or less.…
https://ift.tt/2tcz1puI spoke at SMX Advanced this week on Schema markup and Structured Data, as part of an introduction to its use at Google.
I had the chance to visit Seattle, and tour some of it. I took some photos, but would like to go back sometimes and take a few more, and see more of the City.
One of the places that I did want to see was Pike Place market. It was a couple of blocks away from the Hotel I stayed at (the Marriott Waterfront.)
It is a combination fish and produce market, and is home to one of the earliest Starbucks.
I could see living near the market and shopping there regularly. It has a comfortable feel to it.
This is a view of the Farmers Market from the side. I wish I had the chance to come back later in the day, and see what it was like other than in the morning.
This was a nice little park next to Pike Place Market, which looked like a place to take your dog for a walk while in the area, and had a great view of Elliot Bay (the central part of Puget Sound.)
This is a view of the waterfront from closer to the conference center.
You can see Mount Ranier from the top of the Conference Center.
My presentation for SMX Advanced 2018:
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Schema, Structured Data & Scattered Databases Such as the World Wide Web. My role in this session is to introduce Schema and Structured Data and how Google is using them on the Web.
Google is possibly best known for the PageRank Algorithm invented by founder Lawrence Page, whom it is named after. In what looks like the second patent filed by someone at Google was the DIPRE (Dual interative pattern relation expansion) patent, invented and filed by Sergey Brin. He didn’t name it after himself (Brinrank) like Page did with PageRank.
The provisional patent filed for this invention was the whitepaper, “Extracting Patterns and Relations from Scattered Databases such as the World Wide Web.” The process behind it is set out in the paper, and it involves a list of 5 books, titles, their authors, Publishers, Year published. Unlike PageRank, it doesn’t involve crawling webpages, and indexing links from Page to page and anchor text. Instead, it involves collecting facts from page to page, and when it finds pages that contain properties and attributes from these five books, it is supposed to collect similar facts about other books on the same site. And once it has completed, it is supposed to move on to other sites and look for those same 5 books, and collect more books. The idea is to eventually know where all the books are on the Web, and facts about those books, that could be used to answer questions about them.
This is where we see Google being concerned about structured data on the web, and how helpful knowing about it could be.
When I first started out doing inhouse SEO, it was for a Delaware incorporation business, and geography was an important part of the queries that my pages were found for. I had started looking at patents, and ones such as this one on “Generating Structured Data caught my attention. It focused on collecting data about local entities, or local businesses, and properties related to those. It was built by the team led by Andrew Hogue, who was in charge of the Annotation framework at Google, who were responsible for “The Fact Repository”, an early version of Google’s Knowledge Graph.
If you’ve heard of NAP consistency, and of mentions being important to local search, it is because Local search was focusing on collecting structured data that could be used to answer questions about businesses. Patents about location prominence followed, which told us that a link counted as a mention, and a patent on local authority, which determined which Website was the authoritative one for a business. But, it seemed to start with collecting structured data about businesses at places.
The DIPRE Algorithm focused upon crawling the web to find facts, and Google Maps built that into an approach that could be used to rank places and answer questions about them.
If you haven’t had a chance to use Google’s experimental table search, it is worth trying out. It can answer questions to find answers from data-based tables across the web, such as “what is the longest wooden pier in California”, which is the one in Oceanside, a town next to the one I live in. It is from a Webtables project at Google.
Database fields are sometimes referred to as schema and table headers which tell us what kind of data is in a table column may also be referred to as “schema”. A data-based web table could be considered a small structured database, and Google’s Webtable project found that there was a lot of information that could be found in web tables on the Web.
Try out the first link above (the WebTables Project Slide) when you get the chance, and do some searches on Google’s table search. The second paper is one that described the WebTables project when it first started out, and the one that follows it describes some of the things that Google researchers learned from the Project. We’ve seen Structured Snippets like the one above grabbing facts to include in a snippet (in this case from a data table on the Wikipedia page about the Oceanside Pier.)
When a data table column contains the same data that another table contains, and the first doesn’t have a table header label, it might learn a label from the second table (and this is considered a way to learn semantics or meaning from tables) These are truly scattered databases across the World Wide Web, but through the use of crawlers, that information can be collected and become useful, like the DIPRE Algorithm described.
In 2005, the Official Google Blog published this short story, which told us about Google sometimes answering direct questions in response to queries at the top of Web results. I don’t remember when these first started appearing, but do remember Definition results about a year earlier, which you could type out “Define:” and a word or ask “What is” before a word and Google would show a definition, and there was a patent that described how they were finding definitions from glossary pages, and how to ideally set up those glossaries, so that your definitions might be the ones that end up as responses.
In 2012, Google introduced the Knowledge Graph, which told us that they would be focusing upon learning about specific people, places and things, and answering questions about those instead of just continuing to match keywords in queries to keywords in documents. They told us that this was a move to things instead of strings. Like the books in Brin’s DIPRE or Local Entities in Google Maps.
We could start using the Web as a scattered database, with questions and answers from places such as Wikipedia tables helping to answer queries such as “What is the capital of Poland”
And Knowledge bases such as Wikipedia, Freebase, IMDB and Yahoo Finance could be the sources of facts about properties and attributes about things such as movies and actors and businesses where Google could find answers to queries without having to find results that had the same keywords in the document as the query.
In 2011, The Schema.org site was launched as a joint project from Google, Yahoo, Bing, and Yandex, that provided machine-readable text that could be added to web pages. This text is provided in a manner that is machine readable only, much like XML sitemaps are intended to be machine-readable, to provide an alternative channel of information to search engines about the entities pages are about, and the properties and attributes on those pages.
While Schema.org was introduced in 2011, it was built to be extendable, and to let subject matter experts be able to add new schema, like this extension from GS1 (the inventors of barcodes in brick and mortar stores) If you haven’t tried out this demo from them, it is worth getting your hands on to see what is possible.
In 2014, Google published their Biperpedia paper, which tells us about how they might create ontologies from Query streams (sessions about specific topics) by finding terms to extract data from the Web about. At one point in time, Search engines would do focused crawls of the web starting at sources such as DMOZ, so that the Index of the Web they were constructing contained pages about a wide range of categories. By using query stream information, they are crowdsourcing the building of resources to build ontologies about. This paper tells us that Biperpedia enabled them to build ontologies that were larger than what they had developed through Freebase, which may be partially why Freebase was replaced by wiki data.
The Google+ group I’ve linked to above on the Schema Resources Page has members who work on Schema from Google, such as Dan Brickley, who is the head of schema for Google. Learning about extensions is a good idea, especially if you might consider participating in building new ones, and the community group has a mailing list, which lets you see and participate in discussions about the growth of Schema.
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When it comes to Google search queries, some of the most search terms are related to sports, with basketball and association football (soccer for our American readers) being one of the most searched sports worldwide. This month, the 2018 FIFA World Cup kicks off in Russia, which aims to become the largest sports event of the year.
With some of the world’s best football players competing in the grandest stage of the sport, billions of people are expected to watch the games live and through their devices. The 2018 World Cup will not aim to become the most-watched sports event in the world, but it will also be the most-searched as well.
With this in mind, Google has launched new search features for the event itself, to provide users with some of the latest news, game scores, and top players of the World Cup. Here’s a quick look at how Google has optimized their services for the World Cup.
Google DoodleTo start things off, one of the first things that Google has done to celebrate the start of the 2018 World Cup is by creating a Google Doodle that marks the beginning of the event. The Doodle shows various fans from different parts of the world celebrating and cheering on the kick-off that another fan is about to do.
Google Doodles have always been creative and interesting, celebrating important events and figures through art. The FIFA World Cup Doodle, in this case, is a wonderful representation of the world’s anticipation and excitement for the biggest sporting event of the year.
Google Search OptimizedBeing one of the most-watched events in the world means that people would want to keep themselves updated on their favorite teams and players. With this, having all of these sources in one place makes following the World Cup much more convenient thanks to Google. By searching “World Cup 2018”, “FIFA World Cup”, or other similar terms, you would be able to access the World Cup snippet, which allows you to access information such as real-time scores, news, players, and brackets that help keep you updated.
Another nifty feature from Google search is the score pin, which is making its debut this World Cup as well. This pin allows users to receive notifications on games and news while accessing other applications or web pages.
Google NewsAndroid users can also experience the World Cup fever as well through their Google News app. Users can access the latest news and track every team in the competition using the World Cup tracker. The tracker allows you to quickly view team standings and upcoming matches. All you have to do is to pick a group or team to view their standings and matches, and then you’re set.
Google Assistant / Google AlloGoogle Assistant and Google Allo have also been optimized for the 2018 World Cup, allowing users to ask Assistant on the latest news and upcoming fixtures. You can also access some handy World Cup trivia while you’re at it. You can also ask for some crucial data and stats to beef up your World Cup knowledge before and during the big event itself.
If you want to look for the latest search data leading up and during the World Cup, Google Trends has it in store for you, as they have their own World Cup section as well. The World Cup section allows you to see who are the most searched players across different countries, along with the most popular World Cup nations per country. You can also view trending keywords, and the most popular questions being asked about the World Cup as well.
Along with all of that, you also get some videos which show the insights from current and legendary footballers as well.
With the 2018 World Cup being watched by billions across the world, checking the latest trends has now been made easier using Google Trends.
Key TakeawayThe World Cup has always been one of the most watched sporting events in human history, with billions watching their favorite teams compete on the pitch. With the 2018 World Cup happening shortly, expect another spectacle of passion, talent, and resilience, and trending news and topics along the way.
If you have questions and inquires about SEO tips and strategies, leave a comment below and let’s talk.
https://ift.tt/2t5LzPCIt must be tempting for a brand to try to do the fun, edgy social media thing, like tease a new promotion or rebranding:
For 60 pancakin’ years, we’ve been IHOP. Now, we’re flippin’ our name to IHOb. Find out what it could b on 6.11.18. #IHOb pic.twitter.com/evSxKV3QmT
— IHOb (@IHOb)
Dear Internet, we abbreciate your batience. Now let’s see who guessed right. B-hold!!!!! #IHOb pic.twitter.com/Fh3SkZ7s3Y
— IHOb (@IHOb) June 11, 2018
com/IHOb/status/1003682801042915328?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”>June 4, 2018
IHOb? What could it b? #IHOb
— IHOb (@IHOb) June 5, 2018
This b is an A+ #IHOb pic.twitter.com/QI5rg1sJSP
— IHOb (@IHOb) June 6, 2018
Our NEW burgers are so burgerin’ good, we changed our name to IHOb. For burgers. Go ahead, burger one today. #IHOb pic.twitter.com/lyciVZxAuH
— IHOb (@IHOb) June 11, 2018
Of course even when these campaigns go well on social media, we often see brands totally ignore the SEO components that could get the word out to those few people who for some reason aren’t using Twitter to find a place for lunch.
So I headed down to the local IHopb for lunch yesterday to grab a pburger and take a look at their SEO strategy, which surely they launched to support this bet-the-brand effort right?
As I pulled into the lot, my first impression was that this IHob thing is probably not a true rebranding and more like a temporary promotion to get us thinking that they are now a place to grab lunch cause, just like our President, everywhere I looked I was still getting hit in the face with P.
The signage on the door was a bit schizophrenic. They clearly were making a push for the “b”, but it was as if they hadn’t anticipated that stores might still have a lot of signs, again just like certain statesmen, that were covered with “p”.
So it shouldn’t surprise you that their website has similar issues.
Despite the rebrand, IHob was still rocking the ihop.com domain:
The good news is they had acquired ihob.com but apparently this burger thing was moving too fast to change domains or even put something up on Ihob.com. Probably not a bad idea as that can be tricky SEO-wise, but how about just redirecting ihob.com to ihop.com? Ihob.com would have likely acquired a spate of backlinks yesterday which would have helped when it came time to redirect ihop.com, and it probably would be ranking #1 in Google for “ihob” queries v. all these news results:
IHob SERP with search box and tweets removed
I guess this wasn’t a huge issue yesterday as the news is more important in spreading the word than the brand, but this SERP could easily start to show articles ridiculing the strategy or about how Wendys totally pwned them. And then they are going to want that ihob.com domain to be #1 for that query to try to control the message, or at least to help drown out the snark.
(note: sometime after 5pm PT they actually put a pic of a burger up on ihob.com but for most of the day it just read “coming soon”. Oh yeah and there are multiple indexable versions of the homepage)
And while the site sported an updated IHob logo, someone had forgotten to invite the store locator guys to the meetings:
Scrolling down the homepage below the fold, it appears that maybe folks were a bit too busy with coming up with fun Tweet ideas to give the app team a heads up:
But who cares if the branding on the site is inconsistent as long as people know we’re now all about burgers right? Good thing they updated the homepage title tags and meta descriptions to make sure people searching for them get the “we’re all about burgers now baby!” message:
Hey, I understand. The CMS is a POS and that “update title tag” JIRA ticket is on hold until we can find the guy who knows how to find the guy who knows how to update the title tags. So you did what any resourceful marketer would do, you had the dev guys create a hack so you could add a new “what’s new” page to showcase your new pbrogram:
For those of you without zoom capabilities, the title tag of that URL reads “Big Bold Omelettes and World Famous Pancakes”. This may not be so wrong as one of their new burgers is the “Big Brunch”:
I ended up going for the Jalapeño Kick which the manager mentioned was the most popular burger on the menu. But again the restaurant was sending me signals that this rebrand hadn’t really been well-thought out. For example, at the end of my table there was a sign for their burgers, but instead of bottles of ketchup and mustard, here’s what I saw:
Who doesn’t like a slathering of blueberry syrup on their burger? Actually, maybe I’m in the minority. Why else would they give you side options of fries, onion rings, fruit or…
Is it me or does it seem like iHob, like some other people in the news these days, really can’t quit the p?
And speaking of reluctance to change, let’s not forget about those Google My Business listings:
If IHop truly had rebranded they would have changed all of their GMB names (although I wouldn’t have been surprised if Google would have algorithmically rejected the change. I think Bill Slawski found a “just too damn ridiculous” patent once).
While I can’t say I am particularly impressed with the SEO effort, the burger had a surprisingly spicy jalapeño kick. Nothing a real chili-head would respect but it wasn’t super wimpy like most QSR spice-trend dishes. All in all, a fine low-brow burger.
As for the fries? They tasted pretty much like home fries that had been reshaped for lunch with a slight hint of yesterday’s Crispy Fish & Chips. And they only supplied me with a single flimsy napkin.
Of course they were as stingy with the napkins as they were with their new burger URLs in their XML sitemap.
Look, I get it. We’re doing MARKETING here baby and we don’t have time to do all your fancy optimizing. But think about how much time, effort and $ iHopb is putting into this campaign. Even if this is just a temporary stunt, iHopb does not appear to be appreciating the long-term advantage of tying an SEO strategy to a social campaign. Remember “Puppy Baby Monkey?” I bet Mountain Dew’s SEO guy remembers it as the time his company’s ad went viral on the Super Bowl but they never bothered to try to get the site or Mountain Dew’s Youtube channel to rank for the damn term:
Speaking of time, I asked the iHopb manager when he was informed about the campaign. He said corporate had told him about a month ago and sent new menus, signage and videos with cooking instructions for the new burgers. Unfortunately his cooks had ignored the videos until that morning and now weren’t sure how to cook all of the different burgers which is what everyone had been ordering that day.
SEO in large organizations is a lot like those burger cooking videos. Requirements get sent to decision makers but they get ignored, or pushed down the priority list, until there’s an emergency and then there’s a mad scramble to figure out what went wrong and fix it.
As we like to say over here:
SEO is always the lowest priority, until it’s not…
— Andrew Burger (@localseoguide) May 6, 2016
And as they like to say on Twitter:
https://ift.tt/2JLQrUl— Brad Dayspring (@BDayspring) June 11, 2018
