One of the greatest values of data visualization tools is being to connect different types of data tables to calculate results, illustrate trends, or discover outliers. Relationships between your tables are necessary to create these connections.
Relationships in Power BIRelationships in Power BI have multiple configurations, including cardinality and cross-filter direction, which determine the way that your tables connect and interact with each other.…
https://ift.tt/2NSghJgTwo weeks ago, Joost shared his vision on open source. Today, we introduce yet another WordPress fanatic: Felix Arntz. As a freelancer Felix works part-time for Yoast. Half of that time he’s working on and consulting with the SEO plugin, and the other half Yoast sponsors him to contribute to WordPress core, mainly focusing on the multisite functionality. Learn what open source means to him and get pro tips on how to start contributing to an open source project yourself!
Q. Why is open source so important to you?
“For me personally, there are tons of reasons other than that I simply believe in it. Open source has given me work, new friends, the chance to travel the world, the trust and resources to improve as a developer and as a person. It has given me a passion, and every day when I go to work (which means I get up out of my bed and turn on the computer, in whichever country that may be), I’m looking forward to it.”
Q. In what way do you contribute to open source projects?
“I have been active in the contributing to open source through the WordPress ecosystem for over five years now. It really escalated when I started contributing to WordPress core, which was in mid-2015 when I went to my first WordCamp. I am a core committer and regularly involved in WordPress core development, with weekly meetings, discussing tickets, writing and reviewing patches. I also quite regularly publish open source plugins or libraries, and even small code snippets that have helped me, but might also help someone else – that’s the beauty of open source: in some ways you’re crowdsourcing your development. Occasionally I also contribute to open source projects that I’m interested in outside of the WordPress bubble, to get some knowledge about other projects and how they are organized.”
Q. Who is your open source hero?
“Phew, that’s a tough one. There surely are many folks I admire. For a long time, Joost de Valk was my biggest idol, no kidding! He achieved so much from initially just writing a simple, good plugin, which is amazing and Yoast is now able to influence the ecosystem in so many great ways. By now I’ve personally come to realize that running my own company is not something I strive for because I prefer to focus on development full-time. I guess we’re all different in our visions, and I am beyond grateful to be a part of the team that he, and the board, have created and shaped.
More recently, I’d say Alain Schlesser and Jeremy Felt are two people I want to highlight. I have learned a lot from them about development and open source, and they have enabled me to do great things around open source. I’m happy to call them friends, as much as the distance permits it, and to collaborate with them in the respective WordPress core areas, and I hope that through our discussions and with my contributions I am able to give them back something and support them as well.”
Q. Does open source say something about the quality of the product?
“I wouldn’t generalize that open source has better quality than closed source software. We all know how WordPress core is written, right? However, in my opinion, open source software has the better foundation to achieve high quality. Open source is powered by the developers, designers, accessibility experts, marketers, project managers, copywriters, translators, ambassadors, contributors of any kind, of the entire world – while closed source is usually powered by the folks from a single company.
Something else I want to highlight is security. Sometimes you hear arguments like “WordPress can so easily be hacked because its code is public”. While it is true that people with evil intentions can find a security hole easier in that way, the same goes for all the hackers that want to use their powers in a good way, and, believing in the good in the world, I think there are way more of the latter category. A large number of security issues in WordPress are uncovered by people who aren’t even typically active in the WordPress community, and this is thanks to open source. While companies that run a popular software usually have a solid security team, there is no chance that those few people are better than the entire pool of security experts who look at open source.”
Q. When and what was your first open source contribution?
“That would probably be the first WordPress plugin that I ever published, which was in early 2013. It made embeds in WordPress responsive, back then responsive was more of a buzzword than it is today. Many WordPress themes back then didn’t do a great job at it themselves. I would think that the plugin has been redundant for several years now, but there are still more than 2,000 people using it at this point, and even though I cannot maintain it anymore, it still has a special place in my heart.”
Q. How do you learn from open source? And how can others learn from open source?
“There are so many talented people in open source from which you can learn. Like I said, talents from all over the world can participate. In the same way, other people who contribute to open source will learn from you. Especially for me as a freelancer, contributing to open source meant being part of a team, which I didn’t have in my day-to-day job otherwise. The open source community and its spirit has elevated me to become a much better developer, and maybe even a better person.”
Q. Why is open source important to everyone?
“WordPress’ goal is to “democratize publishing”. In that regard, I see the goal of open source to be democratizing software development. Anyone can get involved and influence a project in ways that would be impossible to do in a closed source project. If you see the project moving into a direction where it contradicts your vision, you are free to create a fork, and either maintain it just for your own usage or gather fellow folks who share the same ideas. The GPL for example, the license that WordPress is based on, allows you to do pretty much anything with open source software. The important restriction is that anything derived from it needs to follow the GPL itself, which in my opinion isn’t a restriction though. It just causes more people to learn about the benefits of open source.”
Q. I want to contribute to open source! Where do I start?
I love to hear that! How you start of course somewhat depends on the project you want to contribute to. Most open source communities I have gotten in touch with were supportive and welcoming. They always hope to chat to a new contributor that will stick around and get more involved – no pressure though! Due to my involvement with the WordPress community, I can only give more precise tips about that specific community, but I’m sure that a lot applies to other communities as well.
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It’s much more likely though that you will fall in love with the community and become more passionate about contributing to it. This is important because by following up on your contributions, staying in the discussions around a bug or enhancement ticket, you can make a much bigger impact. If you are interested in contributing to WordPress core, there are several resources about getting started. I have also given a few sessions at WordCamps about it, as on-boarding new people is a high priority for me. I hope to see you around sometime!
https://ift.tt/2OWiEqNWriting content for another site as guest author or blogger can have many benefits. It could help you get more exposure, especially if you’re writing for a site that’s a lot bigger than yours. Working with other sites also gives you the opportunity to build potentially worthwhile (business) relationships and broaden your network. You might even get paid for your guest articles. Another obvious advantage, of course, is gaining valuable backlinks to your site.
Now, this doesn’t mean you should start sending out loads of mediocre articles to every blog that’s even remotely relevant to your own. A better strategy: guest-write great content for the right website, perhaps a few guest posts, and engage with the audience: you’ll surely get noticed.
But, once you’ve invested a lot of time in writing a great article that you’re very proud of, odds are you also want to put that content on your own site. Preferably without creating duplicate content issues. What are your options, in that case?
Yossi sent us a question that shows this dilemma:
I sometimes write articles for a third party website. I’d also like to put them on my own site. But I noticed the other site set a rel=”canonical” attribute pointing to their page. So, how can I put the articles I wrote on my site and benefit from them, without getting a penalty from Google?
Watch the video or read the transcript further down the page for my answer!
Reposting guest-authored content“The problem is, Yossi, if you publish them on that other site first, and that other site is bigger than yours, then the chance of you ranking with that content is close to zero.
Learn how to write online copy that ranks!
But if you can’t do any of that, then I would not go through the trouble of publishing it again on your own site. Because it really doesn’t make all that much sense. And you’d be better off just publishing a short snippet on your own site, saying, “Hey, I wrote this on that other site.” Good luck.”
Ask YoastIn the series Ask Yoast, we answer SEO questions from our readers. Do you have an SEO-related question? A pressing SEO dilemma you can’t find the answer to? Send an email to ask@yoast.com, and your question may be featured in one of our weekly Ask Yoast vlogs.
Note: you may want to check our blog and knowledge base first, the answer to your question could already be out there! For urgent questions, for example about the Yoast SEO plugin not working properly, please contact us through our support page.
Read more: The ultimate guide to content SEO »
https://ift.tt/2Oic94BThere have been moments in the past year that I wanted to quit my blog. My inner critic would tell me I wasn’t good enough to play with the big bloggers out there and I would tell myself over and over again the blogging world is oversaturated and in particular the mom blog niche. Instead of quitting, I took breaks, started blogging for Yoast and found my love for my blog and my writing style again. And it’s safe to say: people start to recognize my personal brand. How I did this and how you can achieve this too, is something I want to explain today. And the good news is: you do not need 10,000 followers on Instagram and 100,000 visitors on your blog!
Background and statisticsBefore we dive into the world of personal branding, let’s go back to the article I wrote a few months ago about my goals and statistics. Maybe you remember me saying I wanted to reach 100K of unique visitors a month at the end of 2018. Although I still want to grow to these numbers, I am not working on growing that rapidly anymore. As a blogger, you do not (yet) need an audience that’s in the very high numbers. You need to make sure your base is strong and your engagement is high. How I came to this conclusion? Last week I was at a blogging event where I spoke to Cassandra, a blogger in my niche. She talked about micro influencing and about the importance of becoming a brand, instead of focussing on reaching the mighty and powerful 10K on Instagram ‘just’ for the swipe up function. And my head started spinning.
Personal brand – what is it?Learn how to write online copy that ranks!
My personal brand is more than just my blog or my Instagram, it’s everything. On my blog, you won’t find many hints to Yoast, but on Instagram, you will. On my blog, you will find a lot of hints towards Disney, less so on my Instagram. Yet either platform is completely true to who I am. I mock motherhood and being an ‘influencer’ both on Instagram and on my blog and I definitely portray the importance of self-care on both platforms.
You should ask the same feedback from the people around you. Someone might say something you don’t particularly agree with, but it’s how they see you. Be sure to know what you want to be known for. If you do not receive that from anyone or not from everyone, then that means you’ve got work cut out for you!
Your personal brand helps you stay focused and uniqueYou might wonder where I’m going with my explanation about personal brand. There’s an important reason for it: knowing how the world sees you and how you want to be seen, will make sure your blog will stay or become more focused. If you know what you and your blog stand for, you know what your audience expects from you. If you, for example, wish to do a collaboration with a company, you should make sure it is in line with your brand’s values and reputation. For example, if you usually only share vegetarian dishes, it would be a bit strange to suddenly do a collaboration with a company that’s not vegetarian. Although you might still eat non-vegetarian products in your daily life, if your audience is not aware of this fact, your followers will be confused. Do this too often and you might lose your credibility.
The importance of micro influencingI currently have a little over 700 followers on my personal Instagram. Although I too wish to grow my following, I’d find it more important to interact with my followers. My average engagement rate is 12.45%. According to Influencermarketinghub, the average engagement rate for accounts with less than 1000 followers, is 8%. I’m well above that and I take pride in this. It means my Instagram followers represent the people I wish to reach. Less is more and this is definitely the case in the world of online influencing. Although it might look awesome to have thousands upon thousands of followers, if your engagement rate is low and your following does not represent your blog’s audience, it might be even harder to be considered an influencer than someone with fewer followers, but a higher engagement rate. Because it means that the latter knows where his or her audience is ‘hiding’ and knows how to reach them.
So how would you grow?Does it mean I don’t want to grow my blog anymore? No, not at all. I still want to reach a big audience. But I realize now that won’t last if I don’t take the route of commitment. If I don’t want to be forgotten in a few months, it means people should really feel connected to my brand: to me. By knowing what I stand for, I know how I should grow, not how I can grow. If this is a little too vague, let me make it a more clear with an explanation.
The kind of blog posts I write, are:
I know I could reach a lot more visitors by competing with the bigger bloggers out there. I could write ‘how to’s’ and informational articles that have been written over and over again. This could be a business model or a part of your brand, that’s totally fine. But it’s not mine. I would lose my current following and would gain a new following. My current blog posts wouldn’t fit into that strategy and people will become confused about my personal brand.
By staying true to your brand with your articles and on social media, people will eventually recognize you and your brand. Although your biggest source of traffic might not come from Google for a very long time, your brand will be strong and depends on people rather than on algorithms.
I’m curious how you are maintaining your brand. Are you already working on your personal brand and if so, how?
Read more: Blogging: the ultimate guide »
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Google has just celebrated it’s 20th anniversary, which signals another new milestone for one of the world’s largest technology companies. During this milestone event, the company was able to make big and important announcements as well, with announcements like Google Lens being integrated into Google Images, a rebranding of their news feed, and the introduction of activity cards.
These new features aim to make Google an even more versatile search engine that is able to deliver informative and comprehensive results. Google has been launching numerous updates this 2018, and with more bound to arrive, expect the SEO industry to create new strategies and techniques to help make search work better for websites.
Another new and important feature that was announced by Google is the usage of the Neural Matching algorithm. Much of Google’s algorithm is still a mystery for a lot of people, even SEO professionals, and for Google revealing information about it is always big news in the search world. This new piece of information not only expands people’s knowledge about how Google works but also how SEO will be in the future. Here’s what you need to know about the new algorithm and how it shapes the future of SEO.
What we know about Google’s algorithmsGoogle has never fully disclosed their search algorithm in public, only providing partial information about which part of the search it affects. Some of these algorithm updates over the years include Google Vince and Venice, Google Panda, and Google Penguin. These algorithms have helped us understand Google more, and find out which websites are affected by these updates.
While this new algorithm allows us to find out more about Google’s search engine, it is also a new kind of algorithm, as it uses AI technology to generate and diversify search results for users.
What is Neural Matching?Neural Matching is an algorithm that utilizes Google’s latest AI technology to be able to generate more diverse search results. This AI technology allows Google to understand and analyze the language much better. One example that was used to demonstrate this new algorithm is the sample query “Why does my TV look strange?”. Google will be able to process the question to provide a result that answers the question properly through understanding it better.
AI technology has been one of the things that Google has been putting more focus on this past year, with their demonstration of Google Assistant showing that their technology is able to perform human-like conversations in phone calls and be able to perform tasks independently.
Along with this sophisticated new AI system, Google also published Deep Relevance Ranking using Enhanced Document-Query Interactions. This research paper explains how Ad-hoc Retrieval works, which helps us understand how Neural Matching is accomplished on Google’s search engine. This system uses Document Relevance Ranking, which allows Google to rank documents and be able to track down the best search results and avoid spam other irrelevant results.
How will this shape the future of SEO?With the implementation of AI into the Google search engine, this would mean that online search becomes more personalized than ever before, as the new algorithm understands search queries much better. This also means the development and implementation of new SEO strategies that will allow Google’s AI technology to allow our websites to be able to rank better in search results.
This makes question-based and exact search terms even more relevant than before, as Google can now understand these questions more deeply, and would be able to generate results that you would not have been able to find before. With voice and visual search becoming more important, having AI technology will surely bring about “smarter” results that would benefit more users and websites.
Other new features
Along with Neural Matching, Google has also introduced Activity Cards, which allows users to be view previous content relevant to their current search query. This will help more users revisit content that they might need, which comes in handy for people using Google for research. Search Collections is another new feature that helps in tracking down previous content. Users can collate articles, images, and videos in a single location, and access them at a later time. This comes in handy when doing content research and guest posting, as it helps gather up different ideas that can be used to create compelling content for a website.
Key TakeawayAI technology has slowly been improving over the past few years, with AI assistants showing that they can perform multiple tasks, with the potential to do even more in the near future. With the Neural Matching algorithm becoming a part of Google search, we can expect new SEO strategies and techniques that would help future-proof our SEO, and keep our rankings up.
If you have questions and inquiries about Google Algorithms and SEO in general, leave a comment below and let’s talk.
https://ift.tt/2N8cMceImagine this…
You’re checking positions for a page you wrote, and you see something that stops you in your tracks…
Another site has taken your content and has claimed it as their own. There’s no link, no byline, nothing. They copied your page and pasted it into their site.
What’s worse, the page is positioning for the keyphrases
It’s hard to imagine a life without a search engine that knows what it’s doing. I remember the days of AltaVista and co, search engines that just dump random pages on you for every given query. I was so excited to see Google enter the scene and immediately do everything right — the results were great, it was fast and it had no ads. Didn’t take long before I was hooked. But a lot has happened in the past twenty years and a lot will happen in the next. Starting today, Google is looking to change search for the next twenty years.
Google’s Future of Search EventOn Monday, Google held a small event to celebrate its 20th anniversary and it took the opportunity to offer a sneak peek at the coming years. Google introduced three paradigm shifts in how it sees search in the future:
I’ll dive into this below.
Changing how search works: from answers to journeysOne of the biggest challenges search engines had to face was finding out what a user meant to do when he or she entered a specific search term. Search intent became some sort of holy grail that everyone was trying to get to first.
Today, we know all the different kinds of searches a user can do. We also know there are different stages in that process. One doesn’t often go from knowing hardly anything about a product to buying it in one single search, right? Weeks can go by before you enter the next step of the process. By matching your keywords and content to that intent, you can make sure your content fits, so to say.
Now, that journey will become the focal point for Google’s future of search. Increasingly, Google will know where you are in the journey, remember what you did and where you most likely want to go. In the end, it wants you to discover and consume more content — even without you specifically asking for it. We’ll see Google provide more and more content instead of just pointing to other pages. But, hopefully, you’ll be a good boy and visit the sites of advertising partners.
AI-driven searchIt was written on the wall for some time: Google uses AI to up its understanding of languages and uses that knowledge to power new types of search. We’ve been talking about context as one the most important terms in SEO for a while now here at Yoast. Now here’s confirmation that it really is all about what goes on around the terms you use in your content. Google Search Liaison Danny Sullivan said that the past months, Google has been using an AI method to better connect words to concepts. Danny calls these super synonyms. This type of 30% of the queries are affected by this type of search.
Ben Gomes, Google’s VP, Search, News and Assistant, explains this technique called neural matching:
“We’ve now reached the point where neural networks can help us take a major leap forward from understanding words to understanding concepts. Neural embeddings, an approach developed in the field of neural networks, allow us to transform words to fuzzier representations of the underlying concepts, and then match the concepts in the query with the concepts in the document. We call this technique neural matching. This can enable us to address queries like: “why does my TV look strange?” to surface the most relevant results for that question, even if the exact words aren’t contained in the page. (By the way, it turns out the reason is called the soap opera effect).”
Who knows, maybe your site can now show up in the search results without ever mentioning your keyword in your content once — just by providing all the context surrounding that particular topic, Google can match that to the query entered.
Searches without the exact words leading to the correct answer. Photo by Danny Sullivan
To make all these connections, Google introduced the Knowledge Graph years ago. The Knowledge Graph explores and understands connections between entities — i.e. people, places, things and facts about them. What it missed, was something that understands how these connections grow over time and change as people get to know more about the topic they’re interested in. That’s what they’re adding today in the form of the new Topic Layer.
Google’s new topic layer in the knowledge graph
Nick Fox, Google’s Vice President of Product & Design, Search and Assistant:
“The Topic Layer is built by analyzing all the content that exists on the web for a given topic and develops hundreds and thousands of subtopics. For these subtopics, we can identify the most relevant articles and videos—the ones that have shown themselves to be evergreen and continually useful, as well as fresh content on the topic. We then look at patterns to understand how these subtopics relate to each other, so we can more intelligently surface the type of content you might want to explore next.”
This new Topic Layer will power a lot of the changes that are coming to the search engine. You can easily see why it is getting incredibly important to know your subject inside out. Not only that, you need to know the world in which it lives and try to figure out how the connections are made exactly.
Manage searches and discover new content: Activity, Collection and DiscoverGoogle’s new AI powers drive the innovation of new ways of surfacing and collecting search results. One of the features launched yesterday was the Activity tab. The Activity tab helps you retrace your steps in search. It shows you which sites you’ve visited during a particular session. This tab — visible only to you — will only appear on searches where it makes sense according to Google. It will arrive with suggested searches as well. Of course, you can always delete it.
Another way to keep track of what you are doing is by using the new Collections tab. This tab lets you collect searches from your Activity cards in groups so you can use them at a later date. Of course, you’ll also get content suggestions to deepen the knowledge of your subject/search etc.
In the search results itself, searches that can result in a very broad result will now be supported by much more contextual information. Here’s Nick Fox again:
“Rather than presenting information within a set of predetermined categories we can intelligently show the subtopics that are most relevant to what you’re searching for and make it easy to explore information from the web, all with a single search.”
Google’s new and improved Discover feed
Another way AI will drive traffic is Google’s news feed on mobile — renamed Discover. It has proven to be a source of traffic for many sites. It now has over 800 million users and has sent 2.5 times more traffic to publishers over the last year. The feed will also use the new Topic Layer to uncover new articles relevant to the interests of the user. It suggests content without intent: the user might not even know he or she wanted to read this. The more you use it, the more it knows what you like. It even changes content based on the intent you show in search.
Moving to visual searchThe move to a more visual style of search has been written in the stars for some time. Not just Google, but also Microsoft and Pinterest have been very active in this space over the past few years. Earlier this year, Google launched the new and improved Lens app. This AI-powered visual search tool can analyze text in photos and it can show you lookalikes of items in the photos all by pointing your camera to the item. Desktop search will now get a Lens feature as well, so you can analyze what’s in a photo and continue your search on that.
Google is also introducing featured videos into the results. These videos are carefully selected and should serve as an entry point into a subject. Google uses computer vision to analyze video’s and automatically select the pieces of a video that best fit the particular topic.
Tomorrow, 27th of September will see the release of a new desktop interface for Google image search. The interface will provide much more context surrounding the images and should make visually search much more satisfying. Related search terms will help you narrow down your search even more.
The last piece in the visual search puzzle is the launch of AI-rendered, AMP-powered Stories in the search results. Whether you love it or hate it, Google continues to push AMP. This time, we get AMP Stories in search. Stories are a concept done to death by other companies, like Facebook and Instagram, but Google wants to get publishers to adopt the story format as well. It won’t be long before this will be ad-supported of course.
A lot of stuff happening at GoogleEven better SEO with Yoast SEO Premium!
Read Google’s blog posts about these changes:
Read more: Why every website needs Yoast SEO »
https://ift.tt/2xEm8YmI’ve been spending a lot of my time working in Power BI lately.
Why? Because I’m able to quickly connect data that would have taken hours of stacking vlookups in spreadsheets. I can find new opportunities looking at the same data through multiple lenses.…
https://ift.tt/2OaSgMHAfter introducing a slew of new features, an improved meta box, and fully supporting Gutenberg in the previous three releases, it’s time to take a little breather with Yoast SEO 8.3. That’s not to say that this release is nothing but fluff — one look at the changelog will make you think twice. This release is all about fixes and enhancements, a lot of them suggested by our loyal users. Let’s get going!
Community helpA big part of Yoast SEO 8.3 is about improvements as suggested by our users on GitHub. As you know, our plugin is open source, and we encourage everyone to add their fixes or enhancements to GitHub so we can do something with them. So, if you have a good idea for a feature, please add it! Encounter a bug? Please add it! While we find and fix a lot of stuff ourselves, we can’t fix something we don’t know about it, right?
In Yoast SEO 8.3, no less than five user contributions made the cut. These range from fixing the link to a particular article (thank you Nikhil Barar!), to the introduction of a new API function to get all the Yoast SEO-related capabilities (thanks Jory Hogeveen!). Today, we also like to thank Aminul Islam for fixing a bug related to the unwanted localization of the article:published_time and article:modified_time meta properties. Mathieu Aubin helped us remove the executable bits on SVN assets, which makes checking for malware/viruses and/or other types of unwanted files a lot easier and faster. Last but not least, Marco Lipparini found some inconsistent code. He changed the second argument of the wpseo_sitemap_exclude_empty_terms filter call to the correct type. This is used when determining which taxonomies should have a sitemap.
Thanks, everyone!
Changes to structured data content blocksIn Yoast SEO 8.2, we introduced an awesome new feature: structured data content blocks for WordPress’ new Gutenberg editor. These blocks make it incredibly easy to add structured data to your FAQs and how-to articles. Since these blocks are built from the ground up, they still need some fine-tuning. In Yoast SEO 8.3, we’re improving the way the plugin handles the structured data and fix some bugs in the process.
The most significant changes happen inside the FAQ structured data content block. We’ve reformatted the rendered code a bit to follow Google’s guidelines better. Here are the changes:
The long list of changes continues. We fixed several other bugs including one where snippet variables would not be replaced in the og:description of taxonomies after being added to the Facebook Description input field. You can see the rest of the bug fixes in the changelog of Yoast SEO 8.3.
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Yoast SEO 8.3 is not about new features, but it is chock-full of bug fixes and enhancements that improve how the plugin functions. We’d like to thank everyone how has contributed to this release. If you feel the need to help improve Yoast SEO, please check out our GitHub. Thanks for using Yoast SEO and happy updating!
Read more: Why you should buy Yoast SEO Premium »
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Introduced in 2017, Google Lens is one of the newest visual search tools that enable users to be able to receive information through the images that they take. Compared to other visual search engines that are currently available, Google Lens stands out as one of the best. With Google celebrating its twentieth anniversary, one important announcement that they have made is that Google Lens will be coming to Google Images.
With the update scheduled to be launched on September 27, this update aims to provide more functionality into Google Images and make it an even more reliable and versatile visual search engine. With the integration arriving in a few days, here are some of the features that you should know about.
Featured VideosGoogle Images aims to provide more quality visual content to its users, and this means integrating video to allows users to have a better context of what they are searching for. Featured videos will be able to show videos related to your image. This comes in handy when it comes to important locations such as buildings and historical landmarks.
These videos can come from streaming sites such as YouTube, Dailymotion, and Vimeo, with Google ensuring that only the best quality videos would be shown. The addition of featured videos provides another avenue in which users would be able to discover relevant video content, which makes YouTube SEO even more important. This is surely a handy feature that will bring in more traffic to video streaming sites and provides an even more comprehensive amount of information to the users.
Google Image AMP StoriesThe Story feature has become more popular due to apps like Instagram (which can be integrated into Facebook) and Snapchat. Providing users with a way to post temporary updates on their profiles became a sure-fire hit, which Google aims to replicate using their new AMP Stories on Google Images. This works in a similar way that Instagram and Snapchat stories would work and helps provide information in a more dynamic and interactive way.
Publishers would be able to create their own AMP stories to provide information, while Google AI is also being planned to provide them the ability to create their own as well. These stories will be created for search results related to notable personalities such as athletes and celebrities and would have the same kind of functionality that can be found on other platforms. This means that stories would also have links to more content, which can include images and video.
AMP Stories allows Google Images to become a platform similar to social media sites while providing the users with a more diverse and creative way to access and interact with content.
New ranking algorithm and tagsAnother new change that will be arriving at Google Images is a change in the image ranking algorithm. The new algorithm will take into account factors, such as image location, size and prominence, and the authority of the hosting site. This would help prevent users from finding unrelated images, along with being able to find images within a website, which addresses the long-time issue of missing images when users access a website. Website authority ensures that the website is trustworthy and has quality content, which means that you will be getting what you have searched for.
Image tags will also be included, which allows users to be able to look for product images that they might be interested in buying. This can be a big help to e-commerce sites, as they now have a location where they can discover businesses and stores related to their products. Users will also have the ability to create image Collections, which allows them to group certain images together, which Google would take into account in your next search queries. These new features help create a more personalized search and ensure that your image search results would be more on point than before.
Key TakeawayGoogle Images is one of Google’s most widely used tools, and with Google Lens integration, it becomes an even more effective visual search tool that provides quality content that us beyond images. With this announcement being a part of Google’s twentieth anniversary, expect more big announcements and new features on Google’s other tools and services.
If you have questions and inquiries about visual search and SEO in general, leave a comment below and let’s talk.
https://ift.tt/2Ie0kXBI’m a visual thinker; I love looking at images. If I think about my search behavior, I catch myself looking at images quite often, for instance when I want to know what city X looks like. Or if I’m looking for a product I’ve seen somewhere, without knowing the brand or where I can buy it. You can imagine that there are a couple of cases when an image says more than a thousand words (I know, cliché) and that image search can be more useful than an overall search. The question is: how can I find out if I get traffic from image search? Let’s find out!
Google image searchFirst off, some basics: what’s a Google image search? Google offers a search service that allows you to search the world wide web for images. You can go to https://images.google.com/ or just click on the images tab on https://www.google.com.
If you search for Yoast SEO in an image search, you’ll see something like this. We consider our images very important and put a lot of effort into them, as you can see in our awesome illustrations. They’re an important part of our branding, a lot of people recognize Yoast just by looking at the image. But for search, images are less relevant for us. People searching for our SEO plugin or one of our SEO courses won’t use image search. The same goes for a lot of SEO terms people search for.
But for businesses that depend heavily on images, image search is a vital part of their marketing. For online shops, travel agencies and food blogs, for instance, image SEO is important. And if something’s important, you want to know how it performs right?
Image search trafficIf someone clicks on an image in the Google image search results and decides to click on the link that directs you your site, you can detect this data in Google Analytics. And the way to do this is actually quite simple! I’ll show you how.
If you want to know how people end up on your website, the ‘Acquisition’ tab is the place to go. Expand the ‘All Traffic’ tab and click on ‘Source/Medium’. Here, you can find through which source people came to your site. You need to look for google images / organic:
If you can not find it immediately, like in the screenshot above, you need to go look for it. You can do this by expanding the number of rows of the table and scroll around to look for google images / organic. Or use the search function and search for google images / organic:
One of the benefits of expanding the number of rows is that you can see the position image search has compared to your other traffic sources. Plus, you can compare metrics like Bounce Rate and the number of sessions. The benefit of using the search function is that it’s a quick way of looking for image search traffic.
Even better SEO with Yoast SEO Premium!
If you’re curious to find out if people come to your site by doing an image search in Google, then Google Analytics offers you the data to find out. Simply look for ‘google images / organic’ in the ‘source / medium’ report, and you’ll know if you attract any traffic with your images!
Read more: Image SEO »
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Mobile usage has drastically increased over the past few years, with more and more users accessing websites through their devices. This led to Mobile SEO becoming much more important than before. Recently, Google has increased their focus on mobile search, with the Google Speed update adding mobile page loading speed as a ranking factor.
With Google going into a more mobile-first approach, mobile optimization has now become a priority for a lot of websites in order to attain or retain their search rankings. With so many people accessing the internet using their mobile devices, not doing this will lead to poor results, which can definitely screw up your SEO strategy. With that in mind, here are some of the best mobile optimization strategies that will answer your questions.
Should we implement AMP?Google has been pushing forward to having AMP implemented in numerous websites across the internet, as it allows for a better user experience. In fact, AMP has been integrated into some of Google’s services and tools, which allows for a better performance. AMP integration might sound complicated at a glance, but thanks to tools like the one we have on WordPress, the process can be done much easier and allows us to craft websites that have better performance.
In one of our previous articles, we have shared the effects of AMP to SEO, along with a simple guide on how to implement it on a WordPress powered website. Adding AMP gives your website more viewable on mobile, and improves the loading speed by a considerable margin, which is a big plus for your search ranking performance.
Should you go for Responsive Design?Along with AMP, Responsive Design allows your website to be easier to view on various devices, especially for mobile. This means that your website adjusts to the size of the screen, ensuring that you would no longer have to do the tedious process of zooming in and out, which really puts a dent in the user experience. This makes your website look more streamlined and cleaner when viewed on any device, which is a definite plus when you want people to stay on your website.
Should you create a mobile version of your website?Based on our experience, implementing AMP and Responsive Design allows our websites to be viewable on any device, and this means that creating a mobile version of a website would be redundant. While mobile versions of websites are still common around the internet, this tends to restrict content, which means that users might be put off that they are not able to access the full website.
What are the best tools to track Mobile Optimization?When it comes to conducting website audits and reviews, we use a variety of tools to allow us to be able to view different kinds of data that enable us to determine how well it is performing. Examples of these tools include Google Lighthouse and Woorank, which are website audit tools that allow us to assess website loading speed, meta tags, and mobile friendliness.
For Woorank, you would be able to get a preview of how the website would look on smartphones and tablets, which helps you see if your AMP and Responsive Design is working. Another handy Woorank feature is the mobile assessment section, which provides you with the best suggestions to further optimize your website. Woorank would point out features such as font size and touchscreen readiness, all of which are important for mobile optimization. Loading speed and time is also taken into account, which shows if your website loads fast enough for positive SEO standards.
Is Social Media Marketing as important as SEO?The rise in mobile usage can be traced to the rise in popularity of social media sites. The ability to contact people and share content on the go on your mobile device helped establish the mobile market as one of the most successful and profitable technological industries. With social media an important factor, this meant that some of the biggest brands had to take advantage and create marketing campaigns on mobile.
Social media marketing allows users to be able to find your business and website through their mobile devices and is also the best platform to create viral marketing campaigns. However, while social media marketing is important, SEO should still be your top priority. Having a viral campaign might lead people to your site but leading them into a badly optimized one would waste that investment.
Key TakeawayMobile optimization has now become a very important element in SEO strategy. While this is still a relatively new and evolving field in search, the rapid development in mobile technology ensures that more changes will be in store in the near future. By answering some of these important optimization questions, you are guaranteed that your SEO would not be negatively affected by Google’s mobile-first approach.
If you have more questions about mobile optimization and SEO in general, leave a comment below and let’s talk.
https://ift.tt/2O2MLzKIn 2011, Google, Bing & Yahoo announced Schema.org which got SEOs all excited to start marking up website content to turn it into “structured data.” The benefit would be that search engines would be more certain that a text string of numbers was in fact a phone number, or at least they would be more certain that you wanted them to think it was phone number. The search engines could then turn the structured data into eye-catching fripperies designed to seduce searchers into surrendering their clicks and revenue to your fabulously marked-up site (aka “Rich Results).
It also could help your fridge talk to your Tesla.
So pretty much every SEO marked-up their audits and conference presentations with recommendations to mark up all the things. LSG was no exception. And we have seen it work some nice SEO miracles.
There was the ecommerce site that lost all its product review stars until we reconfigured the markup. There was the yellow pages site that got a spammy structured data manual action for merging a partner’s review feed into its own. There is the software vendor and its clients that (still!) violate Google’s structured data guidelines and get away with it. There have been countless Knowledge Panels that have needed the tweaking one can only get from a perfectly implemented https://schema.org/logo.
But structured data is not a killer SEO strategy for all situations, and it’s important that SEOs and clients understand that often it’s more of a future-proofing game than an actual near-term traffic or money-generator. For example, let’s take this UGC site that generated about 22 million clicks from Google over the past three months and see how many clicks are reported as coming from “Rich Results” in Google Search Console:
So less than one-half of one-half of 1% of clicks came from a “Rich Result.” Not particularly impressive.
The good news is that Google is in fact using the structured markup. We can see evidence of it in the SERPs. But it’s likely the content of this site doesn’t lend itself to eye-popping featured snippets. For example, many of the Rich Results appear to just be bolded words that appear in the URL snippets in the SERPs, kind of like this:
It also may just take time before Google trusts your markup.
So before you drop everything and prioritize structured markup, you may want to consult Google’s Structured Data Gallery to get an idea of which types of content Google is pushing to markup. You also should check the SERPs to see what your competitors are doing in this area and how their marked-up content is being displayed. This should give you a good idea of what the potential is for your site.
And remember,”you can mark-up anything, but you can’t mark-up everything…” – Tony Robbins?
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Two weeks ago a client reset its bot-blocker, unintentionally blocking Googlebot. We had SEORadar monitoring the site so we quickly discovered the problem and alerted the client. Unfortunately, by the time they fixed the bot-blocker settings, they had lost about 100,000 daily visitors from Google. Of course, the first thing they asked was:
How Long Will It Take Our Google Traffic To Recover From Blocking Googlebot?
While your mileage may vary, in this case the answer is about one week.
Here’s my theory on how this process works:
On the bright side, when you block Googlebot from your entire site, your avg time downloading a page metrics improve quite a bit pic.twitter.com/CGV3UItX0z
— Andrew Shotland (@localseoguide) August 18, 2018
Your engineering team just mentioned they are rolling out a new type of product landing page built with REACT or Angular or some other hipster tech name you may have seen out of the corner of your eye on your Twitter SEO feed. Your gut says this could be an SEO problem, and your gut is probably right. You search Google for “React SEO Issues.” etc. and you get a lot of smart bloggers giving you way too much information on how this technology works, when you really just need a few bullet points that you can hand to an engineer so you can move on with making that sweet pitch deck for the C-Suite.
This one’s on me*:
*There is a lot of detail beneath the surface in terms of how to best implement this stuff, how to test and troubleshoot it, etc., but for now you just need the dev team to fully render the HTML on the server before it gets fetched, and you need them to think you are not totally clueless. Now go knock out that pitch deck, Killer…
https://ift.tt/2MTvIvmFor fans of the long-running SEO Death series, this isn’t really a new issue. About two years ago I posited Is Your Adwords Campaign Hijacking Your SEO Traffic?
The answer of course was “yes.” Here’s the graph that illustrated the problem:
I am re-upping this because we just got a new client that hired us because their organic traffic had started tanking, but when you looked at the data in Google Search Console, it only showed brand queries were tanking. And said tanking started pretty much when the paid traffic started increasing.
We did some back of the envelope calculations on SEMRush CPC data available for their brand queries and we calculated this client is spending an additional $20,000/day to buy $50,000 in revenue*. This isn’t such a bad deal until one considers that until the increase in paid search traffic, the client was spending ~$0 to achieve that revenue. So their margins just took a 40% haircut.
So, next time your organic traffic tanks, before you panic try this:
UPDATE
The site in question turned off most of the PPC ads targeting their brand a few days ago. On the first day after they did this, PPC revenue was down $90K. SEO revenue was up $170K.
*Data has been changed to protect the innocent
https://ift.tt/2xxtSeWWe have a client site whose SEO often defies description, along with canonicalization.
We often have to check Google’s cache of various URLs to see what in fact Google is getting, but sometimes when you view the Full Version of the cache it just rapidly reloads like a blinking strobe light. Kind of like this:
And there’s no way to get to the Text-Only or View Source versions of the cached URL as the links don’t stay in place long enough for your cursor to recognize the link and make it clickable.
The good news is there’s a simple way to get the desired view of a cached URL in Google – add text strings to the end of the URL in your browser’s address bar. And here they are in their full Instant Answer/Featured Snippet glory:
How To View The Text-Only Version Of A URL In Google’s CacheAnd that’s pretty much it for the basics.
https://ift.tt/2MXSVwpGetting into data visualization for finding new opportunities and accelerating analysis? Me too! But there’s a few best practices I’ve learned along the way when connecting datasets by URLs.
When might you want to connect by URL? …
https://ift.tt/2zqgevnLike any service-based industry, it’s easy to have an “hours-in, deliverables-out” mentality. We all have goals to hit with limited time, and marketing consultants often default to measuring through channel-specific clicks, traffic, and keywords.
But here’s the problem—users don’t care about channels and keywords (and neither do CEOs, to be honest).…
https://ift.tt/2OMKxldIf I have to do something twice, I usually try to find a way to automate or streamline it. Why? Because if I spent five minutes every single day sorting or moving rows from one spreadsheet to another then that adds up to 30 hours a year.…
https://ift.tt/2zqc4DwAs consultants, it’s our role to be a true partner to our clients to help them meet or exceed business goals. But what happens when your client is pushing for something you don’t agree is in the best interest of achieving those goals?…
https://ift.tt/2ONqxiaHotjar has incredible functionality, with tons of ways to get to know your users better.
Hotjar allows you to visualize how users engage with your site. Hotjar uses interactive heatmaps of their clicks and actions, recordings of their sessions, and gathering of their words from survey and feedback polls to help you build a strong, data-backed understanding of what exactly people are using your site for, and how they’re using it.…
https://ift.tt/2QICuY1Seer has continued on a solid growth trajectory and the need for great people to add to our team only continues to heighten. Until this year, “remote work” has not been in our vocabulary as a company and it’s something that’s made a lot of people uncomfortable, including our Executive Team.…
https://ift.tt/2O2McWoAs much as we advocate holistic SEO here at Yoast, there will always be people turning to the dark side, employing less than savory techniques for their own gain. When someone targets a website with actions intended to lower its ranking in the SERPs, it’s called ‘negative SEO’.
One way people can try to damage a site’s rankings, is by getting loads of unnatural, shady links to point to a website. Now, you shouldn’t worry about being the target of a negative SEO attack like that the moment you notice a drop in your rankings! In most cases, the cause is something else. But, if you ascertained that there’s suddenly a great many shady backlinks to your site, it may be time to take action. Google’s disavow links tool allows you to ask Google not to take certain links into account when assessing your site. But is it OK to use this tool, and is it always necessary? Let’s discuss in today’s Ask Yoast!
Shant emailed us about this predicament:
I noticed about 18,000 links to my domain in Google Search Console from a few unethical websites. I suspect someone is targeting me with negative SEO, but my rankings are currently not affected. Should I still disavow these 18,000 links to my domain or could this harm my ranking? Or will Google’s algorithm realize this is a negative SEO effort and ignore them?
Watch the video or read the transcript further down the page for my answer!
Dealing with bad backlinks“Well, if you don’t want those links, then disavowing them doesn’t really hurt you. If you know how to disavow them, by all means do it. And you can disavow at a domain level, so if they only come from a few domains then just disavow those entire domains. If they’re not links you’re proud of, then they’re probably not helping you rank either.
Even better SEO with Yoast SEO Premium!
In the series Ask Yoast, we answer SEO questions from our readers. Do you have an SEO-related question? A pressing SEO dilemma you can’t find the answer to? Send an email to ask@yoast.com, and your question may be featured in one of our weekly Ask Yoast vlogs.
Note: you may want to check our blog and knowledge base first, the answer to your question could already be out there! For urgent questions, for example about the Yoast SEO plugin not working properly, please contact us through our support page.
Read more: Clean up your bad backlinks »
https://ift.tt/2xvd2wVRedesigning even a single website can have a major impact from an analytics perspective, and should be prepared for, evaluated on, and acted on from multiple aspects.
The objective of this post is to detail how your website or brand can 1) prepare, 2) evaluate, and 3) act on what is necessary for a redesign from an analytics perspective.…
https://ift.tt/2QOczOHSeer has continued on a solid growth trajectory and the need for great people to add to our team only continues to heighten. Until this year, “remote work” has not been in our vocabulary as a company and it’s something that’s made a lot of people uncomfortable, including our Executive Team.…
https://ift.tt/2NZi3avIn 2005 Google Analytics (GA) launched an amazing free solution to our analytics problems – setting the landscape to digital reporting and analytics. Over time, its reporting and tracking abilities have expanded to include features, such as multi-channel funnel reports, enhanced ecommerce, and attribution modeling. …
https://ift.tt/2xLXPqXOne of the most frustrating parts of optimizing eCommerce category pages—both product listing pages (PLPs) and intermediary category pages—is that there is no one-size-fits-all solution for how to add content to category pages.
If you add too much content that isn’t necessary on the page it could disrupt the user experience.…
https://ift.tt/2QKBqmhAmazon recently released their Q2 earnings report, listing what they’ve accomplished in the last quarter. At Seer, we’re continually monitoring Amazon to understand how our clients might be impacted by their expansions into new industries.
Here, we’ll highlight where Amazon is most focused on expansion: voice, groceries, fashion, and international*.…
Google’s UI isn’t the only thing that’s changing – Google is now expanding their text ads to include 3 headlines AND an extra description line, and we’re not mad about it.
Tell me more…Currently, Google allows 2 headlines at 30 characters each, with 1 description line at 80 characters for an expanded text ad.…
https://ift.tt/2QLQUXfUsers can navigate most sites in a nearly infinite set of combinations. If you don’t have a set way to approach this more complex data, tying back how users got from point A to B, and then ended up at Z can make you feel like a detective on the hunt.…
https://ift.tt/2xG7G1aWhether you’re the type of person to binge watch eight episodes of reality TV or the type to stand in line for eight hours for the new iPhone release, we all have strong personal interests that make us who we are.…
https://ift.tt/2QH4hbjSo you found your dream job, applied, and were just invited in for an interview. CONGRATS! You’ve got the company’s interest and are one step closer to the job of your dreams. Next step: the interview.
The interview is your time to share your experiences, career goals, and personality.…
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