SEO for Mobile

The mobile tipping point in organic search has been reached. In April 2015, Google rolled out its mobile-friendly algorithm. Using a definitive, “yes or no” response ranking factor, this algorithm determines whether a site (or a specific page from a site) is mobile friendly, and then incorporates this information into its ranking decision for a mobile query. (Note that as of this writing, the mobile-friendly algorithm was not being applied to Google News content for mobile queries returning News results, or for Google News–specific searches).

Google’s message with this algorithm update, which it warned would have more of an impact on its search results than either Panda or Penguin (learn more about Panda and Penguin in Chapter 9), was clear: if you want your site’s content to show for mobile queries, you need to build your site for the mobile user experience. At the most basic level, this means that your mobile site must be:

Fast

Pages should ideally load in less than 1 second.

Functional

Page content should display and function properly in mobile browsers (no CSS, JavaScript, image, or other resource blocking).

Finger-friendly

Tap targets (e.g., buttons, links, form fields) should be large enough and properly spaced for small touchscreen use.

Free from redirects and errors

Mobile version URL requests should all return 200 (OK) status codes—no 301/302 redirects or errors, if possible.

There are various ways to implement a mobile version of your site that delivers user-friendly functionality to a mobile browser, with three being accepted by Google. Note that these fall into two general categories for SEO purposes—same URLs, and separate URLs:

Responsive web design, or RWD (same URLs)

Your site utilizes the same URLs for desktop and mobile. Your site’s server always sends the same HTML to all devices, and cascading style sheets (CSS) are used to alter the rendering of the page on the device. Google can generally detect RWD as long as the site’s assets (including CSS) are crawlable.

Dynamic serving, a.k.a. adaptive design (same URLs)

Your site utilizes the same URLs for desktop and mobile, but your site’s server responds with different HTML and CSS depending on the user agent requesting the page.

Separate URLs

Your site utilizes different URLs for the desktop and mobile (and perhaps even tablet) versions of your site’s content (utilizing a subdomain such as m.site.com, for example), with device-optimized content served at each URL version.

Mozilla/5.0 + (Mobile Device) + Mobile Engine + Mobile Browser +
  bingbot/BingPreview/[version]

App Deep Linking

The indexation of deep-linked content within apps (in-app pages) and the delivery of this content to mobile searchers have opened a world of possibility for apps and the mobile users who use them. In its most basic definition, app deep linking enables a link to send a user (or a search engine crawler) to deep, targeted content within an app (such as a specific page, tab, or view) based on his intent, as opposed to sending him to the app’s home page—something we take for granted on desktop when we share deep-linked content from various websites or when we click on a link in search results. In essence, deep links take the user directly to what he wants to do within the app, increasing app engagement, decreasing the time to conversion for targeted in-app behaviors, and improving the relevance of results in mobile search. All things considered, the mobile search ecosystem is poised to support this trend of driving intent-based traffic to mobile apps.

Deep linking to in-app pages and functionality also allows users to share deep content across various platforms (email, social sharing, SMS), further increasing engagement levels. And from an SEO perspective, it is likely that we will eventually see external linking, social, and other engagement signals applied to deep-linked app URLs much in the same way that we see them applied to website URLs in SEO today.

App Indexing

Google currently offers its App Indexing API to allow developers to notify Google about deep links in their native apps, which Google uses to index content that it then serves in mobile search results. Google also states that the App Indexing API allows the Google App to drive reengagement through Google Search query autocompletions.

Bing currently indexes apps for search on Windows and Windows Phone via the Windows Phone Store URL.

Universal Search = Blended Search

Google’s web results search engine used to be a kind of vertical search engine itself: one focused specifically on web pages (and not images, videos, news, blogs, etc.). In May 2007, Google announced Universal Search—merging results from different types of digital media, such as images and videos, within its search results. Other search engines followed suit with similar search functionality, which is now referred to as “blended search” as a search engine–neutral term within the industry.

With the advent of Universal Search, Google changed the “web page” search engine into a search engine for any type of online content. Figure 10-2 shows Moz’s “Mega-SERP” infographic, which reveals the wide array of search result types that can be pulled into a regular web search in Google, as it now incorporates various algorithmic and data components of its Knowledge Graph (or Carousel) into its main SERPs. Note that Figure 10-2 shows not an actual search results page, but rather the universe of vertical content types that can be pulled into general web search results.

Figure 10-2. “Mega-SERP” infographic (Moz.com)

Figure 10-3 shows an example of how blended search plays out in a Google SERP for a search for iphone. Notice the news results (labeled “News for iphone”), the image results (labeled “Images for iphone”), and the Shopping results (labeled “Shop for iphone”—these are paid search results from advertisers). This SERP is an example of vertical search results being incorporated right into traditional web search results.

Figure 10-3. Blended search results for “iphone”

Figure 10-4 shows the results for a search on Lebroning.

Figure 10-4. Blended search results for “Lebroning”

This shows images and videos in the search results. This enables users to click on them and see for themselves exactly what “leboning” is.

The Opportunity Unleashed

As we noted at the beginning of this chapter, the opportunity in vertical search was significant before the advent of blended search. However, that opportunity was not fully realized because many (in fact, most) users were not even aware of the vertical search properties. With the expansion of blended search, however, the opportunities in optimization for vertical search have soared. By leveraging digital media assets such as images, videos, articles, events, recipes, TV and product reviews, and local business listings, businesses can increase their chances of having search result exposure that may directly or indirectly drive traffic to their sites.

Local Listing Submissions

Enhancing your local listing profiles in Google, Bing, and Yahoo! is a matter of providing as much relevant data to the search engines as you can. The most important elements to focus on are your business name, address, phone number, website, and categories. These are the elements that you can influence that carry the most weight in the ranking algorithms. While adding a rich description can help with click-through rates and conversions, it has very little, if any, weight in the ranking algorithms.

Here are some guidelines for making choices for these data elements:

Business name

Make sure you use an accurate business name. Do not try to add keywords or locations—this is considered spam and may result in your listing being rejected. Be sure to use the exact same business name that you use on your website, and in any other online business profiles.

Address

Like the business name, your address is part of the “key” that the search engines use to identify your business. It is helpful to ensure that the address “maps accurately” in the search engines. Do this by performing a search in each engine on just your address. See if the engines show an exact match for your business address; if they do not, you may need to modify it (for example, there may be multiple ways a particular street is referred to, such as “Mc Andrew” versus “McAndrew,” and you may have to try an alternate version), or you may need to report a mapping error to the search engine directly. To do so, click on the “Report a Problem” link, which can be found in several places on the map results—usually at the bottom of the map, or underneath the business address within the map display.

It is also useful to ensure that the USPS considers your address to be correct. You can check this with free tools available at https://tools.usps.com/go/ZipLookupAction!input.action.

Phone number

For the “main” phone number, be sure to use a unique local phone number. Avoid 800 numbers, and avoid tracking numbers if you do not plan to use them on a long-term basis (i.e., for testing or other purposes). As with your business name and address, your main phone number is part of the “key” the engines uses to cross-reference information about your business around the Web. Using a nonlocal or frequently changing phone number can potentially confuse the search engines and cause them to have less confidence in your listing. In addition, it can lead to the creation of duplicate business profiles, which would compete against your core listing for search engine rankings.

Website

In many cases, for a business with a single location, your website is simply your home page. For businesses with multiple locations, it is ideal to have a separate page representing each location.

Be sure to provide the address and local phone number (as just described) on the page you link to. It can be helpful to encode the contact information on the web page using markup from Schema.org (http://schema.org/LocalBusiness or its industry-specific variants) or microformats (http://microformats.org/wiki/hcard). You can also use the Google Search Console Data Highlighter to “tag” the organization data on your pages in lieu of markup if you are not able to modify your web pages easily, but note that this will only serve to inform Google, not Bing or Yahoo!.

Having a website can be a strong ranking factor for the search engines, and it can be a strong factor in converting searchers to customers. It is advised that you provide at least a basic website associated with your business listing. Of course, if you do so, you will also want to follow much of the other advice in this book to optimize that website.

Description

Google now provides you with a description field that allows 4,000+ characters, which should be plenty of space to describe your business and promote your message. Make sure you provide a well-written, unique description of your business. While Google states that it no longer relies upon the business description for ranking purposes, it is still important to accurately describe your service, product, and location specifics for users.

Categories

Category selection provides a very strong clue for the search engine to determine what kinds of searches your business is relevant to. The best advice here is to simply study the available categories, and be sure that the first one you choose is the “best” category. At least one category selection must be made from the search engines’ standard set of categories. Google and Bing allow for up to 10 categories, and Yahoo! allows for 5.

If you use your own categories, be sure to follow the search engine quality guidelines. Mainly, be sure to list categories that describe what the business is (as opposed to, for example, what products it sells or where it is located). Also, keep each category focused on a unique quality of the business. Do not attempt to jam keywords into your category choices, as the engines may consider this to be spam and reject your listing.

One good source for brainstorming categories is to examine the business listing pages of some competitors and see what they’ve chosen. It is helpful to be seen in the same categories as the majority of your competitors. This ensures that the engines consider your business as “the same type” as your main competitors, allowing you to be considered for display in the most important search results.

In addition to these key elements, your business profile can include information on your business hours and accepted payment methods, photos, videos, and other data items. Providing this extra information is worth the effort, as it enriches your business page and may help entice more users to contact you. It also opens up additional opportunities to provide keywords and context to help the search engines better understand how to rank your business.

Google My Business

In June 2014, Google announced the launch of Google My Business (GMB) in an effort to streamline and simplify the management of local business profiles—which had evolved into an increasingly complex and time-consuming array of business listing options and locations under the umbrella of Google properties. According to Google, businesses that have existing Google Places listings and Google+ Local Pages will automatically be upgraded to the GMB platform. At the launch of this service, Google added the ability to “View the Business on Google,” which gives you a preview of your business info in Google Search, Maps, and Google My Business. The opening page for Google My Business is shown in Figure 10-7.

More information about Google My Business can be found on its FAQ page.

Figure 10-7. Google My Business splash page

Google Knowledge Graph Carousel

A recent eye tracking study by Mediative revealed some interesting data on click-through rates for search results showing a Google Knowledge Graph Carousel (see Figure 10-8).

Figure 10-8. Local search result showing a Carousel

According to the study, the highest-performing Carousel results were the ones at the far right of the display, not those in the traditional 1, 2, or 3 positioning on the left. While this is just a single study, it shows the challenges that a new visual interface can create with regard to traditional user behavior.

As you can see in Figure 10-9, a search for minneapolis pizza is heavily biased toward local results, and Google’s implementation of local Carousel results is displayed at the top. These Carousel results are sourced from the same set of data as regular local “pack” results; however, more results are displayed than the traditional pack of three, five, or seven. This graphic display, which appeared in mobile/tablet results in 2013, presents a new set of challenges and opportunities for business owners. It’s important to note that Carousel has not affected all local results.

Figure 10-9. Local search results for “minneapolis pizza”

According to an October 2013 study by BrightEdge, Google Carousel impacted 14% of keywords across all industries, with Travel and Hospitality verticals being most affected, as shown in Figure 10-10.

Figure 10-10. Google Carousel SERP impact across verticals

Inclusion within the Google Carousel (a.k.a. Knowledge Graph) is available for authoritative sources for organizations, events, movie reviews, and music/video play actions and requires the use of structured data markup, as outlined by Google’s Developers Guide to Structured Data.

As mentioned earlier, Google also provides the Data Highlighter within Google Search Console, which enables webmasters and site owners to “tag” structured data on site pages so that it can potentially appear as “rich snippets” of content within Google search results. While webmasters have always been able to mark up structured data using various formats, with Data Highlighter now they can do so solely for Google’s use without having to modify their site’s pages on the server. Additional information about Google’s handling of rich snippets and structured data can be found here: http://bit.ly/structured_data_mrkup.

Currently, Google supports rich snippets for the following content types:

• Reviews

• People

• Products

• Businesses and organizations

• Recipes

• Events

• Music

Chapter 13 provides more detail on using the Data Highlighter tool.

Bing Places for Business

Bing also enables businesses to create local listings for consideration in the organic search results with Bing Places for Business, which replaced the Bing Business Portal in April 2013. If you already have a Google My Business listing, Bing allows you to import that listing into its Places for Business interface to streamline the process (http://bit.ly/manage_listing). Bing also allows businesses to upload up to 10,000 business locations in one step. Figure 10-11 shows the splash screen for Bing Places for Business.

Figure 10-11. Bing Places for Business

Listing your business in Bing provides you with yet another angle from which to appear in Bing search results, according to Bing’s Duane Forrester:

It can be a way to double dip in the SERP, as [a business’s] Places listing data can appear, with [it] ranked up top in the organic stack.

Bing also allows you to add links to your business’s various social media profiles, so be sure to take advantage of this opportunity and list your Twitter and Facebook URLs.

Yahoo! Local

Yahoo! has been undergoing a steady evolution away from search as a core business function. However, it still provides value to businesses via its Small Business channel with its Local Marketing services, Localworks (local business listings in Yahoo! and 40+ directories), Mobile Offer Ads (mobile advertising), and Yahoo Gemini (its mobile search and native ad platform).

You can create a free Yahoo! Local Basic Listing, which includes your business’s address, phone number, brief description, and URL; or for $9.95 per month you can create a Local Enhanced Listing, which enables you to add a longer business description, multiple web links, and special offers/coupons.

Yahoo! also provides a mass-directory listing service called Yahoo! Localworks, which lists your business in 40+ directories including Yahoo! Local, Yelp, WhitePages, Bing, MapQuest, and Superpages; enables you to add videos and photos to your listing; and lets you track your listing performance with analytics.

Business Website Optimization for Local Search

If you have been around for a while, your business probably is already included in the local search engines, as they compile data from the aggregators and other online directories. Once your business’s listing is loaded into the local engines, you must determine how to get your business’s website to rank higher when users search for your industry’s keywords. On the next few pages, we will outline things you can do on your website to achieve better rankings in local search engines.

All of the basic SEO factors can come into play here and help to influence your rankings. These factors include having good, specific text in each page’s title tag, <h1> tags, meta description, page content, alt attributes, inbound links, and so forth. But some aspects are specific to local search, such as the following:

• If your company has multiple locations, it is not necessary to have a standalone website or subdomain (e.g., loc1.example.com, loc2.example.com, loc3.example.com) for each outlet. In fact, it is probably better if you don’t, because each business location would likely produce similar website content. However, it probably would be helpful for you to create a separate profile web page on your site for each distinct location. Many sites with chain outlets list all outlets on one page—that is not optimal. It is better to have one page dedicated to each store location so that you can leverage all the on-page elements for that location. One caveat: you will want to have a different phone number listed for each location, preferably with a local area code (as opposed to a generic 800 number).

• Have your page title, <h1> tags, and content include the business name, the type of business, and the location—for example, “Acme Café: French Restaurant in Boston, MA.” For multiple locations, make the title different on each location’s page. Include the phone number, neighborhood, street address, area nicknames, and other location-distinguishing information.

• The home page and/or Contact Us page should have the main location’s basic listing information (street address, city, state, zip code, phone numbers, etc.) displayed somewhere in the HTML text. You should also add the basic listing information in the Schema.org Organization or LocalBusiness format or the hCard microformat (these are methods for encoding address information on web pages; you can learn more about them in “Schema.org” and at http://schema.org or http://microformats.org). If you have multiple locations, display the basic information on each location’s profile page. Google also accepts RDFa for this information (as well as tagging via Data Highlighter in Google Search Console). The Schema.org approach is the one we recommend, as this is a standard that has been agreed upon by Google, Bing, and Yahoo! since 2011.

• Place differentiating information on each store’s pages, including items such as a map, hours of operation, brand names of products carried, product photos, “in business since <year>” information, menus with prices (for a restaurant), ratings (if applicable), certifications, bonded status, and so on. As mentioned previously, be sure to include specifics about the physical location.

• In the second edition of this book, we discussed the concept of centroid (the location that the search engine defines as the center of the city). Many of the map search engines used to primarily display the businesses located closest to the centroid first for any particular category or keyword search. However, centroid is being replaced by business/searcher distance as a ranking factor, as the distance of a business from a searcher is more significant.

• Proximity works the same way for zip codes. If a user searches for businesses within a specific zip code, the businesses closest to the zip code area centroid will likely be displayed first in the list. Note, though, that zip code searches are not commonly performed in the United States (you can verify this with your favorite keyword research tool).

• Do not attempt to set up multiple user accounts to rate yourself well or reduce your competition’s ratings! Likewise, do not pay customers for beneficial reviews—if such a practice were discovered, you could lose all of your beneficial ratings. Focus on working in ways that are allowed under all the search engines’ rules: just ask people to rate you.

  • By asking enough happy clients to rate you, you might be able to drive up the positive reviews, which can bring rankings benefits. It is worth the effort to identify your happy customers and ask them to write reviews for you at one or more of the major directory sites. Never offer to pay for or otherwise incentivize positive reviews, however!

  • Consider doing post-sales surveys to find those happy customers, and then reach out to them to ask them to post reviews. You can offer to enter reviewers into a drawing to win a prize, but don’t make their participation in the drawing contingent on a positive review and don’t pay for each review. Monitor your online ratings in the various sites as part of good reputation management and try to respond to complaints/issues as quickly as possible. Consider using an online review monitoring tool such as Review Push and Review Trackers.

• Links from local directories and other locally relevant sites (local “citations”) are increasingly important ranking factors, and should be obtained when relevant.

• For businesses such as restaurants, it may be beneficial to add photos of celebrities who have visited the establishment. People perform searches on celebrity names all the time, so if you are lucky enough to have celebrities frequent your restaurant, uploading photos of them can help attract celebrity watchers to your business. However, be sure to get permission before using the celebrity’s photograph or “likeness” in your advertising or promotional materials, as without it you may be inviting a lawsuit. With permission, a celebrity photo endorsement can drive up inbound links and get users to linger longer on the site, perhaps bolstering the site’s quality scores.

• Community interaction can assist in online promotion. One great way to obtain local area links is to support charitable efforts in the area and to sponsor local events. Although it may seem crass to get link value out of charitable efforts, this is one of the best ways to support your local community while bolstering your business in the online marketplace. Don’t feel guilty for creating a win-win situation! Such opportunities could include:

  • Local charity races/walks, particularly if they list sponsors or sponsor logos on a page on their site. Request to have those linked to your local business site. Inbound links from these sites are very beneficial, and this is a valid way to get them!

  • Local college or high school sports teams and bands. You can request that sponsors are listed on the school website, if this isn’t done already.

  • Local fraternal organizations (e.g., the Freemasons, Lions Club, and Shriners).

  • Charitable events that you host yourself. Is anyone organizing the provision of food for the needy at Thanksgiving? If not, organize it yourself and host the information pages off your own website. This could draw many others to link to you as they help in promotion efforts.

    NOTE

    A special thanks to John Biundo and David Mihm for their contributions to the “Optimizing for Local Search” section of this chapter in the second edition, and to Andrew Shotland and Dan Leibson from Local SEO Guide for their invaluable assistance with updates to this section in the third edition.

Image Optimization Tips

In comparison to indexing pages that are rich with text content, indexing images is much more difficult for search engines to perform. The image itself provides few clues to the content within it. Google is experimenting with artificial intelligence algorithms to improve detection of image content. For example, you can drag the image of a well-known person or place onto the Google Images search box, and Google will attempt to identify the contents and show you similar images.

Search engines are also experimenting with techniques such as optical character recognition (OCR) to read text content within images, but most images don’t have any text to read. Search engines also use facial recognition software to determine when an image is of a face versus a body, or something else entirely.

However, although these types of technologies are very useful, they are limited in terms of what they can do, partly because they are computationally very expensive and therefore not practical to use at the scale of the entire Web. For that reason, success in image search optimization depends on using all the signals available to you to increase the search engines’ confidence in the content of your images.

This certainly includes the basic SEO techniques we have discussed in this book. The web page’s title tag, the <h1> heading tag, the on-page content, and links to the page are all factors in image ranking. For example, if you have a picture of the Golden Gate Bridge as the single image on a page, and the title, headings, and content of the page all support that, the search engines’ confidence in the content of the image increases. The same is true if you have 10 images on a page of many different bridges, and their content is reinforced by the title, headings, and page content. Consistency of content and theme is important in all of SEO, but it is especially critical in image SEO.

In terms of the page content, you should give particular emphasis to the text immediately preceding and following the image. This is what the user most closely associates with the image, and the search engine will view it the same way. A descriptive caption underneath the image is helpful.

You can do a number of things to further optimize your images. Here are the most important:

• Make sure the image filename or img src string contains your primary keyword. If it is a picture of Abraham Lincoln, name the file abe-lincoln.jpg and/or have the src URL string contain that keyword, as in http://example.com/abe-lincoln/portrait.jpg.

• Always use the alt attribute for images. This attribute helps the vision-impaired to understand your site, and search engines use it to better understand what your images are about. Our recent research indicates that this feature is still not used for lots of sites’ images, and that many sites have tried to use it with invalid HTML. Make sure the alt parameter is valid, as in this example:

  <img alt="Abe Lincoln" src="http://example.com/abe-lincoln.jpg"/>

  Use the quotes if you have spaces in the text string of the alt content! Sites that have invalid <img> tags frequently drop a few words without quotes into the <img> tag when they were intended for the alt attribute. Omitting the quotes is a common problem; without them, all terms after the first will be lost, if any are used at all.

• Avoid query strings for img src tags, just as you should for page URLs. Or, if you must use URLs that include query strings, use no more than two or three parameters. Consider rewriting the query strings in the URLs so that they do not contain an excessive number of parameters, which will cause spiders to refuse to crawl the links. Although Google claims to no longer have problems with these types of situations, it is better to be safe than sorry.

• Use good-quality pictures, which will read well when shown in thumbnail format. Good contrast is typically the key here. Lower-contrast images are visually harder to read, and it is common sense that if the thumbnail image doesn’t look good, it will not invite a click.

• Do not save images as graphics files with embedded thumbnails—turn this feature off in Photoshop and other image editing software. Search engines may copy your image, reduce it in size, save it in compressed format, and deliver up a thumbnail of it for their results pages. An embedded thumbnail can wreak havoc with some compression software, and it increases your file size slightly, so just leave that feature disabled.

• Don’t store the image in a sidebar column with your ads or inside the header/footer navigation elements; otherwise, the search engine algorithms will ignore the image as irrelevant, just as they ignore page decor and navigation graphics.

• Have a proper copyright license! You need to have a proper license to display the images found on your site so that you don’t get sued. Be careful about trying to use images from Wikimedia Commons or other public stock photo sites, as you cannot be sure that those images really are in the public domain. For example, when you “purchase” an image from a stock photo site, you are not purchasing the copyright—you are purchasing the right to use the image. More often than not, these arrangements require that you link back to the copyright holder.

• You need to ensure that your server configuration allows your site’s images to be displayed when called from web pages on other domains. Some system administrators have disabled this setting to keep people from displaying their images on other sites, and this could cause problems if you want your images displayed in search engine image results pages. Likewise, make sure that your robots.txt file does not block the crawlers from accessing your image file directories.

• If it is a fit for your business, specify that others are free to use your images for online display as long as they link back to your website from a credit line below or adjacent to the image, where they display your copyright notice. Enabling others to use your photos invites more promotional attention when people wish to write about you in blogs or in news articles.

It is also a good idea to create an image XML sitemap to highlight images you consider particularly important, or to help the search engines find images that might otherwise be difficult for their crawlers to discover. Read more on image XML sitemaps at http://bit.ly/adding_images or in the section “Image sitemaps”.

With the advent of blended search and the Web’s overall movement toward more visually compelling, image-rich content, there are more opportunities to achieve organic exposure with images—and the area is also becoming more competitive. The following is a list of image optimization best practices to use when uploading your images to image sharing sites such as Flickr. These tips will help ensure your image files have the best chance of appearing for targeted, qualified searches in the SERPs:

• When you upload your photos, always add tags. The tags or keywords that you associate with your photo will ensure users can find it when they are searching and will lend keyword weight to the photo’s page. Enter as many tags as possible that accurately describe your photo. Make sure you place any multiword tags within quotation marks (e.g., “pickup truck”). The Flickr Tag Cloud, Flickr’s user-tag “folksonomy,” generates a good link navigation system for both users and search engine spiders.

• This should be obvious, but have your photos publicly viewable, not restricted to viewing by only your friends and family.

• Create a descriptive title for the image. This adds yet more keyword weight to the photo’s page within Flickr.

• Enter a description under the photo, or write something about the picture.

• Consider adding a note or two directly onto the photo, particularly if it is humorous. Flickr allows you to select a rectangular area and associate some text with it that will appear as a tool tip when users mouse over it. Adding a humorous/interesting note or two may encourage users to participate on your photo’s page, and the greater a page’s level of participation/stickiness, the better quality score that page may attain.

• Ensure that photo geotagging is enabled (where applicable) for locally oriented images.

• Create thematic sets for your photos, and add each picture to the set(s) appropriate for it. This provides yet more contextual clues for search engines regarding the content of the photo’s page, and it will allow a user arriving at the page to easily find similar pictures you’ve taken.

• Browse through Flickr’s Groups for public “photo album” collections that are dedicated to pictures that could be related to your photo. Sometimes it helps to search for photos using keywords you have used in your tags, and then see what groups other people’s photos belong to.

• Join those groups, and then add your photos apropos to each group’s theme. The more links there are to your photo page, the more important your photo will be considered, so add it to a number of groups. Ideally, add it to groups that have a lot of members—the number of members indicates the popularity and traffic of the group.

• Link each of your Flickr photo pages to your website, or a related page on your site. You can add hyperlinks to the Description field below the photo. Use anchor text that has a call to action, or that tells the user what to expect if he clicks on the link (e.g., “We sell this product on our website”; “Enjoy this view from the tables at our restaurant”; “This room is available at our bed & breakfast”). It is best to link to specific pages of related content as a richer indicator for link juice transfer.

• Post as many optimized pictures as possible. This is mostly a game of many small fractions adding up to large, cumulative results. The many pages of pictures linking back to your site will help build your overall authority. The more pages you have, the more likely it is that other Flickr users will find your content and link to it. This also increases your chances that a lucky picture or two might find their way onto a viral popularity wave that spurs many users to send links of your picture to their friends, or that a reporter might find one of your pictures ideal for her news story.

Many of these suggestions can generally be applied to images used on third-party social media platforms that heavily leverage images, such as Pinterest, which has become one of the leading referrers of ecommerce traffic on the Web. For these types of sites, be sure to use descriptive filenames and alt text, write keyword-rich descriptions, and make ample and appropriate use of hashtags.

Submitting a Product Feed

To be included in Google Shopping search, you need to upload a product feed that contains true physical/tangible products. The Google Merchant Center will accept other types of items, such as flights, hotels, car rentals, travel packages, and real estate, but such items will not get into Google Shopping search.

The latest technical specifications for submitting a product feed to the Google Merchant Center can be found online at http://bit.ly/products_feed_specs. It is crucial to follow these requirements closely and to provide as much relevant data as possible to ensure Google can read what is in the feed and understand what products you’re selling. The more data Google has about your products, the better it will be able to show your listings at the right time. In your feed, populate as many fields as possible with available product data (Brand, Category, Color, Price, Condition, etc.).

In addition to uploading accurate data, it is important to keep your feed data current, with the latest availability, pricing, and other specifications, to reduce the error rate and improve the chance that Google trusts your data (many merchants update their feeds daily). If the data in your feed does not match what Google finds on your landing pages, your feed quality will be lower, and it will be less likely that your products will appear in the SERPs for product queries. When in doubt, check your Google Merchant Center account to see how many errors Google finds in your feed, and either correct as many as possible or delete the products that are causing the feed errors.

Optimizing a Product Feed

Once your product feed is accepted, Google uses it to match your products to searches for those items. The extent to which Google’s search engine correctly understands what products you sell is largely dependent on what you’ve put in your feed, and various optimization tactics can help you receive more impressions for relevant, product-related queries.

Optimize the title

Titles should contain your target keywords and be descriptive and concise. For example, for apparel you should include the brand, style, and gender. While you’re allowed 150 characters, try to fit the most important words in the first 70 characters in case Google truncates it (see Figure 10-13). A strong title that will fit nicely in the limited space provided by ads might be “Red Wing Men’s Oxford 133.” Avoid overly descriptive or editorial language like “High Quality & Gorgeous North Face Down Jacket.” Google prefers simple and product-focused language because that’s what users prefer to see in the Shopping results.

Figure 10-13. Google Shopping result for “microwave ovens” showing product titles

Become a Google Trusted Store

Google adds a special logo next to any merchant who is a Google Trusted Store, giving Trusted Store product listings more prominence at no additional cost (see Figure 10-14).

Figure 10-14. Google Trusted Store “special offer” in Google Shopping

Promoting Products in AdWords

Because all shopping results are now sponsored, you will need to create product listing ads for all of the products you want to promote. To get started, create a new Shopping campaign in Google AdWords, and connect this campaign with your Merchant Center account. You can do a quick and simple setup with a single campaign, ad group, and product group that contains all products in the feed; more sophisticated setups take a bit more time and effort, but are well worth it for the additional level of control they provide over bidding and targeting.

To gain more control over how much you pay for a click and when your products appear in the SERPs, you can put product listing ads into different campaigns, ad groups, and product groups. This gives you greater control over settings like geotargeting, device bid modifiers, day parting, and negative keywords. Different bids can be set for each product group so that you’re bidding the correct value for each type of product.

If you create multiple Shopping campaigns in an account, you can take advantage of an entirely new setting that’s exclusive to Shopping campaigns: the ability to set priorities of high, medium, or low. In the event that multiple campaigns are eligible to show a shopping result, Google will show the product listing ad from the campaign with the highest priority. For example, you can use this feature to set a higher priority for products that are on sale.

Reporting Results of Shopping Ads

AdWords has reports about all the key metrics such as clicks, impressions, cost, conversions, and conversion values driven by Shopping listings, helping you ensure your ads are successful. Reports also include benchmark data about the average CPC and CTR of competitors to help you see how your shopping ads perform in comparison.

Structural Blog Optimizations

As we have discussed throughout this book, there are many key elements to successful SEO. These include things such as title tags, heading tags, good content, inbound links, and SEO-friendly architecture. Although the various blog publishing platforms are great, they can sometimes also require some tweaks to achieve optimal SEO results:

• Blogs usually offer the ability to categorize each post. Make sure the tag name is used in the title of that tag page.

• Override default title tags with custom ones. You can do this using one of the best WordPress SEO plug-ins available, WordPress SEO by Yoast. Along with many other SEO features, this plug-in allows you to supply a custom title tag, defined through a custom field in a post or a page.

• Rewrite your URL to contain keywords, and to use hyphens (preferred over underscores) as word separators. Do not let the blog platform include the date in the URL.

• Make sure you 301-redirect from http://yourblog.com to http://www.yourblog.com (or vice versa). Note that if you have a site at http://www.yourdomain.com and a blog at http://www.yourdomain.com/blog, you may need to implement a separate redirect just for the blog. This has to be handled not just for the home page, but also for all internal pages (e.g., permalink pages). Each URL must redirect to the corresponding URL on the www version.

• If you change from one blog platform to another one, the URL structure of your blog will likely change. If so, make sure you maintain legacy URLs by 301-redirecting from each page’s old location to the new one.

Optimizing Your Anchor Text

Anchor text is just as important in blogging as it is in general SEO, and should also be treated with an equal amount of caution (i.e., not overoptimized). Here are some guidelines:

• Make the post’s title a link to the permalink page. You do not want your only link to the post to say “Permalink.”

• Use a tool such as Open Site Explorer or Majestic to see who is linking to your site. Using these tools or tools like them, you can see who is linking to you and what anchor text they have used. Look for opportunities to request revisions to anchor text on inbound links, but before making such a request make sure you are confident that your relationship with the linker will not result in her simply removing your link instead of changing it.

• Internally link back to old, relevant posts within the body of a blog post. Don’t use here or previously or similar words as the anchor text; use something more descriptive for the user instead.

Sticky Posts

Sticky posts are a way to add content that always shows up first on a page of your blog—for example, a post that serves as the introduction/overview for all the content on one of your category pages. Using this technique, you can add keyword-rich introductory copy to a category page or tag page. WPMUDev.org, a WordPress developer and resource site, offers a tutorial on how to create and style sticky posts.

Author Profile Pages

If you have a multiauthor blog, another smart tactic is to create author profile pages. This has a multitude of benefits. First, many of your readers will have a stronger interest in one writer than in the others. Better still, offer RSS feeds on a per-author basis. In addition, the authors are likely to link back to their author pages on your blog from their own sites.

Figure 10-15 is an example of an author profile page.

Figure 10-15. An author profile page

Links

Obtaining links and managing your link juice remain critical activities. Blog platforms provide limited ability to manage your internal link juice, so this may require some customization to accomplish. Fortunately, in the WordPress environment, some really good plug-ins are available to help you with this.

For starters, you can also create cross-links between related posts using a plug-in such as WordPress Related Posts. This is a great way to get people who just finished reading one post on your blog to consider reading another one. Finally, develop relationships with other blog and article authors, and get them interested in your content; hopefully, they will follow your work and offer relevant citations when the opportunity arises.

Video SEO for YouTube

Today, more than 100 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. That means 144,000 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every day. So you’ve got to optimize your videos, playlists, and channel to give them the best potential for success on the platform.

Although YouTube’s algorithm doesn’t change over 500 times a year like Google’s algorithm does, the tips outlined here should come with the advisory best if used before the next algorithm update. For example, YouTube officially replaced “view count” with “watch time” as a ranking factor in October 2012. This adjusted the ranking of videos in YouTube search to reward engaging videos that keep viewers watching and benefit channels if their videos drive more viewing time across YouTube.

On the other hand, “relevance” has remained a ranking factor since the early days—that is, before Google acquired YouTube for $1.65 billion in October 2006. So, recognizing that some things will change while others will remain the same, here are key strategies, best practices, and important tips for video SEO (freshness date: July 2014).

Video SEO for Google

Once upon a time, one of the best ways to improve your site’s appearance in video search results was to make sure that Google knew about all of your rich video content. So it made sense to submit a sitemap to Google that included video information in a supported format, making the included video URLs searchable on Google Video.

Google Video was launched on January 25, 2005, after which Google bought former competitor YouTube on October 9, 2006. On June 13, 2007, Google announced that Google Video search results would begin to include videos discovered by its web crawlers on YouTube, on other hosting services, and from user uploads. On January 14, 2009, the Official Google Video Blog announced, “In a few months, we will discontinue support for uploads to Google Video.” On April 15, 2011, Google announced via email that after April 29 it would no longer allow playback of content hosted on Google Video. However, it reversed that decision one week later to provide users with greater support for migration to YouTube. The service, which was renamed Google Videos, was shut down on August 20, 2012.

The remaining Google Videos content was automatically moved to YouTube, so for all intents and purposes, Google Video has been replaced by YouTube.