Web Teacher » SearchEngines

What brings searchers to this blog

vdebolt — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 14:01:28 +0000

I thought it might be interesting to look at the traffic that comes my way from search engines. Here are the top 5 posts that consistently bring in searchers:

I’ve written about 4 posts on styling fieldsets in response to the continuing interest that I see in the posts. They are all popular and get constant visits. Strangely, the one about the wrapper div is perennial favorite. One would think that information was totally widespread already. I think the popularity of the Tumblr post reflects the inadequacy of their Help information.

Now that I think about it, a great deal of what I do on this blog is try to explain something that is badly explained elsewhere. A recent example, of course, is the e-book explaining how to use media queries in Dreamweaver.

Guest Post: Meta Descriptions

vdebolt — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 13:28:00 +0000

The keywords and phrases you use in your Meta description tag may not affect your page’s ranking in the search engines, but this tag can still come in handy in your overall SEO and social media marketing campaigns.

What Is the Meta Description Tag?

It’s a snippet of HTML code that belongs inside the section of a web page. It is usually placed after the Title tag and before the Meta keywords tag (if you use one), although the order is not important.

The proper syntax for this HTML tag is:

If you’re using a content management system (CMS), look for a field to fill out that’s called Meta Description, or possibly just “Description.”

Many years ago, the information contained in a Meta description could slightly help a page rank highly for the words that were contained within it. Today, neither Google, Bing, nor Yahoo! use it as a ranking signal.

In other words, whether you use your important keyword phrases in your Meta description tag or not, the position of your page in the search engine results will not be affected. So in terms of rankings, you could easily leave it out altogether.

But should you?

There are 3 important ways that Meta descriptions are being used today that make them an important part of your SEO and overall online marketing strategy:

They can be used as the description (or part of the description) of your page if it shows up in the search results.
They are often used as part of the descriptive information for your pages when Google shows “extended sitelinks” for your site.
They are often used as the default description in social media marketing links such as Facebook and Google+.

Let’s look at each of these in more detail.

1. Meta Descriptions in the Search Results

People often think that whatever they put in their Meta description tag will be the default description that the search engines use under the clickable link to their site in the search results. While this is sometimes true, it’s not always the case.

Currently, if you’re searching for a site by its URL (for example www.highrankings.com) Google tends to use the first 20 to 25 words of your Meta description as the default description in the search engine result pages (SERP). However, if you have a listing at DMOZ, also known as the Open Directory Project (ODP) and are not using the “noodp” tag, they may default to that description instead. (Do a search at Google for www.amazon.com to see an example.)

Bing and Yahoo!, on the other hand, don’t always default to the Meta description tag for URL searches. Sometimes they do, and sometimes they don’t. A search for www.highrankings.com at Bing or Yahoo! shows content from my home page as the description rather than the contents of my Meta description tag.

Of course, real people aren’t typically searching for a site by URL, so what the search engines show for those types of search queries is not as important as a true keyword search. So don’t get hung up on what you see when you search for your site by its URL or if you’re doing a “site:command” search to see how they’re indexing your pages.

Instead, go to your favorite web analytics program and find the keyword phrases that are currently bringing you the most traffic. Then see what your description looks like at Google when you type in those keywords.

And surprise! What you’ll find is that your search results description will be different for every search query! You may see any combination of the following used:

Your entire Meta description tag text as the complete description (typically if it’s highly relevant and contains no more than 25 words).
A full sentence pulled from your Meta description tag, but not the entire Meta description (if it contains more than one sentence).
Text from one part of your Meta description mashed together with text from another part of it (if it’s more than 25 words long).
Some text from your Meta description mashed together with some text from the page.
Some text from your page mashed together from some other text from your page (nothing from the Meta description).

Some of the circumstances that cause Google to not use text from your Meta description may include:

The information in the Meta description tag was not specific to the page it was on.
The search query used some words that were not in the Meta description, but those words (or some of them) were used in the page content. This includes words that Google considers somewhat synonymous, such as “copy” and “copywriting” or “SEO” and “search engine optimization.”

But even the above are not hard and fast rules. Google doesn’t always use all or part of the Meta description even when the exact search phrase was contained within it – especially if the search query is also contained within the content of the page. Suffice it to say that there are no hard and fast rules for when Google will show it and when they won’t.

My recommendation is to always use keywords on any pages where you get search engine visitors (or hope to get them). Make them very specific to the page they’re on by describing what someone will find when they click through to the page from the search results, while also using variations of your targeted keywords.

Because Google will show only show around 20 to 25 words as your description, many SEOs recommend that you limit this tag to a certain number of characters. In reality, however, you’re not limited to any specific number. Your Meta description tag can be as long as you want it to be because Google will pull out the relevant parts of it and make their own snippet anyway.

For instance, if you’re optimizing a page for 3 different keyword phrases, you could write a 3-sentence Meta description tag, with each sentence focusing on a different phrase. You could probably even insert more than 3 phrases in those sentences if you’re a good wordsmith. The idea, however, is not to stuff this tag full of keywords, but to write each sentence to be a compelling marketing statement – a statement that naturally uses the keywords people might be typing into Google to find your site.

2. Meta Descriptions and Extended Sitelinks

These days, Google often uses the first few words from your Meta description tag when they create the “extended sitelinks” for your website. But this too is not set in stone and is highly keyword dependent. You’ll see different sitelinks and different descriptions showing up depending on the words a searcher used at Google.

As an example, if you do a search for “High Rankings” at Google, you’ll see my sitelinks for that search query.

At this moment, Google is showing my home page as the top result with 6 inner pages beneath:

Forum home page: Description is from DMOZ/ODP. This page has the generic Meta description that is on every page of the forum.
Link building forum home page: Description is content pulled from the page that uses the words “High Rankings” in it.
SEO articles page: First part of Meta description.
Newsletter home page: First part of Meta description.
SEO/SEM resources page: First part of Meta description.
SEO classes page: First part of Meta description.

For the most part, they’re using the first part of the Meta description as the sitelink snippet, but not always. You may have noticed that I optimized those Meta description sitelink snippets that are showing by front loading them so that the first 5-7 words or so are a short description of what the page is all about.

But here’s the rub. Do a Google search for “Jill Whalen SEO.” You should still see sitelinks, and you’ll even see some of the same ones as with the previous query, but some of the descriptions are different:

While the forum home page shows in both, this time Google has pulled text from the page rather than using the DMOZ/ODP description. This is likely because this search query had the word “SEO” in it while the other one didn’t. The SEO articles page also shows up here, and it is using the same Meta description snippet as the High Rankings query. The other sitelinks are different from before, with 3 out of 4 using the Meta description.

As you can see, while you do have some control over your sitelink descriptions via your Meta description tag, Google might not always use them (just as Google does with their regular search results). Your best chance of having them show is to use, close to the beginning of your description tags, the words that you know pull up sitelinks. Also, be as descriptive as possible within the first 5 to 7 words.

3. Meta Descriptions and Social Media Marketing

Ever wonder why some Facebook links have great descriptions and others don’t seem to make any sense? It’s because some site owners have taken the time to write a summary of the article and place it into their Meta description tag, and some have not. If your article has a Meta description, Facebook and Google+ will default to that when you share a link on your profile or “Page.” If there’s no Meta description, you’ll usually see the first sentence or so from the page being used as the default.

While anyone can edit the description that Facebook defaults to, most people don’t. And at this time on Google+ you can’t even edit the default description. You can either leave it as is or delete it all together. Let’s face it — most of the time the first sentence of an article is not a good description of the rest of it. It’s not supposed to be, because that’s not what a first sentence is for!

Therefore, I strongly advise you to always write a compelling 1- or 2-sentence description for all of your articles and blog content that may be shared via social media, and place it into your Meta description tag. This will give you a big jump on your competitors who haven’t figured this out yet, making your social media content much more clickable because people will know what the article is actually about before they click on it.

Overall, the Meta description tag gives you a little bit more control over what people might see before they click over to your site. The more compelling it is, the more clickthroughs you should see. If your Meta description tags can help with that, then it’s certainly worth the few minutes of time it takes to create interesting, keyword-rich tags that sum up what users will find when they arrive!

Guest Author Jill Whalen is CEO and Founder of High Rankings. This article was originally published on her site, and in the High Rankings Newsletter.

The importance of a URL

vdebolt — Mon, 05 Sep 2011 16:59:23 +0000

For a while lately I’ve been noticing that I’m getting search engine traffic from the phrase “backchannel adoption.”

I’ve written about the backchannel several times, I’ve even reviewed a book about it. But I’ve not mentioned backchannel adoption. So what’s up with all the searchers who are coming here looking for info who probably aren’t finding what they want?

I searched the blog myself, to find whatever I could that mentioned backchannel. Aha, I found an 18 month old Useful links post with the title “Useful Links: Backchannel, adoption rates, Scrunchup.” I’m thinking the search engines are ignoring the comma between the two keywords. That seems good to know. Then I looked at the URL:

http://www.webteacher.ws/2010/01/06/useful-links-backchannel-adoption-rates-scrunchup/

Well, that explains more. It also brings home the SEO importance of using permalinks that consist of words from the post title rather than a number out of a database.

Image Credit: woodleywonderworks

I’m sure the bounce rate for users who end up here based on that keyword search is about 100%, so it isn’t doing me any good in terms of building a following for the blog. But it’s something to think about when you are composing your post titles.

Useful links: Google+ on WordPress, HTML5, YouTube SEO, Responsive Design

vdebolt — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 14:46:06 +0000

Three Ways To Display Your Latest Google+ Updates On WordPress from wpmods.

searching for signal gives us: The Most Important Parts of HTML5, or Why audio and video are Boring, or The New Web Platform, or an Introduction to HTML5. Yes, all that.

YouTube Tips: Blown Away by Phyllis Khare tells you some tips that will improve SEO (and accessibility) for your YouTube videos.

Beginner’s Guide to Responsive Web Design from Think Vitamin is a good resource/reference for getting people started with responsive design.

Useful links: Accessibility and SEO, creative writing/programming, Edge

vdebolt — Wed, 03 Aug 2011 13:24:32 +0000

Jared Smith wrote an excellent WebAIM article talking about how Accessiblity and SEO are moving closer and closer together in their goals and techniques. He talks about a variety of things, including HTML5 and SEO. Look at Jared’s list of similarities (links are to WebAIM articles):

The list of accessibility and SEO practices that are closely in alignment include:

Using proper alternative text for images

Providing a clear and proper heading structure and avoiding empty headings

Providing descriptive link text (i.e., avoiding “click here”)

Ensuring page titles are descriptive, yet succinct

Not relying on JavaScript for things that don’t need it

Avoiding mouse dependent interaction

Using standard web formats when possible

Providing transcripts and captions for video

Identifying the language of pages and page content

Allowing multiple ways of finding content (e.g., search, a site map, table of contents, clear navigation, etc.)

Using text instead of images when possible

Providing useful links to related and relevant resources

Ensuring URLs are human readable and logical

Presenting a clear and consistent navigation and page structure

Avoiding CSS and other stylistic markup to present content or meaning

Defining abbreviations and acronyms

Of course content is king, in both accessibility and SEO.

Teaching Creative Writing with Programming at ReadWriteWeb is one of the most creative teaching ideas I’ve seen in years.

Adobe Launches HTML5 Web Animations Tool is the announcement at Mashable. The tool is called Edge and is free right now because Adobe wants testers and feedback. The tool uses only HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript. Stephanie Sullivan Rewis tweeted another article about Edge.

Adobe’s Edge summarized on MacWorld: http://srewis.me/p79ij4 #html5 #css3Wed Aug 03 01:41:56 via TweetDeckStef. Sullivan Rewis
stefsull

Guest Post: 4 Web Design Trends in 2011

vdebolt — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 12:35:08 +0000

With the unavoidable presence of mobile devices and social networking, 2011 saw some major changes in the way websites are designed. In order to have any presence in the new online experience, web designers have embraced a number of changes, but here are four trends that won’t be going away any time soon.

Image Credit: familymwr

Mobile Design

Today’s web designers have to create sites that work easily with mobile devices. More and more people are relying on their smart phones to navigate the Internet. The explosion of apps has also forced a change in the way websites work. Users no longer have to navigate browsers to get exactly where they want to be.

Since Apple holds a large part of the mobile app market, it makes sense that fewer and fewer web designs are incorporating Flash. It’s a tool whose time has past. It may look cool, but it tends to be a time suck. After all, if people are browsing on the go, then, well… they’re on the go! Flash is potentially too time consuming, thus making websites easy to navigate away from, due to impatience.

Social Media

It’s online suicide to not incorporate social media into a web design. Whether it’s simply putting Facebook, Twitter and RSS buttons in a prominent place on the homepage or whether it’s actually incorporating a Twitter feed, websites with plenty of traffic are those designed to make social networking a fluid part of their design.

The web designer has to also make sure that the website is valuable when the various social media outlets direct visitors back to the actual web page. Although Facebook is the “it” site of the moment, social media sites that do a better job of assimilating themselves into private websites are youtube.com and flickr.com. Both sites allow the users to easily place code into another website so that visuals can be easily accessed.

SEO

With the trend towards social media taking hold, SEO is even more important in web design. Basically, the content has to be very high quality, and it has to be something visitors will want to share. Without good Search Engine Optimization tactics, websites will simply fall off Google’s top two pages of search results.

Websites need to have good image content, and about 300 words per page. The words have to be quality content. That means the web designer or the client needs to brush up on fourth grade grammar.

Touch-Screen Friendly

Back to mobile computing. Mobile devices work with a touch-screen design. If the new web designs don’t incorporate this into the site, then the visitor will leave immediately. Therefore, whatever web building tool the designer is using has to provide up-to-date coding options.

Since most of these shifts are centered on mobile computing and the new changes in SEO rules, most web masters and designers can expect them to dominate designs for awhile. Fast, visual, easy to navigate and full of meaningful content will be the primary components of the most popular websites in 2012 and beyond. For the do-it-yourself web builder, look for templates that help optimize the new design trends. Joomla.com and WordPress.org are two good examples of web design sites that will help people keep their websites contemporary.

This is a guest post by Rodney Warner from the Denver Web Design Company Connective Web Design.

Useful links: image search queries, :nth-child, accessibility game plan, ARIA

vdebolt — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 12:45:00 +0000

Google Search By Image: Use a Snapshot as Your Search Query. Wonder if it will do faces – that’s sort of scary. Maybe match fingerprints?

Useful :nth-child recipes. Nice examples that clarify the concepts.

A terrific article by Karl Groves called Barriers to improving the Accessibility Game Plan makes a number of good points. This article is worth studying and then putting into action.

How screen readers speak a page with HTML5 and ARIA. Fast read/listen makes an important point in no time.

Modifying an hReview microformat to include HTML from schema.org

vdebolt — Fri, 03 Jun 2011 13:28:51 +0000

Google, Yahoo and Bing announced schema.org yesterday.

Many sites are generated from structured data, which is often stored in databases. When this data is formatted into HTML, it becomes very difficult to recover the original structured data. Many applications, especially search engines, can benefit greatly from direct access to this structured data. On-page markup enables search engines to understand the information on web pages and provide richer search results in order to make it easier for users to find relevant information on the web. Markup can also enable new tools and applications that make use of the structure.

A shared markup vocabulary makes easier for webmasters to decide on a markup schema and get the maximum benefit for their efforts. So, in the spirit of sitemaps.org, Bing, Google and Yahoo! have come together to provide a shared collection of schemas that webmasters can use.

I immediately began to think about how this would apply to my frequently used hReview microformat. I looked at the schema for books, and tried to see how I could incorporate that into a book review if I continue to use the hReview microformat to do book reviews.

Here’s what I came up with. I’d love comments. The additions to the hReview from the book schema are in red.

itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Book">
product
class="photo" src="image.jpg" alt="alt here">

class="description" itemprop="reviews">
class="fn url" itemprop="name url" href="link here"
title="affiliate link to Amazon">book title
here
by itemprop="author">author's name is from
 itemprop="publisher">publisher's
name, itemprop="datePublished">date
here.
Text of the review here.

Text of the review here.
Text of the review here.
class="summary">Summary: text of the summary

class="reviewer vcard">A review by
Virginia
DeBolt of itemprop="name">
book title here
itemprop="rating">
(rating: n stars)


What I’m wondering.

Is the hReview microformat even needed since there is so much overlap between the book schema and the hReview microformat. It’s redundant. Should reviewers switch to the schema and abandon the microformat?
I’m wondering about putting an itemprop in the cite element, since most of the schema HTML is added with span tags. It seems more semantic to me.

What do you think? Are schemas going to replace microformats completely?

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Want to get in on Google +1? Here’s how.
vdebolt — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 15:04:17 +0000
Google +1 is now live. If you want to make it part of your process, here are some tips for getting started.
Add it to Your Web Page

Mashable has directions for adding a +1 button to a WordPress blog.
Others can add it by using this bit of JavaScript at any point in a page:


See the Google +1 API page for more options

Using +1

Learn about why (or why not) the +1 button might be helpful
Using the +1 options yourself
A Google +1 bookmarklet
Manage the +1s in your Google profile


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Useful Links: media queries, search tips, colors
vdebolt — Mon, 23 May 2011 14:55:01 +0000
Media Queries: a collection of responsive web designs is a new site with selection of sites to study. (Also, see my post on Media Queries 101.)
If you’re teaching one of those introduction to the Internet classes where you show students how to search effectively, here’s a helpful post. How to search & do more with Google.
Named, HSL and RGB colors is another brilliant resource table from Standardista. It deserves a bookmark.

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