Jody Pirrello | NetPlus Marketing Blog

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SEO degeekified

Jody Pirrello Monday, July 19th, 2010

I’m sure you all know how important SEO (search engine optimization) is to the success and visibility of your site. SEO straddles technical implementation, content development and user behavior. Today I’m going to focus on the technical side because that’s often the most mysterious to a non-technical person.

There are several factors to consider when designing a new site or making changes to an existing site. They can be categorized into two groups – factors that impact search engine results (does the site come up when a user searches for a certain phrase?), and factors that impact click through (even if the site comes up on a search results page, does it entice the user to click on it?).

Here’s a simple list of the top factors. It’s in no way an exhaustive list but if your site does these correctly you’ll be well on your way to SEO-friendly pages.

Factor	What Is It?	SERP*	CT**
Title tag	Page title – shown in the browser’s title bar and as the “heading” of the page’s listing on the search results page. See screen shot below.
Keyword tag	Not shown on the web site. Once used by most search engines but currently only used by Yahoo.
Description tag	Not shown on the web site. Doesn’t impact search results. Shown below page title on search results page so it has great impact on click through. See screen shot below.
ALT tag	Used as the words to describe an image. Since search engines can’t read an image, they fall back onto ALT to describe the image. Words in ALT are used by search engines to determine ranking.
XML Sitemap	I’m not talking about the user-friendly site map that’s often linked to in the footer of sites. I’m talking about a file that search engines look for when indexing your site. It’s a specially formatted listing of all pages on your site and an XML sitemap makes it easier for search engines to find those pages. Motivating search engines is not unlike motivating people – make it easier for them to do their job for you and they’re more likely to do a good job while they’re at it.

* SERP = Search Engine Results Page. Here’s an example of a SERP.
** CT = Click-through – when a user clicks on a link it’s called a click-through. Make your hard work effective – entice users to click on links to your site.

I’ve just touched on the elements of a page that impact SEO. There are dozens more but I’ll leave that to your tech team. The items I outlined are the minimum – make sure your team is at least addressing them when creating or updating your web site.

Next time I’ll discuss something even more impactful – how other web sites can increase SEO for your site.

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Real Time Web Publishing

Jody Pirrello Wednesday, May 26th, 2010

Last week, Google hosted its developer conference Google I/O. There were sessions on mobile, chrome, social, geolocation, SEO, and the App Engine. One of them that piqued my interest was v2.0 of their feeds API, including real time updates of RSS and Atom feeds.

Real time updates impact users in several ways:

They’re kept up to date if a feed is updated while they’re viewing it.
They get the convenience of live updates – they don’t have to constantly reload to see if a feed updated.
They’re updated more quickly because the distributed model shares the burden with many servers (ok this one is more about PubSubHubBub but it’s still cool).

The basic difference is that in the old model (in green below) publishers and users were out of sync. Publishers pushed new content whenever they had content available, and users sought new content whenever they wanted it. This model is very inefficient. How many of you have spent time sitting on a site hitting refresh waiting for the new content to publish?

Enter PubSubHubBub and push API v2. Each group – publishers and users – act independently and the hubs act as an intermediary. No more waiting with you finger on the F5 key.

You may have noticed a theme to my posts this week – they’re both about speed increases through code, services or protocols. Information is getting to users faster and at a greater volume than ever. This brings the obvious question of how do people stay on top of it all. I expect this to be an continual struggle for all of us. Look for tools and services to evolve to help us keep up.

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Speed Up Your Google Analytics

Jody Pirrello Monday, May 24th, 2010

Last week, Google announced that their asynchronous tracking tag went out of beta. While it’s been available for six months now, some organizations chose to wait until it was out of beta.

What’s the big deal?

You might be thinking “My old tracking seems to be working fine – I’m not seeing load issues and it feels like I’m getting reliable data. Why switch?”

Even if you’re getting good results, switching to the asynchronous tag can only improve things. Here’s how:

You can place the tag higher on the page. This means the web page doesn’t need to wait until it’s completely loaded to activate tracking. (see image below)
The tag loads more quickly.
Tracking code errors are reduced by eliminating conflicts caused by JavaScript dependencies and lag time. Even if you’re not seeing conflicts now you could experience them at a later date.

Get the new tag

The Google interface provides the new tag by default. To get the new tag, go to:

Account Overview, and click ‘Edit’ on the appropriate profile.
In the upper right, click on ‘Check Status’,
Select the tracking mode you need and copy the tag.

Paste the tag in the desired location. Since it’s asynchronous it no longer needs to be at the bottom of the page – the page load won’t be impacted if the tag loads slowly. And while you’re in there making edits be sure to remove the old tag.

After you’re done placing the new tag, go back and Check Status again to confirm tracking is still working.

If you’re having problems, the old tag is still available.

Over the next few weeks we’re planning to update all our clients’ tags to the new one (and even our own site too). It’s just a few minutes of time but there’s a lot of value in making the switch.

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Microformats – Big Things Come in Little Packages

Jody Pirrello Friday, April 30th, 2010

Let’s start with the basics.

Microformats (or Rich Snippets, as named by Google) are a way of formatting data that’s both human- and computer-readable.

Put another way, they’re a way of formatting content on your web site for easy reading by both visitors and search engines. It’s like putting meta tags in the open for all to see. Search engines trust it because it’s data you’re showing your visitors and love it because it helps them create more relevant and robust results pages.

a sample search result with map and review

At current writing, there are 9 stable formats, 17 in draft format and a whole bunch in development (see the full list). Some examples include addresses, calendar entries, recipes, reviews and video.

Sample

Here’s a sample hCard entry to specify contact information (name, address, phone, etc).

If you’re familiar with HTML you’ll see that it’s not much additional work to create the address in the hCard format.

<div id="" class="vcard"> <a class="url fn n" href="http://www.netplusmarketing.com/"> <span class="given-name"></span><br /> <span class="additional-name"></span><br /> <span class="family-name"></span><br /> </a></p> <div class="org">NetPlus</div> <p> <a class="email" href="mailto:info@netplusmarketing.com">info@netplusmarketing.com</a></p> <div class="adr"> <div class="street-address">625 W Ridge Pike</div> <p> <span class="locality">Conshohocken</span><br /> <span class="region">PA</span><br /> <span class="postal-code">19428</span><br /> <span class="country-name">USA</span> </div> <div class="tel">610.897.2380</div> </div> <p>

and here’s how it looks in a browser:

NetPlus
info@netplusmarketing.com
625 W Ridge Pike
Conshohocken , PA , 19428 USA
610.897.2380

By using the hCard microformat I’m telling search engines “Here’s my address” at the same time I’m telling visitors “Here’s my address.” By using the microformat instead of just inserting the address with any old HTML code, search engines know that’s the official NetPlus address and can do special things such as integrate a map in search results and use the address for local search.

Who uses them?

Google, Bing, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, Yelp and many others. There are a lot of big players on that list and there are many specialty sites looking for microformatted content as well.

The point is, if you don’t already offer microformats on your site or blog you better plan to add it soon.

How do they impact SEO?

Microformats impact search in several ways:

SERPs – Better visibility on a result page. Make that hard-earned first page placement earn the highest clickthrough it can.
Better data – Microformats tell search engines “here’s some good data for you.”
More access to data – A user can find your address, reviews, and local events all through data you published via a microformat.

Search engines are continually adding new support for microformats. When food network planned their site redesign they included hRecipe before any search engines started using it. This paid off when Google announced its support of recipe microformats earlier this month.

Tools

If you don’t want to mess around with formatting there are several generators available:

And once you have your microformat on your site you can test it with Google’s microformat validator.

What is a QR Code?

It’s the next step up from a bar code and holds a lot more information than a bar code – 7,098 numeric characters or 4,296 alphanumeric characters.

Readers are available for most smartphones and mobile devices so they can be used to bridge the gap between offline and online via in-store signage, business cards, trade show flyers, etc.

QR codes originated in Japan and they’re highly popular in that country.

How can you use a QR Code?

QR codes can store URLs, text or phone numbers. In this way they’re very handy for mobile because they eliminate the need for the user to type – a big usability/user experience improvement.

Several sites that provide content are adding QR codes – Facebook (for fan pages and individual statuses) and Google places (links to your Google places page).

There’s also speculation that QR codes will influence SEO over time.

Why haven’t I heard of a QR code before?

They’re slowly gaining popularity in the US and Europe. Currently, most smartphones don’t come with a QR code reader pre-installed. This is a big barrier. If a user needs to install a new app they have to be motivated to do so. It’s not as simple as scan and go. And as you all know, in mobile it needs to be simple.

Qdoba did a Buy 1 Get 1 Free mobile advertising campaign last year and got a 52% redemption rate on approximately 4,000 scans. Lesson – if you give users a good reason to download an app they will.

Look for more smartphones to come with a QR reader in the near future before this technology really takes off. As a comparison, 70% of smartphones in Japan come with a QR reader pre-installed.

And just to keep things interesting, Microsoft released their own 2D bar code (theirs has color).

Where can I get a QR Code reader?

Android – Google Goggles (installed by default on Android phones) will scan QR Codes
iPhone – link runs an App Store search for QR Code
Blackberry – There a good list at RIMarkable (be sure to check the comments too)
Kaywa – supports Motorola, Nokia, Samsung, Sony

Posted in SEO, mobile, search | View Comments