Posts Tagged ‘SERPs’

What makes a good SEO? Is it just about having knowledge of search engine algorithms, being able to tweak code for the biggest ranking impact, or inserting keywords into a page to give it a better keyword focus? Is SEO all about search engine rankings or is there more to this than meets the eye?

Several years ago I wrote, “Gone are they days when SEO focused exclusively on top search engine rankings.” I wish I was right about that, but unfortunately, we still see a lot of SEOs doing just that today. Not the good ones, mind you, but still, far too many.

Today’s top-tier SEOs are getting out of the search engine ranking business entirely. Well, maybe not entirely, but they understand that there is so much more to online success than a top position for your keywords. Many clients still need convincing.

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SEO is like a car. You can’t just ask “how much does SEO cost?”

SEO is like food. Quick, cheap SEO and has little long-term value, while healthy SEO costs more but has a better long-term effect.

SEO is like a chair. It’s something you don’t want to collapse underneath you. (via @mflem25)

SEO is like ice cream. There are a lot of different flavors of SEO strategies that bring satisfaction, and you usually want to try more than one.

SEO is like music. The foundation hasn’t changed since the beginning, but the application of SEO evolves with time.

SEO is like kids. A lot of work goes into it and you can’t be guaranteed of the results.

SEO is like a surgeon. Sometimes you have to do a lot of website surgery in order to cut out the sickness.

SEO is like a doctor. If you don’t follow the advice of your SEO, you’ll never have a healthy site.

SEO is like a diet. It’s easy to know what to do. Not so easy to do it successfully. (via @mflem25)

SEO is like getting in shape. There are no shortcuts to good results. (via @mflem25)

SEO is like exercise. If you don’t keep at it, you lose the benefits of it.

SEO is like gravity. What goes up eventually comes down.

SEO is like the Jones’s. If you are only keeping up, you’re falling behind. (via @PaschenM)

SEO is like Inspector Clouseau. Even the most bumbling SEOs can still stumble across a solution.

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Here’s what’s new in the world of paid search advertising…

Google Changes Display of Top Position Ads

Apparently, Google is going to start putting Description Line 1 of a typical PPC ad in the headline of the Top 3 ads positions as long as the line ends with a punctuation mark.  If they roll this out, it’s likely that competition for top position ads will grow and it will also affect ad copy strategies.  It is not recommended that you merge the headline and description line as there will be a dash placed between the two in the first line of the ad.

Remember, while it may get more expensive to be in the Top 3 positions if this happens, we still only bid for position if it is advantageous to our overall marketing goals.  As for ad copy, we may be more readily willing to be creative with our headlines since you could now put them in your description text and still have them show up big and blue on the page.

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I’ve started powering through David Szetela and Joe Kerschbaum’s new PPC book called Pay-Per-Click Search Engine Marketing: An Hour a Day and I really like this PDF they made available online to their readers.  Although it’s about classified ads, you can pull direct correlations to apply to your PPC text ads when advertising on search engines.  Really, search engine results pages (SERPs) are just like classified ads except the page is digital instead of paper.

Here are some of the highlights that I personally took away –

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Meta Description Tag

One of the big misconceptions about SEO is that everything we do is designed to increase search engine rankings. This isn’t (or shouldn’t be) true, and there is no simpler example of that then the Meta Description tag. Even though this description tag doesn’t weigh all that heavily into the search engine ranking algorithms, it is still a very powerful part of an effective optimization campaign.

Like the Title Tag, the Meta Description tag will often show up in the search results. Generally what you see in the SERPs is the clickable title link and then the description tag or page snippet just below it. If the description is pulled in to the results, it becomes a very important part of helping entice visitors to click on the link into your site.

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The following series is pulled from a presentation I gave to a group of beauty bloggers hosted by L’Oreal in New York. Most of the presentation is geared toward how to make a blog more search engine and user-friendly, however I will expand many of the concepts here to include tips and strategies for sites selling products or services across all industries.

On-Page Optimization

A website can do just fine online without SEO. PPC, social media and other properly implemented off-line marketing efforts can really help a site succeed online with little or no SEO. But unless and until you begin to SEO your site it will always under perform, never quite reaching its fullest potential. Without SEO, you’ll always be missing out on a great deal of targeted traffic that the other avenues cannot make up for.

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Yesterday i was in the Universal and Blended Search session at SES San Jose. Shashi Seth from Cooliris provided what i thought was a rather interesting statistic: in the typical search, searchers hit the “next page” link less than 20% of the time.

This means that less than 20% of searches actually get to the second page of search results. This leads to two important questions.

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Question: When I only have about 65 characters to work with in a title tag (that which is visible on the search engine results pages), should I use any of that valuable real estate to display my company name?

This is a question that I hear quite often, and it’s a good one. I don’t necessarily think there is a universal right or wrong answer to it. Many believe that the real estate in the title is just too valuable to waste on a company name. Others believe that the branding you get from placing your company name in the title is just too good to pass up.

Let’s dissect this a bit and then I’ll let you come to your own conclusions.

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