Matt Cutts Explains Upcoming Domain Diversity Changes In SERPs

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Google is always fighting to maintain diversity on their search engine results pages (SERPs). It has proven difficult over time to walk the line between offering searchers the content they want in easily browsable form, and keep the big established sites from completely dominating the results.

Matt Cutts, head of Google’s Webspam team, recently used one of his YouTube videos to talk about how Google is managing this, and highlight an upcoming change that will hopefully keep you from getting pages full of essentially the same results. No one wants to see eight results from Yelp when they are looking for a restaurant review.

The change Google is making is aimed at making it harder for multiple results from the same domain name to rank for the same terms. Basically, once you’ve seen three or four results from a domain, even over the spread of a few results pages, it will become increasingly harder for any more pages from that domain to rank.

If you don’t quite get what this means, it is easier to understand in context. In the video, Matt walks us through the history of Google’s domain result diversity efforts. It also shows how Google tries to manage bringing you the best authoritative and reputable search results without allowing bigger brands to form monopolies on the results.

You can see the full breakdown of the domain diversity history at Search Engine Land or in Cutts’ video, but basically when Google started out there were no restrictions on the number of results per domain. It was quickly apparent that this system doesn’t work because you will get page upon page of results from the single highest ranked domain. Then came different forms of “host clustering” which prevented more than two results per domain to be shown in the search results, but this was easily worked around by spammers.

More recently, Google has used a sort of tiered system where the first SERPs for a term are as diverse as possible, allowing only a few results from the same domains, however as you progress into the later search result pages, more and more results were allowed from repeat domains. Now, Google is tightening the belt and making it harder for those repeat domains to even get onto the later SERPs.

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Finding Out What Your Audience Wants

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Great content can do just about anything you want it to. You want to draw in more visitors? They’ll come for quality content. Need more conversions? Get some great content. In the best cases, it can go viral. But how do you know what great content is? How do you know what the public wants?

The internet is so insanely populated with content at this point that it is just getting harder and harder to stand out. There are many lists like this one, and they offer different opinions in different ways, but what makes one of those articles more attractive than all the others? It answers people’s needs.

That sounds so incredibly basic that many would say there’s no way it is the whole story, but in reality answering to people’s needs is much harder than you think. There are no guaranteed right answers, and the only way to truly know if you gave the public what they want it to get it out there, but you can get some hints beforehand, if you look in the right places.

Jason DeMers shared some ways you can find out what your target audience is looking for and create the content they need. If you want your content to stick out from the rest, you need to know how to understand your audience.

  1. Competitors’ Forums – This slightly controversial method is also one of the easiest ways to get in the mind of your target audience, and it is definitely one of the easiest. Just find the competitor in your field with the best web presence, and keep tabs on what their audience is interested in and responding to. Of course, some argue that this leads to blatant copying or spylike business practices, and I suggest discretion with the tactic, but if you are looking for a quick way to find out what your market wants, this will show you.
  2. Comments Sections – Just like your competitors’ forums, any place where your audience can directly interact with you offers boundless opportunities to find out what they want and need. Comments sections on your own website, as well as others out there like Reddit, are filled with people looking for solutions, and they are often vocal about looking for it. If you keep your eye on places where the public is interacting, you should be able to easily discern what is on their minds.
  3. Surveys – Where comment threads create an open forum feeling of interaction, surveys allow your audience to speak directly to you and tell you what they want and need. You don’t even have to do your own survey if you don’t have the resources. Just keep your eyes on other public surveys going on. They are everywhere, just look in your daily newspaper.
  4. Product Forums a.k.a. the Support Boards – If you have a niche product and people are looking for support solutions, chances are there is a support board going on somewhere filled with people voicing their problems and opinions all at the same time. In the best situation, you run these boards and can create some good PR while also helping customers and monitoring their interests simultaneously  but even if your customers are using a public forum, you can benefit from listening in.

The public is often very open about their feelings and desires, you just have to go where they are voicing them. The internet offers many popular options, and it is easier than ever to keep tabs on what your target audience is thinking. There isn’t any excuse to ignore their needs.

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The On Page SEO Checklist

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ChecklistThings go in and out of favor in SEO all the time, but some things seem to never change. While content creation is the new buzzword and link building is enduring a big face lift, on page optimization stands tall as a piece of tradition surviving on, much as it has for years. Of course, there have been some tweaks, but largely on page optimization remains as one of the easiest methods of site optimization to implement and understand.

On page optimization is also special in SEO in that we know fairly certainly the best ways to handle this type of optimization. Everything else may be up for some level of debate, but on page SEO can be distilled down to a simple checklist, such as the one CanuckSEO recently shared. This checklist works with any type of CMS or page editing method you want to use, all you have to do is make sure you follow through with every step, in order.

  1. Page Title – Each and every page needs a unique and informative page title, and they all need to be less than 70 characters. Okay, the 70 character limit is a guesstimate which many will question, but the point is you need to distill every page into a short and sweet title. Trying to use generic or repetitive titles won’t get anyone, including search engines, interested in what you’re offering.
  2. Keyword importance – When adding tags or keywords, try to keep them arranged left to right, or in descending importance. Search engines read tags and keywords as a hierarchy  so it is best to show them the most important first.
  3. META Descriptions – Each page also needs its own description. Search engines look for these descriptions to understand what your page is essentially about, and searchers are generally hesitant about sites without descriptions in the search engines. Let people know about the content you want them to see.
  4. H1 Headline – Every page needs a headline, just like newspapers and your old school papers. Every page only needs one, but without a title the page is just woefully incomplete.
  5. Body Text – Write your body text as you think others would like to read it, but also be sure to include your keywords. Don’t go crazy and force the keywords in the text in ways that don’t make sense, but make sure you’re keeping your message targeted and using the words you want people to search for. Moderation is definitely key here.
  6. Image SEO – This is where most people get lazy. Images without names, or strings of letters and numbers for their names, don’t have the weight that images with full titles, alt-text, and descriptions will. Keeping content organized and fully tagged is better for search engines, so don’t skimp.
  7. On Page Internal Links – Links are scrutinized by Google just as much as every other page element, if not more, so keep your on page links fully readable and relevant. Trying to pigeonhole links just to squeeze them in will only lower your relevancy overall, so keep links well focused.

Most importantly, the key to good on page SEO is consistency and organization without resorting to using the same titles or headers for every page. Search engines have been able to tell when SEOs slack with their on page SEO, so don’t let yourself fall into that trap. Keeping your pages, images, and links well organized will benefit your work as much as it will help how the search engines see you.

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10 Major SEO Tips You Need To Hear

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There are more than a few lists of the most important rules to follow in SEO, and to their credit, they all largely say the same things. This is good for site owners and SEOs getting started, but what do you do when you’ve checked off every one of those standard entries? Is your site perfect? Does that mean there is nothing left to perfect? Of course not.

Your site’s SEO is always able to be improved upon, and some things left off the more popular lists can still hurt you terribly. Bill Slawski created his own list of SEO rules that features suggestions you might not have seen before if you stick with just the biggest websites available.

Slawski’s suggestions approach slightly more technical issues than many will give you, and many of them seem trivial until you understand how picky Google’s crawlers and indexers are. For example, site architecture doesn’t seem that important so long as it is organized in some ways, but in reality there are very specific ways you should have your site set up. Having more than one web address that search engine crawlers are able to visit your site from, for instance, can end up frustrating Google’s bots, and you may even end up with a message in your Google Webmaster Tools telling you to cut it out.

Another common site architecture mistake for commerce sites is creating different product pages for all manner of tiny variances. Some will create individual pages for different sizes and different colors, which only creates a mess for your visitors and Google’s crawlers alike. Keeping the architecture of your site as streamlined and efficient as it can be to fit your needs is always important, and unnecessary bulks of pages don’t attract the search engines.

On-site SEO is also a wide spread problem for many site owners, and that is never more obvious than when you see pages that don’t have unique titles. Titles are supposed to describe a page and explain what is featured on the page. Consider it the title for a book. Would you look for a book with no title? Would libraries be able to organize those books? In this case, searchers are wary of any site that doesn’t make every effort to tell them what they offer before they click onto the page, and search engines are the librarians unable to sort your mess without titles on your pages. Don’t upset the librarian.

Of course, even for Slawski, one of the most common problems is simply that people create sites that are too slow for our current standards. It may look nice, but visitors are impatient and won’t hesitate to hit the back button if your page isn’t loading quickly. This is even more true for mobile users who are on-the-go and don’t want to wait for their content. The slower your page loads, the more prospective visitors you’ve lost.

Those were some of Bill Slawski’s most important rules for SEO. What are the rules you always keep in mind while working on a site?

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The Short Cutts Help You Sort Through Matt Cutts’ Videos

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The Short Cutts

Are you familiar with Matt Cutts, the head of the Google Webspam team, and his YouTube videos? I share them here frequently, but even the ones I write about are just a selection of some of his best. Since he has started making the short informative videos in 2009, Cutts has made over five hundred of the videos.

Five hundred videos are a lot to sort through, and YouTube isn’t the best at helping you navigate large numbers of videos so Cutts’ videos were starting to get a bit jumbled. That’s why the online marketing company Click Consult created The Short Cutts, a site which organizes all of the Cutts videos into an easily usable resource for all SEO questions you may have.

Short Cutts QuestionFor anyone not already aware of Cutts’ YouTube posts, they all follow the fame pattern. A Google user asks a question about a topic, and Cutts answers the question as well as he can within a short two or maybe three minutes. Some question the usefulness of the videos because Cutts often can’t go into depth in the short time limit, but I think anyone can understand how important it is to hear information and answers to common SEO questions straight from his mouth, even if it is a little vague.

Possibly the best part of The Short Cutts is their method of displaying videos above two sets of text which may help give you a quick answer. The first block of text consists of the question Cutts is asked, and the second block of text gives a quick “yes or no” type answer which can help give you the answer to many of the more simple issues.

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Using Data To Make Your Content Go From Competent To Outstanding

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While we all like to believe our blogs have weight and share important information with mass of internet users out there, the truth is the majority of blogs are white noise in a field so congested that few actually rise above the static and build a reputation and brand image for themselves.

So how do those select few succeed while the others flounder? The top blogs and content based websites out there all do two things that the majority of the other content creators out there don’t do. They produce great content, and they market their content to reach out to the public.

That seems like such an easy plan. While the first part is a combination of talent and dedication, the marketing side is entirely teachable. The problem is, most don’t actually know what great content looks like, at least when it comes time to gauge their own work.

The foundation of great content is almost always writing ability. You may not be the best writer at the start, but over time you can refine your voice and motivation for writing, and before long, you will be much better. But being able to write well doesn’t mean you’re automatically creating great content. Data is what raises competent writing to the level of great content.

Bloggers can write formally, but the blogging medium is largely used for subjective sharing. People don’t look for boring press releases when they search blogs. They are looking for one person to share their experience and information on a topic in a way that hopefully cuts past the normal politics that make up other advertising formats. The problem is, subjective information isn’t very useful unless you back it up with real quantitative information. It just isn’t very believable without stats and data to prove your point.

Just throwing objective data into a blog post won’t make your mediocre content great however. You have to know how to use the data within your post and build your argument around that data. Chris Warden gives some examples of blogs that do just that, as well as explaining more about how you can improve your content with objective data, all at Search Engine Journal.

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What Do You Do To Make Your App A Success? [Infographic]

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These days, everyone has an app. Apple has over 800,000 apps in their store, and Android is close behind. Search for anything you need an app for, and there is little chance you won’t find an option delivering the solution, quite possibly even for free.

With that many apps out there, making one of your own has more than a few risks. How do you attract users? How do you find a market not already covered? How do you improve over the already available options? You’re trying to get people to flock to your application when, according to Noupe, over 60-percent of apps in Apple’s store have not been downloaded a single time.

The truth is, getting your app in front of others’ eyes requires creating a quality product, then optimizing the heck out of it. App stores work just like search engines, and there is plenty of App Store Optimization to be done.

However, just like with SEO, simply optimizing a bad product isn’t going to get you far. There are numerous concerns you must address if you want your own app to stand a chance before you even get to the optimization stage. New Relic, an analytics service, recently released a new product specifically for Apps, and they accompanied the release with an infographic any App designer would be smart to keep around for their next project.

MobileAppDevIG_final

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The Comprehensive Guide To Unnatural Links and Their Penalties

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Have you received an unnatural link penalty from Google? Are you worried about getting one? Or maybe you are just curious what constitutes an unnatural link. The answers out there are often woefully incomplete, or contradictory to other reputable sources out there.

It can sometimes feel like every different major SEO news source has their own exact definition of unnatural links, and sometimes they aren’t even that consistent. The problem just gets worse as these varying definitions are then interpreted by other writers trying to offer tips on how to recover from the penalties many have received.

If we can’t agree on a singular definition to unnatural links, how are we supposed to agree on a united way to deal with the penalties? All the confusion does is lead many site owners trying to get their site back on track down yet another wrong path.

Well, Search Engine Journal’s Pratik Dholakiya undertook the mammoth task of condensing all the information anyone could ever need to know about unnatural links and the penalties that come from them all into one informative article. From the basic information of how unnatural penalties became a huge problem for the SEO community and a singular definition for unnatural links, all the way to the secret tips many professionals haven’t been sharing, everything you need to find is there.

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Matt Cutts Warns Against Taking Google Patents Too Seriously

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Another day, another Matt Cutts Google Webmaster Help video to talk about. This recent one deals with how SEO professionals pay close attention to any new Google patent that is remotely related to Search or Search Quality terms, and then speculate until some believe some very incorrect ideas about how Google is operating.

Cutts was asked what the latest SEO misconception he would “like to put to rest” and you could almost see the relief in his eyes as Cutts began explaining that patents aren’t necessarily put into practice.

“Just because a patent issues that has somebody’s name on it or someone who works at search quality or someone who works at Google, that doesn’t necessarily mean we are using that patent at that moment,” Cutts explained. “Sometimes you will see speculation Google had a patent where they mentioned using the length of time that a domain was registered. That doesn’t mean that we are necessarily doing that, it just means that mechanism is patented.”

Basically, there is a practice of SEO professionals, especially bloggers and writers, to speculate based on patents they see have been filed, and this can grow to offering tips and suggestions about how to run your website based on speculation stemming from a patent that isn’t in use, which all comes together to create some widespread misinformation.

For example, consider the speculation that comes every time Apple files patents for future phones. While they’ve recently had trouble with leaking physical prototypes in various ways, in the past, Apple kept their secrets well guarded, and the speculation based on their patents were often outlandish, and at best completely wrong.

That doesn’t mean you can’t learn and make predictions based on patents, especially if you see indicators that it has been implemented, but it is important to take every patent with a grain of salt. While Google has created the mechanisms for these patents, unless you see evidence, they probably aren’t worth getting worked up over.

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The 5 Most Basic SEO Mistakes

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While quality SEO is a complex, time-consuming job, there are many types of SEO that any site owner can do. There are also a lot of basic mistakes that site owners regularly make while trying to optimize their own page.

To help prevent these easily corrected mistakes, Matt Cutts, Google’s head of their Webspam team, devoted one of his recent YouTube videos (which you can watch below) to identifying the five most basic SEO mistakes anyone can make.

1) Not Making Your Site Crawlable – According to Cutts, the most common mistake “by volume” is simply not making Google able to crawl your site, or not even having a domain to begin with.

The way Google learns about sites is through web “crawlers” that index pages by following links. If you don’t provide links allowing Google’s bots to find your site, it won’t know what is there. If you can’t reach content by clicking normal links on the page in a text browser, it might as well not exist to Google.

2) Not Using Words People Are Searching For – Google also tries to connect people with the most relevant information for the exact search they used. If someone searches “how high is Mount Everest,” they will be connected with a site using those exact words on a page before they will be suggested a page using just “Mount Everest elevation.”

My favorite example Cutts uses of this is a restaurant’s website, mainly because it seems many restaurants have very minimal websites that are insanely in need of optimization and a bit of a design overhaul. When people look for a restaurant to eat, they search for a couple of things, mainly the location, menu, and hours. If the page has those listed in plain text, Google will index that information and direct more people to the site, than those with PDF menus or no information at all.

3) Focusing On Link Building – One of the biggest buzzwords in SEO is link building. It is one of the oldest strategies, and it is constantly tweaked by Google’s algorithms to keep it in the news regularly, but it may actually be dragging you down.

When people think link building, they cut off many other ideas and marketing options which will equally boost your site. Cutts suggests instead to focus on general marketing. If you make your website more well-known and respected within your community, you will attract real people, which will bring organic links which are much more respected by the search engines.

4) Bad Titles and Descriptions – Many people neglect their titles and descriptions assuming they will either be automatically filled in, or won’t matter in the long run. If your website says “untitled” in the title bar, it will also say “untitled” in a bookmarks folder as well as actual search results. Now ask yourself, would you click on a website without a title?

Similarly, the descriptions for webpages are often blank or copy and pasted straight from the page with no context. Your description should be enticing people to want to click on your page, as well as showing that you have the answer to the question they are searching for. If people can build entire followings around 140 character tweets, you should be able to make someone want to click your page with a 160 character description.

5) Not Using Webmaster Resources – This problem can only be born out of ignorance or laziness. There are countless SEO resources available out there, and most of them are free. The best resources anyone can turn too are the Webmaster Tools and Guidelines that Google offers, but you shouldn’t just stick to those either. There are blogs, webinars, videos, and forums all happy to teach you SEO, you just have to use them. If you’re reading this however, you probably don’t have this problem.

Conclusion

The most common SEO problems, according to Cutts, are also the most simple problems imaginable. There are resources available that will help you fix all your basic SEO problems, and you’ll learn more and get better through finding them and practicing. If you’re currently dealing with trying to learn how to make your site crawlable, you have a long way to go, but if you just keep working at it, you’ll be an SEO pro eventually.

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