Tag: Google

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Don’t Block Google From Spidering Site Files

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McCord Web Services is a Google Partner.

Google has recently made some nice improvements in how and what it can spider to get a fuller picture of your website. By upgrading technology, no longer does their robot spider see the web in nearly a text version, but now almost as a browser sees the page.

As a result Google is letting webmasters know to not block spider access to CSS files, JavaScript, and image files. Read the full Google release on this subject.

Personally I think that Google is also looking for CSS for hidden text and other spammy and black hat uses but they are couching this “enhancement” as a way to provide “optimal indexing” of your website.

It has previously been common practice for webmasters to block search engine spiders from certain sections of their website using disallow in the robots.txt file in the root of a website’s hosting server, but Google clearly now wants to “see it all” and is instructing webmasters to not block their access.

There is still a place for considering blocking search engine robots using the robots.txt file in this fashion:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /folder-name/

One such case may be your draft file folder. If you work with a team and are doing page change drafts you may want to block those working files and old files so they do not get indexed in error.

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Google’s Webmaster Mobile Usability

Image of a responsive website on multiple devices.
Make sure you set the viewport for your responsive website to display it properly on multiple devices.

Newly introduced into the Google Webmaster control panel is a new section found under “Search Traffic” called “Mobile Usability”. With Google flexing its muscles and readying to penalize websites that are not enhancing the mobile viewing experience your site may be getting flagged as not having the viewport configured.

In fact, if you are using WordPress plugins to render your blog or website as mobile friendly, you may need to manually add in a meta tag too stop Google from flagging this issue.

The viewport is a meta setting that helps a device determine how to display the content properly. Without a viewport setting your site can not render as you had expected. Visit this page online to see images where the viewport is set and is not. It is an eye-opener and once you see it, you’ll know why you MUST update your code to show the viewport properly. (Without the viewport set images may be small and the site may not fill the device screen properly. With the viewport set image that you had wanted to be full screen will be and your site rendered maximized for that specific device.)

Adding a meta tag to the head section of your code is easy. Just grab this snippet and install it using the Editor in WordPress or Dreamweaver on your responsive website.

<meta name=”viewport” content=”width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0, maximum-scale=1.0, user-scalable=no” />

Make sure you are using the code snippet that has the attributes separated with commas and not semi-colons. This little detail will assure maximum compatibility. Read this great article to find out why.

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On Page SEO Demystified

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Craft better page content and user experience for on-page optimization.

If you thought that organic placement was all about keyword density you’d be right on one count, it is the keyword but no longer the density; search engines are just too smart to accept spoon-fed content.

Welcome to the world of advanced keyword tactics and how search engines are using them today.

1. It’s no longer density or repeating keyword phrases in your content, it is about natural language and keeping one page on one topic. The actual terms are TF-IDF (term frequency – inverse document frequency) and semantic distance and term relationships. What this means if that Google understands what your entire website is about by reading all your pages. They understand synonyms and the phrases that you use. This makes it key to organize your website into smaller blocks of content; stick with one topic per page. Not only will this work better for search engines, but mobile users will love you too.

2. Page segmentation is important. Understand that what you put in sidebars, navigation, headers and footers is less valuable for Google ranking that what you put in the page’s main body content. Help Google to understand your page’s content better by using only one H1 tag per page and breaking the content into subheadings and bulleted text sections. Know that your main theme should be mentioned in the first sentence, or at least the first paragraph, so that Google understands clearly the importance of your terms or concepts. Write with style, following the guidelines of using an introduction, body, and conclusion when you create your content.

Even if your page has been crafted to these specifications, there are off-site factors that will impact where you appear in the search rankings, number of links, number of links from authority sites, and relevancy of your content to the user’s search query, just to name a few. Google has over 200 signals that it evaluates as part of positioning your website in the organic search results; some are known and some are not.

The first step is to build the best content-informative site you can that answers questions that readers would want to know about your products and services.

If you need help identifying areas of opportunity for your site, I offer a paid site evaluation and report. Use my experience to create a roadmap to identify areas of opportunity for your website as you plan to position it in the organic results.

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Google Means Business on Forcing You to Have a Good Mobile Website

Just this last week Google announced that it was ready to start penalizing websites that did not offer a good mobile web experience. Here’s why:

• Mobile devices have been a driving factor in an increase in time spent online. In fact, since 2010, the time the average individual spends online has doubled.

 

 

• 91% of adults in the United States own a phone; 61% of those phones are smart phones.

 

 

• In 2012, marketers spent $4.4 billion on mobile advertising in the United States alone. By 2013, that number doubled to $8.5 million. By 2017, the figure is expected to fall around $31.1 billion. Search and PPC advertising accounts for nearly half of this budget.

 

 

• 25% of adults in the United States only use a mobile device to access the Internet. PCs have become tools of the past.

 

 

• Organic search results matter now more than ever before. In fact, one-third of all search clicks go to the top organic result; this means that the mobile icons Google is testing could play a larger role than you’d imagine going forward. Read the full article online.

Beautiful young woman talking on mobile phone
Smartphones are no longer a luxury but a necessity.

What Google is doing about this important trend is very important. In the search results, Google has been testing aggressively just how it will be notating information about your website. It has tested a variety of icons that are cues to readers that they experience when they click into a particular site will be mobile read friendly since September with testing continuing.

The next step most SEO’s feel is coming in the near future is an update in the Google search algorithm to penalize sites that do not offer the “right” experience, from Google’s point of view. Remember, Google is all about relevancy. If it stops keeping its eye on that mark, its own share of the market will change.

Already it is predicted, with Facebook’s strong growth this quarter in the mobile arena, that Google share will drop below 50% of mobile search activity. So, Google must stay focused on making sure that its search results for the mobile space are the most relevant and easiest to use in the search world for this growing audience of mobile search users. If it does not, it will lose advertising dollars and its place in the marketplace as the top search engine.

If your website does not have a great mobile experience, you may want to consider our mobile and device responsive websites that are strong on content and SEO for your next upgrade.