SEO
Google's Mobile Update
Posted on 02 Apr 2015 By Daniel Haynes under SEO
You might have recently heard about an upcoming update to Google search, which is focused around mobile compatibility. Google will be changing how it ranks websites on April 21st, and websites that aren't mobile friendly - or don't have a mobile friendly version - will be penalised.
Are Search Results Already Old News?
Posted on 10 Jan 2012 By Elise Kumar under SEO & Social Media
In a previous post I discussed Google and Bing. Google does what it does so well that I think it unlikely that Bing (or any other Search Engine) will seriously compete with Google.
But what about things that Google doesn't do as well?
When you do a Google Search, Google of course does not search the entire internet for that query. Google searches its index of the internet, and the information that appears highest in your Search Results could be days or months out of date. For most searches that probably won't worry you too much. Although it can be frustrating waiting a number of days for Google's "spiders" to re-index your website after you make changes to it. But what if you're interested in finding something that wasn't on a webpage a few days ago? What if you're interested in finding information about an event that happened a few days ago? Or even a few hours ago? Or even a few minutes ago?
Google has added some additional search options to the sidebar to help resolve this. You now have the option of narrowing your search results to pages updated within a certain time frame, such as the past year, past month, or even past hour. However, since Google can only produce results for the pages it has already indexed, many of the results that you would get from a search for the past 24 hours wouldn't be as comprehensive as one you would get from the past week because Google hasn't crawled all the new pages yet.
...1 Minute SEO: Sitemap
Posted on 12 Jan 2011 By Elise Kumar under SEO
You can pay a lot for SEO – but what can you learn, right now, in one minute? An ongoing series.
When Google or another Search Engine indexes your website (looks through it and stores information about your website for when someone does a search) it will follow all of your links to read all of the information on your pages.
A good way to ensure that the search engine sees all of the pages on your website is to provide a sitemap to the search engine. A good Content Management System will build and update a sitemap for google to read automatically.
All websites running the Jack Marlow software have a sitemap for Google which is updated whenever you update the structure of the site. Find out if your content management system automatically updates the sitemap served to Google. Along with listing the pages a good Sitemap will also tell Google the relative importance of pages and how frequently they are likely to change (so that Google Spiders know when to come back and update your listing in the Search Engine)
If you don’t have a sitemap generated automatically, you’ll need to get a sitemap which you can update as you make changes to your website: there are a number of Free online tools which will generate a sitemap for you:
Try: http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ or search on Google for "Generate XML Sitemap".
Further Reading:
A...Don't waste words in your headings and links!
Posted on 10 Dec 2010 By Elise Kumar under SEO
This is my latest Blog Entry
Would you use the words “This is a billboard” on a billboard? Or start a brochure with “welcome to our brochure”? Probably not – pretty much everyone knows that a billboard is a billboard and a brochure is a brochure and pretty much everyone knows that a website is a website.
Following on from my 1 Minute SEO blogs on headings and link text you’ll remember that the words you use in headings are important as are the words you use in links.
Don’t waste valuable word space on links that state “click here”. Links are often brightly coloured and eye catching – if you use words which relate to the destination page your visitors will be easily able to find the page and information they’re looking for on your website. And you’re also telling Google more about what you do.
Use relevant keywords in your headings. Don’t waste heading space saying “Welcome to the [company name] website”. Use that space to immediately grab your visitors attention and let them know the benefits of your products or services - and tell let Google know at the same time what keywords are most important to your business.