seo
NOISIA: Split The Atom – the importance of on-page SEO
Whilst doing some research for an album I wanted, I found a pretty good example of why on-page SEO is important.
The artist NOISIA
In essence, this couldn’t be a more qualified search term: it contains the band name along with the name of their new album (which, no doubt, will be associated with all sorts of press releases and similar). And, in fact, that’s rather the problem:
Noisia aren’t even on page 1, despite being the producers of the music: in fact, they’re usurped by the likes of ‘Filestube’ (which, for the unitiated, is an illegal file download repository). The BBC feature first – which is understandable given the authority of that domain.
Things aren’t all bad, however: at least their Myspace profile is up there at #3…but this isn’t great.
In honesty, whether this is an actual failure for Noisia is debatable, since Play.com features ahead of them and they’re clearly only interested in selling their music for them…I suppose the question remains as to whether they care – or want to sell directly to their fans. Perhaps this isn’t an issue for them.
For those interested, you can buy the album here on Amazon
Duplicate content in search engines
There’re various opinions around how Google and other search engines deal with duplicate content. Google’s comments on the matter give an indication of how they deal with it, and the main takehome points are:
- They can usually spot unintentional (i.e non-malicious) duplicate content
- In the above case, Google will simply index the content it feels most relevant to the query that’s been typed in (so analysis/decision is done on a per-query basis), and will give users the option to see similar-looking results from that site – see below:
- In the case of webmasters trying to game search results by keyword/content-stuffing, they’ll spot that too – and will penalise accordingly.
This is good news and everything, but it does rather raise the question: How can Google tell if you’re malicious or not? And what if Google misunderstands your content and accidentally tags you as a spammer?
If you’re new to web copy writing content/management, duplication perhaps doesn’t sound like an issue…but from a search perspective, it can be. Why could you be penalised? How do you get round it? What are the options? Read on and find out…
1An SEO & web best practice guide: part 2
If you missed part 1 of this guide, it’s here.
Having looked at the first three things on the list, here’re the next three:
- Imagery (relevancy, contrasts, copy-as-images, alt tags)
- Flash (why/why not, navigation)
- Technical (301 redirects, non-www domains, keywords in domain names, mod-rewrite for search friendly pages, meta content)
Read on!
1An SEO & web best practice guide: part 1
Here’s a hopefully quite well-rounded and all-encompassing-yet-succinct guide to all that SEO and web usability stuff you keep reading about but would like to see in one place.
In this 2-part thingy I’ll be covering the following topics at a high level:
- Links (equity, inbound link importance, writing/colours/format/titles/targets, link buying)
- Headings (H1, H2, sizes, colours, keywords)
- Content (relevancy, not keyword stuffed, writing for people)
- Imagery (relevancy, contrasts, copy-as-images, alt tags)
- Flash (why/why not, navigation)
- Technical (301 redirects, non-www domains, keywords in domain names, mod-rewrite for search friendly pages, meta content)
So, without further ado, here are the first 3: read on…
1SEO: keeping PPC costs down
It’s Friday lunchtime, and I’ve apparently had a Redbull enema – so here’s my latest re-entry into the blogosphere. I think it’s fair to say my ceramic tiles have come loose, because I’m on fire…and not in a good way. Want to find out how your website is actually a pub? Need to see how I’ve compared Google’s PPC ads to a hooker? Read on, and all will be revealed!
4Google to index Flash content
So, a recent update by Google announced that they’re to start indexing Flash content. This is good right?
Well, at first glance yes – since generally speaking, it’s better to index content than not. But there are other more worrying ramifications.
That’s a good word, that: “ramification“. RAM-ification. Sounds like a vetinary term.
The problems I foresee are thus:
- This Flash content will show up in the SERPs, but Flash sites are usually built in one giant file – making deep-linking impossible. So a user will search for a phrase, see a match, click it – and then be dumped at the entry point of the Flash site – nowhere near the information they wanted to find. Great user journey there.
- It could encourage more online design agencies to build more Flash sites. Expensive Flash sites…
- …which will have content that is still inaccessible to screenreaders and similar.
I just hope this doesn’t signal the start of a deluge of agencies recommending to their clients that Flash content is suddenly fine to use. The only way it’ll work is if Google works out a way to deep link into this content – or site developers build start building Flash sites differently to allow it.
Don’t get me wrong: when used properly, well-executed Flash content is invaluable…just don’t build an ENTIRE site in it.
1The Eyes have it
Here’s an interesting article about the eye movements of users who are just searching for information vs those who are looking to buy online.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the first thing the researchers found was that users who were looking to buy spent more time absorbing information and looking through more pages of results than those who were looking for info only.
Nothing particularly new here, but what makes it more interesting is the following conclusions:
- Familiarity: keywords which refer to a brand are a strong motivating factor to induce a click-through;
- Succinct: copy in your search results has to be accurate and to the point, preferably with a call-to-action. Consumers will be ready to trawl more results to find what they want, so be concise;
- Paid ads need to be written in such a way as to mimick natural search results: users tended not to spend as much time looking at the paid results as they did the natural entries.
Read more here:
http://www.checkit.nl/pdf/eyetracking_research.pdf