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Google Expanding Candidate Cards, Will Also Offer Primary Voting Reminders

Building on an experiment following the most recent Republican debate, Google will begin providing more in-depth election-related content in search results about the candidates and key issues.

In search and Google Now, users will be able to get a combination of candidate-generated content and third-party content about the primaries and the election.

These are not “candidate listing ads.” Google previously said there’s no advertising angle.

While the information is clearly useful, Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan criticized last week’s launch of candidate cards as a “disaster for search quality.” However, searches for specific issues or individual candidates may be less vulnerable to the sorts of problems he identifies in connection with the Republican debate (i.e., dominance by a single candidate).

Placement in search will be variable, depending on the query. Often, however, cards will appear at the top of results. As previously discussed, candidates will be able to provide their own statements and content. But Google will also be aggregating articles and providing “scorecards” for candidates based on state primary outcomes and delegate counts (See image above).

Google explains in a blog post:

Tracking what’s happening in the primaries and how each candidate is doing state-by-state can be hard. So now when you search for “primary results” or “resultados de la elección primaria” you’ll not only see the primary election schedule, but you’ll also see live results and an evolving tally of how many delegates each Republican and Democratic nominee has received. This feature works in English and Spanish.

Perhaps the most interesting thing Google will be doing is reminding people to vote. Cards will inform voters of the dates of their their state primaries. Google will also direct users to their polling places.

It will probably be difficult to measure the effect of voting reminders on turnout, but it could have an impact, which would not only be interesting and socially beneficial but also could potentially influence primary outcomes at the margins — especially with younger, more mobile-centric populations.

Another interesting and less obvious aspect of candidate and issue cards is that they might operate as an instant fact-checking vehicle for voters and journalists. This was something discussed 10 years ago by Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt as one of the social and democratic benefits of search.

Resource Link: http://searchengineland.com/google-expanding-candidate-cards-will-also-offer-primary-voting-reminders-241497

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How to Conduct an On-Page SEO Site Audit

The first thing an SEO should do when given a new project is to conduct an SEO site audit.

A SEO site audit is a critical first step that SEOs must undertake to understand the state of SEO.

There are two basic options:

    * A quick hit site audit where you go through the top level diagnosis with the site in a few hours.

    * An exhaustive site audit that can take days.

If you choose perform the exhaustive site audit, there are three critical areas to keep in mind. They are:

   1. On-page SEO audit

   2. Technical site audit

   3. Link audit

An on-page SEO audit will begin with obvious points, such as the title and meta description tags. Depending on your website this can get a pretty exhaustive document, so you're better served by creating an Excel sheet with your pages or site categories in rows and then each element of on-page SEO as your header.

Let's start by looking at few important elements of on-page SEO, why they're important, and tips on what you should look out for during your audit.

Title Tags

The purpose of a title tag is to make each page unique in terms of the page’s content. Since each page on your site should be unique, you need to have unique title tags for each page.

Title tags also carry huge weight in terms of how you rank, so try to spend as much time as possible on writing great title tags. A title tag should include keywords relevant to the page content.

For example, a website that sells shoes online has a page about men’s athletic shoes. The title tag might be written in the following format:

Mens Athletic Shoes: Brand name Athletic Shoes for Men at [company name]

The above example uses variations of the same keyword to account for keyword searches.

Also, the company name appears at the end of the title. This is critical because many sites use their prime title tag real estate (the beginning) with their company name.

However well-known your company and its brand may be, always use a popular keyword instead of your company name at the beginning of your title tag. Ideally, you may want to limit your title tag to be 40-69 characters at most.

Meta Tags

The meta description tag should be written like how you would for PPC ad copy. Just as good ad copy on PPC campaigns will increase your CTRs, a good meta description will increase your click-through rate (CTR) on organic search.

Make sure to describe what your page content is about, benefit or value to readers, and then a good call to action. Ensure that you spend some time writing your meta description. As a rule of thumb keep your meta description tags under 200 characters.

Missing Title Tags

In addition to writing unique title tags, keep a list in your Excel sheet on pages that are missing title tags or title tags with just your company name on it.

There are a lot of SEO software options available, but a good free option is Google’s Webmaster Tools. Go to the Optimization menu and then click on HTML improvements. There you will see many suggestions and among those are suggestions related with title tags.

Duplicate Title Tags

In Google Webmaster Tools under the same HTML improvements menu, there is a quick way to look at all your duplicate title tags on your site. Again, auditing duplicate title tags and writing unique title for each page can be a good win. These are on-page SEO factors that are low hanging fruits in nature but provide you with maximum bang for your effort.

Missing Alt tags

Besides having benefits like making your site disabilities compliant, alt tags are an important on-page SEO audit element. They play a big part in optimizing your images as these tags are picked up by engines when including your images as part of image search.

Audit your site well and see if alt tags are missing from your images or they have been incorrectly described.

Missing Image Names

Naming your images correctly plays a big part in image optimization. Make sure that images are named correctly when doing your auditing.

One common mistake companies make is when naming their company logo. Designers tend to name the logo as logo.jpg. Instead add your company name as part of the image name like [company name]-logo.jpg.

If you have products on your site then ensure that you are using accurate keyword to describe that product.

Image optimization can be one of those low-hanging fruits when conducting your on-page SEO audit but can drive good amount of traffic through image searches.

H Tags

Header tags tell the search engines that this is the headline of your page. While auditing your site look out for H tags – if you’re missing any, or you have too many. Ideally, your main headline should be in H1 and then maybe sub-headings in H2.

Keyword Mapping and Cannibalization

One thing that an on-page SEO audit should uncover are multiple uses of same keyword on different pages on the site. This is not optimal because you're:

    * Confusing the search engines as to which page should rank for the keyword in question and as such letting the engines decide.

    * Missing an opportunity to increase the number of keywords you're optimizing your site against.

A good keyword to page mapping strategy can help resolve this and it should be a critical part of your on-page SEO audit.

On-Page Copy

There is no rule that says you must have a minimum number of words on your page. But always keep in mind that you should be describing your content well and your visitors should easily understand what your page is about and what message you are trying to convey.

Think of it as writing good marketing copy. If you can convey your message in 50 or 100 or 200 words then that should be your on-page copy. Perform some guerilla usability and test your copy based on the results.

Summary

Depending on your objectives you can do a quick top level on-page auditing or create an exhaustive list of on-page SEO audit to build your recommendations on.

In any case, as easy as on-page SEO auditing sounds, the devil is in the details. Most of the time, on-page SEO factors are easy to fix, as compared to more technical server side SEO, and as a result can provide maximum bang for your buck.

My next article we look at technical SEO auditing factors and how they should also be a part of your overall SEO audit.

As always, we would love to hear your thoughts and what other on-page SEO audit elements you may have included as part of your auditing list.

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Google Updates “Hot Searches” With Images & Stories

Google has announced an update to Hot Searches, formerly known as Google Hot Trends. The update gives the page a more magazine look with images from news papers, news stories, related searches, and more. But it appears to remove the ability to search for hot trends by date.

Here is a close up of what the top trending search concept is right now, Apple:

As you can see, the image used is from the New York Times coverage of the WWDC Keynote given by Apple’s CEO. There are also news stories from news sources and related searches that make this a trending search concept. In addition, it shows how “hot” the search is, by showing an orange bar, showing about 500,000+ searches in the US right now. Finally, you can share this on Google+, Twitter and even Facebook.

The previous version of Hot Searches, which always provided 20 daily results, the new page introduces a filtering system that helps Google make sure that the list includes only the truly hottest news stories of the day, Google said. It also aggregates stories and searches better. Google also said the number of searches section is new and shows how many search have been conducted for each topic in the 24 hour period.

Hot Searches are now updated on an hourly basis.

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Official Google Panda Update Version 3.7 On June 8th

Google has confirmed the rumors of a Panda refresh happening over the weekend.

Google said this refresh started rolling out on Friday, June 8th and has an impact of less than 1% of search queries in the U.S. and about 1% worldwide.

As I said, the search forums took notice to major changes in the search results, specifically impacting sites that were originally hit by the Panda update. I reached out to Google this morning for a confirmation and they have confirmed the update.

Previously, Google pushed out Panda 3.6 on April 27th, about 6 weeks before this update. Google tends to do Panda and even Penguin refreshes every one to two months.

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Twitter Rebranding: Bird’s the Word, But No Words Allowed

Twitter’s rebranding is complete: the social network logo has gone to the birds. Just one bird, really, known affectionately to many as “Larry”... no words, no special fonts, no border. Don’t play with it, add the name “Twitter,” or otherwise defile the simplistic new logo.

In the blog post announcing the change, Creative Director Doug Bowman explains:

Our new bird grows out of love for ornithology, design within creative constraints, and simple geometry. This bird is crafted purely from three sets of overlapping circles — similar to how your networks, interests and ideas connect and intersect with peers and friends. Whether soaring high above the earth to take in a broad view, or flocking with other birds to achieve a common purpose, a bird in flight is the ultimate representation of freedom, hope and limitless possibility.

As illustrated in the above handy image from Twitter’s trademark and logo policy, the Twitter bird shall not:

    * Speak, or appear to speak, as indicated by cartoon speech bubbles.
    * Change color. Not even a little.
    * Reproduce. Only one Twitter bird may appear in the logo.
    * Move. Do not animate the bird.
    * Change direction. The bird is on a predestined path, who are you to cause him to deviate off course?

Clearly, Twitter has become a dictatorship, at least where their adorable #7EB3CD blue friend is concerned. The little fella must be facing right and float within a buffer space of no less than 150 percent. He’s also not allowed out past 10 p.m. and can’t date until he’s 30. And just to be safe, never feed him after midnight.

Already, those rabblerousers in the Twitterverse are flagrantly violating the wee bird and pushing the limits of acceptable behavior:

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Google’s May Updates: Inorganic Backlinks, Page Titles, Fresh Results & More

Google’s latest batch of search quality updates is online, and offers some insight into a variety of search- and SEO-related topics.

Though some of Google’s monthly updates have included more than 50 items, this one comes in at 39. But it looks like there’s still plenty to digest.

Here’s a look at what stands out for me after a first read of Google’s blog post.



Inorganic Backlinks & Penguin

There are two items that would appear to be closely related to one another:

Better application of inorganic backlinks signals. [launch codename "improv-fix", project codename "Page Quality"] We have algorithms in place designed to detect a variety of link schemes, a common spam technique. This change ensures we’re using those signals appropriately in the rest of our ranking.

Improvements to Penguin. [Launch codename "twref2", project codename "Page Quality"] This month we rolled out a couple minor tweaks to improve signals and refresh the data used by the penguin algorithm.

The fact that they’re listed separately suggests that the item about “inorganic backlinks” is not actually part of the Penguin algorithm. So what does the first item mean? I think Google might be saying that the signals it uses to detect link-related spam/schemes have been “appropriately” applied to other parts of the ranking algorithm, perhaps to help detect other types of spam/schemes. The wording isn’t clear, which is pretty much par for the course with these monthly updates. (I envision the search quality and webspam teams reading my recaps and your comments and chuckling at our attempts to figure this stuff out.)

Page Titles

A friend emailed me a week or so ago to ask what was going on with Google changing and editing his company’s page titles in the search results. I mentioned that Google had discussed this back in January, and that I was unaware of anything new.
How wrong I was. Google lists three changes in May related to how it displays page titles:

Trigger alt title when HTML title is truncated. [launch codename "tomwaits", project codename "Snippets"] We have algorithms designed to present the best possible result titles. This change will show a more succinct title for results where the current title is so long that it gets truncated. We’ll only do this when the new, shorter title is just as accurate as the old one.

Efficiency improvements in alternative title generation. [launch codename "TopOfTheRock", project codename "Snippets"] With this change we’ve improved the efficiency of title generation systems, leading to significant savings in cpu usage and a more focused set of titles actually shown in search results.

Better demotion of boilerplate anchors in alternate title generation. [launch codename "otisredding", project codename "Snippets"] When presenting titles in search results, we want to avoid boilerplate copy that doesn’t describe the page accurately, such as “Go Back.” This change helps improve titles by avoiding these less useful bits of text.

The first item there is what my friend was emailing about. Pages that had two-to-three long-tail keywords in the page title were being edited, and Google was displaying only the first keyword phrase in its search results. This was for an e-commerce site that sells items which can be described in a few different ways; Google apparently didn’t like seeing several keyword phrases in its search results.

Freshness

Not sure if fresh content and fresh search results are important to Google? I’m pretty certain that every monthly update Google has published (they began back in November) has included something related to trying to make search results fresher. Keep that in mind. Here are the four freshness-related changes announced today:

Better detection of major new events. [project codename "Freshness"] This change helps ensure that Google can return fresh web results in realtime seconds after a major event occurs.

Smoother ranking functions for freshness. [launch codename "flsp", project codename "Freshness"] This change replaces a number of thresholds used for identifying fresh documents with more continuous functions.

Better detection of searches looking for fresh content. [launch codename "Pineapples", project codename "Freshness"] This change introduces a brand new classifier to help detect searches that are likely looking for fresh content.

Freshness algorithm simplifications. [launch codename "febofu", project codename "Freshness"] This month we rolled out a simplification to our freshness algorithms, which will make it easier to understand bugs and tune signals.

In addition to the above, there are several items related to Google’s Autocomplete feature, including one which will show some Autocomplete suggestions as “Related Searches” within the search results page and another that aims to reduce “low-quality predictions” from Autocomplete.

Also look for several items related to how and when sports-related answers are displayed, including showing such answers more often.

And the very first item on Google’s list, called “Deeper detection of hacked pages,” indicates that hacking notices are now showing up on deeper, internal pages that may be compromised, not just when the home page URL appears in search results.

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