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No Comments November 4th, 2012 Local SEO

David Mihm at SearchLove 2012

It was brilliant to see Local SEO expert David Mihm in the flesh at SearchLove 2012. On the web his information has always been open and extremely useful – just check out his local search ranking factors for proof  – but his presentation at SearchLove was for me probably the clearest and most actionable presentation of all. It is worth opening up the slides from his deck as you read this post.

But before we go into the key take outs from his presentation, it is worth starting in the same way he did: by stating that 30% of all searches are local (with 20% of desktop being local and a whopping 50% of mobile searches local) – so if you have a local business, why aren’t you practising local SEO?

So here are the 10 best Local SEO tips you’ll see in 2012:

  1. Google must be able to associate your website with a Google + Local page. For more information on how to set up a Google + Local page, read more here:
  2. Always have your business title in the title tag (i.e. go for business name + location)
  3. Make sure your name, address and phone number is on your site and use schema.org to add structured data markup for your organization
  4. Make sure each location page is submitted to Google+, and not just your homepage.
  5. Make sure that you have at least one amazing link for local - it goes a long way for Local SEO
  6. Build (or earn) links that Google can determine are relevant to your local community
  7. Check out David’ unbelievable slide from his deck on the UK local search ecosystem – and make sure you are submitting your local information to the main major data providers (118 information; Thomson Local). Note, if you have two listings, you can ‘report a problem’ to clean up your data.
  8. Reviews are increasingly valuable – get reviews on multiple websites. And quantity is here very important – so 3 star reviews are actually much more powerful than no review at all. Yahoo Local doesn’t even require a login to leave a review!
  9. Use Google Suggest instead of the Google Keyword Tool to expand your local keyword list
  10. Build relationships with active reviewers (by searching with Topsy and using Followerwonk). The next big thing will be ‘power reviewers’ – getting reviews from the big players on the web – so think carefully about that.

And after you have implemented all these – let me know how well your site is doing in the SERPs!

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No Comments October 4th, 2012 International SEO

International SEO FAQs

As SEOloha tries to stay on top of international SEO issues, I can’t recommend this useful Frequently Asked Questions section provided by Google highly enough.

It isn’t the most exciting reading, but if you have any nagging questions, it is a great resource to have.

Enjoy!

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No Comments September 17th, 2012 SEO Interview Questions, Technical SEO

Common Technical SEO Interview Questions

The following list of technical SEO questions will help you prepare for any SEO interview – or just to test your technical SEO knowledge out of curiosity!

The list is in no way exhaustive and there may well be alternative answers to some of the questions. Please feel free to leave any of your favourite questions in the comments section below!

1. What does a nameserver do?

A nameserver connects the human memorable domain and hostname to the IP address (an example of a nameserver is the DNS, domain name system)

2. How to deal with duplicate content due to print versions?

Place a rel=canonical on the print pages back to the main article or if you are using parameters to serve up the print page, place a self-referential rel=canonical on the article page that will populate to any other page made from that page.

3. How to avoid duplicate content for mobile websites?

The preferred mobile solution is to have the same URL for desktop and mobile pages and to use browser identifiers with CSS adapted accordingly to the device.

Otherwise if that is not possible, you can keep two URLs but use a rel canonical, making sure the detection is done correctly so that the user is redirected to the correct version.

4. How to deal with duplicate content from URL parameters?

Simply set up a rel=canonical from the pages with parameters that refer back to the original page.

5. What is pagination?

Pagination is when an article or list of products has more than one page. Pagination issues can be solved by using the rel=”next” and rel=”prev”

6. What does XML stand for?

eXtensible Markup Language.

7. What does RSS stand for?

Really Simple Syndication

8. Name the two main ways search engines discover new content?

Links and XML sitemaps

9. What is the difference between a 301 redirect and a 302 redirect?

A 301 redirect is permanent and a 302 redirect is temporary

10. Name a tool that you can use to view cache/cache date?

SEObook toolbar

11. Name a tool that you can use to set you user agent to Googlebot

User Agent Switcher

12. Name a tool that you can use to crawl a website?

Screaming Frog

13. What does the 500 status code tell you?

That there is a server error and that there is no content accessible either to crawlers or search engines

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No Comments August 29th, 2012 International SEO, Technical SEO

How To Implement rel=”alternate” hreflang

Today we are going to look at the rel=”alternate” hreflang tag. If that sounds foreign to you, don’t worry, you are in the right place – as this tag is specifically designed to help all International SEOs or webmasters who serve users from around the world with content that is translated or targeted to users in a certain region.

Who needs rel=”alternate” hreflang?

The rel=”alternate” hreflang tag helps Google to serve the correct language or regional URL to searchers when you have two or more pages that are equivalent but they are in different languages or target users in different countries. So if you have multiple languages targeting different regions/languages, you shouldn’t have problems with serving content at the wrong users.

To be more specific, Google themselves recommend that rel=”alternate” hreflang is suitable for the following scenarios:

  • You translate only the template of your page, such as the navigation and footer, and keep the main content in a single language. This is common on pages that feature user-generated content, like a forum post.
  • Your pages have broadly similar content within a single language, but the content has small regional variations. For example, you might have English-language content targeted at readers in the US, GB, and Ireland.
  • Your site content is fully translated. For example, you have both German and English versions of each page.

How does rel=”alternate” hreflang work?

Imagine you have a website with two subdomains, with one for German speakers in Germany and one for German speakers in Switzerland. Obviously, you want to ensure that the right people get served the right content (let’s just say for example that there are important differences in currency).

This simple link tag would be implemented as below on each page if you need specific language and country codes. It is very important to note that it is implemented per page, rather than per site or per directory. So it lets you tell Google which is the equivalent page on the other website.

<!doctype html>

<head>

<link rel=”alternate” hreflang=”de-de” href=”http://de-de.example.com/”>

<link rel=”alternate” hreflang=”de-ch” href=”http://de-ch.example.com/”>

</head>

 

There are several important things to note:

  1. In the example above, you have just two alternatives, but you can go ahead and create many more alternatives in the same way. You could add any number of alternatives. For English speakers in the USA it would be en-us whilst for English speakers in the UK it would be en-gb.
  2. This tag is not case sensitive, so if you have countries or languages in capital letters, that is fine.
  3. If you want to be less specific, you can use the “country agnostic alternate” which does not specify a country, just the language. In that case, for German speakers you could add the simple code

<link rel=”alternate” hreflang=”de” href=http://de-de.example.com/>

 

For more information I highly recommend that you watch Pierre Far’s excellent Google+ hangout on the topic:

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No Comments August 23rd, 2012 SEO News

How Google Went From Search Engine To Content Destination

 

In light of Google now selling ‘Google Play’ gift cards and buying Frommer’s travel guides, this is an interesting article from Danny Sullivan about how Google is more than just a search engine these days (but also a social network; a mobile operating system; a mobile phone provider; a place you can buy books, games, videos; a travel guide; a restaurant guide; a place you can write blog posts; watch videos, get local offers and I’m sure much more!)

Big bonus prize for anyone who can name all the Google properties in the image above!

 

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