How Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) Affects SEO – Why it’s Important and How to Implement it

Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) is out and has been speculated to have two benefits for SEO. One is it will have a “Fast” label designation on search engine results pages, and the other is that it will be a ranking factor. As to how much of a factor, that is yet to be seen. I’ll take you through what AMP is and how you can use it to benefit your site’s mobile visitors.

What is AMP?

Accelerated Mobile Pages is an open-source coding standard for publishers. The aim for AMP is for publishers to be able to load their sites quickly on mobile since mobile responsive could be clunky and slow because desktop resources are heavy and plenty. If we’re going to be honest with ourselves, most of the elements of a desktop website is unnecessary for a mobile site.
Until recently, AMP was just for User Experience. Now, Google has backed it up – and is encouraging websites to follow suit. Much like how they heralded Schema.org and laid-low Dublin Core for Metadata.

Why is AMP Important?

Ever tried to load your site on mobile? Are you happy with the load speed? I know I’m not. Heck loading my site in desktop is taking long and I have a respectable amount of speed for my internet connection – but mobile? All I have is usually a clunky data plan with the mobile providers here in the Philippines.
Simply put, browsing on mobile while you’re on-the-go will mean that your internet speed is not always fast. So it’s best to optimize the experience of mobile browsing for all users (at least that’s what Google wants to happen) by standardizing a mobile version of your site with AMP. I’ll show you how to do it below.

Who will Benefit the Most from AMP?

I don’t believe that you’ll want to make your services or product landing pages into AMP. It would be stripped down of its first-impressions. That would defeat the purpose of your original design. So I don’t believe that everyone will be adopting AMP.
Thinking about our SEO Services site and how it would look like with AMP is just unimaginable. I think I’ll leave it as it is, thank you.
The sites that will benefit the most from AMP are publishing sites. Sites that produce content. So how you’ll apply this to your client is not by making their entire site into AMP. That might affect conversions negatively. Rather, you can transition your client’s blog section or news and updates section into AMP.

Actual Sites that Prefer Loading AMP

Try opening an article from Twitter from the native mobile app. you’ll notice that Twitter has its own browser now – and it’s not really loading sites fast enough. But if a site is using AMP then it loads fast even with Twitter’s native browser.

What’s the Difference Between AMP and Non-AMP Mobile Browsing?

One of the starkest differences is that AMP pages does not have a lot of stuff for a more complex user experience. Everything is stripped-down.

1. AMP forces you to use a streamlined version of CSS.
2. Javascript is not allowed at all – in fact, I’m still trying to figure out how to make share buttons appear on my AMP pages.
3. You are forced to use an off-the-shelf Javascript library that AMP provides you with – which forces your images to lazy load.

That’s it. Basically when you integrate AMP to standardize your mobile responsive pages, you are putting speed and readability as top priority over anything else – even over shareablility.

How can I Make AMP Work for my WordPress Site?

Here’s where things get interesting because you can actually integrate AMP in about 5 minutes for your WordPress site. Simply follow these steps:
1) Install the AMP WordPress plugin by Automattic
2) Activate the plugin – what it will do is append /amp on all your pages but what it won’t do is redirect mobile visitors to your /amp pages
3) So the next step is to edit your .htaccess file – you could use an FTP program to do this. I personally use Filezilla.
4) (Optional) Just in case you want to check if your AMP pages are working across the board: In your .htaccess file, paste this code:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !/amp$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} (android|blackberry|googlebot\-mobile|iemobile|iphone|ipod|\#opera\ mobile|palmos|webos) [NC]
RewriteRule ^([a-zA-Z0-9-]+)([\/]*)$ https://example.com/$1/amp [L,R=302]
Note that you have to change example.com to your site’s domain name. I explicitly made the redirect into a 302 because we don’t want all the to link equity to be passed on to your /amp pages since it’s merely an accelerated mobile page version.
5) Lastly, you will want to edit the CSS to make your Accelerated Mobile Pages look and feel more like your site. You can edit the CSS using FTP by going to your wp-content -> plugins -> amp -> template.php
You could see that SEO Hacker’s Accelerated Mobile Pages still look and feel like our desktop page design – without all the fluff.

ReadMore>>

How to Optimize Your Google My Business Listing

SEO is expensive, competitive, and hard. But as a local business, you have something significant going for you: your pool of competition is much smaller than the ones national and international brands have to deal with.
Your website doesn’t need to be found by everyone; you just need to be found by the people who live in your community. If you get that right, the results can be significant. Half of consumers that do a local search on their smartphone end up visiting a store they found there that same day.
When people do a search in Google, they’ll see a map and a list of the top three local listings that are nearby, before they see any other results.


In local searches like this one, users get plenty of information on those top three choices right away – they can see both how other customers have rated each of them and exactly how far away they are. For most consumers, that’s enough information to make a decision and head out, without ever bothering to scroll further down.
For local businesses - seo starterpack, that means that while making sure your website is optimized for search engines matters, making sure that your Google My Business Listing is optimized matters at least as much.

1. Set up your Google Business Listing (if you haven’t yet).

The first step is to set up (or claim) your Google My Business Listing. Go to Google’s My Business page and click “Start Now” in the upper left corner. Then fill in every relevant field that Google offers. You want to make sure the profile is as complete as possible and that every piece of information is accurate.
 

2. Choose a relevant, specific category.

The category you choose will help Google decide which searches your local listing belongs in. You have to choose from the list of available categories, you can’t create your own. If there’s not a specific category that describes what your business is, settle on a more general one that still describes it accurately.
If possible though, you want to go for the most specific category available. “Grocery Store” is a more competitive term than “Gourmet Grocery Store” or “Indian Grocery Store.” The latter categories are more likely to land you in the top three for relevant searches, especially if you’re in a city with a lot of grocery stores.

 

3. Load quality, high-resolution images.

Photos help your listing to stand out and give potential customers a glimpse of what to expect.  Make sure you use high-quality images that make your business look good and show off your products (if you sell physical products).
Consider hiring a Google approved photographer to create a 360-view virtual tour of your business for customers. According to Google, listings that have a virtual tour and photos generate twice as much interest as those without.

4. Make sure your information matches everywhere else.

One thing Google’s algorithm looks at to verify the legitimacy of a listing is a consistency in how it’s listed across different websites. While that seems simple enough – your address is the same each time you enter it somewhere – it’s easy for little differences to slip in. Maybe you wrote out the Road part of the street name one time, and shortened it to Rd another time, for instance.
Pick a standard way to write out your address, a consistent phone number to use, and make sure all your listings match both each other and the information you provide on your website. And work on getting your website listed in as many relevant directories as possible.

5. Use a local number.

In addition to keeping your phone number consistent between your different listings, it’s also important to use a phone number with a local area code. That’s one extra signal to Google that you are actually local. Make sure the number you use for your Google My Business listing is also displayed somewhere on your home page or whatever landing page you link to from your Google listing.

6. Avoid penalty-inducing offenses.

Any work you do to optimize your website or local listing will be for naught if you incur a penalty. Google suspends business listings for a range of offenses. Getting suspended is stressful, confusing, and bad for business, so it’s best to avoid doing anything that puts you at risk of it.
Read through Google’s guidelines for Google My Business listings so you have a full understanding of what not to do. Some of the main things to avoid are:

• Using a URL that redirects to your website’s URL, rather than the actual URL itself.
• Trying to awkwardly add keywords into your business name field.
• Having multiple local listings for the same business location.
• Using any address for your business that isn’t a physical storefront or office space where you meet with customers.

Use common sense and don’t try to play the system or get extra listings and you’ll probably stay on the right side of Google.

7. Encourage reviews.

You’ll notice that the local businesses listed in the map snippet of a local search usually have star ratings next to their name. Google wants to provide the most useful information to its users, and users want to find the nearby business that seems the best. In both cases, it benefits your business to have a high star rating.
Ask your happy customers to take a few minutes to give you a review on Google. Include an encouragement on promotional materials you hand out or put up in your store. A gentle nudge or a reminder of how much it means for your business can make your loyal customers that much more likely to take the time to say a few kind words about you.

8. Make sure your website and content is optimized for search.

All the usual SEO advice that helps strengthen the authority of your website in the eyes of Google matters here too.  So don’t focus on optimizing your local listing to the exclusion of optimizing your website as well.
Make sure that you:

Read More about Google Business Listing

Google update on removing right hand side Ads on search page reviewed

As per the new update in google now ads will be shown only at the top and bottom of the search page. The number of ads shown at the top and bottom will increase in number depending on the competitive search terms likely to compensate for the ads in the right hand side.

According to Google the new changes have been made in order to maintain consistent user experience across devices. The new layout is explained as a better user readability design. However, this move by google have even squeezed the possibilities for organic SEO. All marketers are not in the urge for speedy results. Many work for their sites through serious researches on the apt result of the search queries. This change from google has made the organic SEO more competitive.

Some suggestions on the effects of this change:

• SEO will turn out to be much harder
• High search terms and general search terms are seen more effected
• More marketers go for paid ads for high competitive search terms
• The campaigning and other paid promotion options will turn out to be more expensive with prescribed top or bottom slot.
• Searches become more relevant for long tail keywords.
• When it becomes more dependent on paid promotions marketers demand on more conversions.
• More focus goes for branding.

From a common user perspective more ads will annoy the users when a tough competition comes into being.  As if now the update is restricted only to desktop and the mobile layout will be seen unaffected.

#Google

Read More>>

Google Bolding Answers, Not Just Queries, In The Search Results

Google isn't just bolding the search query now, but also the answers to your search queries.

Google is now bolding answers in the search results, not just the query or the synonym of your query in the search results.

For example, if you search for [what color is the sky] or [the average age of a college student] or other queries that would return answers at the top of the page or in the search results, you would see Google bolding the answer.

In the first example, Google is bolding blue and red colors in the answer in the knowledge graph box, but also you’d find these words bolded in the actual search results below:

Here is the second example:

Here is a screen shot showing a standard search result with the number 25 bolded in the snippet:

Read More>>>

Google Link Removal Requests Climb To 345 Million In 2014

Torrent Freak study reveals the number of Google's takedown notices were up 75% from 2013.

After analyzing Google’s weekly link removal reports for 2014, Torrent Freak says the search engine received more than 345 million requests last year – a 75 percent increase compared to the number of link removal requests in 2013.

With more than five-million targeted URLS each, Torrent Freak said that the majority of takedown requests were connected to three specific domains: 4shared.com, rapidgator.net and uploaded.net.

At TF we processed all the weekly reports and found that the number of URLs submitted by copyright holders last year surpassed the 345 million mark – 345,169,134 to be exact.

“The majority of these requests are honored with the associated links being removed from Google’s search results,” said Torrent Freak. Some requests receive a “no action” status if Google determines there is no copyright infringement, or the link has already been removed.

 

Read More >>>

 

Google Authorship May Be Dead, But Author Rank Is Not

Google Authorship and Author Rank aren't the same thing. Here's why Google Authorship can die yet Author Rank lives on.

Google ended its three-year experiment with Google Authorship yesterday, but the use of Author Rank to improve search results will continue. Wait — you can have Author Rank without Google Authorship? And just what is Google Authorship versus Author Rank? Come along, because they are different things — and Author Rank lives on.

What Google Authorship Was

Google Authorship was primarily Google’s way to allow the authors of content to identify themselves for display purposes. You asserted it by making use of “markup,” code hidden from human view but within web pages. Google extended from this original idea to link it tightly with Google+, as a step to create a Google-controlled system of identifying authors and managing identities.
Those making use of Google Authorship were largely rewarded by having author names and images appear next to stories. That was the big draw, especially when Google suggested that stories with authorship display might draw more clicks. Here’s an example of how it looked:

Above, you can see how the listing has both an image of the author plus a byline with the name.
Google ended Google Authorship yesterday. The image support was dropped in June; now the bylines and everything else related to the program are gone. It’s dead.
The markup people have included in their pages won’t hurt anything, Google tells us. It just will be ignored, not used for anything. But before you run to remove it all, keep in mind that such markup might be used by other companies and services. Things like rel=author and rel=me are microformats that may be used by other services (note: originally I wrote these were part of Schema.org, but they’re not — thanks to Aaron Bradley in the comments below)
We’re planning to explore that issue more in a future article, about whether people who invested time now largely wasted adding authorship support should invest more time removing it. Stay tuned.

What Author Rank Is

Separately from Google Authorship is the idea of Author Rank, where if Google knows who authored a story, it might somehow alter the rankings of that story, perhaps give it a boost if authored by someone deemed trustworthy.
Author Rank isn’t actually Google’s term. It’s a term that the SEO community has assigned to the concept in general. It especially got renewed attention after Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt talked about the idea of ranking verified authors higher in search results, in his 2013 book, The New Digital Age:

Within search results, information tied to verified online profiles will be ranked higher than content without such verification, which will result in most users naturally clicking on the top (verified) results. The true cost of remaining anonymous, then, might be irrelevance.

For further background on Author Rank, as well as the context of Schmidt’s quote, see my article from last year: Author Rank, Authorship, Search Rankings & That Eric Schmidt Book Quote.

Author Rank Is Real — And Continues!

Schmidt was just speculating in his book, not describing anything that was actually happening at Google. From Google itself, there was talk several times last year of making use of Author Rank as a way to identify subject experts and somehow boost them in the search results:

• Google Authority Boost: Google’s Algorithm To Determine Which Site Is A Subject Authority, May 2013
• Google’s Matt Cutts: Someday, Perhaps Ranking Benefits From Using Rel=”Author”, June 2013
• Google Still Working On Promoting Subject-Specific Authorities In Search Results, December 2013

That was still all talk. The first real action came in March of this year. After Amit Singhal, the head of Google Search, said that Author Rank still wasn’t being used, the head of Google’s web spam team gave a caveat of where Author Rank was used: for the “In-depth articles” section, when it sometimes appears, of Google’s search results.

Author Rank Without Authorship

Now that Google Authorship is dead, how can Google keep using Author Rank in the limited form it has confirmed? Or is that now dead, too? And does this mean other ways Author Rank might get used are also dead?
Google told us that dropping Google Authorship shouldn’t have an impact on how the In-depth articles section works. Google also said that the dropping of Google Authorship won’t impact its other efforts to explore how authors might get rewarded.
How can all this be, when Google has also said that it’s ignoring authorship markup?
The answer is that Google has other ways to determine who it believes to be the author of a story, if it wants. In particular, Google is likely to look for visible bylines that often appear on news stories. These existed before Google Authorship, and they aren’t going away.
This also means that if you’re really concerned that more Author Rank use is likely to come, think bylines. That’s looking to be the chief alternative way to signal who is the author of a story, now that Google has abandoned its formal system.

Read More >>

 

Google In-Depth Articles Adds Links To More In-Depth Articles

Google's in-depth articles just got an update. Google announced it on Google+ highlighting two new features.
(1) A link under the 3 in-depth articles to show more in-depth articles
(2) Explore links to other topics and queries that will show more search results that contain in-depth articles.
Here is a picture of a search for [federal reserve] that shows these two features:

Rubén Gómez documented how to search Google' in-depth articles with a URL parameter addition. Specifically adding &ida_m=1 to the end of your search URL.

Read More>>

Who is Matt Cutts?

Matt Cutts joined Google as a software engineer in January 2000, at the time the company had less than 100 employees.. He is currently the head of Google's Web-spam team.

Before Google, He worked on Ph.D. in computer graphics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He have an M.S. from UNC-Chapel Hill, and B.S. degrees in both mathematics and computer science from the University of Kentucky.

He wrote the first version of Safe-search, which is Google's family filter, and works for the Search Quality group in Google, specializing in search engine optimization issues.

He is well known in the SEO community for enforcing the Google Webmaster Guidelines and cracking down on link spam.

Matt Cutts also advises the public on how to get better website visibility in Google as well as webmaster issues in general, and is generally an outspoken and public face of Google.