Happy new year. Yes, it’s that time of year again when the experts dust off their keyboards and round up their top X list of seo predictions for the year ahead. To save you that click from your Facebook feed, I’ll summarise the same points that are made every single year: SEO will get harder Content strageties will be more important … Read More
Are you completely misreading time on site in Google Analytics?
If you’re new to web analytics or GA, you probably don’t realise the number highlighted below doesn’t mean what you think it says: I’ve found +90% of people I’ve worked with in digital marketing interpret this metric as “On average, the time spent by users per visit session is 2 minutes and 31 seconds (in the selected date period)” … Read More
Happy Mobile New Year – AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages)
Content-wise, 2015 was a good year, with traffic from SEO to my knowledge base and SEO blog pages increasing by 150% YoY. My 2016 new year’s resolutions are to: Write more SEO experiments, which are the most popular type of post content I write about Improve the site’s user experience. An increasing proportion of SEO traffic to content and blog pages … Read More
SEO’s War Between Word Men and Math Men. Users Vs Search Engines
In 2009 Rand Fishkin wrote a blog post entitled Terrible SEO Advice: Focus on Users, Not Engines. The post generated over 170 comments of discussion, and illustrates how periniall the question: “What is SEO?” – has been in the history of the industry. Alternative titles for this debate include: “SEO is Dead” “Focus on User Centred SEO” “Don’t Even … Read More
Search World – An xkcd-Inspired Map of the SEO Industry
Click the image to see the full size map Inspired by xkcd’s map of online communities. Links to everything referenced in this map
5 Types of SEOs
Which one are you? 1. The Rand Fishkin “*Sigh* How can I get my clients to stop thinking about links? Why don’t they get that SEO is so much more than just keywords? I’m a digital marketer, I don’t even ‘do’ SEO anymore – I’m way better than that. Lol keywords in the page title tag? That’s so 2003. The … Read More
Q & A With Google Web Trends Analyst Gary Illyes – SMX Sydney 2015
I sat down with Google’s Gary Illyes at SMX Sydney 2015 for a quick Q & A. Question: Why didn’t we see a bigger effect in search results following the April 21 mobile friendly update? Gary Illyes: The term ‘mobilegeddon’, coined after it was suggested the effect of the mobile friendly would be bigger than Penguin and Panda combined, was misunderstood by … Read More
Hiding Keywords in 2015 with noscript tags – SEO Experiment
In my earlier post on using <noscript> tags for ensuring good SEO when using lazy loaded images, we observed that Google is able to properly crawl, index and will rank pages for keywords inside alt tags contained within <noscript>. This gave me an idea to see if Google would do the same for <noscript> tags even when there is no equivalent … Read More
Article Read Time Rich Snippets Appearing in Google Search Results?
Is Google testing a ‘reading time’ metric to display as a search result rich snippet? Spotted this today: Here’s a closer look: Tweet this screenshot If you are wondering, it’s just coincidence that I happened to be performing research on schema, though this fact might have made it more likely I’d notice what is a fairly subtle display of SERP rich … Read More
Lazy Loading Images SEO Experiment
Looking for my SEO experiment on original content? Check out 45wn343on Does Lazy Loading Images Hurt SEO? TLDR: No. Important Update! Make sure you read my super popular related post on using noscript to add keywords even when there is no associated image – the results were pretty amazing Lazy loading is a technique to defer the display and resource loading … Read More