6 Main Google Changes Demonstration the Future of SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

The last few weeks have been amazing. Google has made some big changes and they are all part of a longer term strategy that has many components.
You could argue that "tactical SEO is dead", but that's not quite right. And don't run around saying "SEO is dead" because that is far from the truth, and I might just scream at you.

The Main Changes are:

1. '(Not Provided)'

Losing Google keyword data is sad for a number of reasons. This impacts publishers in many ways, including losing a valuable tool for understanding what the intent of customers that come to their site, for conversion optimization, and much more.

For tactical SEO efforts, it just means that keywords data is harder to come by. There are ways to work around this, for now, but it just won't be quite as simple as it used to be.

2. No PageRank Update Since February

Historically, Google has updated the PageRank numbers shown in the Google Toolbar every 3 months ago or so, but those numbers haven't been updated since February. This means 8 months have gone by, or two updates have been skipped.
In addition, Google's Distinguished Engineer Matt Cutts has said Toolbar PageRank won't be updated again this year, leading many to speculate that PageRank is going away. I won't miss it because I don't look at PageRank often and I normally don't have a Google toolbar in my browser.
However, a lot of people still use it as a crude measurement of a site's prominence.

For sites with a home page that has PageRank 7 or higher, it may in fact be reasonable to assume that the site has some chops. Correspondingly, sites with a home page that has a PageRank of 3 or lower, it is either new, or probably a low quality experience. Stuff in the middle, you just don't know.

3. Hummingbird
If the idea that SEO is dead crosses your mind or turns up in print, dismiss it. The fact is that nothing is really going to change in the way that we pursue the almighty ranking, with the possible exception of the resurgence of the long tail keyword, which was working its way back into our hearts anyway. Everything that worked before Hummingbird’s release will still work moving forward.

4. Google+

OK, this one isn't new. Google launched Google+ June 28, 2011.

While it seemed to get off to a slow start initially, many argue that it has developed a lot of momentum, and is growing rapidly. The data on Google+'s market share is pretty hard to parse, but there are some clear impacts on search, such as the display of personalized results:

5. Authorship

OK, authorship also isn't new (launched on June 7, 2011), but it is a part of a bigger picture. Google can use this to associate new pieces of content with the person who wrote it.

Over time, this data can be potentially used to measure which authors write stuff that draw a very strong response (links, social shares, +1s, comments) and give them a higher "Author Rank" (note that Google doesn't use this term, but those of us in the industry do).
We won't delve into the specifics of how Author Rank might work now, but you can read "Want to Rank in Google? Build Your Author Rank Now" for my thoughts on ways they could look at that.

That said, in the future you can imagine that Google could use this as a ranking signal for queries where more comprehensive articles are likely to be a good response. Bottom line: your personal authority matters.

6. In-Depth Articles

Often when you're searching on Google for a person or organization name, or other broad topic, you'll find a block of search results labeled "In-depth articles." These results provide high-quality content to help you learn about or explore a subject. While the feature is based on algorithmic signals, there are steps you can take as a webmaster to help Google find your high-quality, in-depth content and best present it to users in the search results page.

  

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Google Matt Cutts Hints At Upcoming SEO Changes At PubCon

                                                         

Matthew "Matt" Cutts currently heads the Webspam team at Google. He works with the Search Quality team on search engine optimization issues.

One of the highlights of the year for me is Matt Cutts talk at PubCon. So me not being there, being 6,000+ miles away, was unfortunate. It was the first PubCon I've missed in, well, I can't remember.
Anyway, there was some excellent note taking of his presentation, plus PubCon streamed it live, so I saw a glimpse of it. I wanted to pull out the highlights and most important things Matt shared, specific to topics SEOs should be concerned with for the end of this year and 2014.
First, the live blogging I took this from include Bruce Clay, Search Engine Journal, Pole Vault Media, Search Mojo, Search Engine Land and Google+ via Brian Patterson. Of course, there is a ton of Twitter action from the event.

  *  Black Hat Hacking will be a core topic Google's web spam team will focus on. They hope to go after the hard core hacking tactics and reduce that impact on the search results.
  *  Child pornography will be blocked significantly in all countries, not just the US.
    *Toolbar PageRank may or may not be fixed. The "pipeline" to export the quarterly data broke and Google has no immediate plans to fix it.
   * Mobile is going to be a key area in 2014, so pay attention to it.
  *  Autocomplete, look to add requestAutocomplete to your forms.
  *  Top Ad Heavy Algo will get refreshed in a big way, see the previous update over here.
  *  Authorship 15% Reduction - Google is going to get picky on who they show authorship rich snippets for. So don't be surprised if yours goes away, look for ways to make yourself more authoritative. This includes rich snippets for your site

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Types of URL Redirections - 301, 302 and other Redirects in SEO

Response codes impact every page, image and file on your website.
A visiting search engine bot figures out what to do based on those codes. Incorrect response codes can cause:

• Indexation problems;
• Duplicate content;
• Site performance problems;
• All manner of other site higgledy-piggledy.

301 Permanent redirect-

The most common use for redirecting users from old places to new ones is through using the 301-redirect which basically tells the server that some content has permanently moved from one place to another.

301 redirects helps in proper passing of the link juice without seriously affecting the search engine positioning of the website.

302, 307 Temporary redirect

This was previously debated to be equal to the 301 redirect with regards to SEO purposes. I think the debate is killed nowadays as it is pretty evident that the 301 works a lot better, even if temporary. Basically it tells the requesting server that the content is there, only just not now. It also tells the server that it should continue to request the “old” place in the future as well as the content will return to there in a while.

307 redirects are temporary in nature and are mostly used by web developers.

303 Use GET method to retrieve

This is basically telling the server to use a specific method to fetch the information on the server and is not applicable in this exercise. 303 redirects are "see other" redirects. It tells the search engines that the requested resource exists on a different url. This type of redirect does not passes the link value and should be avoided.

304

304 redirects tells the search engines that the requested resource is not modified. Hence these are known as "Not Modified" redirects.

305 Use Proxy to fetch

The 305 redirect tells the agent that the resource requested must be fetched via proxy.

305 redirects tells the agents to locate the resource using a proxy. The location field must be specified that contains the URL of the proxy.

  

404.

 Page not found. If a file simply doesn’t exist, your server should deliver a 404 status. You can use a 410 response if you want Googlebot to retry the bad URL less frequently.

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SEO Basics: Some Important Points to Optimizing Your Site

                                               

Basic search engine optimization (SEO) is fundamental. And essential. SEO will help you position your website properly to be found at the most critical points in the buying process or when people need your site.

 There are many aspects of off-site search engine optimization that almost every SEO is familiar and aware of, including link building, blog commenting and social bookmarking and tagging for external meta data. Let’s not forget however, that there is an entire practice of site structure, keyword density and on-page factors as well.
There are many tactics one can work with to optimize site pages for on-page SEO which may result in a higher rank for each of your site’s web pages.

 

Here are the following Important Points of on-page SEO:



The Meta Keywords, Description and Robots tag — Google used description copy to market your site in its results, treat this as optimized sales copy. Make sure your sitemap.xml page is CONSTANTLY called up to the search engines .


The Title Tag – The MOST important aspect of on-page SEO, just take our word for it. 

The Body Text (focus on the body text in bold, for this denotes strong emphasis to the search engines) 

The first sentence in the body text and the first words used per sentence are the most important ones for advanced on-page SEO necessities (Make it humanly readable and SE readable — The words used in the first sentence are most important due to the implementation of Google’s LSI algorithm)

The URL — The subdirectory folder and page of content should be SEO’d  

The H1 and H2 Texts are highly important – Why? They show the search engine the main subjects and Table of Contents for the content to be indexed.


Same-Site Link URLs — Not only should you be using your keywords to describe pages within your site, those URLs you link to must have SEO URLs 


Keyword Density — 8% is excellent and doesn’t seem spammy, if you have a 500 word article, then 40 of those words should have variances of the search term you are targeting, if this seems excessive, lower the keyword density down to 5% and you will only need to add 25 variances/instances of your keyword. 

Make Sure That There is Only One Version of Your Site-301 redirect all non www. URLs to the www. ones or vice versa.

If You Following these Guidness You are on Your way towards good On Page SEO.

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