When we look to the future of the internet and how SEO is evolving, what can we expect to find on the agenda in the not so distant future with regards to website mark up?
Image credit: Dominicspics
Well, no one can truly predict the future but by looking at recent past developments we can certainly find a general trend that we are all starting to follow. In my first post as an seo consultant at SEOGadget I will be looking into the use of HTML 5 and (Richards favourite) Micro Formats.
HTML5 – What’s New?
Ok let’s start off with HTML 5 and the introduction of new elements and attributes which not only make a webmasters job a lot easier and more flexible, but more importantly provide a greater context about the content contained on a web page.
For example here are some of these new HTML 5 elements:
- <nav>
- <footer>
- <audio>
- <video>
Although W3C standards are a set of generic website guidelines which do not necessarily influence SEO directly, the mark up can to some extent be understood by search engines e.g. they expect to see a website header, navigation, content area and some kind of footer. Back at the start of 2009 Dave Harry wrote a great post on page segmentation concepts and how search engines are able to identify common elements on page to determine a framework for a website.
As a result of HTML 5, areas of a web page can now be more easily defined which in turn will provide a solid framework of a page to search engines. In doing so will at the same time provide more specific detail of the content contained on a given web page, which search engines can then use to their advantage in their algorithms.
The Launch of Rich Snippets (Micro Formats, Micro Data and RDFa)
The developments in Micro Formats (as well as Micro Data and RDFa) are also part of an evolutionary chain to provide even greater detail about specific pieces of content on a web page. When Google launched rich snippets back in 2009, support for some micro formats was introduced and as a result these have gradually been incorporated within some types of search queries.
Here are some Micro Formats which are currently supported to some extent by Google:
- hReview-aggregate – This property provides a generic average rating based on the data within individual hreview listings. Attributes include rating, count, and summary.
- hReview – Describes individual review listings with attributes including rating, reviewer, dtreviewed (ISO date format) and description.
- hProduct – Describes an individual product with attributes including fn (name), brand, category, price, description and photo.
- hCalendar – Describes an event including attributes location, dtend (ISO date format) and duration (ISO date duration).
- hRecipe – Describes a specific recipe with attributes including ingredient, instructions, duration and photo.
- hCard – Describes contact/profile information with attributes including fn (name), email, logo, photo, and url.
These micro formats can all influence the information presented on search results. For example a combination of hreview-aggregate, hreview and hrproduct (which could typically be used to describe a product on an ecommerce website), can produce a listing with rating information pulled in:
An example listing of hcalendar incorporated within a web page:
An example of a search result including hrecipe and hreview-aggregate:
An example of a search result incorporating hcard:
Although these are the only Micro formats that we have seen influence search results to date, there is still a number of attributes which although supported do not provide a direct impact on the display of search results and are currently under-going testing.
For example if we take the hproduct property, we have the ability to add attributes such as category, price and photo which currently do not bear any impact on the display of product page search results (although hproduct can be incorporated alongside hreview to display the price), but the attributes themselves are supported by Google.
Could this be an early indicator from Google that micro formats will be playing a more influential role in the development of search listings?
As the idea of micro formats is to provide even greater detail about specific content contained on a web page (as a set of standards), you can clearly see why search engines such as Google have jumped in and developed their search results to display this data. By encouraging webmasters to include micro formats, Google will be able to understand more about the content contained within a website, and could use this information to further judge the relevance of a website to different search queries and provide an insight into developing new potential products.
A recent article on readwriteweb.com – ‘Google’s Semantic Web Push: Rich Snippets Usage Growing‘ also indicates the growing popularity of rich snippets and how Google is trying to encourage web masters to introduce this on their websites.
If we then combine this with news that micro formats 2.0 discussions are already under way to simplify the integration, could this amplify Google’s quest for a greater understanding of website content.
The Evolution of Content is King
In a “Content is King” SEO world how can Google look to evolve this one key strategy to create even more relevant results for its users?
Google have reached out directly to the guys behind the internet, website developers/designers/owners and encouraged the use of even simpler coding with HTML5. A great article at Techcrunch on Google’s HTML5Rocks explains how Google is one of the major players pushing the development of HTML5.
The integration of rich snippets and support for Micro Formats, Micro Data and RDFa is another step to encourage webmasters for the change in mark up by displaying more informative search listings in their rankings.
When you combine the two and look behind the scenes Google have been very clever in gradually integrating a format which will ultimately provide them with a lot more knowledge on the structure and content of websites. This will undoubtedly become an influential factor within the rankings, and future services provided by Google.
The developments in website mark up and rich snippets go a long way in providing a greater insight into the future evolution, not only in SEO but the internet as a whole.
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Hope you enjoyed my first post on SEOGadget, it would be great to hear your feedback!
Daniel
Google’s Underlying Plan for HTML5 and Rich Snippets is one of our latest posts from: SEOgadget.co.uk, UK SEO consultants helping people and organisations succeed in search.
Playing Around With Google Webmaster Tools Click Data
I spent an hour or so today playing with the data available via the Google Webmaster Tools “Top Search Queries” report. As you probably know, Google launched an enhancement to the functionality to include impressions and clicks, making a click through rate calculation vaguely possible. The tool was well received by many, albeit rather cautiously. I thought it might be fun to look at the data and draw some charts with Excel Pivot Tables, trying to answer questions like “how far do the click numbers in Webmaster Tools agree with my own figures?”.
Image credit: Hey Paul
A Word to the wise
This post isn’t designed to come to any conclusions on the quality of the data, and I’ll make my usual recommendation now: you should always perform your own analysis, on your own sites to come to your own conclusions. There are some limitations to the numbers I’ve used, the most glaringly obvious being that Google Keyword Tool data is currently exporting values for March 2010. The Google Webmaster data can only export data from mid March to Mid April. That’s probably going to impact the numbers somewhat. The other item to be aware of is this – the ranking position data does not survive the export process, meaning that if you’re not careful you could be comparing impressions data for a keyword on page 2, not page 1. Be aware!
Methodology
I had quite a lot of fun collecting all the numbers for my data. In summary, I decided it might be wise to be able to narrow my values down to a specific region and compare the accuracy of the values to something more global. So all of the Google Webmaster Tools data used was either “United States” (my largest traffic generating region) or “Global”. I filtered the values down to “Web”. I’m still yet to decide if that was the right move, but that’s the point of this study! Google Analytics Google search engine visits by keyword and region was exported, following this I used both Google Keyword Tools (Beta and External) to get what (US) and global search volume data I could.
The data columns in my master Excel spreadsheet table looks like this:
- Keyword
- Country/Territory
- Visits
- GWMT US Impressions
- GWMT US Clicks
- GWMT All Impressions
- GWMT All Clicks
- GKWT Local
- GKWT Global
- GKWTbeta Local
- GKWTbeta Global
Here’s a little screen grab of master data table:
The results
This chart shows a comparison of total visits from the United States, via Google.com to the number of clicks reported by Google Webmaster Tools. The region is set to “US” in Webmaster Tools, selecting “Web” as the preferred source of click data. (Click to enlarge the chart)
The comparison data reveals variances between a minimum of 3% and a maximum of 55% on keyphrases bringing between 1236 and 31 visits over this period. What I found quite interesting was that the error didn’t increase or decrease proportionally to the volume of the query, it just seemed to be random. I’d love to see the variances on a higher volume query set. Some terms such as “html 5 examples” were very close (3%), and the average difference across the top 20 terms was 20%.
Our next chart compares the click data provided by Google and the analytics visits from Google, globally (Click to enlarge)
The range of variance between terms that drove traffic to SEOgadget globally, and the global impression figures is much larger. Variances between -163% and 75% were observed on the top 42 keywords. Certain keywords were vastly different, “how to install ubuntu” presented a -163% difference with Google Webmaster Tools wildly overestimating or underestimating the number of clicks received. Wow. The range of difference in the global data set makes the data particulary unreliable in my opinion.
Next, I took a look at a small range of keywords and compared the impressions data for page 1 rankings to Google’s Keyword Tool and the Beta tool.
The difference is rather clear. Google Webmaster impressions data is significantly lower than the values reported by the keyword tools. I’m actually of the opinion that the impressions data from Webmaster tools is better than the keyword tools data – certainly the CTR% make a lot more sense coming from the Webmaster Tools platform. If you’ve ever tried to calculate click through rates from the keyword tool data, you’ll know what I mean.
If I had more time, there are a few things I’d like to get to the bottom of with this data, in particular working on larger query volumes and more regions to see if certain geo locations offer more convincing figures than others. Remember there’s also a need to recheck these figures against a complete month in the Google Keyword Tool, although I’m not entirely convinced the percentage differences by keyword would be all that different.
Issues aside, it felt that the data fits with the analytics figures when you’re investigating clicks and impressions by region, but be prepared for a variance of anything between 3 and 55%, possibly more.
Playing Around With Google Webmaster Tools Click Data is one of our latest posts from: SEOgadget.co.uk, UK SEO consultants helping people and organisations succeed in search.
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What Google’s Chrome OS Means for the Future of Computing
I’d like to take the opportunity to wish you a Happy New Year and good fortune for 2010, and introduce Jeff Orloff back to SEOgadget who’s looking at how Google’s Chrome OS could impact the future of computing. Over to you, Jeff!
Google has hit the headlines recently with its announcement that netbooks running their browser based operating system, Chrome, will be on the market in the latter half of 2010. If Chrome OS lives up to expectations, it could have a huge effect on the future of computing. Below are a few things I think the Chrome OS can do:
Make the average computer user comfortable with GNU/Linux
Ubuntu made great strides introducing GNU/Linux to the average user. Providing a clean GUI that didn’t stray too far from the Windows or Mac operating systems they were used to helped establish that comfort level. The animal adjectives (Karmic Koala, Dapper Drake, Hardy Heron, etc.) gave Ubuntu just enough hipness to pique the consumer’s curiosity without scaring them away because it’s Linux. Of course, trumping all of this is the fact that Ubuntu is a great OS so once people made the leap, they generally found themselves happy with their choice.
Even with all of this in its corner, Ubuntu still wasn’t able to make a dent in the desktop market. While it continues to chip away, it will take someone with a big name to really attack the Microsoft hold. That’s where Chrome OS steps in. Google has become such a large name that people no longer use Google, they Google something. The trust they have established with the computer consumer may be just enough to get people to jump on board the open source bandwagon.
Of course, the recent success of Android won’t hurt these efforts. Being that Chrome is a souped up version of the smartphone OS, consumers will already be familiar enough with the product on a lighter scale.
Make programmers take security more seriously
I have written before that I find it ironic that good programmers often have no idea how cross-site scripting or SQL injections actually work. Without an understanding of how these exploits work, there is little chance that much is done to prevent them. Not knocking the hard work of these professionals, but when WhiteHat Security makes the claim that 83 percent of all websites have had at least one security flaw, it’s enough to take notice.
Chrome OS being a browser based operating system will be susceptible to all of these vulnerabilities since the applications it runs will be web based as well. While some independent programmers and developers may be oblivious to certain vulnerabilities, you can be assured the folks at Google are not. The last thing they need is report after report telling people how insecure their computers are if they are running Chrome. I would certainly expect to see something along the lines of the Apple App store where applications go through a review process. Being open source, I don’t expect Google to restrict applications, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they recommended certain apps over others. To get noticed, those creating these applications are going to have to step up security or be passed over.
Change the way the communications industry works
Smartphones are popular because with the consistent Internet connection, we can do so much with them. Netbooks never took off as a smartphone replacement because to pay $60 dollars a month for a smartphone, and then another $60 a month for mobile Internet seems like a waste. However, netbooks running Chrome have no other option than to make use of a constant Internet connection. At the same time as promises of a Chrome netbook hitting the market made headlines, AT&T also made news of their own stating that certain users of their smartphones are using too much bandwidth. If Internet traffic is enough to scare away the communication giants, and pricing plans are too high for most consumers, something’s got to give.
The release of netbooks running Chrome may just be enough to prompt the communications industry to upgrade wireless technology to handle the growing use of bandwidth. To stay competitive, it seems to be a no-brainer. For the customer, the ability to tether a smartphone so that it acts as a modem may be the compromise they need to keep their iPhone/Blackberry/Android smartphone as well as a netbook.
Introduce Green Computing to the average household
IBM has made huge strides to bring green computing into the enterprise. With support from hosting companies that run off solar and wind power and GNU/Linux’s tickles kernel, businesses have multiple options for reducing their carbon footprint when it comes to IT.
The choices presented to the consumer market are not as pronounced. Limited to things like turning off their monitor at night, or enabling power save to kick in after 10 minutes of idle time are pretty much the extent of what the home user can do.
Running off the cloud, Chrome will be able to tout itself as a truly green operating system. With much less processing power needed, less energy is expended to run the computer and to cool the computer. The lack of a traditional hard disk drive means less waste. Of course, the push for Chrome to be used in netbooks means a smaller computer altogether, again less power used to cool the computer and less computer that winds up in landfills.
Make a dent in malware
Despite the security industries warnings, people still run their computers without adequate anti-virus protection. Even less update this software to run the latest virus definitions. While most people find it easier to click “Remind me later” when alerted to a file update, few realize that this eventually makes their anti-virus program useless.
Breaking from the traditional desktop model is the fact that Chrome OS will auto-update as a result of the verified boot feature. If the boot process recognizes that there are patches available, these will be installed prior to the boot sequence completing – thus the computer is always up to date.
Another interesting feature that fights malware is the fact that should malware be detected on the computer, the OS can easily reimage itself to remove it. Since data is stored on the cloud, and all the apps run from it as well, there is nothing that needs to be recovered or reinstalled after reimaging.
Google OS promises quite a bit, and if it delivers it could have a huge impact on computing in the upcoming decade.
Jeff Orloff wrote this for Tophost.gr, a web host in Greece offering both shared hosting and dedicated servers.Similar Posts:
- How to Install Google’s Chrome OS in a Windows Virtual Machine
- Ubuntu in the Office
- Link Injections [Wordpress Security]
- The Advantages of Ubunu Linux, By Bob Smiley
- Updated: The Ubuntu Installation Guide
SEOgadget is an SEO Agency specialising in helping people and organisations succeed in search.
What Google’s Chrome OS Means for the Future of Computing
Using Noarchive to Remove Your Cache – What’s the Impact?
Since talking to Dave at A4UExpo about using noarchive in your meta header, I’ve been interested in understanding if implementing an instruction to remove the cache link using the “noarchive” tag has any impact on your search engine traffic and rankings.
Photo by: acka47
As Dave puts it:
So the only reason I can see why I should leave the Google Cached link is so that other people can see what my website looks like in Googles eyes and why would I do that ?
I tend to agree. In fact, why is that cached page link there? It hardly inspires confidence to most (ordinary) visitors if your site is down, so the common reasoning from Google behind having a cached link available seems weak at best.
What are the alternatives to the cached view if you’re an SEO?
It’s easy enough to come up with reasons why the Google cached view is useful to an SEO, but there are other ways to replicate a similar, if not exactly the same view of a page if you’re doing on-page diagnostic work.
Viewing a page in Web Developer toolbar with CSS and Javascript disabled has been my favourite way of viewing webpages as a search engine might for a long time. You can also use the page analysis button on the SEOmoz toolbar, though I much prefer a combination of Firebug for viewing code with Web Developer controlling the view.
Other options include viewing your site using Lynx or SEO Browser, though I’m all about doing SEO with Firefox and Chrome.
“You’ve missed Fetch as Googlebot tool!”, I hear you say! Apparently, the tool has limitations. If you think about the technology used to fetch a HTML page and render it from a cached copy in a real crawler “user search” situation, it’s hardly likely that Google’s fetch tool would exactly replicate their real life crawl. Not to mention that, if the tool was a perfect replication of a Google crawl, it might expose security problems or flaws in Googlebot’s base code. Cool.
Now you see it…
Now you don’t…
For purposes of pure interest, I added the noarchive tag at 3.30pm, Wednesday 11th November. I first noticed the cached link had gone at 9.43am on Thursday 12th November. Of course, the cached page delivered via the “cache:” query in Google still appears (4.12pm Thursday):
It’s interesting to point out that, regardless of the noarchive instruction, the cached URL of my site still works with a current cached date of 13th November at 08:21:19 GMT.
The impact on SERPS and traffic
There has been no impact on my search results and traffic remains quite healthy. I’ve been monitoring my top 100 keywords in Google UK, Bing and Yahoo for the last few days. Needless to say, nothing has happened yet and I genuinely doubt that it will. Of course, if I discover anything then I’ll be sure to let you know on Twitter.
As with all things SEO, I advise you to do your own tests. Just rest assured that implementing the noarchive tag in your header will not hurt you in the short term, at least.Similar Posts:
- Google Keyword Tool – Volume data is permanent
- Using The X-Robots-Tag in Server Headers on Wordpress
- How to calculate approximate traffic volume for the past 12 months in Google Keyword Tool
- SEOmoz Launch a Brand New Toy: Open Site Explorer
- Hidden Quantcast links on Digg.com
SEOgadget is an SEO Agency specialising in helping people and organisations succeed in search.
Using Noarchive to Remove Your Cache – What’s the Impact?
Implementing named anchors to improve your SERPs
On Friday (25th September) Google announced their support for new features, using named anchors found in webpages that provide additional links in the search result page snippets, which allow users to jump directly to more relevant parts of a larger page.
In their first example, Google shows a result for “trans fats” in Google.com:
And a “jump to:” link, which was first picked up by Rob at iCrossing on the 10th September, 2009:
How does it work? According to Google Webmaster Central Blog:
We generate these deep links completely algorithmically, based on page structure, so they could be displayed for any site (and of course money isn’t involved in any way, so you can’t pay to get these links). There are a few things you can do to increase the chances that they might appear on your pages. First, ensure that long, multi-topic pages on your site are well-structured and broken into distinct logical sections. Second, ensure that each section has an associated anchor with a descriptive name (i.e., not just “Section 2.1″), and that your page includes a “table of contents” which links to the individual anchors.
Google have been testing these results for some time, and though we’re not seeing them in the search results consistently yet, I thought it would be worth implementing the approach in my “how to install Ubuntu” guide, if for no other reason than the fact that it would be interesting to see what happens!
Here’s how to quickly and easily review and implement named anchors into a page on your site.
1) First, do some keyword research or check out your analytics for the long tail keyphrases bringing traffic to your page and make sure that your page titles and anchores are relevant to the traffic you’re recieving:
2) Google advised us to use distinct, logical sections on our pages. Review each of your page sub-titles to make sure they’re as relevant as you can make them to actual search queries:
3) Create your table of contents and prepare the anchor ID’s to insert into your HTML source:
<strong>Table of contents</strong>
<P><A href="#install-from-CD">Install from CD</A><BR>
<A href="#Install-with-Wubi">Install with Wubi</A><BR>
<A href="#Install-in-EXT3">Install in EXT3 Partition</A><BR>
<A href="#Install-from-USB">Install from USB</A><BR>
And prepare your anchor points:
id="install-from-CD"
id="Install-with-Wubi"
id="Install-in-EXT3"
id="Install-from-USB"
4) Work through your titles first, rewording them to suit your keyword research if nessecary and inserting the id’s you created earlier on:
5) Paste in your table of contents at the top of the page and text that all the anchors work:
Of course, the next step is wait, and watch. This is one of those SEO tweaks that will take some time to propogate though into your own SERPS, but will be worth the wait when it does.Similar Posts:
- Get high rankings by building authoritative, irrelevant links?
- The commercial value (to Google) of Semantic Search
- Recruitment SEO Guide – How to Optimise Your Jobs Site
- How to count your outbound click stats with onclick in Google Analytics
- Rethink that sidebar, Again! Advanced Wordpress SEO
SEOgadget is an SEO Company and blog founded by SEO Consultant Richard Baxter.
Implementing named anchors to improve your SERPs
Google launches Rich Snippets Preview Tool (RDfa)
You (hopefully) remember a few posts on SEOgadget discussing HTML5 and the impact that structured data will have on SEO, and if you do, you’ll remember me banging on about my hcard implemention too. I’ve been convinced for some time now that Google’s attitude towards structured HTML markup is really starting to get serious, which is why today’s news is very exciting.
On this, the last meaningful day of Summer in the UK I say, thanks be to Google for giving us their Rich Snippets Testing Tool allowing even us mere mortals to view and tweak a rich snippet result after implementing a structured markup modification on a site.
On the news of the release, Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Land writes:
Brian Ussery spotted that Google released a beta version of the Rich Snippets Testing Tool that does just that. What is interesting is that you can plug in any URL, not just URLs that you own via the verification process in Google Webmaster Tools, and preview the snippet data.
Here’s the preview of one of the job postings on SEOgadget.co.uk:
Google points out that “there is no guarantee that a Rich Snippet will be shown for this page on actual search results.” and helpfully advises: “For more details, see Documentation“. Fair enough.
I’ve already learned a lot from reviewing a few of my own results. A tool like this can really inspire a “penny drop” moment or two, an experience I’ll be taking note of ready to make some changes to my hcard markup in the very near future.Similar Posts:
- Markup location data on your pages with the hcard Microformat
- The Future of SEO – Structured Markup
- Draft Microformats – the Future Looks Structured
- Implementing named anchors to improve your SERPs
- Google Keyword Tool [External vs Beta] – What’s the Difference?
SEOgadget is an SEO Company and blog founded by SEO Consultant Richard Baxter.
Google launches Rich Snippets Preview Tool (RDfa)