Can anyone offer any color on how the keywords work on ITC's app store? In the bad old days, you needed to be careful to separately list things, so that:
Toronto real estate,Vancouver real estate
was bad, whereas:
Toronto,Vancouver,real estate
was better. Any hints or tips would be greatly appreciated!
The way keywords are managed by Apple changes from time to time.
I would suggest going into specialized websites. A rather simplistic rule is: sentences in the title counts towards searches: if a user searches for "great party", then an app that has the exact "great party" in the title will appear before an app that doesn't have that exact sentence (e.g. "Creating a great party" would appear before "Great aunt party"). This also applies to keywords (e.g. "Creating a great party" would appear first with the same search compared to an app having "great,party" in the keywords).
In-app texts counted: no more. Keywords count separately so "Vancouver City" as keyword would have the same effect as "Vancouver,city" but in the last case you have "three" keywords instead of one (Vancouver, Vancouver city and City -well, and City Vancouver, but that is less probably looked for).
The more keywords you can place in the title, the better (you'll have more space in the keywords section) but Apple may reject your app for that reason (I have experience with that). However, this depends on the reviewer and the risks you are able to take, in terms of time. You may see an example of an app title with plenty of keywords in the title here (notice they didn't use that bunch of keywords inside the title in the English title).
Finally, this is a link that gets updated and also links to the most well-known App Store Optimization websites: apptamin.
Related
I have found that one of the keywords I would like to be found in the search engine has a domain that I can register. This is not a good name for the general project, and so not for all the web, but it is a good definition or explanation of a part. Is it a good idea to register something like this just to point it to a section of the web? I mean is this effective from the SEO point of view? but most important, is it a good practice?
Interesting question, in therms of SEO, this is NOT a good practice, and google can punish your website (so i'd not recommend it), but...
...if this word is really easy to remember and you think the user will try it to access your site without needing to search for it, it may be "acceptable", because you won't lose online visits.
Anyway.. you should avoid black hat techniques.
Google updates "Panda", "Penguin" later versions discourage this type of technique. Naming your domain as same to the specific research like www.healthcaremedicine.com. That means if someone search for the products health care medicine. Your website is shown at top.
I think that is what you mean.
In past years people name their website closer to the search result but now it is not recommended. It may for some time take your site to top. But that will not last long. Your site should have to provide what it promise its visitors. At least they have to spend some time.
Exact Match Domain is what you are referring to, as answered above is not advisable, but if you find it useful you can register and go ahead.
How to keep you off from penalties.
Do not stuff KW's in title and descriptions, as your domain already has the KW
When doing off-page SEO, Do not choose anchor text as your Main KW, instead use URL itself as anchor text and some generic anchor text like click here, more info, read more.
These can save you from penalty. I still see a lot of EMD's ranking just by being careful with the usage of KW's and anchor text.
This is what I'm referring to: http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/components.html#badges
Is "badge" the commonly agreed upon term? Facebook and countless other sites use this feature to instantly update users via messages, requests and notifications. The UI pattern is becoming so common I fully expected to find something authoritative, like would with "dialog" or "modal". But what I've found has been all over the place: badge, notification, notifier, messages, jewel, update icon, bubble, counter, count... But which is the most semantic and accurate?
I fully acknowledge that I'm attempting to split hairs, but after initially intending to do a quick search on Google to find out what this pattern was called, I've now come to the conclusion that either: a) there is no consensus on how to describe this very common UI pattern. or b) I'm searching in the wrong places with bad assumptions and incorrect terminology (I'm hoping it's A, but I'm man enough to admit that it's more likely to be B).
StackOverflow's "badge" tag description is "A badge is a concise visual indication of something important to the user. For example, the number of unread emails in an email app can be displayed as a badge on the app's icon."
Alas, I'm still not convinced that the word "badge" is even remotely appropriate here.
Not to mention, my team is working on a feature that is completely unrelated that we've decided to call "badges" (not "badgers", very important distinction), so when I saw Bootstrap's .badges component I started wondering if we were incorrectly applying a "known" concept.
So what is that little notification update icon thingy called?
Edit: after seeing a couple of replies I want to clarify that I'm asking this in the spirit of semantic coding. I don't really "care" about the design or usability aspect of the pattern, I am more interested in staying committed to being as semantic as possible with my code. After muddling through terribly written markup from countless open source projects I've come to fully understand the value of semantic coding. Understanding how to effectively describe classes is more than just a "UX" or vocabulary thing. It's about clean code, DRY code, organized semantic code that describes the content as accurately as possible, and so on.
The term "badge" normally refers to a small indicator that is added to an icon to show the current status of the thing the icon references. For example, if an email icon has a small number in a colored rectangle that indicates the number of unread emails, that's a "badge". The "badge" is placed on the icon the same way a badge is placed on someone's shirt.
Twitter's use of the term "badge" to refer to an indication that stands on its own and isn't applied to another icon seems to be an extension of this concept. Personally, I don't like it because it's less like what a badge does and more like simply an indicator.
Was wondering if there are some markups in schema.org for a search results page which Google currently honors .. I was trying
ItemList (http://schema.org/ItemList)
and
AggregateOffer (http://schema.org/AggregateOffer),
but none of them seems to be coming up on Google yet (as in they still dont support it or show up that markup on the search page). Are there any other markups I can try ?
Thank you :)
Search for a restaurant, place, or product and you'll see microformats that google recognizes and uses to format its search results. Yelp reviews all also have a price range. They are used widely. I am pretty sure they use the Places stuff widely as well, and believe I have seen cases of books having author name and so on displayed.
But...
How they are used, in what cases, for what sites, and for what queries google decides to use this information is entirely up to the search engine.
Within weeks of announcements about microformats for product ratings, sites entirely unrelated to the topic were adding microformats having product rating information, so think of them as a hint that Google (and other SE's) might use in some cases when they are confident that it's accurate and helpful.
It might just take time for Google to trust your site.
I can't seem to find any information on how google determines if you are cloaking your content. How, from a technical standpoint, do you think they are determining this? Are they sending in things other than the googlebot and comparing it to the googlebot results? Do they have a team of human beings comparing? Or can they somehow tell that you have checked the user agent and executed a different code path because you saw "googlebot" in the name?
It's in relation to this question on legitimate url cloaking for seo. If textual content is exactly the same, but the rendering is different (1995-style html vs. ajax vs. flash), is there really a problem with cloaking?
Thanks for your put on this one.
As far as I know, how Google prepares search engine results is secret and constantly changing. Spoofing different user-agents is easy, so they might do that. They also might, in the case of Javascript, actually render partial or entire pages. "Do they have a team of human beings comparing?" This is doubtful. A lot has been written on Google's crawling strategies including this, but if humans are involved, they're only called in for specific cases. I even doubt this: any person-power spent is probably spent by tweaking the crawling engine.
Google looks at your site while presenting user-agent's other than googlebot.
See the Google Chrome comic book page 11 where it describes (even better than layman's terms) about how a Google tool can take a schematic of a web page. They could be using this or similar technology for Google search indexing and cloak detection - at least that would be another good use for it.
Google does hire contractors (indirectly, through an outside agency, for very low pay) to manually review documents returned as search results and judge their relevance to the search terms, quality of translations, etc. I highly doubt that this is their only tool for detecting cloaking, but it is one of them.
In reality, many of Google's algos are trivially reversed and are far from rocket science. In the case of, so called, "cloaking detection" all of the previous guesses are on the money (apart from, somewhat ironically, John K lol) If you don't believe me set up some test sites (inputs) and some 'cloaking test cases' (further inputs), submit your sites to uncle Google (processing) and test your non-assumptions via pseudo-advanced human-based cognitive correlationary quantum perceptions (<-- btw, i made that up for entertainment value (and now i'm nesting parentheses to really mess with your mind :)) AKA "checking google resuts to see if you are banned yet" (outputs). Loop until enlightenment == True (noob!) lol
A very simple test would be to compare the file size of a webpage the Googlbot saw against the file size of the page scanned by an alias user of Google that looks like a normal user.
This would detect most suspect candidates for closeer examination.
They call your page using tools like curl and they construct a hash based on the page without the user agent, then they construct another hash with the googlebot user-agent. Both hashes must be similars, they have algorithms to check the hashes and know if its cloaking or not
If you're selling widgets, we all know that having "Bob's Widgets" in the title and the H1 gives you a better ranking in Google when people search for "widgets".
But what if, as someone explained to me the other day, their product is known by different names in different parts of the world?
In the US, it's called a Widget. In Canada, it's called a Flidget. In Australia, it's called a Zidget. There's really no official name for it, just informal names.
Meta-tags are no problem, but apart from that, what's the best way to cope with that situation? Just make separate pages? You can't have 3 H1s on the page. One H1 which says "Widgets, (aka Flidgets, Zidgets)"?
Or do I just trust that Google is smart enough and some magical taxonomy database groups those three words together as the same thing?
EDIT: This question got downvoted simply because it's about SEO? How bizarre. If you even bother to read the question, you can see I'm not trying to game the system or get away with anything. I have a genuinely interesting question and a valid client need.
Please note also, that I always use semantic HTML, I am well aware of how search engine rankings work, and I'm not trying to get away with anything shady.
If my client was selling beer, I would simply use semantic HTML to put the word "beer" first and foremost. If I was selling beer to French people, I would make another page in French and do the same with "biere". But imagine for a second that beer isn't called "beer" in other English-speaking nations. Imagine it's called "reeb". How do I correctly, semantically code an English-language page when different English-language users will be searching using a different string, but searching for the same thing.
HTML meta-tags were originally created for the purpose of embedding exactly such metadata into a webpage. But because of the SEO industry and the commercialization of the web, meta-tags like 'keywords' are no longer used by major search engines.
With all of the advances in page ranking algorithms and intelligent search robots over the years, there's really not much to do in terms of active 'search engine optimization' for legitimate websites. In today's search environment, all you have to do is optimize your site for your visitors, and it will automatically be optimize for searching.
So you can passively optimize your site's ranking by doing any(or all) of the following:
Use good spelling and writing etiquette (like not writing your entire site in caps or text-message-speak)
Format your pages using proper markup. (Title your document, mark your headings with H1/H2/etc., delimit your paragraphs, and so on and so forth.)
Abide by established web standards and write well-formed code.
Weed out broken links and make sure your site works properly.
Don't use pop-ups, cover your site with banner ads, or otherwise bombard visitors with advertising
Don't link to disreputable websites
Simply put, make your site as user-friendly and as accessible as possible. If your site is useful to visitors and provides valuable content, most major search engines like Google or Yahoo! are smart enough to rank it fairly. Your ranking may be modest at first. But if you're genuinely supplying quality content then, as your site becomes better established on the web, other sites will start linking to you, increasing your search ranking.
And if other webpages linking to your site use the various names & nicknames your product is referred to by, then your site will also be associated with those names/keywords (that's how Google Bombing works). Google also tracks synonymous search terms and is even smart enough to recommend related/alternative search terms in some cases.
On the other hand, if you're creating a spam site or the 10 millionth affiliate marketing website with the same exact products and content as the other 9,999,999 sites of the same exact nature, then expect your search engine ranking to be reasonably poor.
It's generally only websites with no original content and that provide no legitimate value to visitors that require active (black hat) SEO techniques to gain a decent ranking--polluting search results in the process. Otherwise, if you're actually building a useful website, then just optimize it for your visitors and let Google/Yahoo! do their job.
The anchor text of your inbound links is a lot more important than the tags you use. So try getting links to your page with both "beer" and "reeb". As long as you'll get enough links with both terms, you'll do well in SERPs, no matter the keywords you use in it.
One option is to localize pages for the different target regions you are interested.
If you use a local domain, google will give it priority on default searches on that country. When I hit www.google.com, it redirects me to www.google.com.mx, and any search I do tends to display high results from mexico domains. I actually have to hit a couple options, when I don't want that behavior.
I also think google has an option to map parts of the site to a region, so you can keep the single domain.
Update: Regarding the beer example, you can localize per country (which is what I mention above). Actually its not that of a special need, since english british and english US have their differences.
The talk has been language agnostic, but consider how .net handle resources. Lets say the current request is being processed for en-GB, and you look for a resource (i.e. a text, image, etc). It will first try to find the resource for the specific culture: en-GB, if it isn't found it will look under the more general en (and then in the default resource file).
The previous allows you to selectively localize what you really need on the more specific resource files. If you only need to localize the resources with the key beerName, you can just configure that on the specific languages and leave the rest.