My site design has three rails: navigation on the left, user generated discussions in the center (liquid), and a primary editorial block in the right rail (no advertising). So, an article would be published by me and appear at the top of the right rail, and user comments would appear in the center rail.
I want search engines to see the right rail content as the primary content, and so the meta description for each page would be related to the right rail.
Is it possible to do this in an SEO friendly way?
[Note: an SEO consulting firm have implied to my boss that web crawlers only "care about the center rail", and if the meta information disagrees with center rail content they will ignore the page]
Search engines cannot see the page the way human users do. Search engines see just the html code of the page, so they cannot distinguish between left, center or right rails. They do, however, have a sense of were the header, the body and the footer of a page is.
When it comes to the body of a page, search engines tend to give more relevance to text which closer to the the top. So if you can have a block of text at the top of your html source, move it visually with CSS somewhere lower on the page, and still (probably) remain more relevant than other blocks of text.
However, there is no way to specify to search engines what your "primary content" of a page is. Search engines determine the relevancy of a page in relation to keywords based on a lot of different on-page signals, so you should focus on those.
As for the meta description, your boss should choose the SEO consulting firms more carefully, as what they recommended is actually a nonsense. Meta descriptions are only used (eventually) by Google (for example) to generate the snippet for your pages in search results. They have no value when in comes to rankings.
Here's two SEO facts regarding meta descriptions that come directly from Google: Seo Fact NO.3, Seo Fact NO.4
Positioning of visible content on a page is handled using CSS.
There's a number of different approaches available from using float to position:absolute etc. For SEO purposes, there's no single-best approach, as long as you have your article content appear closest to the <body> tag, before the other "rails" or "columns".
Related
I have read a little about this but could not find a definitive answer anywhere. So, I thought of asking this question here.
I am building a Travel Guide which has lots of information divided into tabs. Each tab has its own content and keywords which I would like to rank for in SEO. Here's a screenshot of what my structure will be:
Each tab has unique content with its own keywords,images,videos,etc. So, for example, I would like to rank well when people search for 'Top things to do in Bali' and 'best time to visit bali' and show that particular tab by means of anchored links. So, it will be example.com/bali.html#top-things and example.com/bali.html#best-time respectively.
Do anchored links have any SEO value? Will they even show up on search v/s a normal link. So, if I am trying to rank for the keyword Top things in Bali, which URL is better? example.com/bali.html#top-things or example.com/bali/top-things
Thanks for your help.
For a search engine, the anchors don't matter : Wikipedia uses them intensively, but I still haven't seen any link pointing to a specific anchored content from any SERP.
In a way, that's easy to understand : an anchor can be something like this :
<a name="my_anchor">My Anchor</a>
Or something like this, which is far more semantically right :
<anyHTMLTag id="anchor_name">my content here</anyHTMLTag>
Because an anchor can link to any id on the page.
Regarding your example, Google and other search engines will consider all of your content to be different paragraphs of the same page. If your purpose is to draw attention to a very specific zone of your page from the SERPs, that won't work.
Some years ago, when Google did not https encode their results page, a hook could have been used (Detecting the search query), but that's not the case anymore.
Interlinking is important part of SEO. Keep in mind while you creating Anchored make it in Heading tag that will be more effective. anchored text is use full to target Keywords that also important and It is easy to share your pages links.
The anchor link syntax for you website content will be equal to
<a href="" text="" target="_blank" > Your target keyword </a>
Select the target text from your content that you want to include anchor link.
Let says someone has 'legitimately' hidden content within a page.
To explain this further, imagine the following:
<div id="tab-one">This is the content inside tab one</div>
<div id="tab-two">This is the content inside tab two</div>
Tab one
Tab two
From an seo perspective, assuming that none of this is done to manipulate google. And in fact, "tab two" contains spam free, relevant data, how does this impact seo?
Will googlebot index, and conciser the 'hidden' content as part of the content of the page?
Will it use this content in the same way as though the content was "visible" on the page without the use of javacscript?
Thanks.
I don't believe there's an official Google response on this topic in the past, however, from experience I can tell you that Google will index the tabbed content just fine. You'll even see SEO traffic from the content. If you're site is fairly clean, I wouldn't worry about being flagged as having "hidden content", as long as the content is accessible by user action (e.g. clicking), and obviously clickable.
However, you'll want to consider this. Say for example, some of the content in a hidden tab is a product description such as "child safe". If a users is looking for "child safe products", and they arrive at your site through a search engine, they probably won't immediate see that information because they don't know it's buried behind a tab.
Most users don't spend a lot of time hunting, so to a user they might not find the content and bounce because they don't feel like they found the relevant information they were looking for. If you subscribe to the idea that Google and Bing use search query refinements as a search signal, this could potentially "harm" your SEO.
Personally, unless it's truly tertiary information, I wouldn't put it behind a tab unless crucial to the Ux. From my experience, users don't mind scrolling if the information is relevant ... but they tend to have "tab" blindness or only really interact with "hidden" elements when it's part of the navigation or already in a transactional flow.
p.s. An alternative is to use crawlable AJAX or pushState() to have the individual tabs indexed separately on their own URLs. But you'll want to be careful ... if you're rendering out the main content on the tab "pages", you might have a duplicate content concern. If it makes sense, you can potentially use the rel="next" and rel="prev" spec that Google released (but only supported by Google right now).
In Webmaster Tools you will find the option to Fetch as Google. There you can see just how Google is crawling the page. I've noticed some JavaScript carousel libraries are crawled, while others aren't. It's just a matter of how Google is able to read the JavaScript code.
As far as impact goes, it's not like all hidden content is bad. The content is still crawled (As you will see with the fetch). Now if there was an abundance of keyword-stuffed content, that would be susceptible to penalty.
Used correctly, it's definitely still beneficial.
The hidden content will be crawled, and this is not a problem for Google, many sites have this kind of menu. I suppose the hidden tabs are not keywords stuffed and useful for the users, so you shouldn't worry about this - it is useful for the user and googlebot!
I just found out that Google recently decided to start using their own "title" when they display their search results. Also, after checking Yahoo and Bing I saw that the way they are displaying their results are the same but in completely different way than Google.
I guess my question would be, if there is an actual "correct" way of adding titles to my pages in order for Google to display what I want them to and this way get the same results with Yahoo/Bing that are currently using the page's title as a search result (sometimes they pick up the first tag and use it as title).
Any recommendations or links to follow for more studying would be appreciated.
There's nothing you can really do about it. Google will choose what title to display based on criteria they have not made public. This usually is the page's title as found in the <title> tag but if Google feels a different title better summarizes the page's content they may choose to display something else.
You can try to change your page titles to better reflect the page's content and see if that helps.
Using optimal keyword prominency in meta tags according to guidelines... and Google will pick up your meta tags. See our news portal's source and metas (keywords: hírek, választás 2014, etc.): http://valasztas2014.hir24.hu/
do you know how google recovers the description of a website in their search results? is it the meta-description? the first paragraph?
Their algorithms aren't officially released to the public, but if there is a meta description tag, it takes that. Otherwise it generally depends on where the keywords lie within the body of the webpage. If someone is searching for "foo", a paragraph with foo in it will likely appear, with foo highlighted in bold.
Search Engines (including Google) crawl through the first introductory paragraph of the page or a post and takes that excerpt to put in the description when search results are shown. But there's a protection measure that one should take to be SEO friendly. If you are starting your page/post with an image, it negatively affects the SEO of that page because the search results are in text form and for that search engines won't understand the format of the image since they want a text description. In case of WordPress, use All IN One SEO Pack Plugin to manipulate the description if you are starting your post/page with an image.
i was wondering if anyone knows if there's a connection between what a navigation item is named and the page heading it goes to - does this have an impact on SEO?
so for example, if i had in my navigation menu an item called About Us, but when you click it you come to a page with the heading Learn Who We Are (i.e. wrapped in [h1] heading tags)
because there isn't an exact one-to-one match, is that a bad thing in terms of SEO?
No, not at all. In fact it can be beneficial in some cases because Google picks up the text used in links as keywords for that page. So in theory your page could appear in SERPs for the phrase 'About Us'.
If Google's algorithms decide that your 'learn who we are' page is not at all related to the phrase 'about us' then the phrase may not count much as keywords. But you won't be penalised or lose ranking.
Incidentally, keywords in links don't think it carry as much weight as they used to, because of Google Bombing.