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.
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I have added in the bottom of my html like this (just like how stackoverflow has it implemented):
<noscript>This site works best with Javascript is enabled</noscript>
but in one of my pages that has very little text, the text "Javascript is disabled" appears in Google search.
Is there a way to tell Google to avoid indexing this part? Or is there a better alternative instead of using <noscript> tag?
The issue is that Google often won't render Javascript. It can - but it often won't.
You either need to present a pre-rendered page or provide it with a meta description that accurately describes the content. Look up tags and how Google uses them to embellish it's search listings.
Other options like or can encourage Google from deviating from the provided description. However, a pre-rendered page for it to scrape is always more reliable.
I am making a blog with huge ammount of images, and one way to do it, is by using Flickr Gallery plugin, which provides a functional gallery or your albumbs, but the links aren't looking good (www.......5129512891.jpg), but they do have the proper alt tags (Red Carpet From Turkey).
So now I am wondering if I should stay with this Flickr gallery, because it eases my job thousand times, or I should look for a way to have both good link (www.......red-carpet-turkey.jpg) and an alt tag. (I am talking about a blog, primarily for images, not just here and there).
My goal is to appear in Google Images first, for example, when someone types "Red carpet from turkey", and click on images, I want my pictures to be first in the results.
So now I am wondering if I should stay with this Flickr gallery, because it eases my job thousand times, or I should look for a way to have both good link (www.......red-carpet-turkey.jpg) and an alt tag.
Google searches for keywords in the filename and in the alt tag for an image. It also searches relevancy information in the surrounding text (see here for image SEO - disclaimer I maintain that post).
My goal is to appear in Google Images first, for example, when someone types "Red carpet from turkey", and click on images, I want my pictures to be first in the results.
Then you want a relevant filename, alt tag and surrounding text. You must make sure the quality of the image is good (Google checks it for ranking). You can also create an image sitemap to help crawlers find your images.
Both of them are important for SEO score. Its important to set alt tags and a related name for the image. You have to decide if its profitable to change every image name or let them as they are.
Take care with the image size, it matters too.
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/
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".
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.