Back in August Google first started piloting “Author information in search results” (Matt Cutts YouTube Videos 1 & 2) giving authors more prominence in SERPs

Here’s the how-to link – the original post by Google: Google Commandment #1,785,234,002

One of the final steps requires you to add the pubs you write for via the “Contributor to” link. The “Contributor to” link is not so easy to find so I embedded a screen grab of it here. Click the image for a larger version.

This should not take more than 15 minutes start to finish to set up.

It looks like Google is now also giving more favorable rankings to the Google+ profile accounts over other profile platforms in SERPs. More on that, a Techworld article expounding on a Danny Sullivan article.

To summarize all that – You need to get your profile up on Google+ ASAP!

After it’s set up with you’ve got your pic, pub links up, and your articles have your email address in them, (how that happens – see dev team) and Google waves their magic wand, your picture will pop up along side the search result, along with links to other articles you published, your Google+ profile, and social/sharing platforms, among other things.

Not only will you will be the coolest (and one of the most prominent) results in Google, but all your competing editors and authors will be very jealous. Do it for the bragging rights of increased traffic AND enhanced celebrity exposure.

You are going to have to get your email in your profile and that email address must appear in the post.  More spam – maybe. More web traffic – for sure.

There are other ways to comply but this might be the easiest for most companies. Either way you will need to involve your dev team.

And – You’ll need to get the dev teams on this soon so you are not the last one to the party.

How to Pitch Upper Management:
Push this deliverable hard with upper management as a high-value low-impact way to increase page views for existing and future website content. “Page views = sales boss!”

Get a meeting with the dev team, have them watch the Matt Cutts videos and read the full post on Google before.

How to Pitch the Dev Team:
You can tell the dev guys to think of Google as job security, if they don’t already realize this. “And our CMS should do this automatically so we are not bugging you every day to update our posts,” you’ll say to reinforce the benefit to prioritizing this project. Set a near-term deadline and make it happen.

Yes it’s just another thing that Google is making you do, but it is a must do – soon.

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Tom Lynch Categories: google, How To, Search Engine Optimization, Social Media, Web

To whom it may concern: Please stop calling companies and telling them you can save them over 85% on their AdWords spend. Please stop calling them and saying you are “SEO Certified by Google”. That’s right “SEO Certified by Google”. Google does not SEO certify anyone! If your company does not know the difference between SEO, SEM or PPC you don’t deserve to be in the business. Yes, and please stop calling.

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Tom Lynch Categories: Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Web

One of the most fun and valuable things we do as a company is training. I do the SEO training. I have worked with groups over 350 and as few as two.

Over the years, the sessions have been mostly skewed to publishers. And what publishers do is what everybody who wants to score well on search engines should do: Publish lots of content that people want to read. Sounds like a no-brainier but many companies either publish once and forget it or make editorial choices in a bubble that excludes external research. Research not only for topics and keyword popularity but the competition for each one.

The sessions are usually a full day and we cover everything from “is your site search engine friendly” to “how to select editorial” and “how to optimize an article”.

Check out these tools for help with the selection process: semrush.com, wordtracker.com, socialmention.com, https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal, and http://www.google.com/insights/search/

The selection processes should be based on where someone is in their life cycle of search.

Some Optimization Tips:

Keep your html titles under 65 characters, and meta descriptions under 150 characters including spaces & punctuation so they don’t get clipped off in search results.

Lead with the target keyword phrase in the html title – and get it into the meta description as well. The meta description will not bump your rankings but search engines often boldface the words that match the search and it helps your search results stand out.

Name your images-what-they-are.jpg or .gif or whatever file format you choose. The top search engines present images in search results and you will rank better not only for your page but the images may appear separately and help drive traffic to the site. Better then a 1234-unrelated-file-name.jpg

There are lots and lots of tactics. But none will have any impact if your site is not search engine friendly. To see if your site is indexed on Google you can either sign up for a Google Webmaster account or you can do a quick search on Google like this:

site:put-your-domain-name-here.com.

Use your company’s website url exactly as it appears entered after the : sign and then hit search. You will see what Google has in their index for your site.  If you see every page of your site there – good.  If not you need to find out why. Happy to help.

Feel free to hit me up with questions regarding this, the slides, or tools.

The good news it’s all about testing. You can test and learn. Your brain may hurt a little but it’s at least safe.

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Tom Lynch Categories: ePiphany Featured Story, How To, Search Engine Optimization

I had a blast giving a presentation at the Chicago Creative Collation last November. My 2-hour presentation “How to Translate Your Design Expertise into Amazing Websites” was enthusiastically received by about 20 graphic designers and creative professionals.

In the beginning of my presentation I covered some “Basics” of web design that I thought might make for a good blog post here. Here are some of my tips for print designers who are ready to take the leap into Web design.

It’s all about the pixels.
People who work on the Web measure in pixels, not centimeters, inches or points (font). To clearly communicate with the rest of your development team, be sure to reference distance and font sizes in pixels.

Always work in 72 dpi.
This is as high resolution as the web gets. You can work in a higher resolution, but it will only bloat file size and slow down your website.

Design sites to 984px wide or less.
900px is a bit safer, 800px is very safe. Though this width will likely increase over the next several years as monitors improve, right now about 95% of web users will be able to see the full width of your site as long as it is about 900px wide. To learn more about this and see real-time data about the width of browser sizes visit browsersize.googlelabs.com.

Plan on the “fold” for your website at about 450px tall.
The term “above the fold” comes from the newspaper world so it shouldn’t be an unfamiliar concept to most print designers. When web folks talk about “above the fold” we mean what can be seen without scrolling when someone first opens a site. Again, this height is slowly expanding as monitors improve and you can check in on current data at any time at browsersize.googlelabs.com.

Main Text should be no smaller than 12px.
Though this is not a hard and fast “rule,” in my experience, everytime I build a site for a client with text less than 12px font, they come back to me at some point and ask me to increase the size. This can degrade clarity, hierarchy and layout if it’s done after the design phase so my suggestion is just to start with 12px as your minimum font size and chose the size for headers, etc. off of that. (And if you were wondering, yes, on the web pt and px are the same.) Here is a link to a site that shows pt to px conversions: http://sureshjain.wordpress.com/2007/07/06/53/

There are a limited number of Web-safe fonts – stick to them.
Here is a list of the 13-15 web-safe fonts currently available to designers. If you go outside of this list, you will need to either specially code your site using a technique like sIFR which can greatly increase development time (and budget) or you can convert the text to images or Flash which is definitely not recommended for the main text on your site since it can have huge impact on Search Engine Optimization, accessibility to visually disabled users, and site load time.

Do Not Build Your Sites Entirely in Flash.
Though there are some great uses for Flash, like an animated header or a contained interactive element, a site built entirely in Flash is generally something you want to stay away from for several reasons. 1) It’s terrible for SEO – Yes, Google’s getting smarter about indexing some Flash sites, but HTML is still the way to go. 2)The entire site is “one page” – people can’t link to a specific page on the site. 3) iPhones won’t be able to see your site. Remember, many animations can be done through Javascript or HTML5.

Present Your Designs on a Screen, Not a Piece of Paper
Resist the urge to print out your designs to present them to a client. Colors are based in light, not pigment, so contrast is ruined. Size issues like balance and legibility become impossible to evaluate. I recommend exporting review documents as exactly sized, medium quality JPGs and if possible post them for review in an environment that shows the client the JPG in a browser window (Basecamp is great for this.)

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Katie Hawkey Categories: How To, Marketing, Search Engine Optimization

Another Google search gadget! Yes it is Google  Instant Previews.

“Click once on the magnifying glass in the search results to instantly see a preview of the web page.” Google says.

They even call out text on the page. This could very well be the death knell for doorway pages.   Pages just built for search engines using duplicate content or content strictly built to support a keyword strategy used to lure in unsuspecting surfers. Does anybody like these pages? Don’t you feel duped when you get there?

Finally you can see before you click through – no more,  “damn, not another page full of garbage looking for my email address, or worse is trying to load a virus on my machine”.

Yes other search engines came out with this first but Google’s is better.  I especially like the size of the preview and the text call out based on the text you entered in your search.

Website design “should” change to make your previews stand out…

BTW – getting a droid 2 tonight looking forward to loading it up with all the apps.

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Tom Lynch Categories: Gadget, google, Search Engine Optimization

Google Analytics (GA) is far and away the most popular free analytics tool currently available. And for good reason. However, all the data available through GA can be a bit overwhelming so we’re sharing the three most important analytics that you should be looking at and how those analytics affect the decisions you make for your website.

Visits and Unique Visitors​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

What It Measures: “Visits” measures the number of times your site has been visited during a specific period of time. “Unique Visitors” or sometimes “Absolute Unique Visitors” is the number of people who have visited your site during a specific time period. Visits will be equal to or (more often) greater than Unique Visitors because inevitably some visitors will visit your site more than once during your time frame.

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How to Use It: This can be the most satisfying (or disappointing) metric you look at. It answers the burning question, “How many people are coming to my site.” But don’t stop there. Compare the peaks in your visits with marketing efforts you are doing off site. Typically you’ll see a visible bump in traffic on days where you send out an eBlast, get a mention in a newspaper or blog, or perform some other promotional effort. Lining up your traffic with your marketing efforts will allow you to evaluate the effectiveness of your campaigns and help inform decisions on what marketing efforts are worth investing in in the future.

How to Improve It: Remember, there’s no such thing as foot traffic on the web. People won’t just stumble across your site while walking down the information super highway. Some popular ways to drive traffic to your website:

• Send out a marketing email
• Improve your sites performance in search engines like Google through Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
• Advertise on search engines or websites your customers/clients might frequent
• Get your site or company mentioned in the press
• Set up a Facebook or Twitter account with regular updates about your organization with links to your site.

Traffic Sources: Search Engines, Direct Traffic, Referring Sites

What It Measures: This is usually viewed as pie chart showing how people are getting to your site. The three main sources of traffic are:
Search Engines: Visitors who find your site by performing a search in Google or other search engine. They may have been searching for your company name, or they may have performed a general search on a string of words (called “keyword phrases“) that are mentioned on your site.
Direct Traffic: Visitors who either type in your website address into the URL bar or click a link from an email that takes them directly to your site.
Referring Sites: Visitors who get to your site by clicking a link from another site. For instance, if your company is mentioned in the Chicago Tribune and the Trib includes a link to your website in the online version of their article, you will be able to see exactly how many people came to your site by clicking the link in that article.

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How to Use It: This is another great way to see what sorts of promotional efforts are working. It can also give you the reality check on the impact of coverage in certain media. You may be ecstatic to find you were mentioned in a national publication, only to look at your stats and realize that the local industry newsletter actually drove three times more traffic to your site. This can help you focus your PR efforts in the future. Additionally, Facebook, Twitter and other social media show up in these stats so it’s a great way to monitor the impact of your social media outreach.

How to Improve It: To improve traffic from search engines consider hiring a search engine optimization (SEO) consultant to help you research keywords and optimize your site for those keywords. To improve traffic from referring sites, consider hiring a public relations consultant who can pitch stories to traditional and online media. You can also place ads on related websites and approach organizations you partner with about placing reciprocal links on each other’s sites.

Keywords

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What It Measures: The words people are typing into search engines like Google and finding your site. In the example above 45% of the traffic to the website chicagotap.org comes from the top 10 keywords listed above.

How to Use It: Use this report to gain insight into what visitors are looking for and to gauge the success of your SEO efforts. Let’s say you are considering retiring a product line, but when you look at the keywords, you realize that searches for the product name is bringing in 20% of your natural search traffic. Even if the product isn’t selling well, it may be bringing in traffic to your site that results in the sale of other products.

In the example above, ”Idella Reed Davis“ is number three on the report above. She is a tap dance teacher with Chicago Human Rhythm Project (CHRP). Knowing that she is by pulling in more traffic per month than any other teacher’s name may be an incentive for CHRP to continue to bring her back to teach classes and workshops.

Getting new visitors through search engines is most valuable when you are pulling in people who wouldn’t have found you any other way. If someone is searching for you company name, it’s important that you come up, but that’s not going to result in new customers. That’s only going to bring in people who have already heard of you. Look for strong keyword performance on words related to your core products or services – for instance, someone who finds the CHRP website by typing in ”Chicago Human Rhythm Project“ means they have already heard about the company. But someone who finds the CHRP website by typing in ”tap dance lessons“ is a completely new lead and the website is providing value as a marketing tool, not just a point of sales tool.

How to Improve It: There are many ways to improve keyword performance – that is the art and science of SEO. It’s a complicated process that should be highly customized to your company and business goals. We suggest you work with an SEO consultant (like Astek’s very own SEO guru, Tom Lynch). If you are looking to educate yourself on DIY methods, the Astek blog has many articles on this subject. Feel free to explore!

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Katie Hawkey Categories: ePiphany Featured Story, How To, Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Web

Attended SES Chicago this week. Checked out Brent’s (SEO Director Tribune) session on News Search Optimization. I’m the one with the hair. Not long for me though. SEO does this to a man.

Really good session, lots of tactical details – very informative stuff. For me - his session alone was worth the entire ticket price.

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Tom Lynch Categories: Search Engine Optimization

You must have noticed your Google searches bouncing around as you type. If you don’t know what’s been going on – it’s Google’s new way of presenting search results called Google Instant. Here’s a link to what’s it all about: http://www.google.com/instant/

Here’s what you need to know from an SEO perspective.  Rankings – It really changes nothing.  So in other words – “instant” vs. the old “hit enter” search provides the same results.

I have been able to produce anomalies from time to time where one is different than the other but the vast majority of searches I did in parallel came out exactly the same on multiple tries, (logged in or out of my Google accounts.)

Because results are being presented as you type – hence more results per user and each search, Google is saying you may see more impressions and potentially more clicks. Though we have not seen any significant differences with our clients’ analytics, in theory it makes sense.

Should I start optimizing for letters and partial words to get more people to my site earlier in the search processes? NO – please no.

Continue the best practices. Optimize for what the content is on the page.

And you have to use the words people search for in your pages. Make sure those words are what your page is about, and include the keywords in the html title and meta description too. (lots more to talk about than room for here)

Your html title and your meta description are typically what people see in search results. For Google – keep your html title under 65 characters – keep your meta description under 150 characters. Use a call to action in the title and/or the meta description. More than this  exceeds the majority of character display limits on Google.

You have to use the words people search for in your pages. (We can show you the best tools for this.) Make sure those words are what your page is about.

SEO is not a dark art but is a complex blend of understanding:

• human behavior
• how marketing messages need to be different on the web
• having a search engine friendly web site
• using the words people actually search for not only in your site,
• but in external links to your site as well

None of it happens in an instant, and there are no guarantees.

What works – Build authority for you site with a regular publishing schedule on your core topics. This needs to be supported with a selection of those topics based on what people are searching for – well if you want natural search traffic.

Sometimes breaking news or research evades exact matches with backward looking keyword research databases. At least organize, categorize or tag those articles in your website under a worthy category and directory.

No search for what you just wrote but have to publish?

Use similar events or past occurrences to choose the words that modify or describe the phrase. This tactic has been an effective strategy  in the past. Happy to demonstrate a few examples off line upon request.

So what does Google Instant mean to us all? A better user experience? You tell me. Maybe a faster hit on what you are looking for. Maybe we are now forced down a path already chose for us based on search and site traffic frequencies. Maybe it was where we were going already? There has been no significant change in traffic to our client sites that we can see. There is no change required  (today) in our opinion on how you should proceed with your SEO efforts.

Call or email us and we’d be happy to see if we can help get more traffic to your website, instant or otherwise.

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Tom Lynch Categories: google, Search Engine Optimization

To quickly load up search engine results with your content and a message of your choosing, I would have to recommend video…

Our task for one particular client was to get page one results fast. We had a very specific phrase to focus on, with actual search counts.

In less than a week, we were able to garner nearly all of the page one results with our targeted keyword phrase using video.

Though YouTube is the tubby in the space – surprisingly, we have seen the same video appear higher in Google search results from “other” video sharing sites. Sites like guba.com and clipshack.com are outranking YouTube on Google – go figure…

A recent news item for our targeted keyword phrase is the only thing beating us today. And given the opportunity with some new videos we could probably own that top spot again.

Not to get to too much into the tactics of the effort… but the video focused on one keyword phrase and one variation, along with a single word description further explaining what the video covered.

A lot has changed in the last two years – like YouTube’s auto closed captioning and auto time code  - with downloadable/editable transcripts/captions – and real time language translation options – to name a few… 

And though our contract completed shortly after the uploads, two years later those optimized videos still own four of the top five results.

Using multiple video sharing sites was crucial to the campaign’s success. We used a free tubemogal.com account to post the video to multiple video sharing sites at the same time.

See Andrew Crowe’s post on getting started with a video, and get your message out there!

This post was featured in ePiphany, Astek’s Monthly Newsletter |  Other ePiphany Articles

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Tom Lynch Categories: ePiphany Featured Story, Search Engine Optimization

Google is getting smarter and scarier all the time.  Now inserted at the top of regular search results you can find the “latest search results”.  Tweets, news, and Elvis sightings that someone might have posted even seconds ago.

To see it in action put in a Google search for: Coke, or Ford, or even Elvis Presley Lives. Then click “show options”, a new series of “options” will populate the left rail. Scroll down to “Any Time”, and click “Latest”.  A new page will load of all the latest stuff. And if it’s hot it you will start to see the news scroll by. And when aren’t Elvis sightings hot news!?

From an SEO perspective it’s a way to watch the conversation on Google and participate in real time. Twitter is probably the fastest way to get into the stream and make some noise if you choose.

Google put together a video on the new search feature. If you want more click the start button on the embedded video below.

Happy Birthday Elvis!

 This post was featured in ePiphany, Astek’s Monthly Newsletter |  Other ePiphany Articles 

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Tom Lynch Categories: ePiphany Featured Story, google, Search Engine Optimization, Social Media, Web