Countless times I’ve talked with prospects and I ask them, “What do you hope to achieve with your website?” More often than not, they just stare at me confused. It’s almost like they didn’t realize they needed to have a purpose. So let me give you some ideas on what types of direction your website can have.

1. Make money directly from your website.

This generally comes from selling products online or selling advertising space (AdSense, text links, etc).

2. Promote your brand.

If you have a brand image that people are going to be searching for, you likely already have a website, so most small businesses aren’t in this category.

3. Customers want/need your website.

This is where I see the biggest need for small businesses. If you have customers asking you about a website, email, and looking for your website/address online, it’s time for a website with purpose.

If you’re in the third category and wanting to get your website online because of pressure from customers, before doing anything you need to determine what success will be.

Do you want a good looking informational website? This will give customers info about your company, history, staff, location, hours of operation and phone/email/contact info.

Do you want to start selling your products online? Have you done keyword research? Do you sell better/cheaper/smaller/faster (Unique Selling Position) products than your competition? Figure out these answers and determine when you will consider your website a success. Move that direction.

Now let’s look at your website. Who created your website? Does this person have any clue about on-site content, page titles, sitemaps, internal nofollow (for junk pages) or LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing)? If this is all Greek to you, talk to a professional.

So now you have your website online and you’re ready to see your site live on the internet. You go to Google and type your keyword, but you don’t find your website. In order for your website to show up in the search engine result pages (SERPs) you’ll need to build links to your website. Links are like votes, and each link tells the search engines that your site is worthwhile and should show up in the SERPs for a specific term.

There are many ways to build links, do it yourself or outsourcing. If you decide to do it yourself, you must realize that it’s a long and tedious process.

If you decided to do it yourself, here is a tip.

Grab low hanging fruit first – You can buy a few links without getting penalized (What? You don’t know about penalties?). You can buy links at a few big directories like Best of the Web and Ezilon Local Web Directory. These sites offer you a link based on your location which is good for search engines because it shows them geographically where your business is.

If you decide to outsource link building, here are questions to ask.

1. What specifically will you do for our company?
2. What kind of time frame are we looking at?
3. When will we begin to see results?
4. Why canve achieved?

Don’t make the decision to get your website online lightly. Most small businesses get a website online and don’t make changes for years, so get it right the first time!

Brandon Hopkins is a freelance link builder and Madera website designer. Contact him if you want to discuss web design or link building.

Does Your Website Have Direction and Purpose? is a post from: SEOAly - offering affordable small business website design, SEO Audit and Keyword Research services.

Just like how other modes of marketing tools need some forms of monitoring or measuring tools to analyze their effectiveness, video marketing needs some yardstick to grade its performance, too. This is where “Video Analytics” comes in. Video analytics is a tool that is used to measure the actual effectiveness of your video marketing campaigns on the internet. It is a grading system that can measure all the parameters required for analyzing the reach and impact of your videos. After all, everybody likes to see returns on their investments. The same applies to video marketing strategies. Video analytics helps you to study the viewer patterns, their responses, number of views, geographical viewership, impact, and also the results of your video marketing method.

Basically, video analytics works on streaming videos, and can get you results on the following metrics. The start and end times of your videos, pre-roll and post-roll advertisement metrics, time played in seconds, negative and positive consumption metrics, and core content analytics. Geographical response in terms of who watches your videos from which regions are also analyzed and recorded. YouTube has a video analytics tool called “YouTube Insight” that can help you analyze the popularity of your videos in relation to other videos, whether your videos are reaching your target audience, how much time people spend on your videos, and also the rate at which your videos reach peak viewership figures.

YouTube has become a separate search engine unto itself, and most video marketing strategies are directed at YouTube these days. However, the importance of other sites including social networking sites in helping you with video marketing campaigns cannot be undermined. Having to upload your videos on all the sites that your customers or peers frequent, one by one, is very difficult. Sites like www.tubemogul.com help you with this. TubeMogul can be the single point of entry for your videos. You can upload your videos here, and have your videos posted on all the video sharing sites of your choice. TubeMogul also has a powerful video analytics tool that analyzes viewership frequency and geographical viewership.

By using video analytics tools such as the ones above, you can know precisely who is watching your videos and for how long. You’ll know if your target customers are viewing your videos, and if your videos are not reaching your target audience, you can analyze the data, and change your video marketing strategies accordingly. Just as how Google analytics has been an effective tool for analyzing the results of your SEO campaigns, video analytics is just as effective a tool to measure and improve your VSEO strategies.

About The Author: Ryan Sammy is a Social Media Analyst for Search & Social.

Video SEO Analytics is a post from: SEOAly - offering affordable small business website design, SEO Audit and Keyword Research services.

The information contained within many a website SEO audit is a confusing mix of technical jargon and a laundry list of problems with very little information that you, as the small business owner, can take action on. If the audit states the site is suffering from canonical URL issues, poor internal link structure, duplicate content problems, keyword cannibalization, etc., what does all of that mean to you? If you’re like most small business owners, it may as well be written in Chinese. Many SEOs create these audits specifically to result in your hiring them to resolve the issues for you. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this practice, but it’s important that you understand that to be the case.

Let’s face it…not all small business owners are in a position to pay thousands of dollars to optimize their websites. Does that mean they should abandon all hope, throw their hands up in frustration and resign themselves to perpetually poor performance in the organic search results? Absolutely not. What it DOES mean is that where to spend marketing dollars and what to invest in SEO efforts is essential. If you’re among most small business owners, you don’t have a lot of free time, but you have more time to spend these days than money. For you, choosing the right SEO audit – one that will provide you with more than just a laundry list of problems – is very important.

What Will You Do After The SEO Audit – Have A Basic Plan

Have you stopped to think about what you intend to do with the information contained within the SEO audit? If you haven’t, don’t have an audit done – yet. There is a LOT more to consider when deciding who to hire to do your audit than price. Audits can range in price from a few hundred dollars to several thousand dollars. Before investing a dime of your small business marketing budget on a website audit, you need to have some idea what you intend to do with what you learn from it. If you spend $2,000 on an audit, how much of your budget will then be left to put toward actually fixing the site’s problems? If your answer is, “nothing”, you need to find a more affordable SEO audit.

Is your plan to hire the company that conducted the audit to resolve the issues? Do you intend to have the site’s original designer address the issues? Are you going to fix the problems yourself? Your goals, what you hope to learn and your future plans for resolving problems once they are identified are all important things to take into consideration BEFORE deciding who will audit your site. Not taking these things into consideration can cost you a LOT of time and money. The only thing worse than avoiding SEO audits is choosing the wrong one. If the audit doesn’t ultimately result in the necessary changes being made, it’s a complete waste of money.

Resolving On-Site SEO Issues – Understanding Your Options

You don’t HAVE to hire SEOs or SEO companies to improve your site’s organic SEO performance. If you have the flexibility within your marketing budget to contract a reputable SEO or hire an SEO professional to handle optimization for you in-house, that’s fantastic – and is obviously the optimal solution. I suggest you stop wasting your time reading this and do so immediately. That isn’t, however, a realistic option for many small business owners facing today’s economic challenges and shrinking marketing budgets.

The truth is that there are many on-site SEO tasks that can be tackled by designers, developers, or even by YOU – the small business website owner. While there are numerous things to consider in a comprehensive optimization effort, resolving basic on-site SEO issues is a huge step in the right direction toward improving your site’s search engine friendliness and organic SEO performance. That said, HUGE mistakes can be made if you or your designer aren’t careful or aren’t provided with the right information.

Let’s be clear: if you’re going to rely on whomever designed the site initially to resolve the issues, you should assume they know little to nothing about SEO. Why? If they knew much about building a search engine friendly site, they likely would have done so from the get-go and the site wouldn’t suffer from basic issues like unoptimized titles, poor META tag relevancy, lack of text navigation, etc.

That said, if you intend to rely on your designer or developer to resolve the issues, be prepared to tell them exactly what the issues are and provide them with information about how to go about fixing it. Many designers and developers claim to understand SEO, but more often than not this simply isn’t true. In this case, the usual “laundry list” SEO audits won’t cut the mustard.

Knowing the site doesn’t have an adequate internal link structure won’t be enough for the typical designer or developer to know what to do next. Telling them to fix the keyword cannibalization issues won’t be enough to ensure that it actually gets done. And if YOU don’t have a basic understanding of what keyword cannibalization is, you won’t know where to begin to check to see if the issues have been taken care of.

Not only will they (or you) need to be told what’s wrong, but – more importantly – what is involved in resolving those issues, some of which may be specific to an individual page and some of which may be site-wide issues that will need to be fixed on every page throughout the site. Unless the SEO audit helps create an understanding of not only what must be changed, but how and why it is important, someone who doesn’t already understand SEO will find it useless.

Website Audits Are A First Step – Not “THE” Solution

Think of a website audit as a diagnosis, not a solution to your website’s problems. Just like fatigue, fainting or a fever are indications to your doctor that something is amiss with your health, a site that performs poorly in an organic search is merely a symptom of the website’s underlying problems. An audit is a diagnostic tool. The treatment program, i.e. the overall SEO strategy, begins to take shape once the specific problems have been identified.

The right audit will help you better understand what aspects of the strategy you can carry out yourself and what is best tackled only by an SEO professional. Choosing the right SEO Audit – like choosing the right doctor – is an important first step toward reaching your goals. The most important thing to understand about any SEO effort is that it cannot be approached as a simple, one-time “project”. Successful SEO is an ongoing process. Websites that perform well in the organic search results are constantly monitored and changes continue to be made on an ongoing basis in order to maintain consistent, long-term success.

Choosing The Website Audit That Is Best For YOUR Needs is a post from: SEOAly - offering affordable small business website design, SEO Audit and Keyword Research services.

For those who aren’t familiar with canonical URL issues, also referred to as url canonicalization (and sometimes “canonical home page issues” – which is technically incorrect as it does not just apply to the home page), put simply it is having the same page show up on multiple URLs inadvertently – not to be confused with purposely having multiple pages that contain the same text content.

If, for instance, your home page is accessible at both www.domain.com and domain.com, your site is suffering from canonical URL issues. In the worst case scenario, some pages are accessible at up to 6 or 7 different URLs…or more.

What URLs Are Being Linked To

While the duplicate content created by canonical URL issues may or may not have a negative impact on ranking, one thing is certain: it DOES have an impact on the link equity of the page. What does that mean? Well, in short, if the same page can be accessed using two, three, four or more URLs, it means each of those URLs could be bookmarked or shared on a variety of social media outlets or linked to by other websites.

Let’s say that 100 sites link to your home page, but your home page is accessible at www.domain.com, domain.com, www.domain.com/index.html and domain.com/index.html – all of which contain the same useful, and clearly popular content, based on 100 sites linking to it. Now, let’s say that 25 of those sites link to the URL www.domain.com, 25 others link to domain.com, another 25 to www.domain.com/index.html, and the last 25 to domain.com/index.html.

All of the links ultimately serve up the same content, so it doesn’t make any difference…right? WRONG! Instead of the home page being given credit for having 100 links, those four separate URLs are considered individual pages by the search engines and each is given credit for having only 25 links – even though the links ultimately lead a user to the same content. DOH! In a world controlled by Google and PageRank, the number of external links pointing to an individual URL can have an enormous impact on ranking.

What About Duplicate Content?

While some were put at ease by Google’s post back in September, entitled “Demystifying the Duplicate Content Penalty“, some in the search marketing industry still remain convinced that duplicate content issues can hurt a page’s ranking in the search results – myself included. I, and many of my search marketing colleagues, have enough experience to understand that leaving Google to figure things out for themselves and determining which URL should be the preferred URL in the search results is like playing Russian roulette – a point that I elaborated on in a previous post, “Duplicate Content – Did Google Do A 180?“.

The Solution: A 301 Redirect

Creating a 301 redirect is somewhat technical and involves making changes to the .htaccess file in the root directory of your domain, so most small business owners aren’t comfortable creating or modifying the file themselves. This is generally something that is best undertaken by an IT professional. That said, here is the redirect code that should be placed within the .htaccess file on (provided your server is running Apache with mod_rewrite enabled):

NOTE: this is the 301 rewrite code for a server running Apache – if your server is not running Apache, the redirect code is likely different from what is included above. This is yet another reason that creating a 301 redirect by modifying the .htaccess file is often tackled by an IT professional.

A 301 redirect points the browser to a single, preferred URL – the typical choice is www.domain.com. That means that if someone were to follow a link that pointed to domain.com, www.domain.com/index.html, or domain.com/index.html it will be redirected to www.domain.com automatically.

The biggest advantage to creating a 301 redirect is that existing links to any of the variations of that URL will continue to pass “link juice” – meaning you don’t have to inform the sites that may have linked to one of the newly redirected URLs of the change and there is no risk of losing the link juice being passed by those links.

Referring back to the previous example, adding a 301 redirect for domain.com, www.domain.com/index.html and domain.com/index.html will result in links to those URLs being recognized as links to www.domain.com, so www.domain.com will receive credit for all 100 links, rather than 25 links being attributed to each of four individual URLs. Problem solved!

Canonical URL Issues and Link Equity is a post from: SEOAly - offering affordable small business website design, SEO Audit and Keyword Research services.

Whether you’ve already hired someone to optimize your small business website or you’re just entertaining the notion, SEO audits can help to ensure that your marketing dollars are being spent wisely. Every day it seems as though there are hundreds more companies looking to make a quick buck by charging you for search engine optimization whether they know anything about SEO or not. If they don’t, I’m sure you’d prefer to know now rather than later…right?

SEO Audits Equal Peace of Mind

An SEO audit is a sure-fire way to determine whether your site is following the search engines’ accepted best practices. Unfortunately what you don’t know can really hurt you. SEO audits help to identify the issues that may be causing your site to perform poorly, as well as helping to discover if you’ve been wasting precious marketing dollars on an SEO scam.

The unpleasant truth is that there are an inordinate number of companies out there that sell search engine optimization services with no real understanding of how to properly optimize a website for long term success in the search results. Contrary to the claims of many a search marketing charlatan, there is no “quick & easy” solution for optimizing a website. There is no way to guarantee a #1 ranking in Google. There is no method for achieving a page one ranking in 7 days and keeping that page one ranking for long. Optimizing a site takes time and real work. Simply implementing the on-page SEO basics can be a time consuming endeavor, depending on how well your site your was built initially.

Many companies will charge for SEO services with absolutely no understanding of how search marketing has changed over the past couple of years or the direction its continued evolution will likely take. Website designers and development firms are often the worst offenders. Keeping up to date with the search marketing industry requires dedication and ongoing training. In the last year alone search engine optimization strategies have begun to incorporate Social Media campaigns as an integral part of the process of driving traffic to a site. Why? Because that is the direction that search marketing is moving. If you’re working with a firm that isn’t aware of that, you’re at a huge disadvantage and probably wasting your marketing dollars. The fact of the matter is that SEO is incredibly involved. Actually understanding SEO is a full time job in and of itself.

Bad SEO Is Worse Than No SEO

Many small business website owners trust their optimization strategy to a company they know little or nothing about. Are you one of them? What does the company optimizing your site actually know about SEO? Do they even understand the importance of basics – like how title lengths and what should be included within them? What tactics are being used in the optimization of your site? Do you know? When the future of your small business is at stake, it is better to be safe than sorry.

Are You Already the Victim of an SEO Scam?

An SEO audit can help you learn more about how well your site has been optimized and whether or not your SEO firm even understands the basics of on-page SEO. There is a lot more to SEO than the on-page basics – but I can all but guarantee that if they don’t take the time to do the basics, they likely know little or nothing about any of the many other aspects of SEO either. There are no super secret, proprietary or magic tactics that any one company has exclusive access to that can guarantee top rankings in the search engines. There are, however, questionable tactics – such as participating in link farms and purchasing links – that can be used to manipulate the search engines’ algorithms. Those tactics will ultimately result in a domain being banned from the search engines altogether. Many a small business website has suffered that fate due to the negligence and malicious intent of SEO charlatans. Don’t let that happen to you.

If the success of your small business depends upon potential customers finding your site in the search results, nothing is more important than finding a reputable company or individual to optimize your site. The tactics and strategies employed by your SEO can do more harm than good if Google’s Webmaster Guidelines are being violated. And SEO audit can help you to identify these issues before your site is penalized. Even if there is no risk of a ban, simply understanding where your existing site falls short and incorporating SEO best practices can help your site perform better in the organic search results and bring a lot more visitors to your small business website – often resulting in higher sales and greater profits.

Can SEO Audits Help Small Business Websites? is a post from: SEOAly - offering affordable small business website design, SEO Audit and Keyword Research services.

Calling it a “penalty” vs. a “filter” is nothing more than semantics.  Stating that there is no such thing as a “duplicate content penalty” is Google’s feeble attempt to make it seem as though they aren’t unfairly penalizing individual URLs in their self-appointed role policing the Internet.  The fact of the matter is that it doesn’t matter whether a page suffers from an actual “penalty” or not.  If it is “filtered out” of the results for having content that is too similar to another page already listed in the index, does it really matter if it’s technically referred to as a “penalty” or a “filter”?  The ultimate result is the same – people will be able to more easily find one page than another.  Period.

I completely understand Google’s goal in eliminating duplicate content from their search results.  Imagine what SERPs would look like, taking into consideration the number of cookie-cutter, affiliate websites in existence today, if duplicate content weren’t factored into a site’s ranking?  Part of any search engine’s goal, Google included, is to provide its users with relevant and unique information.  If searching for the term “weight loss supplements” resulted 100 identical Herbalife sites, each with a different URL and the exact same information, how reliable would you believe those results to be?  There is a reason duplicate content is frowned upon…and it should be.

It appears that Google, at least in this latest official post, is referring specifically to inadvertent and non-malicious duplicate content within a given site.  I have suspected for some time that this sort of duplicate content has a low level of impact on a site’s ranking.  Think, for example, about the number of WordPress sites that rank highly for competitive search terms.  Many of those sites contain sidebars that are identical on every page.  If that sort of duplicate content were penalized…or, uh…excuse me, if that sort of duplicate content were to trigger Google’s “filters”, that would likely have a negative impact on the ranking of each page.  That hasn’t been my experience.

What about duplicate content from other sites (i.e. scraped content)?  How does Google determine whether or not a site that scrapes content is malicious?  In my opinion, stealing my intellectual property and regurgitating it on your own site as if you created it IS malicious under any circumstances and should be penalized accordingly.  Google apparently doesn’t agree, as illustrated by a number of documented experiences with scraper sites outranking the original source due in large part to having a higher PR than the site where the information was originally published.

Google doesn’t do as good a job at this as they’d like to believe.  Many a webmaster, SEO and search marketing guru has weighed in on the issue and the consensus, at least from what I’ve read, is pretty clear:  duplicate content, regardless of its source, can have a negative impact on ranking and DON’T LET GOOGLE FIGURE STUFF OUT ON THEIR OWN!  These posts seem to reiterate that it is important to put forth a modicum of effort to address what is within your control when it comes to the issue of duplicate content within your own site:

http://searchengineland.com/080915-121927.php
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-pagerank-play-doh/5504/
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-advice-url-canonicalization/
http://www.sugarrae.com/be-a-normalizer-a-c14n-exterminator/
http://janeandrobot.com/post/canonical-url-canonicalization-domain.aspx
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/canonicalization-update/

I mean, seriously – are all of these experts full of crap?  Matt Cutts included?  I’d venture to say that they’re not…and preventing duplicate content issues from occuring in the first place is likely the best option for anyone concerned about driving traffic to a site via Google’s organic search results.  As for duplicate content from another site…I think we all know there is little, if anything, that can truly be done about that and we have no choice but to leave it to Google to sort out those issues on their own.

Google likes to toot their own horn and proclaim that they’ve “got it covered”, but the fact of the matter is that the more you leave to Google’s bots to “figure out” the more time must be spent doing so…meaning greater resources and server load.  Why?  Why not just make things as clean and simple as possible?  Does this recent clarification by Google mean that we should no longer concern ourselves with resolving a site’s canonical homepage issues?  Does it mean that it’s no longer necessary to restrict bot access to printer friendly versions of pages?  Does it mean that multiple URLs resolving with the same content will be ignored, but have no negative impact on the ranking of the preferred URL?  No…I don’t think their claim to have a handle on duplicate content issues means any of that.

What it does mean is that Google is, as always, making every effort to improve the experience for its users – with or without consideration for the impact to webmasters.  They will likely always error on the side of caution when it comes to preventing SPAM and other malicious activity within search results.  To a certain extent, that is for the good of all…provided that Google recognizes the disconnect between what they claim to be true vs. the real-world experiences of many SEOs in dealing with duplicate content issues to this point.

If duplicate content wasn’t factored into ranking, the SERPs would be dominated by a large number of identical affiliate sites and little else in some queries.  “Penalty” or not, there is a definitive reason that a search for “Herbalife” doesn’t result in finding Herbalife’s thousands of identical, cookie-cutter affiliate websites…and I believe at least part of that reason to be duplicate content.  Don’t piss on my leg and then tell me it’s raining, Google!  Give me a break!

See what others within the industry are saying on this issue at Search Engine Roundtable and Sphinn.

Duplicate Content – Did Google Do A 180? is a post from: SEOAly - offering affordable small business website design, SEO Audit and Keyword Research services.

I officially started this test on 09/24, using Rank Checker to run an initial analysis.  Check out the results, should you so desire.  At the time the report was run, the site had one <h1> located within the header.  All other paragraph headings were <h6> and that had been the case for several weeks prior to beginning the “test”.

After running Rank Checker, I adjusted the headings on the site’s home page to include the <h1> in the header (unchanged), remaining paragraph headings were adjusted to include <h2> and <h3>, rather than <h6> as before.  I used CSS to maintain an appropriate font size, style and color within the content of the page.  No other changes were made to the page content and/or site structure.

I will be interested to see if headings have any impact on the ranking of the homepage whatsoever.  Some still believe that headings have an impact on ranking, but some believe headings to be an antiquated aspect of on-site SEO.  Having used an established and indexed domain, as well as a page with content that is relatively static, should ultimately offer some insight as to whether or not headings play into the ranking of a page.

In the meantime, I welcome anyone with similar documented testing on the use of heading tags to share your experiences here!  I’d like to get more feedback on this issue, as there appears to be a great deal of confusion and/or disagreement on the potential impact of headings among search marketing experts these days!

The Jury Is Still Out On Headings… is a post from: SEOAly - offering affordable small business website design, SEO Audit and Keyword Research services.

At that time, it was my understanding that NOSNIPPET would allow me to better control what appears as the description within Google’s SERPs.  I assumed Google would automatically default back to the description META tag itself.  I was wrong.  Wrong…wrong…wrong.  What NOSNIPPET caused Google to do in my case was to show no description of the page at all – opting instead only to show the page title.  Upon realizing this (on August 15th…shortly before writing the original post) I promptly removed all NOSNIPPET arguments from all pages.  Testing…isn’t that we we SEOs do?  I guess that’s what they mean by “trial & error”.  ;)

Here is the result of my having removed the NOSNIPPET argument from my robots META tag:

As you can see, the pages are now appearing with the appropriate descriptions as they should have been initially.  And as they likely would have been  if I’d just left it alone in the first place.  My goal to begin with was to control something that hadn’t even become a problem.  I’ve always been the type to attempt to anticipate a problem and prevent it from occurring…I’m very proactive in nature.  At least in this case, my proactivity caused a problem that may never have occurred in the first place.  Lesson learned.

It was important that I test the NOSNIPPET argument at some point, but I likely should have done a bit more research on it’s original intent prior to doing so.  Now that I know what it does, or at least what it did in this case, I can’t imagine a reason for wanting to use it.  I can’t think of a page worth listing in the index that wouldn’t benefit from having a corresponding description.  Why would anyone want a page listed in the index without a description?  And if there is no ultimate goal of increasing click-through rates, why not just NOINDEX the page and keep it out of the SERPs altogether.

I’d love to get some feedback on the legitimate use of NOSNIPPET and any thoughts on the logic behind having a page listed in the SERPs with just a title and no description!  Did I mention that I have removed the nofollow commands from my post comments?  To dissuade spammers, you do have a leave a certain number of comments before the NOFOLLOW is removed…but it is a low number and I know you’ll all understand.  :)

Please feel free to discuss away!  ;)

Final Results of NOSNIPPET Testing is a post from: SEOAly - offering affordable small business website design, SEO Audit and Keyword Research services.

Todd Friesen (a.k.a. Oilman) has since informed me that the nosnippet argument instructs Google not to show a description in the SERPs at all…and that appears to be confirmed by at least some of the results above.  It doesn’t, however, explain why some pages/posts appear with the META description and others appear with nothing at all, despite all pages/posts having included the nosnippet argument when they were indexed.

I have since removed all of the nosnippet arguments from all pages of SEOAly to see how long it takes Google to update the info in their index.  I will also be interested to see if they elect to use the description META tags I have created for each page/post or simply choose their own random text to display.  Equally confusing is the fact that ALL pages of SEOAly previously included the nosnippet tag…yet, as you can see in the image above, some results DO include descriptions – and the text is clearly what is included within the description META tags themselves.  A little consistency…that’s all I ask, Google!

On the flip side, before fully understanding the apparent outcome of using a nosnippet tag, I also decided to use it for our Welcome Home Pet Sitting website.  I hoped it would help me better control the information included in the SERPs and thereby increase the click through rates to our site.  As illustrated by the image below, the results of using nosnippet on that site weren’t exactly what I had anticipated…the results are also measurably different than what has occurred with SEOAly.  Nonetheless, nosnippet did function as I believed it would for the other static pages of the site, allowing me to achieve the goal of having a modicum of control over what potential clients learn about us solely from SERPs.

As you can see, despite the use of the nosnippet argument on the home page, Google elected to generate the SERP description for that page automatically based on the page text – much to my dismay!  The second result in the image above, one of two blog articles I have written for that site, shows no description at all.  The second blog entry (result 7 above) shows the actual META description of the post, as do the rest of the static pages of the site – all of which included the nosnippet argument when they were indexed.  Those results are what led me to believe that my theory regarding a nosnippet argument resulting in Google defaulting to the META description to be correct.  It now appears my theory clearly wasn’t correct.  I now don’t have a clue why anyone would want to use nosnippet at all, if the intended result is having no description included in the SERPs…

Prior to my incorporating the nosnippet argument into Welcome Home’s pages, Google was randomly generating the description for all pages of the site, despite the existence of a unique description META tag on each page.  That is what prompted me to test the use of nosnippet in the first place.  Initially I got the results I expected – Google replaced the randomly generated SERP descriptions with the text included within the description META tag itself – they did NOT eliminate the SERP description altogether.  “Sweet…”, I thought…”theory confirmed”.  Uh, yeah…not so much, it appears.  I’ve also since removed the nosnippet tag from Welcome Home’s site to see how things shake out without it.

Despite the issues I’m trying to resolve in fully understanding the purpose of the nosnippet argument, BIG kudos to Danny at SEOmoz for including that on his SEO Cheat Sheet.

Unexpected Results Using NOSNIPPET is a post from: SEOAly - offering affordable small business website design, SEO Audit and Keyword Research services.

Some of the powers that be were supposedly informed by “someone with a great deal more knowledge and experience in the field of SEO…” than I that headings don’t impact ranking and are “an old SEO trick”.  I disagree whole-heartedly, but haven’t really done enough long-term testing on multiple sites to back my claims up with supporting data.  The sad part is that he doesn’t have supporting evidence either, but apparently his “reputation” provides him with enough authority to not have to support his contentions with actual proof.  It certainly made me question his commitment to the aspects of on-page SEO and wonder if he’s mostly a link whore.

Headings Just Make Sense

Just the theory behind paragraph headings themselves speaks to the very core of SEO…usability.  Paragraph headings are a short and sweet summary of the text content below it.  They naturally lend themselves to the inclusion of the search terms targeted by the content that follows.  Since we all know that keyword density itself is a myth and that the positioning of keywords within the content is what is important, but what about headings? It only seems natural that extra “weight” would be given to whatever terms the search engines find within heading tags.

One would also have to assume that to a certain extent LSI would demand that primary terms be identified clearly – based in part on their position within the context of the page content.  Headings seem like a natural, user-friendly way to communicate the focus of the text information included within a website page to algorithms, as well as users.  Just like internal linking improves a user’s ability to navigate to the information they desire, headings improve a user’s ability to scan content and locate the specific information they need within a given page.  Right?

Using Multiple Heading Tags

I’ve used multiple H1, H2 and H3 tags on a single page without any noticible decline in ranking.  On the other hand, I’ve come across a number of sources that indicate using each of them only once on a single page is optimal.  I have decided to let a test page ride for 30 days with multiple headings and determine where the ranking ends up.  I’ll then modify it to include just one H1, H2 and H3 tag to see what impact, if any, it has on the ranking.  I may then remove the headings from the same page altogether to see what, if any, difference that makes.  I guess that will help me answer the question regarding the importance of headings for myself.

In the meantime, I’d love to get some feedback regarding other’s experiences and opinions regarding H1, H2 and H3 tags.  Important?  Not important?  Old SEO Trick?  An essential element of on-page SEO?  You tell me!  My experience lends itself to support the argument that they are “important” and “an essential element of on-page SEO”, but I’m still technically a rookie…I need some industry vets to weigh in here.

How Important Are Headings These Days? is a post from: SEOAly - offering affordable small business website design, SEO Audit and Keyword Research services.