A few days ago had a talk with a client that had an unexplainable issue: while googling for his company name, the google result has showing instead of the homepagethe sequence: “[CompanyName] Logo”.
What happened in fact:
the sequence “[CompanyName] Logo” was extracted from the alt tag of the logo
page titles all over the site were the same
page titles were very large and the [CompanyName] was used as a suffix
The recommandations that fixed the issue in a few days were:
Use unique titles on all the pages of the website
Use smaller page titles (up to 70 characters)
On the homepage use the company name as a prefix instead of a suffix and on all the others keep it as it was
On Webmaster World there is a pretty good thread showing a step by step guide on how to implement pagination for long articles (over 500-700 words) for SEO purposes.
Among the reasons you would want to do that:
Increase the volume of unique content
Increase the pageviews (if you are using a CPM advertising solution this would almost double your income)
Decrease the bouncerate on your website (call me paranoid but I bet the Google uses that as a quality factor in organic ranking).
Among the biggest issues with this, is how you handle comments. Basically you have to choose from 4 options:
Have the same comments on all the newly created pages (for wordpress i think this is the only available solution)
Have each part have its own comments (there is no plugin as far as i know for wordpress but in this case you can simply create a new post for each part and link them after you are done)
Have the comments separated from the content (similar to a forum, where the article title is the name of the thread)
Page 1 naturally enough uses the overall title of the article for both its title tag and header, and has a unique meta-description.
Every internal page then has its own unique title and header tag h1. These are based on the first SUB-head for that section of the article. This means more keyword research and writing of subheads than would normally be the case. If the article is considered as a whole, then an h2 tag would seem more accurate semantically. But Google looks at the semantic structure one URL at a time, not for the overall multi-URL article. Most pages also include internal subheads, and these are style as h2
On each internal page, there is also a “pre-head” that does use the article title from page 1 in a small font. This pre-head does not use a header tag of any kind, just a CSS style. This pre-head article title is at the top as a navigation cue for the user.
An additional navigation cue is that the unique page titles each begin with the numeral “2.” or “3.”
Each internal page also has a unique meta description, one that summarizes that page specifically, rather than summarizing the overall article.
Every page of the article links to every other page at the top and the bottom. None of this anemic “Back | Next” junk. There’s a complete page choice shown on everywhere – 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6| 7 – and there is also a centered link at the end of each page: Next: Linked title of the next page goes here
The linked numbers that are used as on-page navigation also include a title attribute that matches the title tag of the target page. I’m still not sure what a title attribute does for Google exactly, if anything, but the tool tip that it generates is a major aid for the reader of a long article.
Those navigation numbers are very clearly coded to show which page is active. And the nav number for the active page is NOT linked. We don’t want the user to click and end up right where they started, and we don’t want to “waste” a link that has no real function.
rel=”next” and rel=”prev” link tags are also included in the section h2
Last year, watching data from a few sites I came with a theory:
Every year, when the summer starts and traffic on the internet decreases, Google does a random shuffle of its main index. As usual in this cases webmasters panic a lot (especially those in the gray area of the SEO color spectrum) and start filling the forums: “Google has kicked me out what do I do know“. The answer is always the same: “Clean up your shady SEO fill a re inclusion report and pray“.
Through this, Google gets a lot of new spamming techniques in the summer, adjusts the algorithm and then:
Before the winter shopping season shuffles back to the old pre summer index
Hits hard the sites that match criteria reported during the summer
Crazy enough for you? Well if the answer is yes check out this thread :
Has anyone seen a change, from Friday, MayDay affected pages?
Some of my sites have recovered traffic
those who were hit on june 2, were major gainers on october 22
those who were unaffected on june 2, lost everything on october 22
Aaron has a new post on SEO Book, about the current algorithmic change made by Google in order to prepare for the upcoming shopping season. In the article he says:
they want to make SEO unpredictable & unreliable (which ultimately means less resources are spent on SEO & the results are overall less manipulated)
they want to force businesses (who just stocked up on inventory) to enter the AdWords game in a big way
Oh well, he has quite nailed it. From what I’ve seen and heard at IMTO 2010, this has already happen in Romania and more and more ex SEOs are joining the PPC battlefield.
This is somehow good for the ones that stay in the game, but in the long term it might turn into a fail for Google. I’m seeing on my clients more and more projects that not they are not optimized but they are a complete disaster from a search engine point of view.
In the end, only time will tell if this was a winning strategy.
An interesting coincidence is that on the day I held my presentation, Vladimir has also posted a nice post on his blog on the same topic along with a case study.
P.S. Details about the topics discussed you can find here (in romanian) and also a photo gallery.
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