SEO

The Google Mobile Friendly Update was launched on April 21^st 2015. The update is designed to address the fact that more and more people are browsing and searching on the web from their mobile devices. According to Google:

Starting April 21, we will be expanding our use of mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal. This change will affect mobile searches in all languages worldwide and will have a significant impact in our search results. Consequently, users will find it easier to get relevant, high quality search results that are optimized for their devices.

Brands Rank Higher Without Fulfilling Many Criteria Required Of Other Websites According To Searchmetrics US Google Ranking Factors 2014 Study

Yesterday, Joomla developers announced the immediate availability of Joomla 3.3. The newest Joomla CMS overhauls its approach to security, enables microdata for the first time and replaces MooTools-based JavaScript with jQuery equivalents. These new features make Joomla 3.3 the most secure, searchable and fastest-loading Joomla CMS yet.

It’s easy to fall foul of Google’s rules says founder of digital marketing software and service company

New York - January 30, 2014 - With Google cranking up its war on web spam in recent years, Searchmetrics, which operates an enterprise SEO platform, is warning that website owners – including many top online brands – may not be doing enough to guard against the risk of a Google penalty which could drastically reduce their organic search rankings, traffic and company value.

But ‘keyword domains’ are less important according to a comprehensive analysis of factors that correlate with ranking highly in Google US searches in 2013

Web pages that rank higher in Google searches tend to have more Google+ plus ones and Facebook shares. While having a relevant keyword in the web site domain name or web address now seems less closely linked with high rankings according to new research. And while pages with higher quality content rank better, top brand web pages apparently continue to automatically rank in top positions without obeying the same rules as other sites.

"Longer, richer pages are more expensive to create, but our data shows that as the quality of a page increases, its effective revenue decreases. There will have to be a pretty significant shift in traffic to higher quality pages to make them financially viable to create."

- Paul Edmonson, HubPages CEO, Interviewed in Google Panda Two Years Later: 5 Questions With HubPages CEO Paul Edmondson,  Search Engine Land, February 26, 2013

Search engine optimization (SEO) is defined as the process of affecting the visibility of a website or a web page in a search engine's "natural" or un-paid ("organic") search results. A variety of methods can increase the prominence of a webpage within the search results but as search engine providers are constantly tweaking their indexing algorithm website owners should review the SEO techniques they utilize for their own site.

Key Factors that Improve SEO Ranking

Following are some of the key optimization parameters that the author believes will contribute to the improved SEO Ranking:

During the Memorial weekend, I decided to pull the plug on the CMS related news feeds we were streaming into Planet CMS. One of CMS Report's biggest strengths has always been pointing people toward the right direction in their search for content management systems. Knowing that one site couldn't support all the stories that needed to be written about CMSs, we began to rely more heavily on using a news aggregator within our Drupal CMS to provide you the links and excerpts to articles written elsewhere. I did this all with good intentions, but Google apparently disagrees.

As an online marketer, I used to work in different environments, but since joining Foliovision, I spend virtually all my time on our clients’ content management systems. Some days ago, I logged into a completely different CMS after a long time. It didn’t look bad at first glance, but spending just a few minutes working with this interface was enough to see the striking difference between this CMS and our own; this one was really medieval! I am a marketer, certainly not a hard-boiled developer, and for the first time, I’ve summarized my thoughts about what makes a good CMS. These are the pillars of success but also the risks involved.

I. Low initial costs

The ocPortal development team is pleased to announce that ocPortal 7.1 has now entered beta.

ocPortal 7.1 brings full support for HTML5 and for the schema.org meta-data initiative that Google/Yahoo/Bing jointly announced on Thursday 2nd June. This article explains how we have received schema.org, and how we have implemented it into ocPortal.

We feel that schema.org is a very important project, and is perfectly aligned with the goals and nature of ocPortal, so we have scrambled to release a solid implementation (achieved within 3 days).

Not only should schema.org support enhance the Search Engine Optimization of ocPortal websites, it really opens up new interoperability possibilities. For example, look at how Microsoft have been using 'tiles' in  Windows Phone, and the recent Windows 8 demo. This is a great example of how semantic markup can be used to create rich interfaces from website data. Because ocPortal now provides this data automatically, in the standardized schema.org microdata format, ocPortal webmasters need not do anything to enable these kinds of interoperabilities.

Specifically, we have implemented the following into ocPortal from HTML5:

• Use of the XHTML5 doctype
• Use of HTML5 semantics tags: header, footer, aside, nav, article, time, output
• upgraded/changed HTML4 functionality that is no longer valid HTML5
• workarounds to make Internet Explorer display pages reliably when HTML5 tags are present
• (We already supported, and continue to support, HTML5 video)
• (We already supported, and continue to support, HTML5 drag and drop upload)

And the following from schema.org:

• WebPage (the default, and we properly support marking up elements such as breadcrumbs, and what the prominent navigation links are)
• ProfilePage (authors, member profiles)
• ContactPage (various contact blocks, support tickets)