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Purpose

The point of the study was to analyze the characteristics of web pages at the top of the Google search engine results pages (SERPs).

What We Did

We randomly selected 100 keyphrases, typed them into Google and collected the URL’s of the first 5 results that showed up. The Firefox browser was used for all the searches. We were not logged into any Google products during the search phase.

The 100 keyphrases ranged from 2 word phrases up to 6 word phrases.  The first 5 results in the Google search results listings were chosen, giving us a total of 500 different web pages to collect data from.

We ignored all the Google Adwords ads. We also skipped image listings, shopping site sets, and news site sets.  We only analyzed actual web pages ranking #1 through #5 in the SERPs.

Here’s what we collected from each web page:

• Full URL
• Title tag
• Headline
• Number of subheadings
• Body copy word count
• Number of images in the body
• Number of videos in the body
• Number of referring domains to the web page (data from ahrefs.com)
• Social signals; Tweets, Facebook like, and Facebook shares (data from ahrefs.com)

We also analyzed the keyphrase the web page ranked high for in comparison with many of the factors listed above.… Continue Reading >>

Google definitely gives out manual penalties. This is not something new.

It sounds a little crazy with all the billions of sites on the internet that Google would ever manually look at any of them, but they do.

The thing is, they only do a manual review on the sites listed at the top of the search engines for fairly competitive keyphrases. So a site in one of the top 3 spots for ‘car insurance’ has a really good chance of getting manually reviewed. So this set of search engine results listings is probably manually reviewed:

A site at the top for ‘my favorite car insurance and why’ will probably never catch anyone’s attention.

And there’s all the stuff in between that may or may not ever be reviewed by someone on Google’s webspam team.

So there’s a limited number of sites that are ever manually reviewed.

Unless you’re actually good at SEO and go after phrases with some competition, you never need to worry about this (and may still not).

But, manual penalties are a real thing.

And there’s more to a manual penalty than just having your site de-indexed. You can have a manual penalty placed against your site where it’s still in the index, but it just doesn’t rank high for any keyphrases anymore.… Continue Reading >>

We’ve discussed on-site search engine optimization in great depth – including some of the different adjustments you can make to your webpages to make them more appealing to search engines – but these techniques are only half the battle.

Off-site optimization is just as important in getting your site ranked well in the search engines results. Off-site SEO techniques revolve around the links that point to your site from other webpages. These links back to your site are commonly called backlinks (or external links).

The thing is, if your site has no links pointing back to it from other sites, then it doesn’t look very popular.  Google wants the best sites ranking high. They believe very strongly that there’s a direct correlation between popularity and the best sites.

In fact, Google’s entire early algorithm was based on the idea of popularity (which was known as PageRank). Currently, PageRank is only one of many factors incorporated into their algorithm, but it’s still important.

You still need these external links.

Link building is hardly a precise art, as there are a number of factors that the search engines take into account when measuring the strength of the backlinks to your site. These include the number of links, the quality, the anchor text of the links, and all this in comparison with each other.… Continue Reading >>

As mentioned previously, on-site Search Engine Optimization (SEO) refers to the actions you take on your website to make your site appeal to the search engines. These include actions like the words you choose to use in the navigation links, meta tags, and the words within your content.

Here’s a screenshot that shows a thoughtful use of the keyphrase dog training. It’s in the headline, the content (even used as a hyperlink) and over on the navigation menu. This site was ranking very high for the phrase ‘dog training’ (which is competitive). So that shows they’re doing something right.

Meta tags are snippets of code you can include on your website to give the search engines more information on what your site is about. Visitors to your webpage won’t be able to see this information, but the search engine crawlers that scour your site will appreciate the tip off. Here’s an example of what this meta code looks like:

Alternatively, you don’t want to frustrate the search engine crawlers by bogging down your site with loads of pictures and flash animations. Search engines rely on the words and phrases on your site to get a feel for what it’s about, so that they know when to pull your site up in response to user search terms.… Continue Reading >>

As you explore the world of SEO, you’ll probably come across the phrases “keyword” or “keyword research” on more than one occasion. But what are keywords and why should you care about them?

Think about what happens when you go to a search engine like Google or Yahoo. If you’re looking for information on cruise deals for your next vacation, you might enter the word “cruises” into the search bar to find websites related to vacation deals. That word you entered is what’s referred to as a keyword. If you entered a string of words, say “best cruise deals”, you’ve entered a keyphrase into the search engine.

Searchers use keywords to find information on the internet.

The keyword or keyphrase tells the search engine what kind of results to bring back for you. Search engines scour the internet, recording the information they find on various sites around the web. When you enter the keyphrase “best cruise deals”, the search engines comb their databanks to find sites related to “best cruise deals”.

When you’re building a website, choosing the keywords and phrases to focus on is extremely important. You want to target the keywords people are actively searching for. But as you can imagine, some keywords are more competitive than others.… Continue Reading >>

SEO, which stands for Search Engine Optimization, refers to the wide variety of strategies used to make your website more appealing to the search engines in the hopes of drawing free traffic to your site.

Getting free search engine traffic is often called organic traffic, or natural search traffic. You don’t pay for it, and if you have the right mindset, you can continue to get large volumes of natural search traffic for years to come.

Unfortunately, when you first launch a website, you probably won’t have thousands of visitors pounding down your door, eating up your bandwidth, just to get a look at your content. When it comes to getting visitors to your website, you’ve got a few choices – two main ones include either paying for your traffic through pay-per-click advertising programs like Google Adwords or banner ads, or waiting around for free, organic traffic to find you through the search engines.

However, if all you do is launch your site and then sit around waiting for visitors, it could take weeks or months before the major search engines figure out that you’re even there at all, let alone send you any free traffic.

This is where SEO comes in.… Continue Reading >>

If you’ve done much of any reading on link building at all then you’ve probably seen people mention “nofollow” and “dofollow” links. But to the person who is new to all of this, it may be kind of confusing. So I’d like to help break it down for you.

When creating a link on a webpage using HTML, the standard code for that link is:

<a href=”http://www.yoursitehere.com”>Anchor Text</a>

This includes the HTML tag, the URL the link will be going to, the text that will be shown on the webpage for that link, and the closing HTML tag.

You’re able to add more HTML to the code above in order to tell the search engine spiders whether or not you want them to follow the link when crawling your website. You may be thinking … “Why wouldn’t I want the search engine spiders to see all of the links on my site?” This is a very valid concern, which I will address further down. But first, I’m going to show you how to modify the HTML in order to tell the search engine spiders to crawl a link or not.

To tell the spiders to crawl a link, you don’t have to do anything.… Continue Reading >>