Wordpress SEO Expert

Improve your Google ranking with Peter Mahoney, 20+ years SEO & Wordpress experience

Google mobile search

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Google mobile search Wordpress SEO ExpertOne of things I’ve talked about a lot in the past couple of years has been Google’s move toward “mobile friendliness”. Last year they made a small change that meant sites that are mobile friendly would appear higher in search results when someone was looking from a mobile device.

Well they’ve really increased this as a search signal – sites that are NOT mobile friendly will now have a very hard time competing with those that are.

They’ve also updated their mobile friendliness test to make it more restrictive—it’s worth retesting your sites to make sure they still pass. Of course the best test is always the information displayed within Google Search Console which reports on the entire site, not just one page at a time.

The extra good news for those of you with mobile responsive sites is that any of your competitors who do not have mobile friendly sites will now suffer in their rankings.

One related point, there is a growing body of data that suggests this change also affects (in a smaller capacity) sites from normal desktops – that Google is prioritising sites that are mobile friendly on searches from ALL devices.

They haven’t confirmed that yet, so it’s not certain, but I am keeping an eye on it.

If you don’t have a responsive site for mobile devices yet and you don’t want to get caught out, please contact me and I can help make you a new, fully mobile complaint one.

Google descriptions

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I’m often asked about how to change the description Google shows in their search results. (This post applies in part to many search engines, but Google in particular.)

The answer is slightly more complicated than any of us might like. The old response (going back a decade or more) was to just change your meta description tag. Those used to be picked up verbatim.

But these days Google isn’t beholden to anything we provide (with the exception perhaps of your own domain name). They can pick and choose what they think will be most useful to their users. They don’t have to use the description we provide–they can choose to ignore it and create their own.

If we want to give our descriptions the best possible chance of being picked up, they need to conform to the following:
  • be between 150-159 characters*
  • be in sentence structure
  • not include too many commas or ands – basically avoid things that make it look like it could be a list of keywords
  • ideally, it would be a whole sentence or two taken directly from the text of the page
  • in fact, really ideally it would be the first sentence or two from the page

and on top of all that of course it needs to fit our own needs of being informative and enticing people to visit the site.

Enjoy.

* = Normally 130-160 (or some other variant within that range, but usually ending with 160) is touted as acceptable. Recent data suggests in fact 160 may be too long, many pages with 160 characters exactly are finding their descriptions are being truncated before the last word with a ellipses (…) added, making it look unfinished. So 159 seems the current practical maximum.

Buying backlinks 2016

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It’s been a while since I wrote a post about backlinks. But it’s always worth re-iterating this.

In short, my stance on these has only become stronger, because Google has become even more clever.

The shortest answer to the backlink question is that having backlinks is very beneficial.

But the longer answer is actually more important. Google has become incredibly adept at working out which backlinks are natural (i.e., someone liked your site and linked to it) as opposed to bought, meaning you paid for them.

Natural backlinks help your SEO, generally speaking. As for manipulated ones, once Google realises what you’ve done (which can take a few months) they will usually hurt your rank, often quite drastically.

There are a lot of people selling what they called “safe” links, or “Google friendly links”. In truth Google is very clear that any attempt to buy or create links is contrary to their ethos and something they will try to find and penalise you for.

And they are very good at it.

The reason people still sell them is a quirk of Google’s algorithm. When Google first see new links come in for a site they will almost always improve that sites ranking. It’s not until they’ve seen the patterns emerge and they realise they were faked links that they penalise you.

So when someone first buys links they usually do see an improvement, and feel happy with the service that made them. Months later when their site takes a hit—it’s too late.

So, are backlinks good? Absolutely. Should you try to have them created on your behalf? Absolutely not.

External links to and from your site

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A leaking glass more than half-full

Links pointing in to your site are really important for SEO. Google has started suggesting they may be less and less important, and give it 5-7 years I think they’ll be one of the lesser important SEO criteria (in favour of RankBrain and Artificial Intelligence tools that can really determine how quality the site and it’s contents are.). But for now, external links from other sites are still important.

But, well, let’s think of links in and out like a glass of water being filled up and poured out.

  • For each link pointing to your site, lets fill up the glass a little. As it gets fuller it gets more SEO authority, which is great.
  • But for each link out, we can empty the glass a bit too.

So if for every link you have in you also have one out, the glass actually ends up empty*.

People used to make sites called “link traps” that didn’t link externally to anything, trying to full their glass right up. But as you’d expect Google got wise to this technique, and started to penalise sites if they did this—it’s contrary to the idea of a well-formed world wide web, and Google wants to help steer the web to be as useful as possible.

So it’s important to have some links out. I usually recommend a ratio of 4/1 – for every four links in, have one link out. That does vary based on a couple of factors, but it’s a good rule of thumb.

The glass fills faster than it empties, so Google is happy, and we are too.

* – important note, this is a very simplistic metaphor. Not all links are created equal, so if you have a link to your site from the BBC homepage, and a link out to your friend’s Etsy shop, you’d still end up with more water in the glass because in that case the link in has more SEO authority than the page you’re linking to. But because most sites aren’t in that position (most sites will have links in and out from sites swimming with them in a similar depth in the pool of link-juice; but I’ve used enough liquid-based similes for one day), it’s still a useful analogy.

3 Approaches to PPC Advertising

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I don’t actually offer PPC advertising services (Pay per click). I’m very specialised at what I do already, but clients do regularly ask me for advice garnered from 18 years experience across a variety of technologies.

So I do have some thoughts to share with you.

One very effective technique with PPC is to target what is known as a “spread” of search queries and phrases. That’s based on making the most of the three different “tracks” people take when planning PPC campaigns.

  1. Many people make the mistake of just targeting the most popular searches, which of course is a valid technique but places them firmly, exclusively, in a very competitive market. It also costs a lot more to run campaigns of this nature.
  2. Conversely some people will try to do the opposite, target only the less common searches to save themselves money spent on the campaign, but of course they see a lot less traffic.
  3. There is a third-road, which is trying to find searches with a statistically slightly higher popularity, but lower competition. However, the vast nature of Google Adwords and other PPC markets tends to even these “gaps” out pretty quickly, so even when they can be found the gap is very narrow.

I prefer to approach these campaigns as a spread, to include some targets from all three of these categories. That way you achieve a good mix of results, financial outlay, and it gives you greater scope to track the success of your campaigns and decide which of these might be worth higher future investment.

Basically, you get more options, more data and therefore in the long run a much more strategic and lucrative approach.

Google’s RankBrain and SEO

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Google has a new update for us. Called “RankBrain”, in its most basic sense it’s an attempt by Google to run AI (Artificial Intelligence) as a way of working out how useful a site is to any given query.

One example Google has given for how it affects things, is this search query:

What’s the title of the consumer at the highest level of a food chain

Obviously that’s not the most well structured question, but a lot of searches aren’t that carefully thought out.

The point of the example is the word “consumer”. In different contexts it can mean different things, and RankBrain is intended to help match searches with the most relevant results; understanding the context.

It doesn’t have a huge effect on how I would structure a site and its contents for SEO though—fortunately because my advice for SEO has always fit in very nicely with Google’s overall ethos, changes to their algorithm usually strengthen my clients’ SEO.

But it is worth being aware that Google is definitively not just “pattern matching”; counting keywords in your content. They’re trying to read it like a human being would—so keep writing for a human audience when you’re adding content.

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