SEO Press Review #14
This week’s press review focuses on how come Google’s algorithms have come and how the changes create new avenues for SEOs to reach out to a wider audience and drive traffic to your website from sources that didn’t exist before. These new approaches are at the heart of SEO and most of them are extremely useful when they get introduced first. Mainly because the market isn’t oversaturated with SEOs trying to get to the #1 spot.
1. Google is Rolling Out a Redesigned News Tab in Desktop Search Results
Google just announced a complete overhaul of its News tab in the SERP – it made numerous changes to the placement, font, and style of the news items, the most important change being the first few most prominent news stories being displayed first in a slide. This acts as a new element you have to consider when you’re optimizing a news article for Google’s search engine, it appears the top positions will start becoming more important than ever. The redesign is final and was officially announced, and it’ll be rolled out to everyone soon.
Read more: Google is Rolling Out a Redesigned News Tab in Desktop Search Results [searchenginejournal.com]
2. Google Showing More Related Search Boxes In Image Search
Google has gone full-throttle with their image recognition and analysis tools – although it would’ve been a pipe dream ten years ago, Google can now provide you with ‘similar images’ suggestion when you search by an image, in real time. Google has been testing this feature for quite a while, but it seems that there are finally satisfied enough to roll out the feature to the general public. This acts as a powerful sign of how much machine learning has come and how it is starting to be capable of completely astounding things. Just a decade ago, a machine would need hours to detect related images, and now, Google can do it in microseconds. It also opens up an avenue for SEO if an SEM can capitalize on the ‘related images’ of an often-searched image.
Read more: Google Showing More Related Search Boxes In Image Search [seroundtable.com]
3. Why an SEO Should Lead Your Website Migration
If you could think about the most difficult task of developing and managing a website, what would it be? The development? No, that hasn’t been true for a few years now. In fact, getting people to actually visit, interact, and return to your website is a much more difficult task now, and most site owners spend more money and time concerning themselves with that than development. That’s the main reason why you should consider letting an SEO agency handle your migration – an SEO agency is familiar with your content, your website structure, and your priorities – they know what it takes for your website to keep most of its visitors after a migration, and if you don’t want to start again from almost 0 visitors, an SEO agency is a natural choice. This article goes in detail with data about how an SEO agency is a superior choice, so it is useful for any site owner to read. It is also important for an SEO to read to understand the most important components of site migrations.
Read more: Why an SEO Should Lead Your Website Migration [searchenginewatch.com]
4. New Things I’ve Learned About Google Review Likes
When you’re managing a business, what do you typically care about? You might think about optimizing the website’s speed, creating a Google My Business Page for it, and even have some strategy to help the business gain more reviews on Google, but have you ever considered the like button on Google Reviews? A small and inconspicuous feature that has been around since 2016, it is something that almost no SEO guide mentions. Is that justified, however? Are the review likes really that useless? Well, a talented SEO from MOZ had exactly these questions, and they went out and conducted a small study talking to Google staff and analyzing multiple business’s Google review pages to reveal all the things that go into the like button. It is a fascinating study that reminds us how important the small stuff is in SEO, and how we should always strive to get it right.
Read more: New Things I’ve Learned About Google Review Likes [moz.com]
5. Top 6 WordPress Plugins to Make Your Site Mobile-Friendly
WordPress has been used to create around 40% of all the websites on the internet, and there are two main reasons for that:
- It’s extremely easy to use and there’s a large and vibrant community that is helpful and produces excellent plugins and extensions to make WordPress even better to use.
- WordPress has always been compatible with search engines, and developers could easily optimize their content and website to get at the top of Search Engine Result Pages.
These two features make it an excellent choice for people who care about SEO, and a lot of SEOs have been using this platform for more than a decade. There are dozens of plugins that are specifically designed to make your life as an SEO easier – be it reminding you about the meta title, measuring the quality of your content, helping you with your URL and many more things. This article shows you a glimpse of WordPress’s capabilities and mentions the 6 most useful SEO plugins. It’s useful for anyone using or thinking about using WordPress.
Read more: Top 6 WordPress Plugins to Make Your Site Mobile-Friendly [searchenginejournal.com]
6. Social buttons How to add and track them on your site
Social buttons are small buttons that are usually situated at the top or the bottom of your page that helps users easily share your website on social media. Most popular websites get around 40 to 60-percent of their traffic from social media – it is an important source of traffic that no SEO agency should ignore, and these buttons can act as a powerful and organic tool to drive traffic to your website. That’s why if you pay attention, you’ll see most websites have implemented it – this article is a guide on how you can accurately implement it, and how can you track how people interact with it so you can figure out its efficacy. It’s an excellent tutorial for people who are new to the social media optimization scene.
Read more: Social buttons How to add and track them on your site [yoast.com]
7. Search Engine Results: The Ten-Year Evolution
The SEO landscape is complex and ever-evolving – unlike other fields, SEO is a strange mix of computer science and marketing that doesn’t have a lot of solid theoretical foundation – the whole sector is tied to a few key players like Google, Facebook, and Microsoft, and most of the time changes happen just because one of those companies decides to change their approach. All of this makes getting into SEO and keeping up with it an extremely difficult job. This article looks back and analyzes how the SEO landscape has changed over the past decade – it is a fascinating read that gives us a unique outlook on the changing landscape that we might’ve not noticed getting lost in the minutiae of our day-to-day tasks.
Read more: Search Engine Results: The Ten-Year Evolution [searchenginewatch.com]
8. 11 Proven Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Website
SEO, in essence, is the art of creating a strategy that drives traffic to a particular website or brand – although it traditionally only applied to optimize your website for search engines, it now encompasses a lot of other complementary strategies that help you achieve that goal. This article is a great primer to learn about all the different and proven ways you can branch out and try and drive traffic to a website – it talks about 11 excellent ways of doing so, which includes things like:
- How writing guest posts is an excellent way to increase your site’s authority.
- Promoting content in relevant online communities to drive traffic from users that have a higher chance of being interested in your business.
- How to successfully collaborate with other brands and come up with a win-win situation resulting in a lot of new users for your website.
Read more: 11 Proven Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Website [ahrefs.com]
9. Google: Be Consistent. Use Either Slash Or No Slash After URL, Not Both.
If we’ve learned anything from following SEO news in the last two years, it is how important URL structure is. Most newcomers focus on content alone and don’t pay a lot of attention to their URLs, how they are written, how they are structured, and how consistent they are across their website. Web crawlers, however, pay disproportionate attention to them and pick up important clues about the quality and the relevance of the content from it. That’s why it is important to pay extra attention to them and choose texts that match a keyword with decent traffic. Google also tries to help webmasters with how they manage the URLs, and they often put out statements stating how to do it correctly. In their latest effort, some employees of Google came out and said it’s important to stay consistent with the use of the slash (/) after the URLs of your website.
Read more: Google: Be Consistent. Use Either Slash Or No Slash After URL, Not Both. [seroundtable.com]
Conclusion
This concludes this week’s roundup. The articles you should pay special attention to is the one discussing site migrations because it is becoming increasingly complex and you should be careful about it. The ten-year evolution of SEO is also an excellent retrospective look at the industry and how it has evolved and changed with the changing technological landscape.
