AseoHosting Blog

Year: 2011

  • Should You Worry About Your Site’s Layout?

    Should You Worry About Your Site’s Layout?

    That wily fox Matt Cutts once again set about the clucking SEOs this month with a Twitter announcement that Google were making changes to their algorithm focusing on page layout.

    Google uses aspects of page layout as one of the signals that determines SERP ranking. They are especially concerned that, all else being equal, they don’t rank pages highly when the ‘above the fold’ portion of the page does not contain useful content for visitors. What that generally means is that they would rather web site owners didn’t fill the part of the page that first appears to visitors with adverts and bury the content further down the page.

    Unfortunately, Google, with their usual lack of clarity, has failed to stipulate exactly what constitutes good content ‘above the fold’, but the common sense approach is usually best. Google tend to attempt to put themselves in the place of their users, and ask what is that user likely to find most useful. They may get that wrong fairly frequently, but absent any better data, this is probably the best approach for website owners too.

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  • Google Introduces Free Tag Management Service

    Google Introduces Free Tag Management Service

    Google have introduced a new tag management service that allows website owners to streamline the process of managing analytics, advertising, and conversion tags on their site.

    Anyone working in online marketing knows the challenges of managing code snippets needed for site performance tracking. These tags often require frequent tweaks or changes, and coordination between marketers and webmasters is not always smooth. (more…)

  • Avoiding Duplicate Content with Canonical Links.

    Avoiding Duplicate Content with Canonical Links.

    Duplicate content is a problem for search engines, and that makes it a problem for SEOs. Google  strongly dislikes including the same content more than once in search results, and if content exists in more than one place on a site, search engine algorithms have trouble determining which version they should include or exclude.

    They also have difficulty knowing where to assign link juice and authority. This confusion can lead to sites experiencing a loss of traffic and reduced SERP rankings. Therefore, the “rel=canonical” element intends to help search engines. It does this by telling them which page is “the page” for specific content.

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  • Resource Round-up: The SEO Stories You Need to Read in September

    Resource Round-up: The SEO Stories You Need to Read in September

    Keeping abreast of everything that’s happening in a vibrant and dynamic industries like SEO and inbound marketing is no easy task. So, this week, we’re pleased to offer our visitors the first of our monthly roundups of what you need to be reading in SEO, social media, hosting and web design.

    We hope you learn as much from reading it as we did when we compiled it.

    SEO and Inbound Marketing

    •  I see so many SEO guides floating around that advocate manually collecting all kinds of information, from contact information to broken links, and they almost always consist of digging around the internet for the information and copying and pasting…and copying and pasting…and copying and pasting.
    •  If you take some time to decode some of these fancy looking SEO acronyms, you may find that understanding internet marketing lingo isn’t as difficult as you think.
    • Author Rank: A Step-by-Step Guide to Dominating Search with Content Marketing – If you are a content marketer, blogger or writer, you’ll be happy to hear that there have been five recent SEO changes that will play to your strengths.
    • Blog Headline Writing Lessons from Mega-traffic Sites – What’s one of the most simple traffic building tools that even most top bloggers don’t use? Surprisingly, few bloggers take advantage of the ability to target a separate headline for people browsing the site and people searching via Google, Bing, etc.
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  • Will the Go Daddy Outage Affect Your SEO?

    Will the Go Daddy Outage Affect Your SEO?

    Light with 501 number
    HTTP 501

    Anyone who hasn’t been living under a rock in recent days will be aware that GoDaddy recently suffered an outage that left millions of its client’s websites inaccessible. While this sort of downtime will obviously affect a site’s traffic and therefore revenue, many people are asking whether it will have an effect on their SEO.

    The short answer to that question is no, probably not. Google generally isn’t happy when they find a site has disappeared from their index. However, they know problems happen. As long as these problems aren’t regular, a site’s SERP ranking likely won’t drop. Reliability is important. Therefore, a site that is often down will be ranked lower. But a short period of unavailability is unusual. It’s not a useful signal of a negative trend. (more…)

  • Nofollow Links Explained: The Good, The Bad & The SEO Truth

    Nofollow Links Explained: The Good, The Bad & The SEO Truth

    There’s been a fair bit of chatter in recent months about the value of nofollow links for SEO. Google considers nofollow links a naturalness signal when evaluating backlink profiles. Truth aside, every SEO should understand nofollow links. The key question: Are nofollow backlinks actually worth pursuing? (more…)

  • Brands: Advertising vs. Social Engagement

    Brands: Advertising vs. Social Engagement

    In the weeks following Facebook’s IPO, the Zuckerberg-led social network faced intense scrutiny. Many people expressed doubts about the financial viability of Facebook’s revenue model. This was especially true regarding its advertising service. For example, GM pulled their Facebook marketing campaign.

    Additionally, the music industry e-commerce startup Limited Run made an impact. They claimed that 80% of the clicks for their ads were (details omitted). Whether that complaint is accurate is still a matter of debate. Furthermore, a study from the Advertising Research Council made a claim. It stated that “blank” ads with no content were performing only 0.1% less well than regular ads.

    While this news is not good for Facebook’s future revenue, and businesses should think hard before spending their advertising budgets on Facebook’s paid ad platform, the real value of Facebook and social media generally was never through paid ads anyway

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  • Decoding Content Marketing: What You Need to Know

    Decoding Content Marketing: What You Need to Know

    It’s becoming increasingly clear that traditional advertising is not creating the levels of engagement that marketers might hope for. Consumers are conditioned to barely see banner advertising — assuming they haven’t installed an ad-blocker — and they are very sensitive and averse to content which they perceive to be biased towards selling.

    Content marketing is an alternative or complementary marketing method that aims to generate conversions in the long term by fostering brand loyalty and awareness, and demonstrating competence within a particular niche.

    Which simply providing content, be it text, audio, video, or even apps, that is of value to  clients and customers. Content marketing makes businesses into publishers. This blog post is an example of content marketing.

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  • How to Adapt to Google’s June/July Algorithm Shifts

    How to Adapt to Google’s June/July Algorithm Shifts

    Google didn’t release their usual algorithm update news last month, so this week we have a plethora of juicy updates to look at.

    Recently, Google has focused on three key SERP improvements:

    1. Cleaning up search result pages

    2. Enhancing Panda’s high-quality content detection

    3. Displaying more answers directly on results (reducing clicks to websites)

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  • See What Googlebot Sees: Fetch As Google.

    See What Googlebot Sees: Fetch As Google.

    A couple of weeks ago we looked at negative SEO and what you can do to protect your site. One of the techniques we mentioned was hacking. Competitors, upon gaining access to a site, may alter the content or add malware to pages in the hope that Google will delist or penalize a site. Hackers may also simply attempt to use a site to spread their malware without any particular intentions regarding SEO.

    We gave a number of suggestions for dealing such an intrusion, but often, after having received a warning from Google, it can be difficult to determine exactly what the Googlebot crawler is seeing.

    Hackers are adept at making a site appear perfectly normal to those who go directly to a page, while serving malware or undesirable keywords and hidden links to search engine crawlers and those who arrive at a site from a search engine. What you see when you visit a site is not necessarily what Googlebot is seeing.

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