Now, on-page factors have grown in complexity and importance.
First,
getting the page ranked; then getting click-through rate on your
listing: there are now some options and opportunities that might (oh
gawd) 'add value' and, well, someone else in your market surely will
deploy, so maybe it's worth taking a moment or three to ponder.
The
search engine listing itself is now wearing long trousers - Google has
experimented with extended snippets, which they seem to have withdrawn,
and they have now added links in snippets. For any given page this could
be good or bad, but in any case we get to decide, or at least
influence, whether to activate or suppress, based upon the way we handle
our page mark-up.
And then there's the panto villain of SEO
('He's Behind You!'): yes, folks its FLP, or First Link Priority, pretty
much forcing us to consider radical changes in mark-up to accommodate
search. Assuming you believe in that kind of thing.
Previously, SEO had only modest impact on the mark-up of the page; now, it can be extensive.
- Ranking
- Title Tag
- Meta Description
- Body Copy
Not a whole pile to say on that, I mean, obvious, right? Well, yes an no
- you'd be surprised about the misinformation that's out there. For the
record, yer onner, 69 characters - including spaces - for the Title,
156 characters - including spaces - for the Meta Description. Body Copy:
literate, informative and keyword-rich. Next up, after getting ranked,
is getting clicked...
- Click-through Rate
- Title Tag
- Meta Description
- Markup Order of Body Copy
The challenge here is that the advertisement that appears in search
results is not the one that we get to write. Instead, the search engine
writes it for us by finding the User's search expression in context
within our page copy. There are a number of things we can do to guide
the quality of the resulting listing and these will impact to what
extent ranking results in traffic and what portion of that traffic is
the right sort of traffic.
- Snippet Links
And just when you think you have that handled, Google creates new kinds
of snippets, ones that included links to anchors within your page. As a
searcher, I find these are really useful, almost a smaller version of
sitelinks but only for the single page that is ranking, not for the
entire site. Time will tell whether snippet links are better overall
than simply a longer text description; we shall see.
- First Link Priority
- Markup Order of Links
- Link stacking
And finally - and why deviate at this late stage in the game from the
Panto theme? - there's the Ugly Betty of them all: the cantankerous,
scheming and self-regarding feature that we shall refer to as, oh,
something vaguely scientific... uhm, oh, I have it now: 'first link
priority'. Dear Google, thanks so much, like SEO wasn't all CSI New York
as it was (I should point out that SEO CSI Miami is for those of you of
a sunnier disposition, self-intoxicated on the notion that SEO is,
like, a walk on a sun-kissed beach bordered by tall buildings of
gleaming glass, like a mouth full - or should that be a mouthful? - of
porcelain veneers).
On the plus side, if you can hoist
yourself on the petard of FLP, well, you might know something your
competitor doesn't know - you'll rank better - and that makes you better
at visibility voodoo.
John Hargaden is a senior search marketer and online acquisition
and communications professional with a strong commercial focus. John has
been at the heart of this rapidly evolving industry for, like, ages, as
Head of Search/Owner CEO of leading, full-service online sales and lead
generation agency
wevolution digital
