Google provides a substantial number of resources on its Webmaster Central Blog about what its algorithm is and is not looking for when returning search results. While Google’s overall goal — providing results users find most helpful — has not changed, the process for finding these results is constantly being tweaked.
Your firm could try to keep up with every algorithm change in an ongoing struggle to be most relevant. But the effort is likely futile and…
Read More
Links have always been an important factor in Google’s algorithm. One of Google’s original innovations, which distinguished it from other search engines in the 1990s, was associating the text of a link with both the page the link is on and the page to which it links. The relationship between the two pages was unique at the time; most search engines only associated the text of the link with the page it was on.
Read More
Google’s Authorship project has officially ended. Last week webmaster trends analyst John Mueller announced in a Google+ post that Google will no longer show authorship information in search results. After three years of use, Google has stopped supporting authorship markup and removed all authorship capabilities from webmaster tools.
A read of the post’s comments eliminates any doubt about the decision. Mueller repeatedly stated that Google is not processing any authorship data — this is not “just a…
Read More
Google’s algorithm uses a myriad of factors to determine what content to show users in search results. The algorithm is tweaked constantly in an effort to provide results that answer a searcher’s question in the best possible manner.
However powerful Google’s algorithm may be, it is not 100 percent responsible for evaluating the quality of pages and sites. Google employs human raters, known as its search quality team, to manually evaluate pages and assign page quality (PQ) rankings from…
Read More
Content marketing will continue to get a lot of attention as websites adjust to Google’s new Hummingbird algorithm, which was quietly rolled out in August and formally announced at the end of September. This release is the first entirely new rewrite of the company’s algorithm since 2001, and it changes the way Google looks at keywords. Hummingbird is a move toward a more contextual, semantic search; that is, rather…
Attorney marketing is tricky in many ways. You must sell a service that only a certain percentage of the population will ever need, and you do not have the same ability to manufacture demand as large retail companies like Nike or Apple. Attorneys are also restricted in many different ways by a variety of recommendations unique to each state bar’s interpretation of best marketing practices. Lawyers must even approach marketing…
Google Authorship is a method for attaching a specific author to online content so that the author can be associated with his or her work across the Internet, no matter where it is published. Google advertises Authorship as a good way to validate content, help get discovered and attract more readers.
The little pictures you see next to some search results are displayed because of Authorship. If you see those…
Read More
Google is giving small business owners a chance to have their sites personally reviewed by engineers on Google’s webspam team. If you have a smaller site that you think should be ranking better against your larger competitors, this is your chance to plead you case.
Distinguished Engineer Matt Cutts put out the call on Twitter for owners of smaller websites to submit their information via a simple…
Read More
This is part 3 in a series of posts about how to write content that people actually want to read and share. Part 1, which you can read here, focused on legal marketing article titles. Part 2 focused on email subject lines and can be found here.
Capturing readers’ attention and delivering content that ranks well in search results are quickly becoming the same thing. Search engines…
Read More
Research released in Monetate’s Ecommerce Quarterly (EQ) report for Q1 2013 reveals that email is still an important marketing tool for businesses. According to data collected during the first quarter of this year, email is actually a larger driver of conversion than search.
The study examined over 500 million shopping experiences and found that email marketing converted more than 3 percent of the time, while search came in…
Read More