Importance of H1 Tag in SEO

 As search engine algorithms continue to evolve a range of elements, both on and off page, experience shifts in their import as a ranking factor. Elements that were once significant ranking factors have lost some of their power on search engine performance in the modern day landscape. Moreover, as more and more new ranking factors are introduced, the impact of any one factor is reduced.

The H1 tag has long been an example of an important ranking factor and important signal to search engines as to what a page of content is about. The proportion of the H1’s authority on rankings compared to the overall picture has diminished over time, but is still an important ranking factor to many of the top minds in the SEO industry. This is illustrated by Moz’s bi-yearly survey on search engine ranking factors. 

Based on the opinions of 120 leading search marketers, the latest survey (conducted in 2013) ranked page authority as the most important ranking factor with a relative score of 0.39. Keyword usage in the H1 tag received a score of 0.12. This places the H1 tag in the bottom half of ranking factors, but nonetheless still a factor.

H1 Effect on Other Ranking Factors

While keyword fame is still an important ranking factor, whether it is within the H1 or simply highlighted at the top of the page, there is another level to the consequence of the H1 tag on organic search performance. A page’s skill to effectively engage users is another way Google organizes its search results. The bounce rate is arguably the most significant engagement metric as calculated by Google’s algorithm. Technology reporter Steven Levy was granted access to Google’s headquarters for his book In the Plex.

 According to the book, Google’s engineers recognized bounce rates of search results as a signal of quality or lack thereof. If a search engine user does not return to a search results page after clicking on an individual result, this is the strongest signal to Google that the user was happy with the result. instead, if a user quickly returned to a search engine results page after clicking a result, the page will be identified to be a poor result and can therefore be demoted in rankings.

The Hummingbird viewpoint

The Google Hummingbird algorithm update, which aims to offer a positive user experience, opens up a great opportunity for optimizing an H1 tag. A key feature of the Hummingbird algorithm is Google’s drive and ability to look past the keywords in a search query and pull out the user’s intent. By understanding the search intent behind a target keyword query, an H1 can be crafted to speak directly to that intent. If Google agrees with your interpretation of the user’s intent and it is effectively communicated in the H1 tag, this can certainly lead to a ranking promotion.

In order to position a content piece as an answer to a user’s query, it is good practice to format the H1 tag as a question, and answer that question in the body of the page. Since the launch of Hummingbird, I have taken note of an influx of top search results containing a question in the H1 tag. Although this is not a scientific observation, it is reinforced by Google’s knowledge graph returning a question based on a short-tail search query, such as “allergy symptoms”.

 In order to have some great, Hummingbird-optimized H1 tags, try to understand what a user may be asking when they are searching for a keyword the page is targeting and format that question on the page with H1 tags.

All in all, when focusing on on-page optimization in 2014, it is absolutely still valuable to spend some time and thought on the H1 tag. With an H1 optimized for the 2014 SEO landscape, you will be providing a positive experience to your users and still receiving the added advantage of improved positioning in search engine results.

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Google Webmaster Tools To attach JavaScript Debugging Tool

Google reported on their Webmaster Central Blog that they will be introduction a new tool in the next few days to help users better understand how Google renders their JavaScript-coded website.

This new tool is designed to let webmasters know whether or not Google is running into difficulties with crawling or indexing their website due to the way JavaScript has been implemented.

Google says they have been making improvements in the way JavaScript is viewed by Googlebot. Previously, Google was only looking at raw text elements and weren’t able to understand what a browser would see when running JavaScript.
This means that Google wasn’t able to return precious content rendered in JavaScript to searchers.

To correct this problem, Google has been improving the way they carry out JavaScript:
We have been slowly improving how we do this for some time. In the past few months, our indexing system has been rendering a substantial number of web pages more like an average user’s browser with JavaScript turned on.

To help out site owners, Google offers the following solutions to potential issues that Googlebot runs into with JavaScript.

•    If resources like JavaScript or CSS in divide files are blocked (say, with robots.txt) so that Googlebot can’t retrieve them, our indexing systems won’t be able to see your site like an average user. We recommend allowing Googlebot to retrieve JavaScript and CSS so that your content can be indexed better. This is especially significant for mobile websites, where external resources like CSS and JavaScript help our algorithms understand that the pages are optimized for mobile.

•    If your web server is unable to handle the volume of crawl requests for resources, it may have a negative crash on our capability to render your pages. If you’d like to ensure that your pages can be rendered by Google, make sure your servers are able to handle crawl requests for resources.

•    It’s always a good idea to have your site degrade elegantly. This will help users enjoy your content even if their browser doesn’t have companionable JavaScript implementations. It will also help visitors with JavaScript disabled or off, as well as search engines that can’t execute JavaScript yet.

•    Sometimes the JavaScript may be too complex or arcane for us to execute, in which case we can’t render the page fully and precisely.

•    Some JavaScript removes content from the page rather than adding, which prevents us from indexing the content.
If you’re anxious that your site may be impacted by any of the above issues, look forward to Google’s JavaScript debugging tool to be launched in the “coming days.”

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How Content Curation May enhance Your power

Analyzing the source of your traffic is a defining characteristic of content curation. continuously monitor the curated and shared content to learn how to make it effective.

Why Content Curation?

The aim audience receives a concentrated form of information without wasting sorting out through tons of content.

Content Curation is NOT Content Marketing

The content “world” is crack in two sides working towards the same goal. There shouldn’t be any confusion between curation and content marketing. The goals and methods are diverse and should not be blended into one big SEO mixer. There are some major differences between curatorial intent and creating brand awareness, links, and sympathizers through curatorial techniques.

How to Manage Large Amounts of Fresh Content

It’s no question a content curator needs to have so many behaviors given the fact that there aren’t many people who can handle the amount of content that’s created every day. Ranging from twitter posts to composite guides, if you want to be successful at curating, you need to manage all this data. It may seem like an overwhelming job. Below, I’m going to give you some tips on handling large amounts of fresh content efficiently.

Real Time Content Duration

1. Identify Your Target Audience’s Content Needs

T he foundation for a successful content curation career is learning who is your target audience. Tailor content especially for the people who are actually interested in the subject. Your audience’s tastes and interests fundamentally decide what content you should curate. If they don’t like what you post, the content might end up being useless data in the sea of billions of information on the internet.

2. Develop a Fresh Content Framework

You want to identify what social media networks and platforms your audience likes to follow. Those are the places you’ll want to share the curated content. In the end, you need to continuously look for hot topics that your audience currently talks about. Nothing is more engaging than fresh content that is currently on the front page of every site.

3. Real Time Duration

It’s okay to curate and create evergreen content that’s of interest to your target audience even if it’s not really fresh. But a common denominator to all people, no matter the niche is curating news. That’s what gets the attention of people and makes them discuss and share. You need to deliver fresh information and you have to deliver it as fast as you can.

4. Write or Share?

If you’re on the path of becoming a content curator or you’re already one, you need to know you have two choices. You can choose to share, where you’re going to just take the information and forward it without altering. This takes you less time and the information travels faster. And of course there’s the harder path, where you’ll need to filter and feather the content a bit before posting it. 

A curatorial method is different from the creation process or the marketing process. The intent is the same, only you also want to build a standing of being a useful source of information.

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Google announced Panda 4.0

Google announced that it’s rolling out Panda 4.0, the most recent upgrade to the spidering and ranking system that the company uses in its search engine. The reason for the fear will be that it is, as with earlier versions, aimed at cutting out the low level and low quality pages from the engine’s search results. 

But that low level end of the web is accurately and precisely about creating low quality pages that then turn up in the search results. The whole game can be seen as a way in which market opposition acts very much like evolution does:

Google’s Matt Cutts announced on Twitter TWTR -0.06% that they have released version 4.0 of the Google Panda algorithm.

Google’s Panda algorithm is designed to avoid sites with poor quality content from working their way into Google’s top search results.

It was Matt Ridley who popularized the idea that progress is rather like the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland. It’s essential to run ever faster in order to stand still. The point being that the various vermin which attack any life form or species do themselves get better at doing so over the generations. Not by any method of planning of course, it’s just that there’s random alteration and those that acquire a useful such mutation, one that allows them to attack a host more efficiently, go on to have more descendants that have this mutation.

The same is clearly true of the hosts: only those that are able to survive this new version of the sponge are going to themselves go on to successfully repeat and thus their subsequent generations will also be able to survive it. And we’ve seen both versions of these time and again in human reactions to disease. 

Most of the current extant European population is not as susceptible to plague or the Black Death as most of the European population were pre-1350. Because those without the genes that provided some (however limited) protection simply died along with all their offspring. And we can see the mutation of fleas into new forms every year when the influenza season comes around: it’s always a slightly different form from the year before.

And my point here is that we can think of business, a market, in very much the same terms. We might more often think of products as being gracious, that is symbiotes rather than parasites (say, the companies that make little cases to keep your iPhone in and Apple AAPL +0.26% itself that makes the iPhone) but much the same is going on. Everyone has to keep organization faster just in order to stand still. Not only are other symbiotes (or parasites) changing what they do the product that you are balancing to is also changing. And it’s very much that process that drives the whole system forwards.

 

And so it is here with Google and that Panda 4.0 update. Google believes that those low-level spam page creators are damaging to the Google search product. Thus they are repeatedly changing the algos in order to protect against such parasites. And, of course, the parasites are continually changing their tactics in reaction to Google’s changes: running ever faster just to stand still.

Of course, one can overdo the comparison. For a start, the market and business is all directed experimentation and development is entirely blind and random. But the two basic underlying similarities remain. We all have to keep running ever faster simply to stay abreast of everyone else doing so, and it’s not the changes themselves that determine the outcome but the surrounding environment that selects which innovations will live. Making little iPhone cases in 1935 would not have been a sound business move, doing so in 2014 employs entire factories in China.

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Google announced New Page Speed Insights To build Your Site More Mobile-Friendly

Google announced via their Webmaster Central blog that they have newly updated Page Speed Insights with mobile-specific recommendations to help site owners make their page more mobile-friendly.

The announcement says:

Poor usability can diminish the benefits of a fast page load. We know the average mobile page takes more than 7 seconds to load, and by using the PageSpeed Insights tool and following its speed recommendations, you can make your page load much faster.

Google suggests that if mobile users have to spend extra time after your site loads to pinch-zoom and scroll through the screen in order to read the text, then your fast-loading site isn’t really all that fast after all. Google’s new Page Speed Insights’ user skill rules can help site owners recognize and correct issues that could be impeding the overall usability of the site.

Google’s new recommendations now cover the following areas:

•    Configure the viewport: Modern mobile browsers will suppose your page is not mobile-friendly if it doesn’t have a meta-viewport tag, which will cause it to fall back to a desktop viewport and possibly apply font-boosting, interfering with your intended page layout. Configuring the viewport to width=device-width should be your first step in mobilizing your site.

•    Size content to the viewport: Users wait for sites to scroll vertically, not horizontally. Google recommends that once you’ve configured your viewport, make sure your page content fits the width of that viewport, keeping in mind that not all mobile devices are the same width.

•    Use intelligible font sizes: Google says that your site isn’t truly mobile-friendly if users have to zoom in just to be able read your article text on their smartphone screen. PageSpeed Insights checks that your site’s text is large enough for most users to read happily.

•    Size tap targets appropriately: Trying to tap a button or link on a touchscreen, and accidentally hitting the wrong one because the site is designed to be used with a desktop cursor, is very frustrating. Google recommends to make sure that your mobile site’s touchscreen tap targets are large enough to press easily.

•    Avoid plugins: Most smartphones don’t support Flash or other browser plugins, so Google recommends making sure your mobile site doesn’t rely on plugins.

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Video SEO Tips That Can Truly crash Your Rankings

Let's focus in on video SEO and talk about how you can really make an crash on your ranking.

Many of the points expressed below have come from speaking with several marketers over the last few weeks who have been working at the intersection of video marketing and SEO for a short time.

 Let these 10 points be a checklist for you as you plan or review your video SEO strategy.

1. Use Video to Solve Problems & offer New Information

To get your videos to rank well for your search terms, you need to offer great content that actually solves problems or provides new information. The good news is that great content usually isn't hard or expensive to produce.
 

2. Make Videos Easy to Browse & Link to Individual Video Playback Pages

Group mutually your video assets and create a user-friendly video resource center where your viewers can easily search your content.
Set up your video portal or gallery with categories and tags so it's easy to find exactly what you're looking for and navigate between videos seamlessly.

3. Use Interactive Video basics to Connect With Viewers

For every video someone watches, there is an chance to call that person to action or guide them to the next logical step.
Interactive video elements like in-video links, quizzes, surveys, and forms allow you to intercept your viewers at key moments and drive action.

4. Be Smart & Relevant About Metadata

I moderated a video SEO webinar last month where Jennifer Lewis, the senior interactive marketing manager at SafeNet, talked about how she uses rich metadata and smart content organization to get the most from their video resource library. For SafeNet, video is a way to go after precious long tail keywords that they would not otherwise be able to take

5. Use Transcriptions for Indexing, Usability & Content

To release the content in your videos, add video transcriptions directly to the HTML of each of the pages where your videos are hosted. Transcriptions give your viewers the choice to "read" a video if they can't listen at the time, while given that the keyword richness a search engine requirements.

6. Host Your Videos on Your Own Domain

If there is one single thing you do to get more SEO value from your videos it's to host them on your own domain. YouTube and Vimeo have their leave, but you must host your videos on your own site.

7. Make Sure You Have a Video Sitemap

To really nail the nuts and bolts of video SEO, you require to have the basics covered with a correctly configured video sitemap.

Every entry in your video sitemap must take in a link to a landing page for a video, hence the value of the video resource site or video gallery.

8. Use YouTube to Preview High-Value Content, Drive Traffic Back to Your Own Site

A great way to leverage YouTube for all its knowledge value, while contributing to your own video SEO, is to create shorter video previews for your content and use YouTube's comments to place in-video CTA that drive viewers back to your site's own video resource library, hosted on your own domain.

9. Allow Others to Embed Your Videos

As you create great videos, let others incorporate your content into their work. By making it easy for others to embed your videos on their site, you're increasing the potential for more inbound links to your own website – clearly an SEO win.

10. calculate How Keywords Impact the Bottom Line

Last but not least, always start with the end in mind. As you plan out your video SEO strategy, don't overlook to implement a tracking system to capture the success of your new strategy.

Sometimes tracking is built into your video platform or analytics software, sometimes this is custom code that engineering or IT will build, but it should always report on the number of people that come through the top of the funnel through social or search, and track those contacts through your content strategy to end.

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Facebook announces New Video Metrics

Facebook announced this week that fresh video metrics in Page Insights and Facebook Ads Reporting are coming soon. Facebook’s goal is to help users better understand how people respond to videos.

Currently, Page owners are imperfect to seeing how many people started watching their videos. Facebook’s new new video metrics, which will be rolled out over the coming weeks, will display more complete information like video views, unique video views, the average duration of the video view and audience custody.

These new video metrics are designed to help Page owners understand which of their videos are clicking with people so they can better decide what kind of video content to create for their audience.

Detailed View Counts

Facebook’s metrics will show both the total number of video views and the number of being people people who watched a video. A “video view” is define as a view of three seconds or more and will emerge for all videos, including those that automatically play as people roll through News Feed. If a person clicks on the video while scrolling through the News Feed, that will be counted as  “clicks to play video.”

Viewers Retention

The viewer’s retention metrics will measure the level of interest in various sections of videos. An increase in the percentage of views at a certain point may indicate that people are re-playing exact sections, while a decrease in the percentage of views may indicate where people lost interest and stopped watching.

You will be able to exactly decide how many people watched your whole video, or just some of it. The new video metrics will count the number of views that reached certain points in a video — 25%, 50%, 75%, 95% and 100%. This information is helpful in helping you determine how a video is performing and give you an idea as to where to place key messages.

Demographics

If you’re running a video in an ad you will be able to take advantage of the the “data breakdowns” feature in Ads Reporting, where you will get contact to demographic information about people who viewed your video, such as age, gender, location, etc.

Coming Soon

Facebook’s announcement states that the new video metrics will be accessible for all paid and organic videos uploaded directly to Facebook Pages and will roll out slowly over the coming weeks.

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Why Body Content Matters to Google

Google’s Matt Cutts unrestricted a short webmaster help video reminding webmasters not to disregard about the content in the body of the page. In this entertaining webmaster help video, Matt and his team clearly are trying to make this point by removing his body and leaving only his head.

It seems as though many webmasters and SEO experts have been a bit too gripped with the head of webpages that they seem to have forgotten the key element of a webpage, the content. Yes, you may have the ideal header with the right title, description and keywords tags but if you do not have the content to support it, it makes it hard for Google to return that page to users.
So next time you’re optimizing a sites header keep in mind to take some time to make positive the page has the content to support it.

Since Cutts did this video as a PSA, it does also lift the question if the upcoming algo update that he has hinted about will also more a lot stress quality content over thin content than webmasters have seen up awaiting now.

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New Seo Tips

Let's make a deal as an industry to do away with the old ways of thinking that have totally no place in what we do anymore. Our industry has truly grown up; there are more effectual and sustainable ways to make sure long-term success for our clients.

SEO has changed and evolved, totally for the better. It's a very pleasant time to be working in the industry, as we're now tasked with structure brands, growing communities, enchanting audiences, and flexing our creative and analytical muscles. We play integral roles in the increase of businesses. Our thinking should match the new responsibilities that have come our way.

Here are five new tips to replace old and inefficient ways of thinking that have permeated across our industry.

How Can I Be of Most Help to My Customers?

 
It's time to modify our thinking from being "all about me" to being all about the customer. Long-term SEO success is – and has always been – all about as long as value.
You can boost your odds of share-worthiness by taking the time to research the consumer's purchase path. Understand the thought process throughout and seek ways you can add a lot of value, either by being helpful or being amusing, at a key step in the process. section your efforts down to relevant personas and the content will experience a much better success rate as you will be speaking with a more busy pool of related audiences.

There Are No Silver Bullets

 
Much like socialites changing the "it" bag of the season, the industry has in the past been frenetic in its pursuit of the hottest new tool or tactic that does everything in a couple of easy steps.

Unfortunately, tempting as it may sound, there are just no SEO shortcuts that work long-term. There's no replacement for good old strategic thinking and hard work.
Certainly tools have their place and there are great ones out there, but we need to treat them just as supplemental add-ons for efficiency and not the sole basis of our efforts.

It's All About Quality

Let's stop cluttering the Internet with average-quality content. The amount of content being published every day has reached record levels, but unfortunately quality hasn't increased at the same rate.

The Web doesn't need the one millionth article on painting a house or traveling to Spain. We need to ensure we put in the effort to publish content that really stands out and that merits its own place on the Web. Otherwise it's just a waste of resources.
Old Thinking: But my competitors who outrank me are still doing [insert black hat tactic].

Focus Only on Long-Term Sustainable Efforts

It's supremely annoying when competitors have higher positions in search but appear to employ not-so-kosher SEO tactics. It can be tempting to think "oh if we can't beat 'em, let's join 'em," but don't give in to the temptation. Google is getting really good at cracking down on dodgy tactics so really it's just a matter of time before they could get penalized.

Not only can these different strategies compensate for any traffic lost by ranking lower, but by resonating well with these other audiences you can also help your search rankings improve. Win-win.

If We Want to Play in Google's Sandbox, Let's Make Their Rules Work in Our Favor
While it can be easy to settle into a Google-bashing mindset (e.g., they favor large brands or whatever complaint du jour you may have), ultimately that type of thinking isn't entirely true. It's also won't help you reach your goals.

Google is a darn good search engine. Google processes provide tremendously relevant content for every search and they are striving to provide better experiences, so people continue to use them. That's why they have the majority market share and why we can't afford to ignore them.

If you constantly put out high-quality work that people like, then Google will basically want to rank it higher since they know it resonates well with searchers. Be helpful, focus on user experience, treat customers well, and you'll enjoy better conversion rates and improved rankings.