Author Archive
Posted on March 18, 2013 by Travis Loncar
When Google first made the announcement that they’d be transitioning Google Places into Google+ Local, I was pretty darn excited. I’d dipped my big toe in the local water not long before, helping businesses verify their Places listings at an internship and then publishing a still applicable guide to Google Places. I couldn’t help but think that Google+ held new and exciting opportunities for business owners looking to communicate with existing and prospective customers. All in a beautiful new interface, too. That was the cherry on top.
It’s been a fair amount of time since the transition now, and I’m still a fan of the switch. Having recently gone through the process of updating LunaMetrics’ location information via the Places (or + Local?) Dashboard, though, I thought it an appropriate time to voice my concerns with the whole relocation process. Without any further ado, my three wishes: (more…)
View Comments (1 Response) | Categories: Search Engine Optimization
Posted on February 19, 2013 by Travis Loncar
When it comes to updating title tags, meta descriptions, canonical link elements, etc. on a page-by-page basis, we often rely on the power of the client’s CMS. Whether we’re using WordPress plugins or Drupal modules to get the job done, we generally have a process that is efficient and feasible. No tinkering with template files. No scouring the web for alternative solutions. Simple implementation – just the way we like it.
Content Management Systems with built in SEO utilities are great. What happens, though, when you’re tasked with implementing all of the pertinent HTML elements page-by-page on a PHP based website with a static <head>? Let’s dive right in.
1. Make that <head> dynamic!
In most cases, each static PHP file, be it index.php, contact.php, what have you, will reference the same header.php file via an include statement:
<?php include('header.php'); ?>
The include statement tells the server that any code within header.php should also be included in the file being requested. This way, we don’t have to write a lot of the same HTML on every content page. Instead, we have this one static file from which we can pull the necessary code. Note that the header.php file doesn’t necessarily contain only the HTML <head>. Generally, it will include any code that is reusable at the top of the HTML document throughout the website (including the logo, navigation, banner, etc.). Let’s look at an example of code we might find in header.php:
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View Comments (6 Responses) | Categories: Search Engine Optimization
Posted on January 29, 2013 by Travis Loncar
As SEOs, there are times at which we take for granted the tremendous tools and resources that help us perform our jobs efficiently. In this post, we’ll look at three tasks that we perform regularly, the tools that help us perform these tasks, and how we might replicate these tools’ functionality and results if they didn’t exist. Hold on for the ride; it’s time to get hypothetical.
1. Crafting Page Titles
In a recent post on misconceptions within the SEO industry, I talked about the mythological character cut-off for page titles, highlighting SEOmofo’s width-based snippet testing tool as a viable alternative to JavaScript character counts. This tool is useful in that it demonstrates that title cut-off in Google SERPs is not a function of character count, but rather the pixel width of the text. Pretty great, right?
We can fit 128 ‘i’s into a page title
I got to thinking – if this tool didn’t exist, how could I verify that a title fits within the allotted space? Beyond building my own tool, there has to be some hacky, inefficient way to get this done. Alas, we turn to Chrome’s Developer Tools and/or Firebug for Firefox. To avoid dealing with the <em> tags that Google uses to markup query terms that appear in result titles (bolded keywords, in other words), we start with a simple site search. You can use any domain you please. For this example, we’ll be using Google.com.
Once we’ve executed our site search, we can right click on any of the result titles and choose ‘Inspect Element.’ From here, we can edit the text within the result anchor tags, testing to see whether or not our title will overflow the allotted width. We’ll be testing the title, ‘Monkey Bar Conundrum | Donkey Kong Libation or Playground Equipment?‘ – a title that’s 68 characters in length.
Editing the result title
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Posted on January 22, 2013 by Travis Loncar
Behind SEOmoz’s popular Open Site Explorer is a breadth of metric-defining data. The engineers at SEOmoz have coalesced and interpreted this data, forming well known metrics, like Page Authority and Domain Authority, and delivering meaningful counts, like External Followed Links. As SEOs, we use these metrics almost daily, accessing them via OSE, the SEOmoz toolbar, and third party applications (like HubSpot).
In this tutorial, we’ll examine the practice of accessing SEOmoz metrics via your own applications (like our Luna Link Rover), making use of the free version of the Mozscape API and the provided PHP Signed Authentication Example. Prior programming experience isn’t a must, but it certainly won’t hurt. All you’ll need to complete this tutorial is an SEOmoz account, a text editor (we use Sublime Text 2 in this tutorial), and a web server (for testing your application). If you don’t have access to a hosting account, you can setup a local web server using XAMPP (Windows) or MAMP (Mac).
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Posted on January 8, 2013 by Travis Loncar
Chances are good that you’ve read your fair share of ‘SEO Misconceptions’ posts. You know — posts wherein authors debunk and demythologize common misconceptions that outsiders hold true about SEO as an industry. Most recently, Bill Slawski and Will Critchlow offered us a fabulous rebuttal to Paul Boag’s article, “The Inconvenient Truth About SEO.” (A must read, I might add.)
The misconceptions outlined in this post are a bit different, though. These misconceptions are ones often held by those within the SEO industry. While following best practices is generally a safe bet, it can cloud our understanding of the way things really work. In this post, we’ll look at three misconceptions born of SEO best practices and one that’s a bit more related to causal oversimplification. Let’s begin.
1. Title tag and meta description cut-off occurs at a given character count
Truth be told, keeping your title tags under 65-70 characters is generally an advisable practice. However, it’s important to understand that it isn’t the number of characters in your title that determines whether or not Google cuts it short in a site search, but rather the pixel-width of the title itself. The same holds true for the meta description. As Barry Schwartz posted recently, this is a fact that seems to have gone largely unnoticed (seemingly due to no official confirmation from Google).
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Posted on December 11, 2012 by Travis Loncar
For SEOs, the web crawler is a powerful tool. When conducting technical audits, competitive analyses, what have you, we use web crawlers (like Xenu’s Link Sleuth or Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider) to navigate internal linking structures and collect data. These handy utilities take much of the human effort out of discerning top-level page attributes. Feed in a starting URL and—should fortune favor the HTML—you’ll receive the titles, meta descriptions, server response codes, etc. of a healthy selection (if not all) of the website’s URLs (not to mention the URLs themselves).
Having near-immediate access to these various page attributes is valuable for a number of reasons. We can efficiently:
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Posted on November 15, 2012 by Travis Loncar
Google’s Panda update is anything but extinct. It frolics in the wild web, chewing on and spitting out the bamboo that is thin, outdated content. It is not particularly forgiving and, thus far, has caused severe search engine visibility problems for web properties of all sizes. Those nomenclature guys at Google – they ruin the cutest creatures, don’t they?
Now, more than ever, it is imperative that, as SEOs, we advise our clients to get copy (indexable text) on their pages. Having 300-400 words on important pages can be an easily attainable competitive advantage. Often, however, the client is concerned with design and usability – a valid concern, no doubt. How do we add 300-400 words in a way that doesn’t detract from the current design and/or usability of our website? My answer: Get creative.
Let’s look at a couple of examples (using various web properties and some Lorem Ipsum text) of how copy might be implemented in a way that provides SEO value but doesn’t detract from design/usability.
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View Comments (2 Responses) | Categories: Search Engine Optimization, Usability
Posted on October 25, 2012 by Travis Loncar
As of late, the SEO blogosphere has been rich with posts from authors seeking to diagnose seeming declines in branded organic traffic. The common culprit (or deceiver, if you will) is Google’s grand obfuscation – (not provided). In the technology industry, the presence of (not provided) in keyword reports has proliferated drastically. In September, LunaMetrics saw nearly 65% of our organic search keyword data veiled in uncertainty. That’s right; more data is hidden than is available. Are you comfortable extrapolating from 35% of organic search visits? Probably not.
Comfort is a commodity, after all – a commodity granted to those who haven’t seen such a stark increase in (not provided). The more actual keyword data you have access to, the more likely it is that your extrapolation across the (not provided) segment represents an approximate reality. While there have been a number of viable proposed methodologies for recovering lost keyword data, it remains clear that, at a granular level, the long tail segment has been the most victimized. Keywords that might’ve once shown up once or twice in the monthly report might now remain absent (or hidden, rather). This makes extrapolating individual keyword volumes from the long tail segment grossly misrepresentative.
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View Comments (6 Responses) | Categories: Google Analytics, Search Engine Optimization
Posted on October 2, 2012 by Travis Loncar
Isn’t it ironic? Don’t you think? A little too . . .
I’ll stop. Alanis is my girl, and her timeless classic does hold some relevance here; but I don’t need to serenade you any longer. I think we’ll both agree on that. I would like to talk about irony, though – the good kind, I guess. The kind of irony that presents itself when a webmaster, who pays little attention to SEO, finds his or her website to be the destination of a healthy stream of non-branded organic search traffic. Don’t recoil with shock just yet. The majority of the time, this isn’t the case. However, as the proverbial they say, improbable events happen all the time.
First, let’s explore how these websites make their mark in the SERPs – not in spite of SEO, but perhaps neglect.
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Posted on September 13, 2012 by Travis Loncar
Launched in September 2008 by Valley Forge, PA (represent!) based Gabriel Weinberg, DuckDuckGo is a search engine that promises privacy and simplicity. From its playful name to its hallmarks of better instant answers, less spam, and no filter bubbles, Weinberg’s creation has a certain allure to it. Not to mention, the DuckDuckGo extension, DuckDuckHack, allows developers to create open source plugins that add functionality to the search engine. An open source search engine? Pretty cool, right?
While DuckDuckGo has not the notoriety of the children’s game from whence its name was coaxed (Duck, Duck, Goose!), it continues to gain traction among techies and the privacy-concerned. I’d expect that it appeals to wealthy Buffalo residents, as well. They can’t get enough of the bills. Ah, yeah, sorry about that. Anyways, let’s get down to business. Here are three features that make DuckDuckGo worth a weeklong try (and perhaps a t-shirt purchase).
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