Tag Archive for: SEO

console post message text

How to Track Google Analytics Conversions on BuilderTrend’s iFrame Form

Let’s say you have a client who insists on using a third party webform on their site. In this case, the third party is BuilderTrend. For the client this is the best option because it merges with their office workflow and the actual process of building a house. For you, the agency, this is a poison pill, because BuilderTrend has no inbuilt Google Analytics functionality. BuilderTrend put their webform inside an iframe, the most convenient solution for them. They don’t have to worry about conflicts with the host site, or communication barriers with their server. They just tell their customers to embed the iframe on the contact page, and the work is done.

For an agency, particularly one running a Google Ads campaign, iframe contact forms are exceptionally dangerous because they sever you from seeing what your users are doing. It destroys your ability to track conversions in Google Analytics (or at least makes doing so a non-trivial feat, more on this as we go). In the case of BuilderTrend (and a few other iframe form applications, such as MailMunch), we have found a solution for tracking conversions which is not elegant, but it’s at least feasible.

Why You Need Conversion Tracking on Your Website

Back in the day, in the nascent days of SEO, analytics were just an afterthought. After all, you could see how well you were doing by seeing how well you were ranking. Today, Google Analytics is a vital tool for tracking the success of a campaign. After all, you’re only doing as well as the conversions you’re getting.

Once you bring Google Ads into the equation, tracking conversions is super, super, super critical. The effectiveness of your ad spend is directly proportional to the accuracy of your analytics. The creepy AI brain over at Google headquarters will see who’s converting on your site, and then present ads to more people like that. When your analytics track legitimate conversions, this smart targeting will put you on the fast track to success. If your analytics can’t see who’s converting (because they’re hidden behind an iframe) then you might as well be flushing your ad spend down the toilet for all the good it’s doing you.

The Problem with iFrames

You can think of iframes as an HTML element which allows you to put a window into another website within your webpage. For all practical purposes, your website, where all your analytics code is, has no authority over the content within the iframe. If it’s a different domain expressed by the iframe then you can’t grab user data from it any more than you can grab the user data of people visiting whitehouse.gov or Amazon. It’s a tantalizing pool of mystery, right there out of reach. There’s no real javascript solution, and if there were, then the programming community would shut it down for security reasons. You can’t take screenshots of the iframe. You might be able to put a transparent div on top of the iframe and track cursor movements, but that won’t tell you if they succeeded in filling out the form.

There are solutions to this conundrum, which require the domain in the iframe to cooperate with you. Mostly they are variations of the cross-domain tracking solutions which you can use on multi-site campaigns. Generally you need Google Tag Manager on all the domains involved. GTM will tag the URLs with a unique user ID so that Google can match up user behavior even when different cookies are tracking those users in different locations.

Unfortunately, you need control of Google Tag Manager on both ends of the cross-domain tracking, and third party organizations like BuilderTrend can’t be bothered to help out like that. It would be a lot of extra labor hours for them to get something like that to work, and they probably worry about their customers taking advantage of the ability to insert arbitrary javascript code onto the BuilderTrend servers. In short, helping out their customers with analytics tracking would require a ground-up approach. Consider Ngage, a javascript-based chat app, which has well-documented Google Analytics event capabilities. Ngage started out as a search marketing company, so it’s not surprising that they prioritized their customers’ need to track conversions onsite.

Why BuilderTrend is so Awful

BuilderTrend of course recognizes the importance of analytics. If you look at the Tag Assistant on any page with an embedded BuilderTrend form, you will see that they have quite a lot of analytics tags on their side of the iframe. Data is money, and they are certainly not going to let any of their data go to waste. They’re just not going to spend any extra effort helping out their customers with data. It’s sheer carelessness and contempt for their customers, that they would release a conversion capturing feature that has no conversion tracking features. Shame on you, BuilderTrend, shame. I hope y’all read this and do right by your customers, and give them a way of tracking conversions which isn’t as janky as the solution I explain in the next section.

The Terrible Yet Workable Solution

This next part is where we make coding choices which are so outlandish and seat-of-your-pants imprecise that they would surely leave Google Tag Manager guru Simo Ahava spinning in his grave (he’s not actually dead, but like all Finns he presumably has a pit for curing salmon and making graavilohi).

It’s not strictly true that there’s no way to see what’s going on inside an iframe. The site inside the iframe has to want to communicate with you. Or, as is the case more often than you realize, you can listen in to the bleed-through signals. Let’s take a look at the BuilderTrend embed code. Yes, there’s an iframe with its sinister one-way window. But there’s also an attached piece of javascript. You might ask yourself, what’s that for? The answer is, it’s for the convenience of the developers. You see, BuilderTrend wants the easiest one-size-fits-all solution they can get. So if you have an embedded iframe which contains a user-customized form, how does the webpage know the best dimensions of the iframe? If the user adds a field or two, suddenly it needs to be longer. This is the purpose of the attached code, every time the iframe loads, it tells the javascript onpage the best height to style the form, to prevent the iframe from taking up too much space or using those annoying scroll bars.

There’s a comment in the attached BuilderTrend javascript which gives us a mesmerizing glimpse into the minds of the developers:

// there have been mulitiple ways of doing this over the years, unfortunately this has to support all of them

So apparently a lot of thought and development time has gone into deciding how to style the form so that it looks good onpage, but nothing for the marketing needs of their customers.

The backchannel method of communication between BuildTrend’s iframe and the client page is called postMessage. We can listen into this channel using your Chrome Developer tools. Open the page containing the iframe and then right click and select “inspect.” When the window opens up, change to the “console” tab and enter the following command:
monitorEvents(window, ‘message’)
console post message listener
By right-clicking on the BuilderTrend iframe and selecting “Reload Frame,” we can see that a postMessage comes through every time the iframe reloads. And if you fill it out, the iframe reloads again to display the thank you message, while once again sending a postMessage to inform the javascript function about the preferred dimensions. In the console window the important information will show up under the “data:” section.
console post message text
Now that we know that the BuilderTrend servers send a postMessage with the form’s height every time the iframe reloads, we can now make an analytics event triggered by the postMessage. We like Google Tag Manager for this sort of project.

First thing we do is add a “Custom HTML” tag in GTM which pushes into the datalayer the two different data formats used to declare the frame height in the postMessage JSON.

<script>
    window.dataLayer = window.dataLayer ||[];
    var FrameHeightCount = 0;
    var JustHeightCount = 0;
    window.addEventListener('message',function(e) {
        if (e.data.FrameHeight) {FrameHeightCount++;}
        if (e.data.height) {JustHeightCount++;}
    window.dataLayer.push({
        'event' : 'BuilderTrend' + e.timeStamp,
        'bt_FrameHeight' : e.data.FrameHeight,
        'bt_JustHeight' : e.data.height,
        'bt_FrameHeightCount' : FrameHeightCount,
        'bt_JustHeightCount' : JustHeightCount
    });

});</script>

Once we have the relevant postMessage communications in the datalayer we can trigger events in both GA4 and UA.
GTM trigger screenshot for buildertrends
The customization I made to this particular trigger was to delay activation three seconds after page load, so that the initial postMessage declaring the iframe height doesn’t register as a conversion.

Why This PostMessage Tracking Method is Useful But Also Very Fragile

The reason this is a terrible solution is because there’s a lot of points where the conversion tracking could break down. We know that BuilderTrend has a history of changing the coding implementation. At any point they could change the JSON structure sent through postMessage from their silly iframe and this could break conversion tracking, leaving all of us internet marketers high and dry.

However, it appears to very nearly match up with the actual numbers of leads coming through, which is the most important part for us.

An informal (and limited) survey of these sorts of iframe forms shows us that about half leak postMessage information. We were able to use a similar method to track conversions on a Mailmunch form:
mailmunch custom html screenshot gtm
This code is a little simpler, just sending a datalayer event whenever it sees a robust data field in the postMessage JSON.

So should you check your clients’ terrible iframe forms to see if they have postMessage events? And should you cobble together a fragile conversion tracking system? For sure. But that doesn’t mean that software companies like BuilderTrend should be left off the hook. They need to show respect and consideration to their customers and their marketing needs, so that we don’t have to engineer crazy hacks just to run a simple Google Ads campaign.

Test Results: How to Stop Google Re-Writing Your Title Tags in the SERPs

TLDR; Experiments show that adding square brackets to the title tag and/or turning H1/H2 headings into questions will break Google’s tendency to put something other than your title tag in the SERP links.

Starting in about August of this year, us SEOs were shocked to discover that Google was rewriting the title links in the SERPs. For a long time it had just been assumed that the title tag was more or less sacrosanct. The title tag was the jewel of onpage optimization! But now Google grabbed heading elements from the page text and displayed them to users as if that’s what the SEOs had intended.

Of course we’re all a bit miffed about this.

We wanted to know the extent of the issue, so we asked one of our analysts, Erica, to do a survey of the SERPs, to see how this change affected our clients. And yes, a large portion of the SERP title links now showed something different, such as an H1. But while going down the list of clients, Erica noticed that titles which had non-standard characters bracketing the brand names, were more likely to display as written.

You may recall that a number of years ago (around 2013), another incident where Google did what it wanted with our title tags. Google began displaying brand names to the left of the SERP titles, connected with a colon. So instead of
Austin SEO Company | TastyPlacement
what showed in the SERPs was
TastyPlacement: Austin SEO Company

SERP title pivot

Brand name pivot in the wild

We assumed at the time this was because Google was tired of seeing title tags in the SERPS in the format of:
{keyword}{keyword}|{brand name}
It was fairly logical to us that if all the sites which ranked for a term had essentially the same title as the term itself, then the main point of uniqueness would be the brand name. So of course Google would try to make that more prominent. We called the SERP title rewrite, “the pivot.”

We had the bright idea at the time that we could confound the algorithm which made the pivot by surrounding the brand name with non-standard characters, in our case, left and right square brackets:
Austin SEO Company [TastyPlacement]
This worked 100% of the time, putting the titles on the SERPs pages as we wrote them. It looked snazzy to boot, and had no effect on the site rankings. Another welcome side effect is that it took up slightly less pixel real estate than that old standby the pipe character surrounded by two spaces.

But did the brackets have an effect on the title-rewrite phenomenon? What exactly was going on? And could we use scientific reasoning to test it all?

As it happens, we had the perfect testing subject in Client X. This client had above the fold rankings in dozens of locations around the country, delivered by a couple dozen very similar landing pages with very similar title tags. So first step, see what actually had happened to these pages in the SERPs.

September 20: Initial Conditions

    • Out of twenty-some local landing pages, only two retained the same title tag that we had originally wrote.
    • Twelve of the SERP titles were the same as the title tag, but were missing the brand name. These brand names were connected to the rest of the title tag with pipes, and the scuttlebutt is Google particularly hates these pipes when they do the rewrites. We’ll call what happened to these twelve pages: “Brand drops.”
brand name dropped from SERP title

A brand drop title in the wild

    • 8 of the SERP titles came from a heading element onpage, mostly H2s (H1s were in the slider, but H2s were right above the text, which may be why they were preferred). We’ll call this type of rewrite: “Heading-type.”

Heading-type in the wild

  • And one particular page, the black sheep of the bunch, had a brand drop title, with an extra keyword added from someplace mysterious.

Curiously, some of the headers titles had the brand name appended to the end with a hyphen, as if Google believed that some of these virtually identical pages required a brand declaration, and some did not. Almost seems to contradict what the pivot has been doing since 2013, no?

For the experiment, we put square brackets around the brand names in a randomly selected half of the <title> elements. We’re all scientists here, are we not? Control groups are our bread and butter.

We waited a month for the full indexing to take effect, and you’ll never believe the results! Well, you might.

Results of Brand-name Bracket Experiment

Of the control group, nothing much changed. If they had a brand drop, it was still a brand drop. If it was a heading-type, it stayed like that. One of the control group pages mutated from a heading SERP title to a brand drop, but otherwise the control group stayed remarkably the same for a couple of months.

In the experimental group, some shit went down.

  • 4 Brand drops turned into heading-types
  • 3 Heading-types stayed as heading-types
  • 1 What had been originally a correctly reproduced title tag, updated to the new title tag
  • 3 Brand drops turned into accurately reproduced title tags
  • 1 The aforementioned black sheep page correctly displayed its title tag, but then Google tacked a second brand name onto the end. Basically in every way Google made this title worse

For this first round, we came to the conclusion that the brand name square-brackets don’t affect the heading-type of SERP titles. However, they do have an effect on the brand drops. About half the time it will fix the SERP titles and show them as-is, and half the time it will give you the heading-type titles instead. Perhaps this is because Google’s title rewrite algorithm is essentially random? But that’s just speculation.

That’s when we had an idea for round two of the experiment. Clearly the heading-types were the real problem. What if we changed the headings onpage to questions? Like that last sentence? We were going on the assumption that Google wouldn’t care to have rhetorical statements and aggressive ad copy tricks polluting the SERPs.

Esti re-wrote about half of the heading-type H2s so that they formed questions, roughly in this format:
Are you looking for the best {keyword} in {region}?
After we questionized (yes, this is a word) the headings, we only waited about ten days for the pages to re-index.

Results of Question-type Headings

In the control group, all four SERP titles remained unchanged. But once again we saw action with the experimental group:

  • 3 Titles suddenly displaying correctly
  • 1 Still showing old heading
  • 1 Showing new “questionized” heading

Conclusion of Heading Questionizing

Turning your primary headers into questions isn’t foolproof, but it is very likely to dissuade Google from hiding your title tag. Better than even odds in your favor! There’s probably other tactics which will be able to confound the algorithm Google is using for this. You could use brackets, colons, tildas, or other a-typical characters in the headings. I bet some well-placed emojis will kick your headings off the SERPs.

Our speculation is that the real purpose of this title re-writing is to prevent homogeneity in SERP results. Consider how many sites which rank on the first page for “Austin SEO” have “Austin SEO” as the first two words of their title tags. Nearly all! By mixing up the sources of the SERP titles, Google is breaking up the visual impact for the user and making it easier to differentiate the results. Which may be good for the user, but maybe not for the SEOs who put a lot of time and effort into writing the title tags and controlling that messaging.

Have you seen this SERP title rewriting in the wild? Have you tried any techniques to mitigate the effects? We’d love to know about it! Leave us a comment below!

Study Authors:

Matthew Bey, Estibaliz Sanchez, Erica Mancha

From the Wordpress SEO book

Book Excerpt: What Are Authority Links?

The following is an excerpt (with some recent modifications and editorial comments) from our book, WordPress Search Engine Optimization (now in second edition!). You can buy the book at Amazon.

Authority Links: What They Are and Why You Want Them

There is a measure of power that some links possess that is independent of PageRank and it is the principle of authority links. Authority links are links from websites that have established a substantial degree of trust and authority with search engines as a result of their age, quality, and size. Authority is a somewhat subjective concept. Unlike PageRank, neither Google nor the other search engines offer any public reference or guidelines as to what constitutes an authority site or authority link. Authority sites are going to be the market leading sites, sites representing established government and educational institutions, large corporations, or leading websites. Authority links can bring tremendous ranking power to a website if one is lucky enough to obtain one or more.

Authority links are the golden eggs of link building. They tend to be extremely difficult links to get, and for that reason most webmasters rarely get them. The best approach to authority links is to be vigilant for opportunities to obtain them, but it is most likely fruitless to waste time seeking them out.

Our discussion of PageRank and authority links leads naturally to the notion of the relative power of inbound links. No two links are the same in terms of power. The degree of authority of a site, the PageRank of the page upon which the link appears, and the number of outbound links on the page where your link appears will all effect the relative value of the links you obtain. That said, almost all links are worthwhile, even lower value links. With what we’ve learned in the previous few pages, you will have a strong sense of how to evaluate link opportunities and to evaluate the relative strength of links.

Sometimes, you’ll be forced to settle for lower value links but in higher volumes, as is the case with link directories. But never fall into the trap of thinking that the only links worth getting are high-authority, high-PageRank links. All links are good for your rankings (except links from link farms and content farms, from which you should never seek out links).

Link Anchor Text

A vital concept in link building is link anchor text. Link anchor text is the word or words that constitute the visible text of the link itself, the “blue underlined text” as it is often called. The anchor text of a link is a powerful ranking factor; anchor text serves as a signpost to Google as to the content and subject of the destination page.

How Anchor Text Appears in HTML Code

The anchor text of a link is coded by placing the desired text between the open and closing markup of the hyperlink:

<a href="https://tastyplacement.com/">This Is Anchor Text</a>

Controlling the link anchor text of inbound links is vital whenever possible. The problem is that you can’t always control the anchor text of inbound links. And unfortunately, the higher quality the link, the more restricted you’ll be in choosing anchor text. A perfect example is the Yahoo Directory. A link in the Yahoo Directory is a great link to get, but Yahoo dictates that the anchor text you select be the name of your website or the name of your business. Yahoo does not allow you to stuff keywords into the anchor text. Here lies another good reason to choose a keyword-rich domain name for your website and business. When your business name is carefully crafted to comprise keywords, like “Austin Air Conditioning,” then you can employ those high-volume keywords more easily in your link building efforts.

To continue an example from an earlier chapter, if you have identified the phrases “Jacksonville air conditioning,” “Jacksonville air conditioning contractors,” “Jacksonville air conditioning companies,” and “Jacksonville air conditioning repair,” as the keywords around which a specific page is built, then your anchor text selection is nearly complete. You can use the same keywords as your desired anchor text.

When you can control the anchor text, you should craft the anchor text of links based on the keywords you have designated for each destination page. With this device used in connection with sound on-page optimization, tremendous ranking power comes into focus. Remember that Google and the other search engines have a primary goal of returning quality search results to their visitors. When anchor text accords with the on-page elements of a web page, that gives search engines confidence as to the subject of that page. And, when a search engine is confident about subject matter, it rewards the page with high rankings.

But be careful with anchor text when gaining links in high numbers. It is unwise to secure hundreds of links all with picture-perfect anchor text; this manner of link building does not appear natural to search engines. There is a risk of over-optimization when your link anchor text is too perfect. Generally, you never want more than 70% of your anchor text for a particular page to be solely based upon a small family of perfect keywords. Thus, there is a hidden benefit to garnering links for which you can’t control the anchor text because these links dilute your principal keywords to some extent.

If your anchor text isn’t varied naturally, then you should intentionally vary the anchor text. Clever SEO professionals sometimes go as far as to obtain noise links. A noise link is a link with common generic terms used as the anchor text like “click here,” or “website.”

Not all hyperlinks have anchor text. Images can be hyperlinks, but do not use anchor text. In this case, search engines register the link but have no anchor text upon which to determine the subject matter of the link. Links in image maps and flash files suffer from the same limitation. For this reason, such links are less desirable.

Buy the Book Today at Amazon

Is WordPress Good for SEO?

Updated for 2015

We originally wrote this post back in 2010, and now revisit the question. We get asked a lot about WordPress’ suitability for search engine rankings. WordPress’ reputation and having a sound foundation for SEO has certainly seeped into the public’s mind. For the most part, the reputation is deserved. This site, TastyPlacement.com runs on WordPress, and ranks very well for our intended keywords.

There are a few drawbacks with WordPress, but like most things SEO, it’s really about the cumulative effect of everything. Overall, we’d grade WordPress an A- on it’s suitability and power for SEO purposes. But it’s so good at so many things, that it presents a compelling story overall.

First, a summary and then we’ll dig into the nuts and bolts.

Is WordPress Good for SEO?

  • WordPress generates a very search-friendly URL stucture
  • Speed of publishing is superb
  • Built-in Ping services notifies web properties of your new content
  • Plenty of Plug-in and development support for SEO features from the WP community
  • Built-in sharing and commenting (depending on the theme used

 

Benefit: Search-Friendly URL Structure

WordPress seamlessly and automatically handles the creation of URLs through its permalink feature. A permalink is simply WordPress’ way of describing the URL for a particular page. Because keywords in the URL of a page are a ranking factor, If you want to rank for “WordPress Development,” than this URL: mysite.com/wordpressdevelopment
will perform bet ter in search than mysite.com/index.com?page=5 .

WordPress’ permalink functionality gives you descriptive URL st rings for search engines to follow with no effort at all. First, you’ll need to turn on Permalinks within the WordPress dash board—permalinks are not activated in a default installation. To turn on permalinks, log in to the dashboard and follow the left site navigation to “Settings” then “Permalinks”. At the Permalink Settings page, in the section titled Common Setting, click the radio button for “Custom Structure” and enter /%postname%/ . This permalink structure will automatically generate URLs
from your Page and Post titles—but you’ll still be able to manually change them if necessary. Because the titles of your Posts and Pages are relevant to the topic of your content, the permalinks based on your titles will be relevant as well.

In WordPress version 4 and above, you can also simply select the newly included permalink “Post name” instead of “Custom Structure”–but look closely because WordPress will insert a trailing slash at the end of your page URLs. We prefer our URLs without trailing slashes, which you can accomplish with the following:

permalinks

WordPress SEO Benefit: Speed of Content Creation

WordPress is built to run: it is designed for the speedy and continual publishing of content. Since I have converted nearly all my sites and most of my client’s sites to WordPress, our speed to publishing has increased. On a static html site, the creation of content would generally involve either hard-coding the article, or using a WYSIWYG interface, then adjusting menus–sometimes on multiple pages.

With WP, sites grow big and grow fast. All that content brings breadth to your keyword families quickly, and your large site can quickly become “bait” for inbound links from other websites.

WordPress SEO Benefit: Crawlability

Websites must be crawlable by search engines in order to be indexed properly and appear in search rankings. WordPress’ internal logic and link structure is simple and shared universally among millions of websites–so WP is familiar ground for search engines. This familiarity means that Google’s spiders can find what they are looking for, and index and rank the content with confidence. WordPress won’t generate a lot of duplicate content (although it generates some).

SEO Benefit: Plug-Ins and Support

Because the WordPress community is so large (enormous, really), the variety and number of plug-ins for SEO support has grown tremendously (Plug-ins are small software modules that website owners can optionally install in addition to the default WP installation). The All in One SEO Plug-In, or the Platinum SEO Pack are both quick and easy “one stop” plug-ins that accomplish a basic, but sound set of SEO goals such as manual Title Tags and Meta Descriptions.  These plug-ins extend WordPress’ functionality to rival the control and customization you would achieve under a static site.

SEO Benefit: New Content “Bump”

Another great feature of WordPress, which is also shared by other blogging platforms is the “new content bump”. A new post (generally not a “page” though–WP divides its content into two classes of webpages: “posts” and “pages”) will receive an initial lift in rankings during it’s first few days after publishing. This is logical: blog posts are intended to be topical and current, like a news item–Google treats this fresh content as noteworthy and rewards it with a bump in initial rankings. Ranking position will generally settle down after a few days.

SEO Benefit: Pings, Comments and Trackbacks

Pings, Comments and Trackbacks are interactive features built into WP–these supplemental tools let other blogs and individuals interact with a WordPress site: this brings inbound links and traffic (in the case of pings and trackbacks), and free content and visitors  (in the form of comments to blog posts).

SEO Drawback: Poorly Designed Themes

But it’s not all rosy: I see a lot of poorly designed themes that undercut WordPress’ SEO power. Here’s an example I often see: a theme/template will be designed with the blog’s title bearing a Heading 1 (h1) tag–that’s not the way to go. The h1 tag should speak to the subject/topic of each page or post–to repeat an h1 tag mindlessly throughout hundred of pages on a blog is a waste of a valuable SEO tool.

The fix? Code the Blog Title in a plain old CSS class–and utilize the powerful h1 tag for the on-page title for each post or page.

SEO Drawback: Rigidity in Menu Presentation

The biggest hang-up that WP forces upon us is perhaps the way menus are presented. The Page/Post methodology described above generally means that posts and pages are kept separate in menus. That’s not an insurmountable problem, but excluding individual pages from particular menu locations (like a top bar menu, where space is limited) can require coding the WP template’s core .php files, or inserting page ID’s in Widget boxes ad nauseum. Now, to get advanced: If you want to “nofollow” certain page links, say to a contact page or a privacy policy page (in a static site, this task is a breeze) you can either forget it, or go hunting for a plug-in.

When it comes to menu presentation in WordPress, I have learned “the wisdom to recognize that which I cannot change”. I have adapted, and I got over it. It’s a small price to pay for all this power.

Book Review: The Art of SEO

Book Review: The Art of SEO

by Eric Enge, Stephan Spencer, Rand Fishkin, and Jessie C. Stricchiola

Art of SEO Book ReviewIt’s hard for me to review The Art of SEO–after all, the book was a gift from author Eric Enge, owner of search marketing firm Stone Temple Consulting. Eric gave me a copy at PubCon Paradise in Honolulu in February of 2012, and I returned the favor by humbly offering him a copy of my book, WordPress 3.0 Search Engine Optimization.

But were I not to like the book or discover some obvious error, I’d be looking the proverbial gift horse in the mouth. To make my task even more challenging, I’ve met co-author Stephan Spencer as a co-speaker at several PubCon conferences, and the other co-authors are of equal stature in the SEO sphere. Then, I procrastinated this review for so long that the Second Edition came out, necessitating a second gift to me, this time from Spencer.

But no problem: The Art of SEO meets its well-deserved reputation as the Bible on SEO: a sound, comprehensive guide to nuts-and-bolts search engine optimization.

First Impressions

The first thing you’ll notice about The Art of SEO is the testimonials; accolades are offered up by industry heavyweights including Tim Ash, Will Critchlow, Danny Sullivan, Barry Schwarz, Andy Beal, and more. The second edition offers testimonials that go on for pages. The book itself is voluminous: nearly 700 pages of very dense text and ideas.

Support for Fresh SEOs

For an SEO book to be worthwhile, it must serve both experienced practitioners and those just starting out. “Search Engine Basics” lays a solid foundation in clear terms for the material to follow. Chapter 4, “First Stages of SEO,” maps out a clear plan of action for the early stages of a campaign. Some of the more advanced material, though, will likely leave an inexperienced webmaster with a headache. However, text throughout the book is accompanied by explanatory diagrams and images that help the reader visualize the concepts.

Each chapter is broken down into comprehensive subsections. This allows for an in depth analysis without seeming overwhelming.  The detailed snippets focus on the importance of each element, while getting straight to the point.

The sections pertaining to social media are particularly extensive. They discuss the benefits of link building with social media on multiple platforms. They also discuss what types of content work best to attract attention on the different platforms. This section has general information that is beneficial for those new to social media, but it also goes deep into analytics information and new trends that are great for those well versed in social media marketing.

The last chapter, “An Evolving Art Form: The Future of SEO”, discuses how Google and SEO are constantly changing. It’s a game to try to constantly crack the code. It emphasizes the importance of local, voice recognition and mobile search which are recently increasing with the development of new technology — like Siri on the iPhone.

Overall, The Art of SEO is a good book for both beginners and experts. It has basic information, but also goes in depth to fully discuss certain tactics and methods.

 

Footer Links: Bad for Google Rankings, Bad for Clients

Google Says it’s Forbidden and it’s Bad for Clients

(So Why are Agencies Still Doing It?)

While working on our own WordPress SEO, we’ve learned that site-wide footer links have always been dicey at best (you know, “Designed by Denver SEO Company” in the footer of a website). They were easy to detect both visually and algorithmically, and like any site-wide link, they generate potentially thousands of inbound links from one IP/Website. In-content links (one or two from a website’s content rather than hundreds in the footer or sidebar) were always more desirable. TastyPlacement.com has many examples of in-content links throughout the site.

Examples of Obvious Footer Links Are Easy to Find

Here’s an example from an Inc. 5000 company that touts its work for the NFL and Canon, with a footer link on a client website bearing the simple-minded anchor text “Website Design”:

footer-link

The previous example is from an NYC design agency that ranks number 1 for “New York Web Design”.

Does Google Hate Footer Links?

Well, maybe. Google certainly has warned against it. In an October 2012 revision to its webmaster guidelines, Google warned about “[w]idely distributed links in the footers of various sites.” A valuable discussion on Webmaster World regarding footer links followed. Certainly, the use of footer links, especially when used with aggressive anchor text, should be undertaken with caution. Just as certain though is that footer links can still generate strong rankings.

Footer Links and Client Responsibility

There’s another facet though to this question, and that is the question of taking footer links on your clients’ websites. If you are a website designer or an SEO, when you take a footer link on a client website, you doing a few things:

  • You are using your superior knowledge of the search algorithms to get a link from someone who trusts you; they might not give the link so willingly if they knew all the facts and consequences.
  • You are exposing your own web property to an inbound link that violates Google’s written webmaster guidelines.
  • You are exposing your client’s website to a potential Google violation.
  • You are taking Page Rank from a client and giving it to yourself.
  • You have a more effective and safer alternative, an “About This Site” page or its equivalent–still sorta’ sleazy, but maybe not so obvious.

If you want the possible referral business that a prestige web build might generate, you can always achieve that with a simple text citation, with no link.

 

Google Announces New Link Disavowal Tool

Google’s Matt Cutts announced at the PubCon marketing conference that Google is rolling out a new much-anticipated link disavowal tool. Bad links from poor quality sites can harm a site’s rankings in Google, and Google has implemented this tool to let webmasters remove bad links from their link profile. TastyPlacement has been able to use this tool for clients at risk of being associated with spammy or shady sites. This feature can be extremely helpful in our WordPress SEO Service when we are identifying specific client issues.

The tool will operate by uploading a txt file that contains a list of domains that a webmaster wishes to disavow. There will also be a domain: operator that will let a webmaster disavow all links from a domain.

Here’s a sample of what a disavowal tool text file would look like:

http://www.shadysites.com/bad-post
http://www.shadysites.com/another-bad-post
domain: http://wwww.reallyshadysite.com

The tool is ostensibly live at the following domain:

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/disavow-links-main

Cutts warns that it’s always better to have bad links removed rather than disavow links with the tool, but recognizes that’s not always possible.

Negative SEO

Infographic: Testing Social Media Signals in Search

How Social Media Activity Impacts Organic Search Rankings

Can social media activity impact organic search rankings? Popular wisdom says yes, but we set out to prove it with a simple test. We’ve compiled our findings into an easy-to-follow infographic.

Use This Graphic for FREE on Your Site!

You may use the infographic above on your website, however, the license we grant to you requires that you properly and correctly attribute the work to us with a link back to our website by using the following embed code.

Embed Code

<div style="width: 420px">
<a href="https://tastyplacement.com/wp-content/uploads/testing-social-signals.jpg" />
<img src="https://tastyplacement.com/wp-content/uploads/testing-social-signals-thumbnail.jpg"
alt="Infographic: Testing Social Signals" /></a><br/>
Infographic authored by TastyPlacement, an <a href="https://tastyplacement.com/">
Austin digital marketing, SEO & PPC agency</a>. To view the original post, see the original
<a href="https://tastyplacement.com/infographic-testing-social-media-signals-in-search">
Social Media Infographic</a>. </div>

Want an Infographic for Your Site?

Check out our Infographic Development services and see what TastyPlacement can do for you!

…and the thumbnail!:

Infographic Thumbnail

Pictures From Pubcon Paradise 2012

I thought this was appropriate as an introduction, from the opening evening networking event sponsored by TastyPlacement:

Pubcon Paradise 2012

Day One of Regular Pubcon Sessions:

Pubcon Paradise 2012

Pubcon Paradise 2012

Pubcon Paradise 2012

Pubcon Paradise 2012

Pubcon Paradise 2012

Pubcon Paradise 2012

Pubcon Paradise 2012

Evening Networking Party Sponsored by the Social Media Club of Hawaii:

Pubcon Paradise 2012

Pubcon Paradise 2012

Pubcon Paradise 2012

Pubcon Paradise 2012

Pubcon Paradise 2012

Pubcon Paradise 2012

Day Two of Pubcon Regular Sessions:

Pubcon Paradise 2012

Pubcon Paradise 2012

Pubcon Paradise 2012

Pubcon Paradise 2012

Pubcon Paradise 2012

Pubcon Paradise 2012

Pubcon Paradise 2012

Pubcon Paradise 2012

Pubcon Paradise 2012

Wrap-up Party at Jimmy Buffet’s

Pubcon Paradise 2012

Pubcon Paradise 2012

Video Tutorial: All in One SEO Pack to Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin Migration

We’ve seen the light and are converting to the Yoast WordPress SEO plugin on all of our sites. However, when migrating from your existing SEO plugin to the (superior) Yoast plugin, there are a few tricks along the way that will help your conversion go seamlessly and keep your pages displaying properly. This tutorial walks you through the migration from the All in One SEO Pack to the Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress. Watch and learn – you (and your website) will be glad you did.