Currently viewing the tag: "Google"
How much of a title does Google index? I don’t mean the 66 characters that are displayed in the SERPs but how much is actually read and tucked away in the event someone searches a keyword that is beyond the 66th character? As a live test, I’ve given this post a title that is 96 characters long. I’ve place strategic keywords past the 66 mark. After the post is indexed, I’ll search on the keywords in the title, which will not be repeated anywhere else, thus we shall see how much title content, if any, Google retains past the 66th character.
I’ll post a comment here and tweet/FB the results.
Stay tuned!
Dave Keys, Orange County SEO & Photography
Results Followup:
The answer? A lot! Everything past the 66 character mark was indexed and searchable. I tried several variations, with and without quotes, all of which were on terms past the 66 character mark. You know what this means for SEO. What we don’t know is how much weight is given to a term in the beginning, middle and end of a title. I’ve seen results, often, where the keywords in the center of a title rank the best.
Dave
If you want to see what Google Page One domination looks like, type, Realtor Palooza, into Google. Things change, but right now, all but the last link is to something I created. The term is a niche, for sure, but it’s perfect branding for the recurring event.
This is a followup on my previous blog entitled How I Went From Page 35 to Page 3 in Fifteen Minutes – Orange County SEO
In the post, I cited the importance of the Title tag on a website and the difference it can make in a hurry. I had a photography website that I had neglected and let languish for months. I’ve been focused on many SEO projects and just didn’t bother with the photo website. Frankly, I’d been getting exposure for my side-work of photography through my real estate contacts and YouTube videos on my photography.
This website had ranked on page one for “Orange County Photographers” until I decided to abandon the position and really convert davekeys.com to what it should be, an SEO and web strategies focused website.
Last week I was reviewing in my ADHD way, lots of things and gave the photography angle a quick look and noticed my website, Pennycafe.com had dropped out of sight. Where was that website?
Page 35. Yep, almost as if “penalized” by Google. Taking a closer look at things, I noted that the title wasn’t very specific and decided to streamline it, and to be honest, I swapped the theme for one a little less “noisy” and, finally, added a new post (a photograph and a few lines about it).
I’m guessing the real difference was the title text. It usually is.
caveat: you might read this, and check for ranking, my ranking for orange county photographers may appear page two because that’s the nature of a new changes in competitive SERPs and results vary by whatever Google datacenter you may query. As I cited previously on my “page 3″ post, the position today or tomorrow is relatively unimportant compared to long-term placement and the dramatic shift achieved by simply adjusting the website title.
Orange County Photography Website by Dave Keys
OK, so page 3 is nothing spectacular but the website in question hasn’t been my chief concern for some time. I’ve been pretty busy doing SEO for others while my own SEO “house” has fallen behind in maintenance. I also run a photography website. I’d actually been on page one for “Orange County photographers” but I really wanted the website that enjoyed that rank to be used for my general web marketing and SEO business, not just for photography so I re-purposed the website and oriented it toward Orange County SEO. I changed the title and started posting content related to web marketing and SEO. The site soon moved to page two for photography and only page three for SEO but no matter, this is a long term shift. The problem is that as soon as I’d made the change, I lost the time to commit to promoting the page enough for top Google placement. Then the grandchildren were born.
Yes, twins.
I added photos to my Picasa web album and gave thought to my photo blog which needed some attention, but I was awfully busy with work and helping out with the new family additions.
Finally, today I took a look at the standing of the poor photography website. What? Where was it?
Page 35. Well, no wonder. The title didn’t match the term I wanted to rank for and there weren’t enough back-links to force the placement anywhere so there it sat on page 35.
I wondered if this could be some kind of penalty but other search terms directly keyed to particular posts ranked well so, it had to be poor on-site SEO and lack of recent fresh material.
Today, I chose a cleaner, leaner WordPress theme, added an article and changed the title to include the Keyword phrase, “Orange County photographers”
Fifteen minutes later, the site appeared on page three for the search.
It didn’t take an Orange County SEO expert or genius to fix that.
The title is always the most important element of on-site SEO.
According to Bloomberg, Yahoo’s fortunes slipped as their earnings missed estimates. Geez, their earnings are only 1.6 to 1.8 billion instead of 1.9! Well, I guess Yahoo is crying all the way to the bank but it is a sign that they’re losing ground to Google. In SEO, who really concerns themselves with shooting for page one of Yahoo? Yahoo has to stand downwind of Google to get any love from site optimization or features.
Userbase? If my own larger family is any indication, I started suggesting Gmail accounts years ago. Today, with ten or so “suggestees”, there is one hold-out. The one who uses the web the least.
If you’re fond of web bling, then rock on! You’re using the right web service. For the rest of us it’s usually either our corporate caged-in software suite or Google.
SEO follows the waterfall, not the overspray. My SEO focus in Orange County markets remains squarely on Google.
How do you optimize YouTube video and why would you learn how? What is the difference between SEO for a website and video SEO?
The real answer to both: strategy.
A small business owner has a unique and relatively unknown product and posts a single two-minute video on YouTube to see what happens. This video gets 651 views in its first 34 days (now it’s over 900 and counting 4/25) and traffic to the business owner’s website spikes. The website was perfectly optimized but the big boost in traffic came from this one video. Pretty soon people from other websites referred to the site and people went to the website after watching the video.
YouTube Result For The Video in This Article
The small business owner just took the bullet train to Tokyo while the others are meandering along at standard information superhighway speed limits.
There are real results from this kind of exposure. Sales is numbers. Most businesses can predict a certain sales volume based largely on advertising volume. Present your message to 1000 people and you’ll get X percent of leads and from that, a predictable number of buyers. We’re looking at roughly 600 new impressions a month, meaning 7,000 per year if the video doesn’t get any greater exposure than it is right now, a video that took a couple of hours to produce… is that a good investment of time and resources?
Lets recap.
- Cost- about 2 hours to create, edit and post a video.
- Exposure- YouTube is the second most searched website on the Internet with traffic that sometimes exceeds Google.
- YouTube top results get featured on Google’s web search results pages. Most often on page one.
- Many people are attracted to video and will click it first if it appears anywhere on a search result. Some people even search video before or instead of a standard web search.
- Video can be passed around over many avenues of social media and even word of mouth. Your video can go viral at any time.
What’s not to like? The SEO advantages of video are in sharp contrast to standard search, especially in markets that have high hurdles to overcome in local competition.
How do you optimize video? It’s easy and almost nobody does it. You optimize video like you optimize a web page. Logical and reasonably proportional distribution of keywords and back-links do the job. The difference? It takes appreciably less back-links to send nearly any video hurtling to the coveted top 10 results on Google. Most times (but not every time) you’ll get a thumbnail of your video in the web search. Getting your video to the top of YouTube is important to achieve the thumbnail but you can get a message that motivates whether or not you get the thumbnail version. Consider a search that yields: “How to Go FROM SALE To SOLD in 30 Days – Fullerton Real Estate and Sales” among all the others that say “Fullerton Real Estate For Sale”. That’s a compelling message and that’s how you should think about your page titles including video pages like YouTube.
Contact Orange County SEO Expert Dave Keys any time for SEO info at 714-924-4422 or 888-216-1231.
