Currently with HTML4, mark-up coders are working with document structures like this:

<div id="header">
[insert a logo]
[insert some links]</div>
<div id="leftnav">[bunch-o-links]</div>
<div class="post"><p>Lorem Ipsum</p></div>
<div id="footer">[bunch-o-links]</div>

In principle, <div> tags are generic and don’t tell the browser/crawler anything about the content it contains. It’s true that I’ve used some semantic ids and class names in the above example but that’s just for ease of illustration. I could have called them anything.

If we change up the obvious id and class names, the only way a search engine would know that something is actually a footer or a nav-bar is if it repeats over and over again. But that’s sort of the crucial part, isn’t it? It has to have a way to KNOW that some section is repeating in order to devalue any part of it. Across billions of web pages that would be a fair amount of heavy lifting to maintain.

Well HTML5 is about to make their lives a LOT easier. Here’s how that same code above would look in HTML5:

<header>
[insert a logo]
[insert some links]</header>
<nav>[bunch-o-links]</nav>
<article><p>Lorem Ipsum</p></article>
<footer>[bunch-o-links]</footer>

With HTML5 and semantic markup, browsers and crawler will know exactly what section of the page contain what content. Now all a search engine needs to do is just say “Oh, it’s the footer tag. Give -5 internet points to all the links contained therein.” Or, worse yet, just ignore them completely and only concern themselves with what’s in the <article> tag.

Don’t get me wrong here. I’m all for semantic markup, microformats and RDFa, and all that good stuff. HTML5 is going to be powerful (and it’s about time anyways). I just thought this could make for an interesting side effect of the transition.

Thoughts?

http://www.multifamilyinsiders.com/home/apartment-groups?action=gj.core.groups.showgroup&groupid=81

See you there!

Now, let’s consider another post that covers Rich Snippets as well as something called “Answer Highlighting” which looks like this:

“Consider the example, [empire state height]. The first search result used to look like this:”

“With today’s improvements, the answer —1250 ft, or 381 m — is highlighted right in the search result:”

Let me start off by saying I’m not making a judgement here… I just want us to take a moment to consider what’s going on here. These improvements for the user can have a detrimental impact on your traffic numbers.

By offering more information to the searcher on the SERP itself, the developer is removing the need for the searcher to actually visit the website. In the above example, I no longer need to visit Wikipedia to see the height of the Empire State Building. As Google adopts more and more Microformat protocols, it seems logical that the number of visits siphoned off should increase.

What’s the motivation for developers to encourage proliferation of the protocols if your goal is to drive traffic to your website? Couldn’t this change your goals?

Let’s say you have a restaurant website with your phone number and address tagged with Microformats. Someone looking for your restaurant or a similar one, might find your Rich Snippet in the SERP and call your restaurant. Success right? Sounds like it. Now imagine how that looks to an Analyst when multiplied by 1000 times.  I’d see a steady decline in visits to the site from Google and need for a way to account for that.  The apparent success of the site would appear to be waning but the restaurant’s phone would still be ringing off the hook.

What’s next?

It’s not hard to imagine what else could be served up in a Rich Snippet. Why not figure out a way to display your actual lead or contact form right there? Imagine the havoc that would cause for conversion rates. If you think about it, it wouldn’t be beyond the realm of possibility, right?

I think there’s opportunity for further discussion on the impact of Rich Snippets and Answer Highlighting on our analytics in the future. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

January 20th
One Giant Leap for Link Data: Announcing Open Site Explorer + Page/Domain Authority Metrics – Awesome tool. Making me consider becoming a Pro Member, honestly.

January 19th
Keyword Targeting: How to Employ Multiple Keywords for SEO & Conversions – SEOMoz breaks down keyword research

January 18th
Browse American Eagle, Aerie Merchandise Directly From Your News Feed With New Widget – Finally an effective use of a Facebook widget

10 Professional Development Tips to Boost Your SEO Career – This sounded important so I starred it. I haven’t read it tho. Let me know how it is.

Link Building With Interviews: How Thought Leadership Builds Links & Leads – I really thought this was a neat idea and a good example of thinking out of the box. I’m definitely going to try to implement this with some of my projects.

That’s it for this week folks! If you’ve got something you think I should read, just lemme know.

Thanks!

Video source: How do you rate links from sites like Twitter and Facebook?
Original Article: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/01/answering-your-december-grab-bag.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+blogspot/amDG+(Official+Google+Webmaster+Central+Blog)

Points of interest:

1. Links aren’t any different if they come from .gov or .edu. “It’s not like a link from an .edu autmatically carries more weight.” (1:58)
2. Most links on Twitter are nofollow. (We knew this but it’s worth mentioning again.)

I noticed that he didn’t mention links from Facebook Fan Pages, but he makes it pretty clear that all links are treated equally from the outset, but then Page Rank is applied to determine the linking site’s “reputation.” Keep this bit in mind people. It’s not always the number of links you have, it’s the quality of those links. You dig?

(for the experts out there… you may already know all this. however, this is core information that bears repeating for others out there who are just getting their feet wet. thank you for your understanding.)

Use tools you already have to find ways to boost traffic.

Using a Site Analytics tool? Got a Rank Tracker or some free time to manually check some rankings? Here’s a way you can find and predict how much traffic you might be missing out on.

Aside from the fact that I just ended that sentence with a preposition which drives me nuts, let walk through the process, shall we? Super. Open up your analytics tool and your favorite spreadsheet app and let’s go.

Collect the keywords

Go into your analytics tool and find the report that tells you what keywords are driving organic traffic to your website.

Set your date report range for 30 days and make sure you can see how many visits each keyword/keyphrase drove to your site within that time frame. Get as many keywords as you can. I’m talking like 400-500 keywords if your report allows and if you have that much data.

Paste that data into a spreadsheet. One column for the keyphrase and one column for the number of visits. Good!

Get the rankings

Arguments about the veracity of rank-checking these days aside, paste that list of keywords into your favorite rank checking tool and fire it up. Or, you can always check them one-by-one if your list is manageable.

Plug in your findings into a third column on your spreadsheet. (I’m just checking Google here)

Forget about the #1 ranked items

Now, sort the spreadsheet and delete all the rows that have keywords that are currently ranking #1 for you. We’re only going to concern ourselves with anything not currently ranking #1 from here on out.

Now for some imperfect math

Let’s take a look at the chart here…

source: http://www.seo-scientist.com/google-ranking-ctr-click-distribution-over-serps.html

If we accept these numbers, you can start to calculate how much traffic you might be losing by ranking something other than #1. For example…

“red widgets” brought in 100 visits and you’re currently ranking #4. Based on our chart above, there’s a difference of  44.83% between #1 and #4. Let’s do the math: You could have had roughly 45 extra visits had you been #1. See where this is going?

You can use these numbers to help justify projects/man-hours geared toward trying to rank for all these other keywords. You can use them to give a ROUGH projection of potential traffic/lead increases. I can’t emphasize the term “rough” enough here. The math is not perfect all the time in all cases. You’re going to have two moving targets here:

1. The percentage of click-thru rates are not going to work out exactly for every market or set of search terms
2. The rankings you see might not be the rankings that everyone sees.

But overall, you can see how this can give you a rough estimate on traffic of which you could be taking advantage. You can also turn this into a monthly or quarterly exercise. I find it best to track the traffic I’ve gained by moving up the rankings on that initial list. I use the same spreadsheet we set up above and add columns by date that track the ranking improvements/setbacks. I then add a column after 30 days to see if the traffic to that keyword has improved.

Hope this helps! It’s an interesting report anyways. I gotta give a shout-out to Larry Cotter from ApartmentHomeLiving.com on this one.

Basically, all the search engines will let you suggest the preferred URL you’d like them to focus all the SEO juice on:

To use Google’s example, all you put in the head tag is something like this:

link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish”

That’s all there is to it, folks.

Here are the links to the new canonical goodness!

Google Webmaster Blog posting

Search Engine Land posting

For once, the search engines unite to make and SEO’s life a little easier.

WOO HOO!!!

Check it out!

“The Google PageRank Algorithm”

It pretty interesting since he also includes a PageRank Calculator.

Check it out folks!

Backlinks.com, as site that lets you buy and sell links (I’m sure Google loves these guys) let their security policies ride the fail boat and leaked a truckload of customer data to Google (ironically).

Check out this link: http://www.google.es/search?hl=es&q=site%3Abacklinks.com%2Fadmin

While you can’t click on the links, you can view the cached versions of the pages. Usernames and passwords for everyone! Thanks Backlinks.com!

once again…thanks habitaquo.net for the scoop!