ssharma@brightedge.com

M Posted 11 years 6 months ago

t 9 min read

When Google called for “HTTPS Everywhere” (secure search) at its I/O conference in June, with its Webmaster Trends Analyst Pierre Far stating: “We want to convince you that all communications should be secure by default,” it anticipated skepticism from the SEO industry. Google reinforced its I/O battle cry for a completely secure Web with an official announcement on August 6, saying that it will use HTTPS as signal that might boost rankings for those sites that adopt it.

The SEO industry skepticism did indeed follow Google’s official announcement with a flood of tweets by thought leaders the following day, which Matt McGee captured at Search Engine Land. Still up for debate is how significant Google’s promised rankings boost actually would be, whether it is worth the cost and resources to migrate to a HTTPS domain URL, and Google’s underlying motivation for its HTTPS initiative.

What is HTTPS?

So, what is HTTPS? HTTPS means Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (the “HTTP” before the site’s domain) with the addition of “S,” denoting “secure”: hence, HTTPS. The security, or “S” at the end of the usual URL, means that the site’s data is encrypted - just as Google has encrypted all of its properties. (Visually, a secure site will display a padlock icon left of its URL address, and in some browsers, the address will be highlighted in green). In its announcement on the Webmaster Central Blog, Google states the following:

Over the past few months we’ve been running tests taking into account whether sites use secure, encrypted connections as a signal in our search ranking algorithms. We've seen positive results, so we're starting to use HTTPS as a ranking signal. For now it's only a very lightweight signal — affecting fewer than 1% of global queries, and carrying less weight than other signals such as high-quality content — while we give webmasters time to switch to HTTPS. But over time, we may decide to strengthen it, because we’d like to encourage all website owners to switch from HTTP to HTTPS to keep everyone safe on the web.

What is really behind 'HTTPS everywhere'?

So is it really worth it to migrate your site to HTTPS? As Daniel Cristo recently wrote for Search Engine Land, probably not, unless your site collects and shares user data, such as financial, e-commerce and social networking sites. Daniel also speaks to what he suspects to be the real reason behind Google’s call for “HTTPS everywhere,” namely “to get back at the NSA” for making the search giant “look bad during the PRISM scandal.” He continues:

It’s a classic “greater good” story. Google says HTTPS will be a ranking signal so that everyone runs out and switches to HTTPS. What they’re not saying is that this change will only affect a minuscule number of sites. For everyone else, they’ve wasted time and energy switching to HTTPS for no reason – but that’s okay, because it serves the greater good of improving privacy for the internet as a whole.

Whether Google prevails in its quest for HTTPS everywhere on the Web remains to be seen. (Some sites, notably SEO news leader Search Engine Roundtable, have already switched to HTTPS). In the meantime, should you want to migrate your site (or sensitive pages within your site, such as an e-commerce shopping cart), you may want to check into Google’s webmaster help forum. For help with technical matters in converting to HTTPS, consult this file. For more general information about HTTPS and best practices for setting it up, this is a good resource. Clearly, this is an unfolding story and we will continue to track it for our readers.  

Andy Betts

M Posted 11 years 6 months ago

t 9 min read

The research is abundantly clear: adding rich media like video to your Web marketing plan drives organic traffic. BrightEdge CEO Jim Yu recently discussed our latest data on rich media in his article for Search Engine Land. In it, he highlights findings that show rich media drives not only search visibility, but also significant click-through, making it essential to your Web marketing and SEO strategy. Considering that YouTube is second only to Google itself as a preferred search engine, it only makes sense to incorporate video within your overarching content strategy. In this post, we’ll go through best practices for optimizing video, focusing on the YouTube platform.

Creating and optimizing YouTube videos

• Create a quality video content plan
• Optimize the videos with titles, descriptions, and tags
• Upload video transcripts
• Share your videos

1. Creating a quality video content plan. Compelling, quality video on YouTube can help you capture prospects at the beginning of the buy cycle and even help you be more visible by showing up in Google’s Universal Search results. Before you begin your video content campaign, however, make sure you understand your target market, the topics you want to tackle, and the keywords that you want to optimize the video for. Although the YouTube keyword tool has been discontinued, Google recommends using the keyword planner tool for keyword research. And, just like you would on a blog, aim for a consistent publishing schedule for your video campaign.

A steady video-posting schedule will help build your brand and encourage engagement. And speaking of engagement, you want to build it over time. One of the ways you can measure the quality of your video is the engagement metrics. Are viewers staying for the entire duration of the video? Be sure to optimize the length of your video in response to what you’re seeing in YouTube’s analytics. Research coming from Wistia suggests videos start losing viewership after the first 30 seconds.

2. Optimize the videos with titles, descriptions, and tags. Like your website’s content, your video content should have optimized titles, descriptions and tags. Here’s an example of what the title and description fields look like in YouTube:

• Titles: As a predominant factor in driving click-through, it’s important to make sure your video titles command attention. Remember that when optimizing them for search with keywords, guard against excess use (i.e., “keyword stuffing”). And just like a Web page’s Meta title, your video title should adhere to a character count – about 65 characters – so that it won’t be shortened (truncated) in the search results.
• Descriptions: There’s more room for adding details, including keywords, in the video description (about 180 characters). Adding text here is an essential part of video optimization, as it allows the engine to better understand what the video content is about. Make sure the most important information is first. If you want your site’s URL included, place it at the beginning of the description (include the http:// or https:// prefix) so it will directly serve as a link to your website. You can also use URL shorteners like bit.ly for tracking.
• Tags: The tagging feature allows you to leverage keywords; but unlike titles and descriptions, tags are words to denote the general categories under which your video content may fit.

3. Upload video transcripts. As eluded to with video descriptions, supplementing your videos with written content provides search engines the searchable text they need for indexing and ranking.Video transcriptions is a great way to do this. Adding written content to YouTube videos can help drive traffic to a website from long-tail keyword searches as well. It’s also important to note that providing a transcript can help the hearing impaired access your video content, too.

4. Share your videos. Strategic sharing can amplify your video content across the Web. Key ways to use links and social media to boost your brand and revenue include:

• Embedding: Embedding your video on the relevant pages of your own website can enhance the user experience.
• Social sharing: Calling to attention your video on your own blog, a partner site or on social media (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon, Tumbler) helps get the word out. You can even include it in your email marketing campaigns. Here is an example of how to embed and share your YouTube video on a Web page:

Bonus video tips

• Export your videos with frame size 1920 x 1080 pixels; Google prefers HD.
• A 16:9 aspect ratio is recommended.
• Use an Mp4 file format; max file size should be 2 GB.
• Create a custom thumbnail for each video.
• Pick a preferred video format (.mov, .avi, or .wmv); make one version visible to search engines, but offer them all to users.
• Include annotations to give videos extra interactivity.
• Don't forget: Set visibility to public.

With video becoming an ever-increasing source of organic traffic and conversions, brands that want to truly become brand publishers in 2015 will need to embrace this channel and learn how to leverage it effectively. Hopefully this simple video optimization “primer” inspires you!  

ssharma@brightedge.com

M Posted 11 years 7 months ago

t 9 min read

Two weeks ago, Google’s John Mueller announced that after three years of experimentation, the search giant had “made the difficult decision to stop showing Google Authorship in search results.” He explained that Google’s analysts had “observed that this information isn’t as useful to our users as we’d hoped, and can even distract from those results.” This didn’t come as a shock to some in the SEO industry, as it followed on the heels of Mueller’s June announcement that Google was dropping author images (G+ profile photos) and G+ circle counts from its search results. The rationale offered by Mueller then was that Google wanted to create “a better mobile experience and a more consistent design across devices” by cleaning up the “visual design of our search results” – but some were suspicious that this move was in preparation for something bigger. Mueller added: “Our experiments indicate that click-through behavior on this new less-cluttered design is similar to the previous one.” That statement in particular was met with surprise -- even disbelief -- by many in the industry who’d taken stock in what Google’s executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, wrote in his 2013 book, “The New Digital Age”:

Within search results, information tied to verified online profiles will be ranked higher than content without such verification, which will result in most users naturally clicking on the top (verified) results. The true cost of remaining anonymous, then, might be irrelevance.

But is there going to be a different way that Google verifies authors? Some say yes. In fact, at PubCon in 2013, Google’s Matt Cutts discussed the future of authors in the search results, and eluded to what may be coming: “It’s not just going to be about the markup; it’s going to be about the quality of the author.” In this post, we’ll discuss what Google’s Authorship initiative was, why it failed, and what to expect going forward.

The birth of authorship

Google introduced its Authorship project in June 2011 with a Webmaster Central blog post by the software engineer in charge, Othar Hansson. The purpose of Gooogle Authorship, he wrote, was to provide “a way to connect authors with their content on the Web,” stating that Google was “experimenting with using this data to help people find content from great authors in our search results.” For years, a flurry of SEO industry articles, posts and forum discussions followed, echoing Hansson’s strong recommendation to adopt Authorship markup or face search oblivion (or as Google’s Schmidt phrased it in his book, “irrelevance”). In short, the promise of Authorship was for Google to be able to better tie content to authors, and for authors to enjoy a higher click-through rate from the search results page as a result. Authorship search results were known for their “rich snippets,” which showed author images next to their content. Then in June, those images disappeared, as Barry Schwartz reported at Search Engine Roundtable.

So, what happened?

Google Authorship seemed like a win for authors, users and Google alike … so what went wrong? According to AJ Kohn of Blind Five Year Old, the biggest problem with Authorship was low adoption. In fact, Kohn talked about this problem back in 2013, when he also pointed out that key Google engineer Hansson was no longer on the Google Authorship project. Kohn's observation on low adoption was echoed by Eric Enge and Mark Traphagen in their recent article for Search Engine Land, in which they stated:

Participation in Authorship markup was spotty at best, and almost non-existent in many verticals. Even when sites attempted to participate, they often did it incorrectly. In addition, most non-tech-savvy site owners or authors felt the markup and linking were too complex, and so were unlikely to try to implement it.

Mueller reportedly told Traphagen that Google data showed users were not getting sufficient value from Authorship snippets, and that test data collected over three years convinced Google that Authorship results did not have enough ROI to justify the resources it took to process the data. Enge and Traphagen also pointed to the fact that Google’s “unswerving commitment to testing … every product, and every change or innovation with each product” means that “anything that the data show as not meeting Google’s goals, not having sufficient user adoption, or not providing significant user value, will get the axe.”

What’s next: author rank, schema, and semantic search

Authorship can trace its origins to Google’s 2007 “Agent Rank” patent. Google patent expert Bill Slawski detailed the beginnings of Authorship for Search Engine Land readers, describing Google’s ambition of connecting online content with the “agents” (authors) who penned them, so that it could then adjust search rankings based on the authority and trust signals around their content. While Google Authorship may be dead, “author rank” (a term created by the SEO industry to define the concept) is not. The caveat is that author rank is currently limited to Google’s “in-depth” articles results, according to Danny Sullivan in a Search Engine Land article. He writes that while author rank may grow beyond its in-depth article confines, “it’ll be only one of many SEO ranking factors that go into producing Google’s listings.” Google’s Mueller talked about what the future may look like in terms of verifying authors or content for search results:

Going forward, we're strongly committed to continuing and expanding our support of structured markup (such as schema.org). This markup helps all search engines better understand the content and context of pages on the web, and we'll continue to use it to show rich snippets in search results.

Perhaps it’s best to bid farewell to Google Authorship as we know it for now, rather than declare it dead. It seems inevitable that it will return in some form, as Google pushes forward in semantic search.