What Do Google Answers Mean for Content Writers

 Google just doesn’t need to send traffic to your website to provide definite pieces of information anymore. Instead, they’re answering a lot of questions on the search results page itself.

Let’s take a look at some of the search queries that Google is stealing the attention from, and what it means for you as a content maker.

What is today’s forecast?

The result provided for today’s weather forecast is one of the more complicated Google direct answers. Sure, The Weather Channel is still number one. But unless you need more information, there’s no need to go there with Google’s full answer widget that outranks everyone. It allows you to flip through the seven-day forecast and see the hourly temperature, precipitation, and wind facts. The fact that Google’s widget is much easier to use than The Weather Channel mobile site doesn’t hurt either.

What is… Anything?

 Have you been trying to rank for content that starts with what is? If it’s a one to two word saying, Google has already provided the answer with their Web Definitions.

The latter is quite attractive as they show mentions from as far back as the 1800’s based on the number of books using the word searched. You can even click on the graph to see the Google books Ngram Viewer for more information.

How Much Is… Anything?

What Is My IP used to be a very suitable website to visit when, for whatever reason, you needed to know your IP address. But now, Google can answer that in a matter of seconds.

Need to know the present value of the US Dollar in the country you are traveling to? Google has that covered, along with a trending graph to show you whether you picked a good or bad time to make the trip.

Google also does unit conversions. No more needing to click during to a website to find out if a kilometer is greater than a mile or how many ounces are in a cup. They don’t get as coarse as Wolfram Alpha, but they are working on it.

The Point?

So, where am I going with this?  If you’re Machine Learning for improved Content & SEO outcome , you have a challenger bigger than Wikipedia and Yahoo Answers, and it’s Google! Google is expanding their knowledge graph, direct answer, web definitions, and oneboxes on a regular basis. You can’t just make content based on this.

It’s always been significant to find out if you’re competing against Wikipedia and other high authority knowledge providers when creating a piece of content, but at least if you were second you weren’t halfway down the page. Now you are, particularly if the searcher is on a mobile device, has a low resolution, or clicks that down arrow for more information.

The Way to Win Traffic

The way to grab attention from Google’s direct answers is to give more when more is needed. in its place of having a piece of content that tells someone what a hashtag is, rank well for a piece of content that tells people the profit of using a hashtag, how to use a hashtag, how to measure analytics for hashtag usage, and so on. Provide more value than Google does to boost the odds that you will still get a click, even if you are further down the page.

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Seven guidelines for Winning with SEO Website Design

One of most difficult aspects of building a site for the search engines is implementing proper SEO website design. 

On one hand, the aim is to create a website that wows visitors and is engaging. On the other hand, you want to make sure the site is correctly optimized. Design-heavy sites don’t always leave much room for on-page optimization, so it’s essential to find the right balance.

Here are seven helpful tips to make it work:

Tip 1: maintain the layout simple 

Make sure the navigation links can be followed by the search engines. Keep the layout easy and clean but packed with design. Trying to achieve too much can work for the search engine spiders but will ultimately discourage visitors from browsing your site.

Tip 2: influence text with CSS 

One of the biggest issues designers face is using plain text (such as the h1 tag) when graphical text is far more beautiful.

The solution is to use CSS to influence how plain text looks so the search engines will be able to pick up the content. It will never look good as graphical text, but it will be a huge improvement more than plain text.

Tip 3: Use mouse-over’s on images 

if the site is image-heavy and needs text, using mouse-over will be the ideal solution. If this is set up correctly, it can turn an image-heavy site into one that is full of content.

To the visitor’s eye, an image will mouse-over to written text. To the search engine spiders, the text will be crawl able and seen as real content.

Tip 4: test with different fonts 

there are many fonts that look like graphical text but are in fact regular text. This means that the search engines will be able to read the text. Try experimenting with different fonts and consider buying font packs. This will let you to avoid using images and keep your design simple.

Tip 5: make a mobile substitute and format it

more people are by mobile devices to browse the Internet.

That’s why it’s significant to build a site meant to be viewed in mobile format and optimize it for search engines. In addition to creating this site, it is necessary to test how it appears on different devices and platforms so it is formatted correctly.

Tip 6: Design is good but loading time is bad 

too much design can slow down the loading time of a site. When that happens, it’s time to go back to the drawing board and figure out how to decrease downloads. Many things can affect loading time from font downloads to plugins for SEO to high-resolution images to scripts.

Tip 7: Conversion is king 

Creating a well-designed site can give you a lot of pride. However, the one thing that matters most is conversion. Try out diverse designs and see which result in more action whether it is e-mail sign-ups, social media shares, or sales. After all, your sales numbers are what matter the most.

Finding the balance between optimization and great design isn’t always easy, but these solid tips will help you to win with SEO website design. There will be many times where it will be essential to go back and forth until all the technical problems are solved and the overall design is attractive.

Ways to Find Out Why Your Website Traffic Died After a Prelaunch

A site redesign and prelaunch can be an thrilling and busy time in the life of a company’s web marketing program. It's a great time to shake a site down to its core, revamp the message, look and feel, and – most outstandingly – structure the site for SEO success.

On the other hand, if done rudely, a prelaunch or site update can have terrible consequences. For those who nervously await the increased traffic and conversions from the updated site, there are those who are often greeted with tanking traffic post-launch.

Worriedly assessing the site to find out what's gone wrong and why can be the most nerve-wracking part of a post-launch failure. Below is a quick evaluation to diagnose post-launch issues.


1. Check Google Analytics

Has all site traffic ceased? If so, maybe critical tracking didn't make it to the new site. Check this manually.
If you are getting organic traffic, just at a reduced rate, run the site through Analytics Checkup. It could be that a certain section of the site, such as the blog, doesn't have suitable tracking code placement. The scrape of all pages for tracking placement will identify issues.

2. Check robots.txt

If analytics passed examination, now you know something is wrong. The first consideration is deindexation.
Check the robots.txt file for “disallow: /” or in the head of page source code for a Meta robots tag exclaiming noindex. If your site is typically crawled very frequently this can do injure very quickly and start killing rankings. If your site doesn't enjoy frequent crawling, then this cause can take days to a week before killing your online presence.

3. A Deeper test of Google Analytics

OK, all the factors above are fine, where to next? It's time to review Google Analytics again, but go deeper.
Page Names distorted during the Prelaunch
Was this URL rewrite architected well so that old URLs are 301 redirected to new pages? Review the natural traffic by landing page for those with the largest loss with a date range of the week prior to launch. Have those hall pages showing as top performers last week been redirected to new URLs?

Next, move to the Content section and the sub-category of All Pages in Google Analytics. Choose the Primary measurement of All Pages while also choosing a date range of post-launch.

Now, expressive the text rendered in the title element of your 404 page, filter search this text and see how many page views on the site are rendering 404 pages. Furthermore, open a secondary dimension of Landing Page to find these 404ing pages.
When you redirected pages, did you do a simple bulk redirecting of pages to the homepage or a site section or thorough one-to-one redirects. The latter is the preferable choice as redirected ranking listing may now have no thematic correlation with their respective search term and thus be washed away from ranking for the given term.

Page Names Didn't alter During the Prelaunch

Once again, look at organic traffic by Landing Page. Look at post-launch vs. a comparable time pre-launch.

You still see the drop, but now open a secondary dimension by Keyword. Make an evaluation of the keyword losses paired to their respective landing pages.

Review the current landing page vs. the pre-launch landing page. Have the suffering keywords in question left from the focus/theme of the page?

Assuming you ran a keyword ranking report before launch, run one again and sees if there are noticeable ranking drops already. Again review pre-launch and post-launch pages as done above a moment ago for the keyword theme differences.

4. Check for Host or Server Issues


Analytics are fine, there are no de-indexation issues, all redirects are fine, and all keyword focus for each page is fine. What gives?

Did you change hosting or server? message issues between visitors, the host and server can lead to a delay in content delivery or in fact a timing out of content. This leaves a search engine with no way to view the page.

You can review this in Google Webmaster Tools in creep Errors and assess DNS errors and Server Connectivity. This may take days to show too and time is something we don’t have.
Run the site through Pingdom’s DNS Health and the Ping/Traceroute tool. This will help recognize potential content delivery and server communication issues that may exist.

Finding decision

While there may be alternative methods for finding post-launch issues, following the tips above should help you quickly run through your site to pinpoint your traffic's cause of death.
If everything above check out OK for you and you still don’t know why you're experiencing a grave organic search contact loss, then you may have a less common issue that requires a deeper dive. Perhaps there is a design/code flaw or flagrant over-optimization.

Summary

Many times, even with a well-planned prelaunch, you may suffer a slight traffic loss out of the gate. I assertively feel that when Google sees a changed site, be it through design/code or copy, it holds that site at arm’s length while assessing the changes.