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It is always a good idea to have a video on your website. It increases the user engagement and grabs the attention. If you appear in a SERP with your own video thumbnail, it increases the CTRs, and the user will likely stay longer on your site.

If you decide to host (or embed) a video on your own website, you have to include proper structured data markup.

In general, it’s easier to appear as a video thumbnail in SERP with youtube video.

From the technical point of view, it is important to have a structured data markup for your article and it is recommended by Google to have an AMP version of the website.

It is based on internal Google algorithm. Your website has to be authoritative and contain high quality content. It doesn’t matter if you are a big news portal or you have a personal blog. If there is a long, high quality content, Google may include your website.

If you want to appear as an in-depth article, you should write long, high quality and unique content marked up with a structured data markup for article (don’t forget to include your company logo within the schema markup).

Higher CTRs. It’s kinda catchy as numbers will always attract people attention. An image can make the feature even more prominent.

Implementation: Good old friend: structured data

In the SERP, they replace the classic URL of a result. It’s a simplified and a common version of URL of the result. Categories and leaf pages are separated with chevrons. On the desktop you can achieve it with the right structured data, in mobile SERP it is automatic for all results.

Breadcrumbs (as opposed to a common URL) are easier to read for people, so it leads to a better UX right from the very first interaction with your website in the SERP, which can also lead to a higher CTR.

It’s really easy to implement it on every blog or ecommerce site – just another structured data to your website. If you have a WordPress site, you can do that with SEO plugins like Yoast SEO.

It mainly appears for the root domain, but it can be shown for a leaf page too (e.g. if you have the blog as a leaf page, blog categories (leaf pages) may appear as sitelinks).

Sitelinks contain links to leaf pages of a current website with title and description. It may contain 2 – 10 sitelinks. Appearance on a mobile is a bit different from a desktop. You may also spot small sitelinks as a vertical enhancement of an organic result.

High CTRs.

You can’t directly control the occurrence of sitelinks. Only Google decides whether to display them or not. However, the best practise is to have a clear website hierarchy in a top menu website with descriptive anchor text. The sitelinks are links from the menu.

Site level: If your site has a generic top-level domain (for example, .com, .org, or .eu), specify your site's target locale using the International Targeting report. Don’t use this tool if your site targets more than a single country.

The biggest problem for SEOs is the missing organic traffic, but it is also the fact that current methods of tracking organic results generally don’t show whether things like Knowledge Graph, Featured Snippets, PAA, Found on the Web, or other types of results are appearing at the top of the query or somewhere above your organic result. Position one in organic results is not what it used to be, nor is anything below it, so you can’t expect those rankings to drive the same traffic. If Google is going to be lifting and representing everyone’s content, the traffic will never arrive at the site and SEOs won’t know if their efforts are still returning the same monetary value. This problem is especially poignant for publishers, who have only been able to sell advertising on their websites based on the expected traffic that the website could drive. The other thing to remember is that results differ — especially on mobile, which varies from device to device (generally based on screen size) but also can vary based on the phone IOS. They can also change significantly based on the location or the language settings of the phone, and they definitely do not always match with desktop results for the same query. Most SEO’s don't know much about the reality of their mobile search results because most SEO reporting tools still focus heavily on desktop results, even though Google has switched to Mobile-First.  As well, SEO tools generally only report on rankings from one location — the location of their servers — rather than being able to test from different locations. 

The only thing that good SEO’s can do to address this problem is to use tools like the MobileMoxie SERP Test to check what rankings look like on top keywords from all the locations where their users may be searching. While the free tool only provides results with one location at a time, subscribers can test search results in multiple locations, based on a service-area radius or based on an uploaded CSV of addresses. The tool has integrations with Google Sheets, and a connector with Data Studio, to help with SEO reporting, but APIs are also available, for deeper integrations in content editing tools, dashboards and for use within other SEO tools.

Fraggles and Fraggled indexing re-frames the switch to Mobile-First Indexing, which means that SEOs and SEO tool companies need to start thinking mobile-first — i.e. the portability of their information. While it is likely that pages and domains still carry strong ranking signals, the changes in the SERP all seem to focus less on entire pages, and more on pieces of pages, similar to the ones surfaced in Featured Snippets, PAAs, and some Related Searches. If Google focuses more on windowing content and being an "answer engine" instead of a "search engine," then this fits well with their stated identity, and their desire to build a more efficient, sustainable, international engine.

“Wouldn’t it be nice if Google understood the meaning of your phrase, rather than just the words that are in the phrase?” said Google’s Eric Schmidt back in March 2009, just before the company announced rolling out their first semantic offerings.This signaled one of the first moves away from “strings to things,” and is perhaps the advent of entity-oriented search implementation by Google.

On the whole, however, much of language can be resolved by mathematical computations around where words live together (the company they keep), and this forms a large part of how search engines are beginning to resolve natural language challenges (including the BERT update).

Google’s team of linguists (Google Pygmalion) working on Google Assistant, for example, in 2016 was made up of around 100 Ph.D. linguists.

By 2019, the Pygmalion team was an army of 200 linguists around the globe

BERT in search is mostly about resolving linguistic ambiguity in natural language. BERT provides text-cohesion which comes from often the small details in a sentence that provides structure and meaning

BERT is not an algorithmic update like Penguin or Panda since BERT does not judge web pages either negatively or positively, but more improves the understanding of human language for Google search.  As a result, Google understands much more about the meaning of content on pages it comes across and also the queries users issue taking word’s full context into consideration.

BERT is about sentences and phrases

We may see this reduction in recall reflected in the number of impressions we see in Google Search Console, particularly for pages with long-form content which might currently be in recall for queries they are not particularly relevant for.

International SEO may benefit dramatically too

Question and answering directly in SERPs will likely continue to get more accurate which could lead to a further reduction in click through to sites.

Can you optimize your SEO for BERT?Probably not.The inner workings of BERT are complex and multi-layered.  So much so, there is now even a field of study called “Bertology” which has been created by the team at Hugging Face.It is highly unlikely any search engineer questioned could explain the reasons why something like BERT would make the decisions it does with regards to rankings (or anything).Furthermore, since BERT can be fine-tuned across parameters and multiple weights then self-learns in an unsupervised feed-forward fashion, in a continual loop, it is considered a black-box algorithm. A form of unexplainable AI.BERT is thought to not always know why it makes decisions itself. How are SEOs then expected to try to “optimize” for it?BERT is designed to understand natural language so keep it natural.We should continue to create compelling, engaging, informative and well-structured content and website architectures in the same way you would write, and build sites, for humans.

I’m confident that we know some of the factors, but certainly not all of them. I think there are X factors out there still to be discovered.I have little confidence that we know the weight Google assigns to individual factors, and I strongly suspect that Google weights unique factors differently in different industries.

No one factor will “do the trick” in any local finder.

The foundation of success both offline and online is positive real world relationships. Be sure you make this message central to what you teach all clients.

use rankings mostly as internal benchmarks, and be sure you’re tracking how the work you’re doing is leading to upward growth in conversions and revenue.

Be sure incoming clients understand the influence of user-to-business proximity, meaning that there are no static #1 rankings.

A new fact about a topic may have to pass some quality threshold before it is added to the Knowledge Graph, but these thresholds are unlikely to be discussed openly by Google.

Topics can also be seen in Google Trends.

Google also provides a Knowledge Graph Search API as shown above, and surfaces entities in the output of its NLP API.

Siloing URLs helps to keep topical relevance within folders; however, if this cannot be achieved due to technical restrictions, you can use internal linking to showcase the topical connection between pages. 

Machines may not be connected to the network until they have had the latest OS and application updates applied, anti-viral software installed and activated, firewall enabled, AND a strong passphrase enabled on all accounts.

Departments must establish, maintain, and effectively implement plans for emergency response, backup operations, and post-disaster recovery for organizational information systems to ensure the availability of critical information resources and continuity of operations in emergency situations.

Encrypted backups should be taken regularly, and all on/off site storage should be physically secure.

Clocks must be synchronized to two (2) internally hosted time servers

RedHat Linux

Encrypt all non-console administrative access. Use technologies such as SSH, VPN, or SSL/TLS (transport layer security) for web-based management and other non-console administrative access.

Logs must be available online (electronically) for three months, available on tape (or other removable media) for one year.

Establish a process to identify newly discovered security vulnerabilities (for example, subscribe to alert services freely available on the Internet). Update standards to address new vulnerability issues.

Remove inactive user accounts at least every 90 days.

Google really wants to make sure that the brand name is visible within the title tag, so it can be re-written to become well-suited to having the brand name on the end of the snippet.

Google has confirmed that when they show a different title in search results compared to what has been specified, this will not impact your rankings for that page