Group items tagged

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

Tools like Buzzsumo and Text Optimizer can give you a good insight into questions people tend to ask around your topic:

Note that Search Console labels featured snippet positions as #1 (SEO used to call them position 0). So when you see #1 in Google Search Console, there’s nothing to do here. Focus on #2 and lower.

MyBlogU (disclaimer: I am the founder) is a great way to do that. Just post a new project in the " Brainstorm" section and ask members to contribute their thoughts.

1. Aim at answering each question concisely My own observation of answer boxes has led me to think that Google prefers to feature an answer which was given within one paragraph. An older study by AJ Ghergich cites that the average length of a paragraph snippet is 45 words (the maximum is 97 words), so let it be your guideline as to how long each answer should be in order to get featured. This doesn't mean your articles need to be one paragraph long. On the contrary, these days Google seems to give preference to long-form content (also known as " cornerstone content," which is obviously a better way to describe it because it's not just about length) that's broken into logical subsections and features attention-grabbing images.  Even if you don’t believe that cornerstone content receives any special treatment in SERPs, focusing on long articles will help you to cover more related questions within one piece (more on that below). All you need to do is to adjust your blogging style just a bit: Ask the question in your article (that may be a subheading)Immediately follow the question with a one-paragraph answerElaborate further in the article

2. Be factual and organize well Google loves numbers, steps and lists. We've seen this again and again: More often than not, answer boxes will list the actual ingredients, number of steps, time to cook, year and city of birth, etc. Use Google’s guide on writing meta descriptions to get a good idea what kind of summaries and answers they are looking to generate snippets (including featured snippets). Google loves well-structured, factual, and number-driven content. There's no specific markup to structure your content. Google seems to pick up <table>, <ol>, and <ul> well and doesn't need any other pointers. Using H2 and H3 subheadings will make your content easier to understand for both Google and your readers. 3. Make sure one article answers many related questions Google is very good at determining synonymic and closely related questions, so should be you. There's no point in creating a separate page answering each specific question. Creating one solid article addressing many related questions is a much smarter strategy if you aim at getting featured in answer boxes. This leads us to the next tactic: 4. Organize your questions properly To combine many closely related questions in one article, you need to organize your queries properly. This will also help you structure your content well. I have a multi-level keyword organization strategy that can be applied here as well: A generic keyword makes a section or a category of the blogA more specific search query becomes the title of the articleEven more specific queries determine the subheadings of the article and thus define its structureThere will be multiple queries that are so closely related that they will all go under a single subheading For example: Serpstat helps me a lot when it comes to both discovering an article idea and then breaking it into subtopics. Check out its " Questions" section. It will provide hundreds of questions containing your core term and then generate a tag cloud of other popular terms that come up in those questions:

5. Make sure to use eye-grabbing images

How about structured markup? Many people would suggest using Schema.org (simply because it's been a "thing" to recommend adding schema for anything and everything) but the aforementioned Ahrefs study shows that there's no correlation between featured results and structured markup.

Do article URLs need dates in them?No. If you currently use dates in your article URLs (like theguardian.com does), you don’t need to remove them. It’s fine to have them, but there may be a small downside with regards to evergreen content that you want to rank beyond the news cycle;

Should article URLs have a folder structure?This is optional, but it might help. Google likes to see relevant entities that are mentioned in an article reflected in the URL

Can the URL be different from the headline?Yep, as long as they convey the same meaning.

Can you use special characters in a URL?Short answer; yes, but you shouldn’t.

Long answer; special characters are often processed just fine, but sometimes can lead to issues when a character needs to be encoded or is otherwise not easily parsed. It ’s better to keep things simple and stick to basic characters. Use the standard alphabet and limit your non-text characters to hyphens and slashes.

Is capitalisation okay?This is one of those grey areas where you’ll want to keep things as simple as possible. For Google, a capital letter is a different character than the lowercase version.

What about file extensions like .html?This question can be relevant if you have a website that still uses extensions like .php or .html at the end of a webpage URL.Modern web technology doesn’t require file extensions anymore. Whether your article ends in .html or with a slash (which, technically, makes it a folder), or ends without any notation at all - it really doesn’t matter. All those URL patterns work, and they can all perform just as well in Google.

Can you use parameters in article URLs?You can, but you shouldn’t. In its Publisher Center documentation concerning redirects, Google specifically advises against using the ‘?id=’ parameter in your article URLs.

Do my article URLs need a unique ID?No. This is a leftover from the early days of Google News, when there was an explicit requirement for article URLs to contain a unique ID number that was at least 3 digits long.

How long should my URL be?As long as you want, up to the rather extreme 2048-character limit built into most browsers. There’s little correlation between URL length and article performance in Google’s news ecosystem.

For almost any other purpose, changing existing URLs is generally a Bad Idea.

Over the years Google has given conflicting information about this, though recently they seem to have standardised on “no link value is lost in a redirect” which I’ll admit I’m a little skeptical of.Regardless, the advice is the same: don’t change URLs for any piece of indexed content unless you have a damn good reason to.This is why site migrations are such a trepidatious enterprise. Changing a site’s tech stack often means changing page URLs, which can cause all sorts of SEO problems especially for news publishers.