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New Data Nuggets Web analytics may not necessarily need another metric but +1 button promises to help measure engagement. Official details on what data will stream from Google's +1 button are not available yet, but Jim Prosser from Google confirmed to SEW that "we're bringing data to Analytics, Webmaster Tools, and AdWords frontend soon". Nontheless, there are methods of tracking +1s to your pages. By writing your own Javascript function, you can track +1 clicks as a Google Analytics event using _gaq.push() and use GA's standard reporting functionality.  All-in-all, the +1 button will now become another micro-conversion that may provide insight to how your site is performing and how users are engaging with your content.

so Google tends to move back and forth between two URLs within any given Featured Snippet, so what? Well, for starters it means that getting your URL into a preexisting Featured Snippet is perhaps a bit harder than we may have thought. If you're not one of the two sites that Google is toggling between, you may want to place your Featured Snippet hopes into other keywords. 

if your URL exists within a query that is purely informational, i.e., does not relate to product or service procurement (we'll get to those in a moment), Google is less apt to remove your URL from showing. Conversely, getting Google to pick up your URL for such Featured Snippets is a bit more difficult for these types of keywords. 

URLs within Featured Snippets produced by product-oriented best keywords are far more volatile than the dataset overall, across the board.

Site Speed’s Impact on SEO Site speed is a ranking factor and an even larger ranking factor for mobile pages. Google is rolling out a Mobile First index moving forward, which will officially take effect in July 2018, meaning now is the time to optimize for mobile site speed so you’re not on the losing team when it officially rolls out. With that being said, we have already seen the direct impact that site speed has on our clients’ websites’ SEO rankings and organic traffic. The reason why site speed is a ranking factor is that it is, first and foremost, a sign of quality user experience. A fast site speed will result in a better user experience, while a slow site speed will result in a poor user experience. A user is typically staying on a site longer if the site speed is faster and they also convert better and bounce less. For those reasons, Google has made it a ranking factor. Related: Improve Website Speed with these 5 Quick Tips We view three to four seconds or less as a good page load time. This varies slightly based on the type of site and industry but typically if your web pages load in under three to four seconds, you’re doing well. Once you exceed that load time, we start to see less optimal rankings as well as a poorer user experience. Conversely, if we brought this page speed down to sub-three to four seconds we would likely see better rankings. We have seen the effects of this first-hand with a client. We implemented site speed optimizations on a client’s website and the client’s developer accidentally removed the work we had done. The website with the site speed optimizations went from a four-second load time to a 12-second load time after the optimizations were removed, which caused rankings to plummet. We went back in and updated the site with the proper site speed optimizations again and got the website back to a four-second load time and rankings went back up. This illustrated in real-time that site speed has a direct link to SEO and keyword rankings. This is rare, as almost nothing happens in real-time for SEO, it’s a slow and steady wins the race scenario, but we saw the ranking impact in just a few days when site speed optimizations were stripped and then re-implemented. It was a great experiment because we already knew site speed made an impact on SEO, but this really showed the emphasis Google is placing on it for mobile and desktop from a search perspective. The benefits of site speed on user experience impact other digital channels as well, like paid search.

Using questions on your landing pages and / or social media will improve engagement

Most basic and how-to questions are going to have informational intent (simply due to the essence of the question format: most people asking questions seek to find an answer, i.e. information). But there's always a chance there's a transactional intent there that you may want to make note of

"People Also Ask" boxes present more SERPs real estate which we may want to dominate for maximum organic search visibility

We decided at MHC to stop offering link audits as we did not feel that it was right to offer a service that could be completely unnecessary. However, we found that a few clients were quite insistent and wanted to give disavowing a try. We filed a few disavows and were incredibly pleased to see that some of these sites saw nice gains a few weeks to months later.

Google’s guide on linking.

We’ll hopefully soon be putting out a thorough guide to disavowing. For now though, we would recommend that you only file a disavow if you are confident in understanding what Google considers a natural link to be. Also, if you are having an SEO company audit your links, we would recommend that you only use companies that manually review your links and have good knowledge of Google’s guidelines on linking. If your SEO company is filing disavows based mostly on recommendations from tools, we feel that this work is unlikely to result in improvements in ranking.

But here’s the formula we’ve found to work really well: video for awareness, interactive display creatives and social channels for engagement, and product-focused creatives for acquisition. This is not just for a purely performance-based approach, but for encouraging account growth year-over-year with increases in traffic and conversions.

It’s impossible to specify different images/formats/files for different networks, other than for Facebook and Twitter. The Facebook image is used, by default, for all other networks/systems). This is a limitation of how these platforms work. The same goes for titles and descriptions

The image size and cropping won’t always be perfect across different platforms, as the way in which they work is inconsistent.

Specifically, your images should look great on ‘broadcast’ platforms like Facebook and Twitter, but might sometimes crop awkwardly on platforms designed for 1:1 or small group conversations, like WhatsApp or Telegram.

All of the other major platforms, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+, recognize Open Graph tags. Twitter actually has its own meta tags for Twitter Cards, but if Twitter robots cannot find any, Twitter uses Open Graph tags instead.

The tags can affect conversions and click-through rates hugely

Adding Open Graph tags to your website won’t directly affect your on-page SEO, but it will influence the performance of your links on social media

Google can anchor you to the exact spot of the answer you are looking for and highlight the block of text that is most relevant to your query. This only works for some searches on Google mobile, that feature AMP content in the featured snippet block.

After you click on it, it anchors you to the section of content and highlights that content as well

filter out your AMP mobile pages and try to see if moving elements around on your web page can result in a better conversion metric for these pages.