DISC Inc

impact

blog post

been

Introducing: The Periodic Table Of SEO Ranking Factors

sites

The value of "long-form journalism" has been tested on websites such as Salon and shown to be quite viable. It also attracts a better caliber of writer. With this in mind, over a year ago I was working with an online magazine that was already publishing longer, in-depth articles, in the area of many thousands of words. The SEO challenge we had was that page 2 and beyond for most articles were not getting any search traffic - even though there was plenty of awesome content there. The approach we decided on is labor intensive for the content creators. But after some education, the writers were all interested in trying to increase the audience size. Here are the steps we took: Page 1 naturally enough uses the overall title of the article for both its title tag and header, and has a unique meta-description. Every internal page then has its own unique title and header tag . These are based on the first SUB-head for that section of the article. This means more keyword research and writing of subheads than would normally be the case. If the article is considered as a whole, then an tag would seem more accurate semantically. But Google looks at the semantic structure one URL at a time, not for the overall multi-URL article. Most pages also include internal subheads, and these are style as On each internal page, there is also a "pre-head" that does use the article title from page 1 in a small font. This pre-head does not use a header tag of any kind, just a CSS style. This pre-head article title is at the top as a navigation cue for the user. An additional navigation cue is that the unique page titles each begin with the numeral "2." or "3." Each internal page also has a unique meta description, one that summarizes that page specifically, rather than summarizing the overall article. Every page of the article links to every other page at the top and the bottom. None of this anemic "Back | Next" junk. There's a complete page choice shown on everywhe

"visitors found this page by searching for" niche

how much author authority is being used as a ranking signal

Google Extends Support for rel=canonical

Does ad position effect conversion rates?

There's one workaround I will leave you with that negates the use of redirects altogether-including conditional ones. It's useful specifically for tracking, and involves appending tracking information to URLs in such a way that tracked URLs are automatically collapsed by the engines. No, it doesn't involve JavaScript. Curiously, I don't ever hear this method being discussed. The method makes use of the # (hash or pound character), which is normally used to direct visitors to an anchored part of a web page. Simply append a # to your URL followed by the tracking code or ID. For example: www.example.com/widgets.php#partner42. Search engines will ignore the # and everything after it; thus, PageRank is aggregated and duplicates are avoided. Hopefully this has challenged you to think critically about redirects-temporary, permanent and conditional-and their implications for SEO. Opt for permanent (301) over temporary (302) if you want the link juice to transfer. Conditional redirects should be avoided, especially if your risk tolerance for penalization is low. If you take a good hard look at your "need" for conditional redirects, I think you may find you don't really need them at all.

Adam Audette

this Google help article

Google announced

Bloomreach

discussion