SEO - search engine optimization for websites

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1 SEO - search engine optimization for websites How you can easily optimize your website

2 2 CholakovIT We Love What We Do Content Why does a website need optimization? How will SEO help my business and how long will it take until it does? How much does it cost and will investments return? SEO Search Engine Optimization, what is it? Domain factors influencing rankings in search engines part 1 Page level search engine ranking factors part 2 Some easy SEO tips to optimize your website for a keyword phrase Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for WordPress CholakovIT 3 Sofronii Vrachanski 21 str. Plovdiv 4000, Bulgaria mobile: info@cholakovit.com, sales@cholakovit.com web-site:

3 CholakovIT We Love What We Do Citations and their SEO meaning How to register your business in Google + Local? Why you should register your business in Google + Local? Rich snippets and SEO Microdata, semantic search and SEO Schema.org and how to include microdata in your web site? What does structured data mean? Panda and Penguin updates how to protect your website? CholakovIT 3 Sofronii Vrachanski 21 str. Plovdiv 4000, Bulgaria mobile: info@cholakovit.com, sales@cholakovit.com web-site:

4 4 Why does a website need optimization? Everyone has a computer today and uses it to search and find a variety of things online. Some people seek products they want to buy, others look for the details of a particular event, and still others look for information they really need. According to recent studies 20% of the people spend from 1 up to 2-3 hours a day at their computer, 30-40% spend from 3 up to 7-8 hours a day, and 30-40% spend more than eight hours at the computer every day. The percentage of people who spend very little or no time whatsoever at their computer is very small. From 70-80% of the people who use the Internet go to Google to find information on products, events and other things necessary. Since Google is the most visited search engine, and a lot of searches are generated through it, a great number of websites get a large portion of their traffic right from there. And this is exactly what holds the essence of the answer to why a website needs optimization. A great percentage of the visitors go through the first few links in the search results, or through page one at the most, thus leaving page two to be visited extremely rarely. If your website is displayed on page one, and most importantly, if users can find you within the top 3 of the results, you will not only have website traffic, an improved image, and a page visited and read by many, but you will also make actual sales of products and services. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) makes finding your website easy, and you will notice that after a SEO cam- CholakovIT 3 Sofronii Vrachanski 21 str. Plovdiv 4000, Bulgaria skype: panko10 mobile: info@cholakovit.com, sales@cholakovit.com web-site:

5 5 paign website traffic rises significantly, and thus you can take the leading positions in the results displayed by search engines. This is exactly what SEO aims at- higher traffic and more sales because you are easily found on Google (the most widely used search engine), and surely let us also add Yahoo, Bing, and the others. Because of SEO users will stumble upon your website, and not your competitors! The process of search engine optimization is part of the overall strategy of Internet marketing. That is why, if you would like your website to really reach the audiences you target on the Internet, and to benefit from its existence, then you should consider using the services of a professional SEO optimizer. How will SEO help my business and how long will it take until it does? The main goal of SEO is to drive some serious traffic to your website and generate sales. The way we achieve this is through optimization for Google, Yahoo, Bing, Yandex, and more. Once SEO has reached its goal, you will not only be amongst the first page results for certain keywords, you will also be in the top 3 or 5, and you will have huge traffic and lots of sales. Optimization is one of the ways in which you increase your sales and traffic. Our experience shows that even if you create a beautifully designed, well-structured website, it will not be very efficient unless some serious work to make it popular is done. However, once the website becomes popular, the investment returns are huge and profit continues to increase over time. The time which is necessary for the optimization of a website is at least three months (or at least this is the minimum period we CholakovIT 3 Sofronii Vrachanski 21 str. Plovdiv 4000, Bulgaria skype: panko10 mobile: info@cholakovit.com, sales@cholakovit.com web-site:

6 6 would recommend you). During that period an SEO expert works on your website code and files- the so-called On page optimization; after that has been done the expert will start registering your website in different directories, create back links, and these back links will be rated by Google- if they are high quality links, it s your win, for your rank grows. SEO - web traffic and web site optimization There are a number of techniques that an SEO expert will apply and it takes time for basics to be implemented. This time has to be at least three months in order for SEO to take effect, and whoever aims at serious results, should subscribe for SEO services for a full year. This is when the effect will indeed be huge. There is no fixed limit- the more you invest in SEO, the more you earn, and the higher will your revenues be. How much does it cost and will investments return? From one point of view, the price of SEO may be considered very low, but also very high from another. It largely depends on the type of business you would like to develop, how active you are ready to be, and much more. In a number of cases the business is being rather neglected, the people who run it are very inactive, and the achieved results simply lose their significance- this is a typical case when optimization turns expensive. This is the place to point out that if our client is really serious on business development, he/she will follow the advice given by SEO experts, as in this way all desired goals will be achieved, and the service we provide will be inexpensive and our client will be able to generate profits. We have also come across a number of cases when a very cheap low-quality SEO service is offered, which can seriously damage the reputation of a website. The real price of high-quality SEO services in Bulgaria is about 400 BGN per month (approx. 200 ) and even more. There are services which are offered at a lower price, but are stripped from certain features, either because the website is small or new, and is not very powerful, or because the price is just too high for the client in the beginning, for he/she still has other expenses on the hands, still investing and not yet expecting huge returns. CholakovIT 3 Sofronii Vrachanski 21 str. Plovdiv 4000, Bulgaria skype: panko10 mobile: info@cholakovit.com, sales@cholakovit.com web-site:

7 7 For one reason or another, you can find these services at a slightly lower price but oftentimes the quality is lower. If we are considering serious quality and active optimization which aims high, then prices can go as high as 600 BGN per month (approx. 300 ) or even more, but keep in mind that the profits after this investment are enormous. The website itself also plays a role in determining the price, the website quality and code matter are not to be neglected either. To have great profits it is important to work with an expert in SEO, one who has had years of experience optimizing a variety of websites, and has recommendations from clients. If you find the right person, you will definitely enjoy huge investment returns! CholakovIT 3 Sofronii Vrachanski 21 str. Plovdiv 4000, Bulgaria skype: panko10 mobile: info@cholakovit.com, sales@cholakovit.com web-site:

8 8 What is Off Page SEO? Off Page SEO is all the optimizations that a specialist makes outside the optimized site. It is mainly link building (creating of links from other websites towards the optimized pages) which is the most important factor for high search rankings. A few of the ways for Off Page SEO are: - registration of the website in directories - link exchange between one or more websites - publishing of articles about your website in other websites - creating of new websites (blogs, forums) which have links towards the optimized website in other word they make your site more popular. Can a website on which has been performed only On Page SEO come up in search engine rankings? It is possible to some extent if the website has been optimized for keywords with low competition ratings. It is possible also in cases of the optimized website having exclusive content drawing visitors to share links toward this content. Often this is the case with entertainment websites but again the keywords have to be with low competition ratings. If the keywords you optimize a website for are popular and many people optimize for them than it is very difficult to rank high in searches for them especially if the content of the optimized website does not stimulate user sharing. For successful SEO you have to combine On Page with Off Page optimization.

9 9 Domain factors influencing rankings in search engines part 1 The factors influencing rankings in search engines need to be understood, figured out and used in Search Engine Optimization. Without proper understanding of SEO you may not reach the desired results or just rely on chance. The Google algorithm for search results is kept secret but our experience, the experience of many people, SEO specialists and Google and Bing employes show the relation between your website and its placement in search results. Which are the factors? The factors influencing search results can be divided in 2 categories domain name related and website pages related. The influence of different factors according to Seomoz (as of 2011) can be viewed in the diagram to the left. The results shown are: - links leading toward a website page and their authority 21% - keyword inside the website content 15% - keywords in the domain name 11% - data showing the level of the pages in social sites 7% - level of the brand represented by the domain 7% - on page optimization factors non keyword related 7% - web traffic toward a page 6% - on page optimization factors related to the domain name and non keyword related 5% Below are detailed analyzes of the factors mentioned.

10 10 I. Domain name related factors 1. Using keywords in the domain name. How are the website keywords used in the domain or subdomain name? Is the keyword included in the domain name and what is its positioning in the domain? The possibilities are: 1.1. The domain name is a keyword for example keyword.com The keyword is included in the domain name abckeyword.com The keyword is the first word in the domain name keywordabc.com The keyword is the subdomain name keyword.abc.com The keyword is the second subdomain name keyword.123.abc.com The keyword is an extension of the domain name ABC.keyword The keyword is at the same time in the domain name, subdomain and extension key.word.com or key.wo.rd. The best choices are 1 through 4. The best and most preferred is 1. where the keyword is the domain name which case is considered a head start in the search rankings. 5, 6 and 7 are not a good choice. The domain name extension.com,.org,.info etc. has less and less influence in the search rankings. The tendency according to SEOmoz from 2011 compared to 2009 is: the importance of using keyword/s in the domain name decreases. In June, 2010 domain names like keyword.com had 0.38 correlation with higher rankings. At the end of March, 2011 this number went down to 0.22 one of the lowest so far. 2. Links toward the domain and the quality of the links This factor includes the quality of the inbound links (the links pointing toward the optimized website). Here we talk not only about the links toward the site for example to page but for all the links pointing toward the domain *.test.com. This factor includes: 2.1. The quantity of inbound links with certain anchor text The importance/authority of the domain i.e. page rank, moz rank etc The distance form the trusted domains calculated by algorithms like TrustRank, moztrust etc The quantity of unique URL links pointing toward your domain (dofollow and nofollow) Is the content of the websites having links toward your website similar to your content What is the frequency of attaining inbound links.

11 Quantity of unique c-blocks from IP addresses (with rel=follow or rel=nofollow) which point toward your website Diversity of inbound links for example links from forums, links from blogs, links from news sites etc Inbound links from websites with high reputation. The tendency is: latest research of the % dofollow links suggest that if a website has very few nofollow links compared to dofollow links what happens is that the website goes down in the search engine rankings. SEO specialists suggest that the reason for lowering the ranking is that Google suspects spam campaign. 3. Non keyword related on page factors regarding the domain name Besides keywords and links there is other criteria search engines use for ranking a website Number of letters in the domain name, dashes, use of digits Unique website content Adding new content Website bounce rate how long do visitors stay on the website CTR rating from the SERP search engines for the domain how many people stay on the website and continue looking at different pages Number of errors found when the search engine robot passes through the website How old is the domain name The speed of response from the hosted domain name measured by the Google robot Number of 404 page errors Quality of other websites in the same C-block or IP of the hosting server Time left for the domain to expire! The SEO specialists have concluded that the domain name length is important factor. It is not recommended to use dashes and digits. Another observation is that domain names that expire in less than a year are less indexed by Google, the indexing speed is considerably lower. The loading speed of your website is also very important. If your website loads slow when the Google robot tries to index it than your ranking in searches will also be lower. Avoid having pages not found or error 404! It is very important for your website to have unique content. Avoid duplicate content! Google places higher websites that are more useful, unique and easy to navigate. 4. Level of the domain brand Here are included elements of the domain that show the quality of the branding plus data about the brand. This area is not very clear but representatives from Google and Bing share that the information for a website from Facebook and Twitter play a role in search placement.

12 12 This factor includes the following elements: 4.1. The brand/domain searches Number of mentions in news sites and social sites The quantity of data in the toolbar/browser for the use of the domain Wikipedia quotations about the domain Registration of business web sites in Google Places Official Facebook page of the website Official Twitter page of the website Official LinkedIn page Frequent mentions of the website in LinkedIn as an employer. The tendency is that the number of shares and mentions of a domain in the news and social sites will have more and more influence in search rankings. More valuable are only the inbound links. The social shares and mentions increase the traffic toward your site which in turn helps for better search engine rankings. Page level search engine ranking factors part 2 That article is part 2 of Domain factors influencing rankings in search engines. Part 1 described the domain level search engine factors. The article in part 2 will describe the page level search engine factors. 1. Data about the pages level in social sites. This factor is related to data from the social media (Facebook, Twitter etc.) about the ranked page: - The authority of Twitter users with link toward a page. - Quantity of shared pages in Twitter. - Quantity of Facebook shares. - Authority of the Facebook users sharing a link within Facebook.

13 13 - Comments about the page in the social media. - Authority of Google Buzz users sharing links toward a page. - Quotes with links toward the page. Some of the elements above may not influence the Google rankings so much but it is very possible that by having many shares in the social media or mentions of your website in Wikipedia that your website becomes higher ranked in search engines. 2. Links toward a page inside a website and relevance of these links. This factor includes the number and quality of the links pointing toward the page. It includes: - Quantity of unique domains having a link toward your website with anchor text with the exact keywords. - Quantity of unique domains having a link toward your website with with anchor text partly containing your website s keywords. - Quantity of unique domains containing a link towards a page. - Total quantity of links pointing toward the website (each domain may have many links toward your website). These links can have anchor text all with your website keywords or partly containing the keywords. - Page authority measured with algorithms like PageRank, StaticRank, mozrank. - Similarity of the content between your website and the website linking to it. - Difference in terms of TrustRank and mozrank between the page linking to your site and the highly trusted government and university websites. - Quantity of unique c-blocks of IP addresses linking toward your website. - Diversity of links (from blogs, forums, directories). - Links from established trusted websites.

14 14 The tendency is that external links have high importance for search engine rankings and the social media factors increase their role. Interesting discovery according to SeoMoz from 2011 is that external links with anchor text containing non exact keywords is better than the case with anchor text with the exact keywords. This is better for your SEO website optimization! Our advice is to have around 50% links with exact and 50% with partially anchor text to avoid penalty by Google. Thematic relation to linking websites has less influence but it is important to have inbound and outbound links from and to thematically related websites.important: after the Pinguin and Panda updates is important to have back links from websites with relevant topic. It is better to have a link from the highest ranked page of a website than have links in all its pages in the footer of the website. 3. Using keywords in pages. Here are included keywords/phrases in certain parts of the HTML code of the page (in the title tag, H1 and H2 titles, alt attributes of images etc.). The elements of this factor are: - The keyword is first inside the Title tag of the page. - Number of keyword repetitions inside a page. - Keywords in alt tags of images. - The percentage of the keyword inside the Title tag and inside all the pages of the domain. - The percentage of the keyword inside the Body tag of the page. - Presence of the keyword in the first 100 words of the page content. - Presence of the keyword in the webpage URL. - The keyword is first in the H1 title. 4. Traffic level toward a page. At this time Google considers not only the traffic toward the domain but also the traffic toward a particular page. The pages with more traffic are considered more important and rank higher. These elements describe the user data for page ranking based on the assumption that Google and Bing with their toolbars, browsers and mobile devices have access to large web traffic for analyses. This factor includes:

15 15 - CTR from Google for the page for keyword. - Bounce rate of the page, measured with the return of users to the search engine. - Average CTR from Google for a page for all keywords. - Quantity of keywords for which the page is being rated. - Volume of user data collected from the browser or toolbar. The wider opinion is that Google follows CTR and bounce rate of the pages because this is a clear indicator if the users are satisfied with the page content and it is logical that this affects the page rating. 5. On page factors non keyword related. This factor includes: - Unique page content. - Connections of the page with other pages (if the page is isolated from the rest of the website pages) includes inside pages pointing toward this page and not only links from the menu. - Newly added content. - Page age how long ago has the page been indexed by Google for the first time. - Page content length. - Page loading speed. - Images included in the page. - Links pointing toward 404 error pages (pages not found). - Usage of snippets. Observations: Long URLs have negative effect. Rich snippets help for CTR increase of the page. Fast page loading for users and the Google robots positive. Slower page loading can lead to lower rankings. Unique content is most important. There are many websites with not well structured HTMLs ranked high by Google because of that reason. AdSense do not give any advantage they can even be disadvantage in rankings.

16 16 Some easy SEO tips to optimize your website for a keyword phrase We share with you some easy steps for you to make your website optimization better. It is important the keyword phrase to be in the title (< title>) the best for the keyword phrase is to be in the beginning of the title. Place important keywords as close to the front of the title as possible.also the keyword phrase has to be mentioned exactly, not almost exactly. For example for a keyword phrase Chocolate donuts the best title would be exactly: Chocolate donuts URL the keyword phrase has to be in the url of the page. Place it as close to the domain name as possible. For example: sweetes.com/chocolate-donuts Different words in the url have to be separated with dashes, not with underscores. This is what Google officially recognized as the way to separate words in urls. Also all letters in the url

17 17 should be with small caps (because it would be easier for people to write it that way and that s why this is also one of the factors for Google). Meta description it doesn t have direct influence on Google s ranking. But when people see well written and related description to some page in the search result, it is possible for them to click it and that will increase your traffic. It is good your keyword phrase to appear there also because people will know that there is information in the content which they are searching for. The content in a small text the keyword phrase has to be mentioned at least 3 times. In a bigger text at least 5-6 times. The best is your keywords to appear in the first sentence of your content. Nearer to the beginning of the text, the better! Your keyword phrase can be marked with italic in the beginning once (not more than that). This is considered to have some small percent for the ranking of your web site. Important: Don t come to the extreme with adding keywords. It is important your text to look natural and not like stuffed with keywords. It will be more useful even if the content is useful, attractive and linkable inspiring people to link to it. Seo researches show that one text can be ranked higher and higher when you add keywords till one moment. After that there is no change in the position in search results. Keywords stuffing can repel users of your web site and it also can act as an alarm signal for Google that something is wrong with your content and there can be a penalty for your web site. Alt (Image Alt Text) your keyword phrase is good to be included 1-2 times in the alternative text of your images. If you have many images, it is not necessary to include your keyword phrases in all of them. It is also good the filename of some of your images to be as your keywords because there is a possibility for images to be found in Google image search and that can also bring traffic.

18 18 Additional tips: Internal links the links to your optimized for keyword phrase page has to come from other pages in your website also (it s better to be inside the content of these pages). This will show to search engines that you consider your optimized page as very important in your website. Click-Depth it is considered that the more easy and near to the home page is one optimized page, the better (because visitors will have to click less times to reach that page starting from your home page.) Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for WordPress WordPress offers a variety of settings for search engine optimization of your website. The best part is that these settings are easy to access and don t require coding experience whatsoever. One of the most important settings is located inside Settings > Privacy. Here you can enable your website visibility for search engines. This option is turned on by default but it is a good idea to check it out. Next you have to pay attention to your website title (Settings > General > Site Title). Your website title will be a part of the title tag for each page and title tags are important for search engines. Use a keyword/phrase which describes best your website. The tagline description is also a part of the title tag for the home page unless you leave it blank. Usually after publishing a new article on your website it takes some time before the content gets indexed by the search engines. To avoid this slight inconvenience after every change you make in your blog WordPress automatically signals every content change to given servers. Go to Settings > Writing and inside the Update Services field type in the servers addresses. Here you can find a list with servers: codex. The URLs of your pages are very important for SEO. URL like is not the best option. Search engines cannot understand what the page content is by reading?p=123. Use in this way search engines will index your pages more easy and correct. You can set how your posts URLs

19 19 appear in Settings > Permalinks. It is a good idea to enter inside the Custom Structure field /%postname%/. You can learn more about using permalinks here. Search engines like dynamic website with periodically added new content. That is why blog is a good choice. WordPress makes it easy to create a blog and if you structure well the blogposts your website will definitely go up in search results. To write a new post inside of WordPress go to Posts > Add New. The post title is of importance. Include in the post title chosen for SEO keywords/phrases so that search engines can easily recognize what is the topic of the article. The content of the article is also very important. It has to be engaging for the visitors with useful information in this way people will come back to your website. The theory is that the keyword density in your articles should be around 2% but don t worry just write the article without thinking about the keyword density and it will look natural. One way to choose keywords is to write in the search engine a word related to your web content and look for the drop down results to show up. In the Post Tags field you can enter some important keywords related to the article. After you publish the article it will appear in the main blog page and the article s own page. In this case the search engines will index duplicate content which is not good. To avoid the duplicate penalty after the first few sentences insert more tag. This will divide the article in two parts, the first part will be visible on the main blog page and the full content will be on the blog post s individual page. Dividing your content into categories can be very useful for easy navigation. Don t add an article in more then on category this can also lead to duplicate penalty. Besides the blog you website probably contains and other pages. The above principles are also valid for them but due to their static content they are not considered that important for SEO. If you want to expand the standard SEO capabilities of WordPress you can install SEO plugins. There is large variety of SEO plugins most of them are free of charge make your own choice. In this article we will focus on two of them: All in One SEO Pack and Google XML Sitemaps. All in One SEO Pack optimizes the home page, creates your chosen meta title, meta description and meta keywords. It optimizes the same way all the blog articles (all the posts). Google XML Sitemaps makes XML duplicate of the website which search engines use for quick access and indexing.

20 20 To install the plugins go to Plugins > Add New and in the search field type the plugin name. Choose the plugin and click Install Now. After the new page is loaded click on Activate Plugin. You are all ready, check the settings. There is no need to change the default settings of Google XML Sitemaps they are already well set up. The All in One SEO Pack settings can be found in Settings > All in One SEO. For any plugin to work its Plugin Status has to be Enabled. In the Home Title field you have to enter a variation of the website title. Follow the same principles as for the website title. If you leave the field blank the plugin will use the website title. Inside the home description you have to enter the website description which appears in search engine results for the homepage. The best number of words describing your website is For Home Keywords use 3 4 keywords for the website in general. Leave the next few fields the way they are by default. Canonical URLs Rewrite Titles: Post Title Format: Page Title Format: Category Title Format: Archive Title Format: Tag Title Format Search Title Format: Description Format: 404 Title Format: Paged Format: SEO for Custom Post Types: Use Categories for META keywords: Use Tags for META keywords Dynamically Generate Keywords for Posts Page: Make sure that Use noindex for Categories and Use noindex for Archives are checked. In this way the categories and archives pages won t be taken into account and duplicate content will be avoided. Leave the rest the way it is by default. Don t forget to click the Update Options button to save the changes. After that go to the posts page Posts > All Posts. Open an article and at the bottom of the page you will find All in One SEO Pack settings for the article. Type in Title, Description and Keywords and click Update. Your beginning website optimization settings are complete. You can also go beyond these SEO settings and create social media connections etc. for further popularization of your website. Citations and their SEO meaning The use of Citations, included as part of our SEO strategy, is important for improving the overall search engine ranking of your site. It is really important to understand the definition and application of Citations. Citations are essentially data references to your business name, address, telephone or other pertinent data which can appear on

21 21 website pages, other than your own website. For example, citations regarding you and/or your business can appear in online company directories, public yellow pages and other sources, such as conference attendee listings without your direct participation in submitting information to these sources. Citations are one of Google s optimization factors that you should not neglect, because if implemented properly, citations can be the main factor for your website to be shown or not. For example, if two websites have almost the same SEO values, the website with the most citations will most likely be ranked higher and therefore will be more visible in certain search engine results. Why they are so important for Google? Citations serve to affirm as a proof that you own a real company not just a put-up affair, but a real business (both online and offline). Your company has real company staff in other words, citations point out you are a registered firm, you maintain a physical office, have an established phone connection and most probably a real person exists as a part of it all. SEO best practices and trends show Google likes brands, prefers real companies and other organizations with many established citations because these data points suggest those type of companies/organizations are appreciated by search engine users. How should the citations look like? Citations should appear using your country s accepted format for displaying data such as addresses, phone numbers etc. It is important the citations to include: Company s address with postal code Your company s primary phone number Your company name (with or without an URL link) For Example: CholakovIt Ltd, 9 Bulgarski apokrif Str, 1434 Sofia, Bulgaria Where I can place Citations? A list of the most commonly used sources are shown below, but wherever you see a competitors listing or a citation for a company in a similar business, you should consider adding your organization too. yellow pages, directories about companies sponsorship of different events websites like Flickr, Picassa, You Tube signatures in forums and s How we can we find out where our, or other company have citations in search engines?

22 22 Users based in America can visit If you are outside USA post in a search engine box, the address, the phone number and the name of the company and see what will display on the results. Here you can watch video with additional information from our colleagues! Why you should register your business in Google + Local? Why would you register your business or company in Google + Local? Let s take a look at the following significant reasons: 1) It s free and it provides accurate targeted traffic and free advertisement as well. 2) The second reason can be easily seen on this image:

23 23 The top few results, shown after searching in Google, are the Google + Local results. If your website is not registered with Google + Local, it will not be listed within these results, neither on the map, and will be hidden far away from the visible part of the search engine. This shows how important Google + Local is. This helps a lot in your website optimization! 3) If you have a mobile device you can easily find active local businesses like dental offices, retail stores, etc, by browsing the internet, which becomes widespread nowadays. One of the greatest benefits of using Google + Local is helping clients to find your company easily (especially for offline business). 4) At the moment 1/3 of the queries in Google are related to places (Ed Parkers from Google). For comparison in 2010 it was 1/10, which is clearly showing a progressive trend. This means your business will be shown on the map with the exact location and address. 5) Local search is expected to surpass 50% of the overall search queries for places in the next 2 years! Using your mobile device for searching queries is a common practice nowadays. How your website can be included in Google+ Local and be in a better position there? Still there is no real definite clue how to improve your ranking in Google + Local, so it appears as a top result. However, there are some advices you can take, so your website would be included and get a better position: 1) Register your business when you register your company you will need to add information about it. Be careful when typing in your address (Google will send letter to verify your business at the indicated address) and the phone number you will list. Your name, phone number and address represent your business card all over the web. When you register in Google + Local you will have the option to include more than one phone number, however, we suggest you to list

24 24 just one the primary contact number. It s really important that all the information, citations and details about your business are identical everywhere on the web. For more details about how to register your business you can visit our page How to register your business in Google + Local?. 2) A common rule about the ranking in Google + Local is that your company s office should be located in or near the central part of the populated place(city, town, etc), there are however some exceptions. 3) Ratings and reviews of your business page in Google + Local could reflect on your ranking in Google + Local, but they should look truly objective if you receive 10 great positive reviews for just 1 day and none for the next several days or weeks, it will be obvious that this is not very natural, especially when other similar websites have only 1-2 reviews within a whole year. How to register your business in Google + Local? In attempt to increase its social media presence, Google integrated Google Places and Google Local in its social media, the result of which is Google Plus Local, which has more attractive view (typical for a social media). That helps for better position in Google Search Engine too.

25 25 The company make this with the purpose to encourage companies in all countries to make their business more popular, the way other social medias like Facebook and Twitter are already doing. Now the users of Google Plus can not only to associate with other people in their circle but also to search for other firms and services in their area, and also to rate and make reviews. Instructions on that how to make your own Google + Local business page: 1. If you don t have a Google account, first you have to create it. 2. Go to and login there 3. On the left hand side of the page, select More and then click on Pages 4. In the upper right hand corner of the page, select the Create a new page link 5. Now you have to select the most applicable category for your page. 6. Once you ve chosen your category, type in the main phone number for your business and then click on Locate and if there is no other company listed with the same phone number you will continue to the next step of giving your company s info. 7. If your business already has a Google Plus Local page listed, then select it from the list and on it and edit the details. But if your business doesn t appear in the results, select the Add your business to Google link to add your business to Google + Local. 8. Insert your company details. 9. Press the button for creating a new page. 10. After you have pressed it, you will go to another page where you can update or add more information about your business. 11. Click Save and your information will be saved. 12. Important step (!) In order your page to be showed when somebody search in Google +, you have to validate your page. There are buttons to do that in the top and the right hand side. Then you will see a page, where Google asks you to see again your company details and if you confirm them, they will send you a letter with your validation pin code.

26 26 I hope this article is helpful for you. If there are some questions, we can help you with your registration. Rich snippets and SEO Rich snippets? They could be well known to you or you might still never have heard much about them. But if we give you some examples like the image below and we explain what they are actually, may be you will remember that you have encountered them, when you were searching in internet. Yes, that s right! The first and the third result in this page from Google contain rich snippets and they are looking better, right? Rich snippets are additional lines and information on particular result in search engines, which usually contain visual information (rating stars, images, etc.). To be included in your pages, you have to use structured data like microdata. What is the use of rich snippets? Most of the time the use of rich snippets in the source code of your website helps to attract the attention of visitors, makes them more confident and gives them some expectations about the

27 27 content of a web page. This on the other hand brings more traffic by average 30% and betters the ranking in search engines. What rich snippets are mainly used for in search engines? In the moment rich snippets are used in Google for: Reviews People Products Businesses and organizations Recipes Events Music Brands, which use rich snippets Some of the famous web sites, that use them, are: IMDb, ebay, itunes, Rotten Tomatoes, Allrecipes.com. What you have to do, so that you have rich snippets in your web site? It s necessary to use structured data using for example microdata. Your microdata have to be according to the standards like the examples on schema.org (other alternative is datavocabulary.org ). The information in the content, which is described, must be visible not only for search engines, but for visitors also! Your web site must have some authority.

28 28 Microdata, semantic search and SEO Today the use of microdata in your website is as important as in the past meta tags were important for search engines! All that is part of Google s ambition to offer its users more detailed and exact search results. This is also popular as semantic search. What does semantic search mean? Semantic search can be shortly described as an attempt of major search engines to offer better and more detailed search results by using structured data. Let s say that you look for some recipe. You write in Google the name of the recipe and there are different related results in standard view. Imagine how great will it be, if you are able for example to sort results by time for cooking, ingredients, calories, etc. This is what semantic search does and you can see example of this on the following image: What does microdata mean? One of the ways, which Google uses in attempt to achieve sematic search, is the use of structured data by adding microdata in the code of a web page.

29 29 Microdata is a part of HTML5, which gives additional information for search engines by using different markup in the content of pages. Microdata can easily be seen, when it is used for voting. When you search in Google, you can see rating stars near some of the results these are rich snippets, which are made using microdata. Microdata also has a W3C standard. The use of microdata is considered as a replacement for the older microformats and is recommended officially from Google. Also it replaces some other technologies like Video Sitemaps. The use of microdata to create for example rich snippets may increase the traffic to your web site and CTR (Click-through rate). Because of misuse of rich snippets mainly by some website owners who want their pages to look more attractive in search engines (although their pages and content topic are not suitable for rich snippets), Google now also can receive reports for such misuse of rich snippets. Here is one very short illustrating example of microdata s code: Html code wihout microdata <div> My name is Bob Wall but people call me Wall. Here is my home page: <a href=" Html with microdata <div itemscope itemtype=" My name is <span itemprop="name">bob Wall</span> but people call me <span itemprop="nickname">wall</span>. </div> What is microdata used for? Microdata is used for creating: Rich Snippets (reviews, peoples, products, business and organizations, recopies, events, music) Semantic search Social Graph and sharing: Personalized advertisements Friend s recommendations

30 30 For extracting structured data Browser plugins Examples of structured data similar to microdata on different brand websites: Ebay Aggregate Rating and product description using microdata (prices) IMDB actors, starring in the movies using microdata Microdata for recepies

31 31 Rotten tomatoes information for movies In My space information for music In Ticket Master information for events. If you want to learn more about how to insert microdata in the code of your website, you can visit the next article: How to include microdata and what does schema.org mean.

32 32 Schema.org and how to include microdata in your web site? This is part 2 of the article Microdata, semantic search and SEO. What is the structure of microdata and how you can add microdata in your website? That we can find in the vocabulary of schema.org. It is very rich in content. The use of that vocabulary for implementing microdata in a web site is recommended from Google, Bing, Yahoo and Yandex (schema.org actually is owned by Google at the moment). Another alternative of schema.org is datavocabulary.org. Is there a microdata alternative? There are the following microdata alternatives: Microformats (HTML4) there are some differences and a lot of similarities to microdata. It uses classes and attributes similar to css and there might be some confusion when you use the same class for css and for microformats in you web site. RDFa (XHTML) (W3C standard 2008) erdf (Embedded RDF) GRDDL (W3C Recommendation 2007) Open Graph Protocol (Facebook) Open Graph is used by Facebook. It is used for example when you share your page in Facebook it gives information about the page s thumbnail, description and title on the page. If Open Graph tags are missing on your page, when you share your page there might be not correct default sharing information in Google. Open graph is needed when we want to share are pages in Facebook for example. However Open graph is not so descriptive like microdata. Also it duplicates information sometimes. All this ways to structure data have the same goal to make a search more semantic. Google recommends the use of microdata, although it allows also the use of Microformats and RDFa. Tools to create microdata and microformats If you want to add microdata and microformats to your websites, the following tools may be very useful:

33 33 Schema-creator.org hrecipe helper for Chrome Microformats for Chrome Microdata Tool Bing WMT Google s Rich Snippets Testing Tool Quixapp.com hreview pluginза WordPress (it uses microformats) More useful resources: Schema.org guide for microdata Microdata и SEO presentation in Slideshare What does structured data mean? You may not notice structured data, when it is displayed in a browser like Mozilla Firefox or all others. You can see it only in the source code of a web page. However structured data can be easily seen when Google or other search engine bots crawl your web site. This kind of data helps search engines to get more information from your content. If you mark with structured data part of your text, Google will know for example that a particular sentence is your address or phone number, etc. it won t be just a text for it now Here you will see two examples of texts with and without structured data:

34 34 Code without structured data <p> Hello, my name is Vladimir Nguyen. I work as SEO. I publish some articles on this topic at <a href=" cholakovit.com </ a>. I live on Budapest 3 Street, 1000 Sofia, Bulgaria. </ P> Code with structured data (microdata) <p itemscope itemtype=" Hello, my name is <span itemprop="name"> Vladimir Nguyen </span>. I work as <span itemprop="jobtitle">seo</span>. I publish some articles on this topic at <a href=" itemprop="url">cholakovit.com</a>. <span itemprop="address" itemscope itemtype=" I live on <span itemprop="streetaddress"> Budapest 3 Street </span>, <span itemprop="postalcode">1000</span> <span itemprop="addresslocality"> Sofia</span>, <span itemprop="addresscountry"> Bulgaria </span>. </span> </p> As you can see, the second code contains more markup! This additional markup here is made using microdata. You can see examples about the use of microdata in the next article Microdata, semantic search and SEO

35 35 Panda and Penguin updates how to protect your website? What aren t Panda and Penguin? "Panda" and "Penguin" in the nature both are nice animals but if they visit your website you won t be happy to welcome them For those of you who are not familiar with these terms these are names for updates in Google s algorithm with goal to rank higher websites with good quality and to decrease spam. These changes are made periodically from Google and they decrease the ranking and traffic of many websites. In this article we will reveal in details what is the difference between them and how you can protect your website. You have to understand that both Panda and Penguin are not penalties from Google. They are just a change in the ranking algorithm, which is made periodically, and they are different from manual penalty from Google because your website was reported by somebody. If you receive a manual penalty you will receive message about it in Google Webmaster Tools (that s why it is important for you to create account there) but you won t receive it for algorithm updates. What is Panda update? The first Panda update was in February It was named to one of Google s engineers although it is the same name as of the animal. This update hits mainly websites: with many pages without enough content (1 or less paragraph). websites with low quality content (f.e.: translated using Google translate or copied by other web sites). duplicated content (it happens often when you use different content management systems) a visitor can go to the same address from different url addresses. F.e.: Let s say that we can go to the page from urls etc. If the content in these 3 urls is the same, Google will see it as duplicate content.