Should you focus on perfecting your H1s and H2s, or should structured data demand all your on-page attention? While Google hasn't completely pulled the rug out from under us, don't let the lack of drastic change in page markup fool you. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand outlines where to focus your efforts when it comes to on-page SEO and offers some tools to help with the process.
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Video Transcription
Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we are going to chat about page markup and tags and which ones still matter for SEO.
Now, weirdly enough, you would think that over the last, say, seven or eight years we would've had an enormous growth in the number of tags and the optimization options and what you have to do on a page, but that's not actually the case. Google kind of gave us a few that were important — things like rel=author — and then took some away. So it's changed a little bit, but it is not as overhauled massively as you might think, and that's a good thing.
Old-school SEO markup
Old-school SEO best practices were sort of like, okay, I had to worry about my title, my meta description and keywords tag — keywords a little less though, keywords haven't been worried about for maybe 15 years now — my robots tag certainly, especially if I was controlling bot behavior, rel=canonical and the rel=alternate tag for things like hreflang, which came about six or seven years ago, and my headline tags. Some potential basically markup or text tags that could change the format of text, like strong and bold and EM, these have gotten less important. I'll talk about that in a sec. Obviously, with URLs worrying about rel=nofollow and other forms of the rel tag, and then image source having the alt attribute.
This was kind of the basic, bare-bones fundamental minimums. There were other tags that some people employed and obviously other tags that Google added and took away over time or that they paid attention to a little bit and then didn't. But generally speaking, this was the case.
Modern SEO markup
Nowadays there are a few more, but they're really centered around just a few small items. We do have metadata now. I'm going to call this SEO even though technically it is not just for the search engines. Those are Open Graph, Twitter Cards, and the favicon. I'll talk about that in a sec why that actually changed even though favicon has been around for a long time. Then, things like the markup for Google itself, the structured data markup that's part of schema.org that Google is employing.
I want to be clear. Google is not using every form of schema. If you go to schema.org, you can find schema markup for virtually anything. Google only uses a small portion of that. While certain websites have seen an uptick in traffic or in prominence or in their visibility and display in the search engine results, it is not a guaranteed rank booster. Google says they don't typically use it to boost rankings, but they can use it to better understand content, which in my opinion, better understanding content is something that often leads to better rankings and visibility, so you should be doing it. As a result, many of these old-school tags still apply of course — alt attributes and in the header tag the title and the meta description, meta robots, canonical.
What's changed?
Really what's changed, the big things that have changed, added to the header of pages, I would tell you generally speaking that you should think and worry about:
- Twitter Cards
- Open Graph markup
- The favicon
Twitter Cards is pretty obvious. Basically, because Twitter is such a big distribution network for content and can be, it pays to have your cards optimized rather than to just have the URL exist on its own. You can stand out better in Twitter that way.
Open Graph markup, this is basically used by Facebook, an even bigger distribution platform than Twitter, and so of course you want to be able to optimize how you appear in those. Because social media in general is so well correlated with all sorts of positive SEO things, you want to put your best foot forward there. Therefore, I'm going to say this is an SEO best practice as well as a social media marketing one.
Favicon is a little weirder. Favicon's been around for forever. It's the little graphic that appears in your browser window or at the top of the browser tab. The reason that it matters is because so many sites — social media platforms and many distribution sites, places like Pocket, places that scrape, places that will show your stuff including sometimes, at least in the past, Google's knowledge cards — will sometimes use that favicon in their display of your site. For that reason, it certainly can pay to have a good favicon that stands out, that's obvious and clear, much more so than it was, say, a decade ago.
Not as important...
The H1, H2, and H3
I know what you're going to say. You're looking around like, "Wait a minute. I still see a lot of recommendations from tools, even like Moz Pro, that say I should use H1, H2, H3." It is a best practice. I'd say H1 and H2 are best practices, but they are not going to transform or massively help your rankings. They're not very well correlated with better rankings. In lots of testing, folks could barely ever observe a true, reconcilable difference between using the headline tag and just having those headlines be big and bold at the top of the page. However, I'm saying this alone. If you are using itemprop to describe a headline, an alternate headline, in your schema.org markup, that actually can be more useful. We do think that Google is at least using that, as they say, to better understand your content. I think that's a positive thing. Then, there are lots of other sites that can use schema as well. Google is not the only place. That can certainly help your visibility too.
Strong, bold, and EM
It just kind of doesn't matter as much. With CSS taking things over, you don't need to worry about visual display of text in your HTML code nearly as much and certainly not from the search engine perspective.
Added to body
I'm adding to the body tag of course all of the schema.org options. I'm just showing the article ones here, but you should consider any of the ones you've got — recipes or news or videos or all sorts of stuff.
What about...?
Questions that folks might have around page markup:
- What about other metadata? There's the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative and other forms of open metadata and other forms of markup that you could put in there. I'm going to say no, don't bother. Until and unless something gets truly popular and used by a lot of these different services, Google included, it just doesn't pay, in my opinion, and it adds a little bit of extra weight to a page that just doesn't matter.
- W3C validation, does it matter if I have valid HTML code that's sort of very, very perfect? Nope, it doesn't seem to matter much at all. It didn't matter back in the day. It doesn't matter now. I would not worry about it. Most of the most popular and most visible sites in Google do not actually validate at all.
- Schema that Google hasn't adopted yet? I'm going to be a little controversial and say it's probably worthwhile. If Schema has already stated this is how this format works, but you don't yet see Google using it, it could still pay to be an early adopter, because if and when Google does do that, it could bring benefit. Now, if you're worried about heavy page load or if this is very time-consuming for you or your dev team, don't worry about it too much. You can certainly wait until Google actually implements something before you go and add that relevant schema to your site.
- Other forms of semantic markup? I know there are lots of people who believe semantic markup is the future and those kinds of things, but I don't. I don't think that until and unless the engines adopt it, it probably does not pay. Certainly we have not seen browsers, we have not seen search engines, and we have not seen big organizations that in the social media world start to adopt this semantic markup stuff, so I would worry less about that. I think, to be honest, the engines of the future are worried about parsing the content themselves, not about how you mark it up on your pages.
- Header, footer, sidebar labels in CSS? This was like a spam or manipulation or link counting thing for a long time, where SEOs worried that page markup that called out this is in the header, this is in the footer, this is in the sidebar of the visual of the page, like I'm saying these links are in here or these links are over here or these links are down here, this was a concern. I am less worried about it nowadays. If you are very paranoid or concerned, you certainly could use alternate things. I just wouldn't worry about it very much.
Want to check your pages?
If you want to check these pages, you want to go through a process of actually reviewing all this stuff, there are a few tools that will do all of this stuff for you. They'll look at all of these different tags and markup options.
The free one I love the most happens to be a Moz tool. I just really like it.- MozBar. You can download it for free. There are almost 400,000 people who use it regularly for free, and that's awesome. It does have a little on-page checking option. It'll run through all this different stuff for you.
- View source and do it manually in your browser.
- Google Structured Data Checker tool, which is linked to from the MozBar's on-page checker, but also you can Google it yourself and then plug stuff into it. You don't need to be logged in to your Webmaster Tools or Search Console account. It will validate at least the schema.org options that Google considers, which is great, and some ones that they don't use, but that's cool too.
- Facebook has the same thing with Open Graph checking.
- Twitter with their Card Validator.
If you want to use a paid service to go crawl your site automatically and surface all these issues for you:
- Moz Pro campaigns do that.
- Onpage.org, a great company out of Germany, and Screaming Frog, a great company out of the UK.
We'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.
Good WBF Rand!
Here my 2 cents.
Old classic HTML (H1 et al)
Sincerely I was not paying that much attention to them because, as we all know, their influence in SEO was almost residual. Not that I wasn't using them, because they still were (and are) useful for formatting and giving a better sense to written content.
However, since the rise of Featured Snippets, they started being interesting again also for SEO. In fact, as Google doesn't rely on structured data for creating them, it is quite clear that it is using the classic HTML tags (Hx, ol, li and tables) for formatting them, which has some logic being these tags semantics by nature.
W3C
I agree that W3C validation wasn't and isn't a "ranking factor", however I would pay attention to errors the W3C test can point out, especially - again - because a not clean HTML may complicate the work Google does for understanding the semantic formatting a web document, hence having less probabilities of being "selected" as best answer for a featured snippet.
However, I do this kind of control more as a prevention and not a Priority A task. In this sense I'm more conservative than you or, let's say so, I trust less the ability of Google in parsing the content with easy.
Schema.org
When it comes to Schema.org and structured data, I think that there are two ways of thinking and both valid.
Aleyda Solís, Fernando Maciá, Christian Sepulveda, Juan Felipe Rincón (the Googler) and I discussed about these two philosophies in the first Google Search Hangout in Spanish organized by Webpromo Expert (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJEXoPYAkHw&feature=autoshare ... sorry it is in Spanish only), and they are:
These two approaches are not in contradiction, in fact I personally prioritize the structured data that offers tangible results in the SERPs (and makes happy and convinced the clients), and then I proceed with implementing the other possible schema.org.
NOTE: a good clarification offered in our hangout was - in the case of the sameas property - that Google doesn't really care if reference a Wikidata source, which is not in the language of our site (eg.: using the English Wikidata instead of the Spanish in the case of Spanish website).
Cannot agree with you on your first section enough, this is a situation I have actually faced whereby UX wanted to remove a heading which they felt was confusing but was being used as a rich snippet/quick answer for the exact H1 terms.
The H1 was completely removed and the snippet fell off a short while later, no other changes happened on the page. Our ranking stayed the same we just lost the quick answer.
So true! To remove confusion and page markup "take-downs", it works best when I meet with the design team in advance of my structured data implementation. More than once, ALL of it has been completely removed! The reason give was they "didn't know why it was there and it made their task seem confusing to work around the code.
The best of content writers understand that the rich snippets need to work for both machine learning and readability.
I love quickly updating and adding schema markup, because the advantage it gives a site vs similar sites without it is significant. Once competitive sites have caught up with the latest page markup opportunities, the moment of advantage may have passed.
Surprised on the mention of H1 tags, I recently replaced H2s with H1s on a large site that was set up wrong across 15,000 pages in 15 languages (the only change at that time) and saw a marked increase in search traffic after that change was made.
Thank you for sharing this experience. At the moment I will not change the h1 and h2 of my website, but it is good to have visions like yours
They do matter. Don't believe the hype.
<h1 class="h2 title font-lato"> <a href="https://moz.com/blog/which-page-markup-tags-still-matter-for-seo-whiteboard-friday">Which Page Markup + Tags Still Matter for SEO? - Whiteboard Friday</a> </h1>
hey, me I seeing on my site the same results, with or without the H1. Probably depends on the niche...if they do matter or no. If more competitive the niche is, I think the smallest detail, do matter.
For now I always use a h1 and then h2, h3 or h4. That's my tactic so far, never exceed h1 per page
I agree the more competive the niche, the more getting the details 'right' matters.
I think there's a slight misunderstanding a lot of people have had here on exactly what Rand is talking about with the H1/H2/H3 tags.
I don't think he's suggesting that having a heading doesn't matter, simply that having that heading specifically wrapped in a <h1> tag makes little to no difference.
Basically, whether your heading is wrapped in <h1> or simply styled to be more prominent is next to indistinguishable in terms of ranking improvements.
Recently, Google began requiring the IMG field for JSON-LD markup with the local business type. If I'm remembering correctly, it's meant to be an image of the business in question. Just thought it would be worth mentioning in this conversation. Has anyone else been testing JSON-LD vs tradional Schema.org markup? Any interesting result?
Thanks, Jesse, this is a question I too have an interest in learning about. Anybody care to comment on Jesse's JSON-LD question? TIA.
I think schema matters for SEO! Ratings, knowledge graph are all related to schema markups, right?
If you mean with "knowledge graph" the real Knowledge Graph boxes... then, yes, Schema.org plays a role.
If you mean with it the "featured snippets", then no, Schema.org is not needed by Google for creating them.
Knowledge graph is not come with schema.org. it is automatic process by checking edges and nodes information. When you type "Who is current president of united states" then Google don't check the schema pages, they understand the user intent first then it gives the answer in rich snippet. You really missing many of things, you have to study some patent on this.
Valuable information, as always, Rand, thanks! Just wanted to add that among the tools that check the pages of my site I also liked the SEO Report Card by UpCity. It does a pretty thorough on-site analysis. Apart from that, Hubspot's Website Grader does a pretty good job in evaluating my site's performance.
Great WBF Rand!
I'd add: rel alternate for sites that have separate mobile pages.
Also, for phone numbers, a href tel: to make them click-to-call for mobile users.
Lastly, it USED TO BE true that setting meta robots NOODP,NOYDIR would force Google to use your page titles and meta descriptions instead of wildly pulling text out of your page for the headline and snippet to show in the search results (even though the original purpose was to tell Google not to use the DMOZ or Yahoo Directory descriptions, it seemed for a while that it had this side effect). Yoast has dropped the option to add NOYDIR (maybe they're just dissing the fatally wounded ex-giant Yahoo), but still keeps the NOODP option. Have you heard of any tests on NOODP that might show/not show an effect on Google not going all freestyle with your page titles & meta description? I certainly have a number of client examples where they're doing that despite NOODP/NOYDIR.
Most pages on the web today are not listed in either ODP or Yahoo directory - possibly 99% of pages! - so having NOODP and NOYDIR is somewhat redundant.
Hey Rand,
Thanks for another solid WBF! I agree with you in that "the engines are worried more about parsing the content themselves, not about how you mark it up".
With that, are you surprised that schema has stuck as much as it has? I for one was not a believer in schema in the beginning. I thought, why in a time when Google is becoming more sophisticated in topic modeling and NLP would it choose to rely on us even more to describe what our content is about? But obviously I was pretty dead wrong. Besides page speed (best practices, AMP, PWAs, etc.), it seems like this is what John and team keep pushing the most. Thoughts?
Most interested in your thoughts on H1 tags - although they aren't as important as they used to be, my gut feeling is they still have a big role to play in onpage seo. You have made me question if I've just got the old-school rules of SEO in my head. I will have to test it to find out.
Good Friday Rand,
Very good information. I though your comments on the H1 tags info was interesting. What about tags like
meta name="geo.region"
"geo.placename"
"geo.position"
meta name="ICBM"
meta name="language"
Thank for the great article
Tim
Thanks for these tips. But i think these are the basic tips, I have read it a lot of times on the internet. Did you think I am Wrong?
Regards Junaid
Very nice video, it's easier to learn this way :)! (keep it interactive)
Good job Rand
Hi Rand!
First of all, thanks for this great content;
I totally agree with the Schema.org part, but I cannot say the same with H's tags, my little experiments told me than H1-3 are really important for SEO if you write them ok.
Same here, agree with you...its massive improvements for product listing websites and also we get indexing quick.
I always start with best practices, and that includes proper and consistent use of H tags. As SEO has evolved over the last 20 or so years I have been doing this I have added to, but never strayed from the basics of good, clean markup. Working with business where local rankings are as important as national including geo tags has become standard. And over the last year, inclusion of schema markup for at least addresses, phone numbers and types of businesses has been incorporated. And now including relevant (haha) rel tags is increasing in importance especially on sites where duplicate content can be perceived to be an issue. But SEO is a lot like building a car, there are a basic set of components that you need to make it work, and, depending on what you need it for, you fine tune is as is necessary.
Am I wrong to say the tl;dr for this article is, "Markup doesn't matter, content is king"?
Content and the links and exposure it earns.
Hey there!!
I noticed you recommend Microdata for Schema Markup.
I see JSON is recommended by Google - do you think there really is any difference between them?
I do not recommend JSON-LD at all (unless its is required by Google like for AMP etc). I always use inline microdata markup myself..
Think about it for a second here.. Why does Google recommend JSON-LD?
Why JSON-LD markup is separate from the actual content of the page? You can copy-paste any markup you want, not accurate or even irrelevant data!
But with microdata that is damn hard & got to be accurate.. Because you are marking up the actual content on the page.. And Microdata is time consuming.. so lazy guys will not try this :)
For Google, JSON-LD is a test.. thats is all..
People insert JSON format, Google checks the content and tries to match it to the structured data you have provided in json format. Or if Google trusts your json data, it tries to match it to your content.. So it can understand better..
Who would spend long hours implementing microdata?
This was actually pretty fascinating to me. I'm a writer that just started working writing web content so the whole subject is new in and of itself for the most part. The fact that so many things I've just learned about are already becoming, for lack of a better word, obsolete, makes me realize I've got to stay alert! Thanks for sharing this, it was an excellent read!
Hey Rand,
Another great WBF, thanks!
I'm definitely going to be sending this video link to our clients the next time they ask for everything to be W3C validated - because someone somewhere told them that's how it should be - I am so bored of that and having to explain that it really doesn't matter. At all.
Thank you!
Great WBF on page markup tags. I would agree that H1, H2 and H3 hold very little for rankings , yet they are important from the view of users. This is because the user can find out at a glance the main points of the post
Rand, I know this question will be a bit off topic, but just now I was about to publish my new blog post, when I saw the automatic message from the Yoast SEO - The focus keyword doesn't appear in the first paragraph of the copy - marked red.
Is it still important to include my main keyword in the first paragraph of my copy?
Thanks!
Stacey.
I wouldn't worry about it. Yoast comes up with all kinds of weird warnings on pages of mine that rank at #1 for very competitive keywords.
Thanks, so you think that the main keyword in the first paragraph of the copy is not that important for SEO any more? Should I just forget about that rule of the past completely?
Stacey, to answer your question, my comment wasn't suggesting that any specific part of Yoast was wrong but that, in general, even if Yoast marks your post with "red" that doesn't necessarily mean the SEO on the page needs some urgent action. I've got several "red" posts featuring at #1 in Google for fairly competitive terms (£5-£10 per click in Adwords). Many of them don't have the keyword in the first para (but the keyword, or variations of it, appear several times in the 5000 odd words that follow)
I usually start by trying for a green score overall. You can't please it completely, in most cases - you can do OK overall even if you have some red/orange points in the details. But if you have a green Yoast score and aren't ranking as you want to be, it wouldn't hurt to address some of its remaining concerns.
That's what I usually do, too, Alex. If I'm not ranking, I try to follow the Yoast recommendations. And then if I start ranking, is that due to my actions, I wonder?
U totally remind me of Duckie Dale from Pretty in Pink lol
Bunch of crap. H tags matter, so does schema. Moz is losing credibility by the minute..
ufff my top competitors work with "oldschool" and they are in first positions, so... i am afraid to do something like modern school
Great article Rand! However I would've added something about how this onsite configuration works versus the user experience one. How good do we have to set up all this onsite SEO markups VS the content we are offering our user? Can a site rank well without having these markups but having an amazing and unique content? We know the answer to the other way around - an amazingly set up page with perfect onsite markups but bad content. No matter how good we have the on page SEO we will never rank well if our content doesn't like the user (although we all know some exceptions).
So yeah, I would've added something about how this works along with useful content.
Thanks for the information.
Cheers
David
Which is important link building or optimizing your website like this?
Please can someone help me with the best SEO tools to improve my site google ranking?
Hi there! Glad to see you're interested in learning more about SEO. :) Because individual blog comments don't often get much visibility or attention, I'd recommend asking your questions in the Q&A forum, where there are tons of experts in our community that can help.
Here are a couple of other resources that you might like:
https://moz.com/blog/how-to-rank
https://moz.com/blog/100-free-seo-tools
https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo/search-engi...
Hope that helps and best of luck! :)
Nextvitamins, if you really are serious about SEO, I've got a better suggestion than looking for a "list of tools". Set aside a few days and go through the last few months of blogs posts at moz.com.
Hey Rand, Thanks for sharing Article about Schema. I do agree with your point that Google is not using every form of schema and only uses a small portion of it. But I think schema really matters a lot in SEO because It helps the search engine to give more informative results for users.
Great Rand! Thx for the update.
I have always and still subscribe to the idea that the engines are pushing daily for better and better AI looking to eliminate many of these things as you eluded to "hoping to figure it out all by themselves."
That said, their AI is certainly learning from these various schema, metadata and tags used by developers. I have been doing SEO since 1998 when Yahoo was the old west :-) So when I started in the Internet business world I did things backwards. I started with SEO, then PPC, then started learning code and finally Graphic Arts. That said, as time has progressed it use to be the joke that Graphic Artist and Website Developers / Programmers new nothing about Internet Marketing and SEO. These genius brilliant people couldn't get to the top of Yahoo to save their life. But as Google came along, more and more they started respecting the developers and I have watched this transition for years. So to your point, many of these tags may or may not need to be used, but I think if it is important to a developer for practical use purposes it wouldn't hurt to use it now for the engines because somewhere along the line they most likely will validate important tags and codes that matter to developers to further their AI depth.
H1 following with subheading and good content still works for me, Thanks for another great WBF.
The detail with the <h1> tag is that there can be several on the same page, because according to W3C (HTML5) it is valid to place it as many times as you want within its <header> </ header>
I think that's why Google lately is not taking as much relevance as before.
Also I would like to share a tool, SEO Site Audit of Agency Analytics, It also has paid version but anyone can use it free for 15 days, that are enough for finding SEO issues in the websites.
Hello Rand,
Thanks for this summary. Just one thing: in 2016, I guess it would be better to check directly the DOM, and not the source code you can display with your browser. We know it's not the same thing and search engines carry about the DOM, not the source code.
I work most of the time in the ecommerce market and use of the Meta tags, correct markup and most importantly, good text around the page keyword is essential in my experience.
I have only found one way of checking all of this for each and every page of a site which is to use a tool I found - Web Text Analyzer. This allows me to fully display all of the text on a page showing all the tags, image and link data and markup. It also shows word density. This allows me to look at the page and focus it on the keyword.
It takes a couple of months for changes to fully work through to Googles index but it has worked every time in improving overall rankings and increasing the keywords the site is found for.
Excellent read. Thanks a lot for sharing, Rand!
Thank you for the information!
I have one question please, i have a Garage Door Repair website(Local Business).
What type of schema markup should i use for the pages?
How can I sign up for this weekly blog post? Ideally I'd like to get an email reminder with a link. Thanks.
Thanks @Rand for sharing an informative article.
Valuable information! Thanks so much for this one!
Great video. I've actually implemented social media markup which hasn't been picked up by Google (it's been live for weeks).
Hey Rand, nice Post, but you didn't talk about detailed schema.org markup. Some say it may have a strong impact on SEO (see https://www.seoskeptic.com/a-websites-structured-da...), as it disambiguates and connects content topics with search engines knowledge graphs (example : serp => wiki/Search_engine_results_page => wiki/Q2704141)
If you want to see what it looks like for your article, try this : https://semanticmarker.com/mark?url=moz.com/blog/wh...
As you pointed out: Microdata can be extremely useful if you are in the right business. For classifieds there have been schema.org entities already in use for several years, but Google hasn't adopted them yet (and nobody really knows why; maybe 'cause eBay is the powerful captain in this sector and will never put microdata in use, thereby making them pretty useless for Google).
Great video Rand, and loved your comments on Schema. I recently saw an overnight sudden report of 'missing' schema for homeLocation for schema type Person appear in Search Console. However, Google's Structured Data Test Tool doesn't complain about it - so a bit of conflicting messaging there from Google... so your advice is good to hear, and I'm happily finding natural ways to weave in homeLocation into those pages, which is resulting in a drop off of those errors in Search Console, and the pages are continuing to pass in the Testing Tool.
It was interesting to hear your thoughts on the change in H1 tags now too - I guess other factors have simply become more informative and Google just keeps getting better at digesting and understanding content.
Nice Write up ! But Google is already making use of Schema Markup in Search snippet. Cheers!
Honestly, I think this is one of the better white board Friday's in quite some time.
How are you handling the markup in WordPress?
I see you are referencing Microdata as the markup method versus JSON-LD, do you see one helping more over the other?
Finally, what are you thoughts on Google now requiring images for the LocalBusiness markup? I think it has something to do with a coming Rich Cards implementation but would love to hear your thoughts.
Hi Rand,
Super WBF. I'm finding that <tr> and <td>, whilst been around for forever, if you structure the content right. Google might pull in this extra data into the SERPS.
Here are a couple of examples of Google serps (not my clients);
https://bit.ly/2gIaIZN - checkout the first link and the extra specs for these rogue speed ropes
https://bit.ly/2fOy6I1 - The caravan site finder link pulls in some pricing details
From my experience it takes around 6 months for Google to display this information, if it so chooses.
Great video Rand. Good to be brought up to speed as there's always so much to think about and lots of the techniques that we learned in the in early days just aren't needed anymore.
One question... would you still recommend using one major software (MOZ for example) or would you say use MOZ as well as SEMrush and also Screaming Frog. I'm curently using MOZ and SEMrush, but not sure I need to invest in Screaming Frog as well if I have both of the big players crawling and monitoring my sites.
What do you think?
Alex
Hi Rand, thanks for sharing your knowledge.
Its clear one of the major ranking signal is user behavior / interaction on the website(i.e CTR, bounce rate, conversions, etc.) by adopting schema markups like review ratings, price and other structured data increases CTR to the website this would benifit in organic rankings isnt it?
I have seen conversions on client website increased their organic rankings? did any experienced this or could any say it dosent matter?
When I took over the SEO responsibilities for the two companies where I work, I first and foremost focused on onpage optimization. As smart as Google is, it also plays by some set rules.
While this was somewhat of an overhaul (correct title and meta description length, implementing h1 tags, deleting meta keywords, writing more targeted text etc.) it did a lot in general for our search visibility. In two months the domain rank has risen 5 and out of 46 selected keywords, over 41 are on the first page of the SERPS and a large majority in 1-3.
While this does not at all show that h1 tags contribute to the results, it is highly likely. On a couple of localized versions of one of the companies, the h1 tag was omitted by mistake and comparing those with and those without h1 tags, there was a clear difference in how they had performed.
Best,
In my opinion, tags and page markup is not a matter for me. There might be changes, but what I do is go with it. Learn new things. Anyways, You did an informative blog, it has a nice content. Good Job, Rand!
H1's and other headings is something I would definitely always consider as important.
Hey Rand,
What is the best way to get information into a snippet that you see in the SERP?
Hi Rand,
What a great article.I have been waiting for this topic.According to this Whiteboard friday, we should fix our structured data as soon as possible.
.We have some issues at Offpage seo...
Could you please talk about Group Penalizing from Pengiun realtime algorithm?I want your experience about this one.
We had about 20 Website at our SEO training class.All of us Penalized at that damn Pengiun September update.What are Dangerous Group mistakes?
Thanks for your attention
HassanMosavinejad
Psst... I suggest you to post your "Penguin" question in the Q&A. Surely you will find people ready to help you.
I dont want my specific answer about Penguin.I want to see a special Whiteboard Friday about Group Penalizing from Rand.
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