In its continuing effort to keep low quality content out of its search results, Google announced this week that it would be supporting “authorship markup”. Authorship markup is essentially a couple of specific pieces of code you can add to links that would designate you as the author of that content.
a way to connect authors with their content on the web. We are experimenting with using this data to help people find content from great authors in our search results.
If you’ve Google-d for a recipe lately you may have noticed a new feature Google has launched, which is a recipe-specific search – they call it Recipe View. It allows the user to search results specifically designated as recipes, and also to narrow searches by ingredients, prep time and even calorie count. You access it via the “Recipes” option in the left menu bar on search pages.
It seems pretty useful for web searchers, but what does this mean for food bloggers? Well in order for your recipes to show up in this special search, Google is looking for you to use special markup i.e. code, to designate your content to be recipes. It’s called a microformat, which is a specific set of code tags used to designated content as recipes, with special parameters such as prep time, ingredients, reviews and more. Click here to see all the gory details
Perhaps the biggest news this week in the online world is that Seth Godin announced he is giving up on traditional book publishing and is going all-digital. Seth has the following and the leverage to make this an exciting development for digital publishing. This could be a big step in mainstreaming electronic publishing and changing the consumption of “books.” He has published 12 bestsellers in the traditional manner, so it’s possible he will be the reason some consumers start buying digital products.
Business owners are often asking how they can be ranked #1 on Google, or if they should trust the company that told them they would guarantee a first place ranking. A common turn of phrase is that a company told them they would “put them #1” on Google. If only it were that easy! I always steer clients away from such offers, tempting as they are, and try and explain the complexities and many factors involved in ranking. Google didn’t get to spawn its own verb by enabling folks to ‘put’ any ole’ site at the top!
A Guide To Online Marketing Terms – Part 2
This is the second part of my developing series on online marketing terms explained. This time we focus on some basic SEO-related terms you might come across.
SEO
Search Engine Optimization is the process of fine tuning your website so that when your target internet surfer types a phrase into the search engines, your website is deemed to be among the most relevant for that phrase, and is displayed at the top of those results. Lately SEO has also come to refer to a person that performs SEO services, or a ‘search engine optimizer’.
Why You Should Care:
SEO can provide your site with lots of free, targeted traffic. What could be better?!
Matt Cutts is a blogger and head of Google’s Webspam team. On his blog he gives a lot of great information regarding SEO and ranking well in Google. He gave a fairly in-depth talk at this year’s Wordcamp San Francisco, basically about how awesome WordPress is for SEO purposes. The video of his talk was just made available. Watch it below. If you are just starting out with WordPress it gets quite detailed at times, but there’s some great info here.