Real Estate Investing and Marketing

Google improves its ranking algorithm on an ongoing basis. During the last weeks, Google changed three things on the result pages that are visible to all Google users.

The changes are an improvement for searchers but they might be bad for your website.

1. Google has increased the snippet length. Less visitors for you?

Google now shows an extended snippet for queries that consist of three or more keywords. The idea behind this change is that these multi-word queries are very targeted and complex. The usual short snippet might not contain enough information.

What does this change mean for your website?

The longer snippet contains much more information. As Google tries to provide the user with the most relevant information in the snippet, the snippet might already contain the answer to the user’s query. The longer snippets might result in the following:

Fewer users might click through to your website because they get the answer to their question in the search results.

Users might begin to use more multiple-word queries to get more detailed search result snippets.

As the longer snippets need more space, the longer snippets move another result page below the fold and web surfers will see fewer results at first glance. That increases the importance of very high rankings.

It seems that Google ignores the meta description tag for the snippets. That means that you must include a call to action in your web page titles.

2. Google now shows more related searches at the bottom of the results

When you search for a keyword, Google will display related searches at the bottom (and sometimes at the top) of the search results.

For example, if you search for the keyword “principles of physics”, Google will suggest “angular momentum,” “special relativity,” “big bang” and “quantum mechanic” as related terms that could help you find what you need.

What does this change mean for your website? Read more…

Should you use your keywords in the URLs of your web pages? Do search engines look at the keywords that are included in the addresses of your web pages and do these keywords have an effect on the rankings of your website?

Google’s statement about keywords in URLs :

Google’s Matt Cutts recently discussed Googles position of keywords in the URL of a web page. He said that keywords in the URL do help a little bit.

He also said that one should not obsess with the order of the words and that you should not use too many keywords in the same URL.

Yahoo’s statement about keywords in URLs

Yahoo filed a patent application with the name “Techniques for Tokenizing URLs” that has been published on March 26th. The patent application contains information on how search engines might extract keywords from the URLs of pages.

Search engines look at many different web page elements to determine what a page is about. Most keywords are extracted from the content of the web pages but search engines can also consider the URL of a web page to find related keywords.

Yahoo’s patent shows in detail how keywords can be extracted from URLs. That’s a strong indicator that Yahoo also considers the keywords in URLs.

What does this mean for your website?

If you want to get the best possible rankings for your website, it can help to include your target keywords in the URLs of your website.

However, it is important not to overdo this so that search engines don’t think that you’re spamming. Keywords in the URLs of your web pages can improve the position of your web pages in Google’s search results. Google also considers a variety of other ranking factors.

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