When talking to our editors about the capability to claim ownership on articles and tutorials, the question came up, how to deal with the fact that a portion of our content is authored by multiple authors.
I've posted A question to Google Webmaster forum, but have not received any answer: Can you claim joint ownership for a singe piece of content ?
However in cases where one author is the primary author, and the supporting authors agree one can claim ownership, we do have a solution that passes the Google Snippets Test tool.
When we have multiple G+ profile links on an article, only one will include the "?rel=author parameter. This author gets ownership credit.
Our content is generated through XSLT, so we'll add conditional coding. If there is one author, that G+ profile url will be appended with "?rel=author. If there are multiple authors, we will look for an attribute, such as owning-author=yes (default is no). For multiple authors, if one author is assigned owning-author-yes, we'll append ?rel=author to the end of that G+ profile url. If we encounter multiple owning-author=yes settings in a single file, default will be no one gets ownership.
Friday, May 3, 2013
Wednesday, April 17, 2013
Claiming Google Authorship on non-blog content
At developerWorks, most of our content is in the form of articles and tutorials rather than blogs. We want to enable our authors to claim ownership in Google for this content, in addition to their blogs.
An article or tutorial published on dW is, in actuality, a polished blog entry.. albeit a blog with only one or two entries for some of our authors. But they should still take ownership.
Most of the methods I found online required linking from the blog entry, to an "About" (the author) page, and then from the "About" page to the person's Google+ profile. We don't have about author pages on dW, so this method allowing each content file to link back directly to the Google+ profile is a much better fit.
There are claims that enabling Google Authorship, and thus enhancing the SERPs display, can increase click-throughs by 150%. I find that exciting, but a little hard to believe. As our editing team implements Google authorship on specific articles and tutorials, I'll track traffic trends and see what happens.
For the record, here is the process:
1. Author creates Google+ profile
2. Author lists developerWorks (www.ibm.com/developerworks/) in the "Contributes to" area of the about page.
3. Author provides Google+ profile to our editors for inclusion in the article or tutorial xml source
4. The XSLT stylesheet processes the Google+ profile element when rendering the html. If there is only one author listed for the article or tutorial, a link to the authors Google+ profile (with ?rel=author appended to the url).
The link shows up in the author overlay as shown below:
An article or tutorial published on dW is, in actuality, a polished blog entry.. albeit a blog with only one or two entries for some of our authors. But they should still take ownership.
Most of the methods I found online required linking from the blog entry, to an "About" (the author) page, and then from the "About" page to the person's Google+ profile. We don't have about author pages on dW, so this method allowing each content file to link back directly to the Google+ profile is a much better fit.
There are claims that enabling Google Authorship, and thus enhancing the SERPs display, can increase click-throughs by 150%. I find that exciting, but a little hard to believe. As our editing team implements Google authorship on specific articles and tutorials, I'll track traffic trends and see what happens.
For the record, here is the process:
1. Author creates Google+ profile
2. Author lists developerWorks (www.ibm.com/developerworks/) in the "Contributes to" area of the about page.
3. Author provides Google+ profile to our editors for inclusion in the article or tutorial xml source
4. The XSLT stylesheet processes the Google+ profile element when rendering the html. If there is only one author listed for the article or tutorial, a link to the authors Google+ profile (with ?rel=author appended to the url).
The link shows up in the author overlay as shown below:
Tuesday, April 2, 2013
SEO Best Practices for content editors
Part of my job is educating the editorial teams on SEO Best Practices. I'll use this post to collect from my ever widening and wandering perusal of SEO articles.
1. Title tag - use the preferred keyword or keyword phrase at the first of the title tag.
2. Meta description - not used in ranking by any search engines; they are important in the snippets that show up in organic search results. Use the keyword, as it is bolded in the SERPs.
3. Meta keywords - fuhgeddaboudit. Nobody uses it for anything sigificant, if at all.
4. Meta robots - index, follow for the most part. We use noindex, nofollow on our 404 pages and other maintenance pages. But otherwise, we want to encourage the crawler to continue throught the site.
5. Canonical URL tag - this I have to read a little more about. I'll put together a future post on this. The guidance says if site is large and complex, rel=canonical can prevent duplicates. I wonder if we might have some issues in our community where content display can be modified dynamically.
1. Keep urls short and readable.
2. If possible, use keywords in the url. Avoid unnecessary internal verbage in the url /folders/archive/meetings/archived_meetings.html
3. Search engines prefer use of pages over subdomains. So, they recommend using a subfolder beneath your top domain.. rather than a separate subdomain.
I'm going to have to do a little reading about subdomains before I understand this recommendation. But, here is a good starting article.
4. Use hyphens not underscores to separate words in a url. So
...com/bicycling-the-himalayas NOT ....com/bicycling_the_himalayas.
1. Use the keyword in the title tag at least once.
2. Use the keyword once near the top of the page.
3. Use the keyword 2-3 times within the body copy, preferrably within the first 50 words of the body copy. Also, use variations of the keyword in the body text. So for example, "NC bicycling" could be "bicycling in North Carolina" or "NC bike clubs"
4. Use the keyword at least once in the alt attribute and the filename of an image on the page. Interestingly, they said this would help for users looking for your content uses the images search utility on google.
5. Use the keyword once in the url.
6. Use it at least once in the meta description content.
7. H1 tags are showing less correlation with top rankings, but still good practice to use keyword in the h1 tag.
8. Consider using the keyword in bold and/or italics within the body tag once if possible. There is slight evidence that bolding or italicizing the keyword may carry a small amount of SEO weight. But, only do this if it makes sense within the context of page content.
HTML head tags that matter
- from SEOmoz1. Title tag - use the preferred keyword or keyword phrase at the first of the title tag.
2. Meta description - not used in ranking by any search engines; they are important in the snippets that show up in organic search results. Use the keyword, as it is bolded in the SERPs.
3. Meta keywords - fuhgeddaboudit. Nobody uses it for anything sigificant, if at all.
4. Meta robots - index, follow for the most part. We use noindex, nofollow on our 404 pages and other maintenance pages. But otherwise, we want to encourage the crawler to continue throught the site.
5. Canonical URL tag - this I have to read a little more about. I'll put together a future post on this. The guidance says if site is large and complex, rel=canonical can prevent duplicates. I wonder if we might have some issues in our community where content display can be modified dynamically.
URL recommendations
- from SEOmoz1. Keep urls short and readable.
2. If possible, use keywords in the url. Avoid unnecessary internal verbage in the url /folders/archive/meetings/archived_meetings.html
3. Search engines prefer use of pages over subdomains. So, they recommend using a subfolder beneath your top domain.. rather than a separate subdomain.
I'm going to have to do a little reading about subdomains before I understand this recommendation. But, here is a good starting article.
4. Use hyphens not underscores to separate words in a url. So
...com/bicycling-the-himalayas NOT ....com/bicycling_the_himalayas.
Optimizing page content for specific keyword(s)
- from SEOmoz1. Use the keyword in the title tag at least once.
2. Use the keyword once near the top of the page.
3. Use the keyword 2-3 times within the body copy, preferrably within the first 50 words of the body copy. Also, use variations of the keyword in the body text. So for example, "NC bicycling" could be "bicycling in North Carolina" or "NC bike clubs"
4. Use the keyword at least once in the alt attribute and the filename of an image on the page. Interestingly, they said this would help for users looking for your content uses the images search utility on google.
5. Use the keyword once in the url.
6. Use it at least once in the meta description content.
7. H1 tags are showing less correlation with top rankings, but still good practice to use keyword in the h1 tag.
8. Consider using the keyword in bold and/or italics within the body tag once if possible. There is slight evidence that bolding or italicizing the keyword may carry a small amount of SEO weight. But, only do this if it makes sense within the context of page content.
Thursday, March 28, 2013
Adding structured data.. part deux
After searching for "microdata and css" and finding little, I realized the problem was me. I went back to my html and tried putting the elements within the <div> tags.
The markup became:
<div itemscope itemtype ="http://schema.org/Event">
<p>It's almost time for the <span itemprop="name">MS Spring Fling 2013</span>.</p>
<p><b>When:</b>
<meta itemprop="startDate" content="2013-04-06T0800" />April 6th, sign-in starts at 8:00</p>
<div itemprop="location" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Place">
<div itemprop="address" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/PostalAddress">
<p><b>Where:</b> <span itemprop="streetAddress">1101 Shiloh Glenn Drive - Hwy 54 & I-540 Morrisville</span></p>
</div>
</div>
<p>The 2013 MS Spring Fling <a itemprop="url" href="http://www.active.com/cycling/morrisville-nc/ms-spring-fling-2013">online registration</a> is now open until April 3rd. </p>
</div>
This markup respects my css as you can see here.
The markup became:
<div itemscope itemtype ="http://schema.org/Event">
<p>It's almost time for the <span itemprop="name">MS Spring Fling 2013</span>.</p>
<p><b>When:</b>
<meta itemprop="startDate" content="2013-04-06T0800" />April 6th, sign-in starts at 8:00</p>
<div itemprop="location" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Place">
<div itemprop="address" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/PostalAddress">
<p><b>Where:</b> <span itemprop="streetAddress">1101 Shiloh Glenn Drive - Hwy 54 & I-540 Morrisville</span></p>
</div>
</div>
<p>The 2013 MS Spring Fling <a itemprop="url" href="http://www.active.com/cycling/morrisville-nc/ms-spring-fling-2013">online registration</a> is now open until April 3rd. </p>
</div>
This markup respects my css as you can see here.
Adding structured data markup to a page
I've been reading a lot, and by "a lot" I mean A LOT, about the importance of structured data. I'm sold. So I thought I'd give it a try.
We have an upcoming event on the TeamCBC home page, the 2013 Spring Fling. I originally coded the event information in straight html:
<p>It's almost time for the MS Spring Fling 2013.</p>
<p>
<b>When:</b> April 6th, sign-in starts at 8:00<br />
<b>Where:</b> 1101 Shiloh Glenn Drive - Hwy 54 & I-540 Morrisville<br />
<p>The 2013 MS Spring Fling <a href="http://www.active.com/cycling/morrisville-nc/ms-spring-fling-2013">online registration</a> is now open until April 3rd.</p>
When i added the microdata as defined at schema.org, I ended up with this:
We have an upcoming event on the TeamCBC home page, the 2013 Spring Fling. I originally coded the event information in straight html:
<p>It's almost time for the MS Spring Fling 2013.</p>
<p>
<b>When:</b> April 6th, sign-in starts at 8:00<br />
<b>Where:</b> 1101 Shiloh Glenn Drive - Hwy 54 & I-540 Morrisville<br />
<p>The 2013 MS Spring Fling <a href="http://www.active.com/cycling/morrisville-nc/ms-spring-fling-2013">online registration</a> is now open until April 3rd.</p>
When i added the microdata as defined at schema.org, I ended up with this:
<div itemscope itemtype ="http://schema.org/Event">
<p>It's almost time for the <span itemprop="name">MS Spring Fling 2013</span>.</p>
<p><b>When:</b>
<meta itemprop="startDate" content="2013-04-06T0800" />April 6th, sign-in starts at 8:00
<br />
<b>Where:</b>
<div itemprop="location" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Place">
<div itemprop="address" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/PostalAddress">
<span itemprop="streetAddress">
1101 Shiloh Glenn Drive - Hwy 54 & I-540 Morrisville</span>
<br />
</div>
<p>The 2013 MS Spring Fling <a itemprop="url" href="http://www.active.com/cycling/morrisville-nc/ms-spring-fling-2013">online registration</a>
is now open until April 3rd.
</div>
The markup took a lot of time, and a lot of referencing the examples on schema.org. But that wasn't the biggest problem.
When I published my html, turns out the added div structure screwed up my css and the text formatting was blown away. So looks like if I want to use the microdata markup, i'll have to accommodate for it in the css... really ?!?!
For the time being, I've put the microdata'ed html in a "mud" test directory, as in "clear as" or "markup data" .. depending on my mood.
Thursday, March 14, 2013
SEO... go
SMX West 2013 has wound down. I'm saturated, but ready to get started blindly feeling my way through SEO. This blog is a way for me to keep track of what I do right and what I do wrong.
There's group consensus on the first step. Build a small website where I have total control over the buttons and levers, and start experimenting.
So I've got two (soon three).
I built the TeamCBC site several years ago to support my cycling team, yeah!, and to learn css, even yeaher!!
Now to test it's standing, or ranking, in Google search results. .... not very impressive, yet.
With the help of friends and search engines, I've found two utilities that seem pretty helpful in understanding what Google sees and thinks of my content.
First: A utility that lets me see my page as Google sees it. Jennette Banks clued me into this and documented it's usage on her blog entry Google Cache Hack: see what Googles sees. You add it to your bookmarks, open a page, and then invoke the bookmarked utlity.... voila, your page seen through the eyes of Google.
Hopefully this is not a shock. When I invoked the TeamCBC site, it looked just like my site. This is goodness. However, when I invoked in on several of the community pages within IBM developerWorks, as well as the top abcnews.com page, I get the following 404 error from Google.. which can't be good.
I'll figure out what is going on and report back in a later post.
Second: This utility from Google Webmaster Tools lets me see the keywords Google believes are relevant to the content from my page. And note, this would be the content it can see:
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
I enter the url www.teamcbc.com, in the website field, Google returns keywords it believes are relevant. Quite a shock. I get a lot of keywords associated with "tours" and "vacations". "NC cycling" is about #25 in terms of relevance.
Seems Google and I don't see eye to eye, yet.
There's group consensus on the first step. Build a small website where I have total control over the buttons and levers, and start experimenting.
So I've got two (soon three).
I built the TeamCBC site several years ago to support my cycling team, yeah!, and to learn css, even yeaher!!
Now to test it's standing, or ranking, in Google search results. .... not very impressive, yet.
With the help of friends and search engines, I've found two utilities that seem pretty helpful in understanding what Google sees and thinks of my content.
First: A utility that lets me see my page as Google sees it. Jennette Banks clued me into this and documented it's usage on her blog entry Google Cache Hack: see what Googles sees. You add it to your bookmarks, open a page, and then invoke the bookmarked utlity.... voila, your page seen through the eyes of Google.
Hopefully this is not a shock. When I invoked the TeamCBC site, it looked just like my site. This is goodness. However, when I invoked in on several of the community pages within IBM developerWorks, as well as the top abcnews.com page, I get the following 404 error from Google.. which can't be good.
I'll figure out what is going on and report back in a later post.
Second: This utility from Google Webmaster Tools lets me see the keywords Google believes are relevant to the content from my page. And note, this would be the content it can see:
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
I enter the url www.teamcbc.com, in the website field, Google returns keywords it believes are relevant. Quite a shock. I get a lot of keywords associated with "tours" and "vacations". "NC cycling" is about #25 in terms of relevance.
Seems Google and I don't see eye to eye, yet.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)