Change in title tags & snippets of your website in SERPs

While doing research, I have noticed that Google is NOT showing the title tag in the Search Engine Result Page (SERPs) for our website. I got shocked and started wondering why this is happening. Why Google is just ignoring our page title tag and displaying their own. I thought Google may be just testing or about to launch some new algorithm. But if it is happening, it could be a scary thought.

Here we go, below is a result when I did a search for “pepper square” query.

Now see for yourself: Try a search for “digital agency bangalore”.

Look at the sixth result: www.peppersquare.com

Notice the title in the SERPs, this is the actual title of the page: “digital agency bangalore, interface design & web development.”

Don’t believe me?  Check the snap shot below:

Google actually altering the title tags we created. Matt Cutts discusses this in a video of Google changing the Title tags and Snippets: - 

I am not finished yet; I started digging bit deeper and found another SERP snippet change. Found another example: now search for “Interactive Agency” and see wikipedia’s snippet description (highlighted below) with a Jump to interactive agencies link.

What will happen if Google will do this kind of updates and ignore the number one factor of on-page optimization the title tags? 

Have you notice this and do you have an example to share with? What is your thought? Please comment.

Hands-on SEO Audit

Website audits are a great way to figure out what might be keeping your site from ranking well in search engines for a given keyword.

This post is not comprehensive, but definitely it will help you quickly identify major problems and also tell you what the current state of the website’s health is.

Here are some three basic steps to conduct website SEO audit analysis:

1. Check Google indexed/cached pages:

To do this open http://www.Google.com/ and enters site specific search “site:example.com” and clicks the search button.

By using above specific site search command you can see how many pages have been indexed in Google. My suggestion would be to check the cached page’s text only version and see how Googlebot is crawling and affecting the site. See how Googlebot crawls and indexes your site which will assist to identify issues like website homepage isn’t showing up as the first result.

2. Website Homepage Analysis:

This approach will help you critique your site and improve the performance of the site. Your home page is one of your most valuable assets. Below homepage analysis checklist will cover mostly every area that can impact your site’s online success.

• Does the homepage have enough content, at least one paragraph? 

• Does the page have good magnetic headlines which grab attention and draw users in? 

• Does the page have proper targeted keywords

1. Keywords that you think can drive traffic to your business?

• Does the page have heading tags (H1, H2 etc) used? 

• Does the page have images, if yes does they have alt text and image title? 

• Does the page have title tags used?

• The best practice format for title tags is one of the following

• Primary Keyword - Secondary Keywords Brand
• Brand Name Primary Keyword and Secondary Keywords

• Does the page have meta description used? 

• Run a quick check on the URL change or URL is canonical (e.g. from your-domain.com/ to www. your-domain.com or from www. your-domain.com to www. your-domain.com/lame-keyword-in-URL-trick.html etc.) 

• Check domain, sub-domain and microsite for duplicate content.  

1. To conduct that, search the engines for title tag (in quotes) or the first sentence of the content page (also in quotes). If there is more than one result from the given domain, sub-domain and microsite, then there is a duplicate content problem.

• Has the entire site, or important content being blocked via the robots.txt file?

• Check for XML Sitemap.

1. Sitemap: www. your-domain.com/sitemap.xml
2. You can examine the content of a sitemap.xml file by http://validator.w3.org/

• Check for Broken links.

1. Are 301’s being used for all redirects?
2. Custom 404 error page.
3. Call to action button. 

3. Website Statistical Analysis

This is an important phase, analyzing the data from your website is very important. According to a book “Measuring the Success of your Website” by Hurol Inan. There are four phases of customer engagement. These phases are 1. Reach, 2. Acquire, 3. Convert, and 4. Retain.

I do statistical analysis to determine the amount of visits to each web page. This helps me to understand where the traffic comes in and what keywords or phrases used to find web pages. There are several steps, some of the ways that I use to analysis includes:

1. How many visitors are coming to the website?
2. What are the top paths that users use to navigate site?
3. What are the traffic sources and where do visitors come from?
4. If search engines, what keywords and phrases they are using to find website?
5. How long do visitors stay on website?
6. What is the bounce rate?
7. What referral websites are sending the high visitors traffic?

The next step what I perform is to assess what changes are required in terms of visitors behaviour, time spent on various pages, most requested content and most requested keyphrases to improve conversions. This analysis helps me to build better digital marketing strategies to drive more traffic to increase conversion ratio.

There are lots of powerful, flexible and easy-to-use tools to analyze your traffic data in an entirely new way. Every aspect of a website and website marketing campaign can be measured and analyzed to ensure that maximum efficiency can be attained.
 
As a web strategist I help businesses and organization to be success online. I would highly recommend you to create a document that says what needs to be done. Instead, create a document that says what’s wrong with the website.

Happy Auditing!!

Google Search Error

When I conducted a Google search today, Google displayed the error page “To continue, please type the characters below:” and blocked my search results.

Here is what the complete error message looks like:  

Our systems have detected unusual traffic from your computer network. Please try your request again later. Why did this happen?

This page appears when Google automatically detects requests coming from your computer network which appear to be in violation of the Terms of Service. The block will expire shortly after those requests stop.

This traffic may have been sent by malicious software, a browser plug-in, or a script that sends automated requests. If you share your network connection, ask your administrator for help — a different computer using the same IP address may be responsible. Learn more

Sometimes you may see this page if you are using advanced terms that robots are known to use, or sending requests very quickly.

IP address: 123.201.130.114
Time: 2011-06-29T08:10:23Z
URL: http://www.google.com/

=======================================================

I cleared the cookies from my browser and now things are fine... :)

Steps To Remove this ERROR: Source: Google support

If you don't see a CAPTCHA image or if you continue to encounter the CAPTCHA over and over, try these steps in order:

1. Check for malware on your computer.

Malicious software, sometimes bundled with other free downloads without your knowledge, can trigger Google to show this message. We've suggested some well-known programs below that can detect and remove such applications. Please remember that we have no connection with these companies and can't guarantee their effectiveness.

• Google Pack

The Starter Edition of Spyware Doctor is included free with the Google Pack

• Sunbelt Software CounterSpy
• Kaspersky Lab Internet Security
• Norton Internet Security
• MacScan (for Mac users)

If these programs don't resolve the problem, you might want to try an advanced troubleshooting program such as HijackThis.

2. Contact your network administrator.

If you tried the steps above and haven't resolved the issue, it's very likely that a user or a computer in your network is sending automated traffic to Google. Your network administrator may be able to locate and shut down the source of the automated traffic; feel free to refer them to this page. Sending automated queries of any sort to Google is against our Terms of Service. This includes, among other things, the following activities:

• Using any software that sends queries to Google to determine how a website or webpage ranks on Google for various queries
• 'Meta-searching' Google
• Performing 'offline' searches on Google

Once the automated traffic has stopped, the ban on your IP address should be automatically lifted.

3. If the problem persists, your network administrator should contact us.

If your network continues to experience this message in error, please send us additional information.

Article Marketing Strategy Secrets

Article marketing and blogging can be a perfect match if you do it right. Getting traffic from articles is a great way to get, blog visitors, or just great targeted traffic to your website.

This blog post contains the basic steps involved in creating an "Article Marketing" campaign and the effective way to recycle old blog posts.

Here are few more simple steps to take when spinning an old blog post into a new article.

1. Write Articles on topic you're familiar with, or Re-purpose older blog posts into articles.
2. Find an older blog post that performed well - older posts that were popular with your readers, attracted a lot of comments and got a decent amount of social buzz.
3. Create an outline based on the post- Write down the main points of the old blog post, add any new points you can think of, and create an outline for a new article. Try switching up the format to make sure it’s completely different from the original.
4. Write according to the outline, not the old post - Always make sure that quality content should always be your first concern for Search Engine. Once you have created an outline, stick to it. This way, your new article will have a life of it's own, even though it’s based on an old piece of content.
5. Insert one or more links to build more backlinks and attract more visitors to your blog.
6. Double check to ensure there is no duplicate content - Feel free to double check your new content with duplicate content tool.
7. Create Article Marketing Strategy.
8. Promote your articles - now broadcast your articles to hundreds of sites and create an abundance of good back links to your blog.
9. I strongly recommend you to convert Article into a PDF file and submit the PDF file to document sharing sites.

Also, feel free to contact me if you have questions. I'm happy to help! You can email me by the "Contact Me" link right here on this page.

Web Strategy to Beat Google’s 2011 Panda Update

Use Mr. Ping Attack Against Google’s Kungfu Panda. Here’s an extensive list of items to look at.

1. SEO Strategy – Get it Right!
2. Focus Toward Producing Highly Original And Useful Content
3. Increase the Length of Your Blog Posts
4. Review And Develop An Approach To Article Marketing Strategy
5. Pay Attention to Your On-Page SEO
6. Get Active, Stay Active: Branding Using Social Media
7. Don't Put Too Many Advertisements On Your Website
8. Analyze Visitors Behavior And Activity
9. Use Your Own Site For Deep Links
10. Encourage Repeat Visitors To Your Website.

And below are a few of the more well-studied examples that Google may be using to identify poor or weak quality:

1. High % of a number of pages on a site with duplicate content (in this case the entire site is penalized not just the page)
2. As mentioned above high amount of inappropriate advertisements, ie ads that don’t match the target content
3. Keyword stuffing, over-optimized SEO resulting in unnatural language
4. Page content and title tags not matching search queries which increases high bounce rate on page or site.
5. Low visit times on the site with low % of returning users to the site
6. Low or no quality inbound links to a page or site (by count or %).
7. Low or no links to site from social media or from other sites.