Learning SEO, Summer 2017

06/09/2017 by Bill Slawski 4 Comments

The Omni La Costa Resort

In January, I wrote a post titled, Advice Given to an Aspiring 14 Year-Old Entrepreneur Wanting to Learn SEO. I included in that post links to a number of pages that I thought might be helpful to someone learning SEO. On my walk this morning past the Omni La Costa Resort, I was thinking about it, and decided that it might not be a bad idea to create a Learning SEO category here, and provide more resources to help people who are learning SEO access some of the resources I come across that might help them understand more.

One that I was thinking might be really helpful is this video (SMX West 2016 – How Google Works: A Google Ranking Engineer’s Story) with Google Engineer Paul Haahr:

How Does Google Look for Authoritative Search Results?

05/25/2017 by Bill Slawski 36 Comments

If you’ve done any SEO for a site, you may recognize some of the steps involved in working towards making a website authoritative:

Conduct keyword research to find appropriate terms and phrases for your industry and audience
Review the use of keywords on the pages of your site to make sure it includes those in prominent places on those pages
Map out pages on a site to place keywords in meaningful places
The meaningful places on your pages are determined by information retrieval scores for HTML elements such as Titles and Headings and Lists
The placement of keywords in prominent and important places on your pages can make your pages more relevant for those keywords
Research the topics your pages are about, and make sure they answer questions that your audience may have about those topics in trustworthy and meaningful ways

Focus on Authoritative Search Results

New Finding Events Feature at Google Search

05/11/2017 by Bill Slawski 29 Comments

This week Google rolled out an event finder on its mobile search app. You can read about it on:

Google Search will now help you find nearby events

The techcrunch article tells us that Google is working on suggestions for developers to have their events listed in search results – so we should be keeping an eye out for those as they get published.

I wrote about a patent here, in a post in November that talked about Ranking Events in Google Search Results, which focused upon a Google patent that had been granted August 23, 2016 titled Ranking events.

This feature is available in the United States starting today; but the Techcrunch article tells us that there are no plans for international expansion.

Will Google Start Giving People Social Media Influencer Scores?

04/27/2017 by Bill Slawski 42 Comments

A patent granted to Google this week tells us about social media influencer scores developed at Google that sound very much like the scores at Klout. In the references section of the patent, Klout is referred to a couple of times as well, with a link to the Wikipedia Page about Klout, and the Klout FAQ page. We aren’t given a name for these influencer scores in Google’s patent, but it does talk about topic-based influencer scores and advertisers.

Many patents are published that might give the inventors behind those patents a right to the technology described in them, but often the decision to move ahead with the processes described in those patents might be based upon business-based matters, such as whether or not there might be value is pursuing the patent. When I read this patent, I was reminded of an earlier patent from Google from a couple of years ago that described an advertising model that used social media influencers and their interests called Adheat. That patent was AdHeat Advertisement Model for Social Network. A whitepaper that gives us a little more indepth information about that process was AdHeat: An Influence-based Diffusion Model for Propagating Hints to Match Ads. One of the authors/inventors, Edward Chang left Google after the paper came out to join HTC as their Vice President of Research and Innovation.

This new patent was originally filed on May 29, 2012. Edward Chang left Google for HTC in July, 2012. I don’t know if those events are related, but the idea of using social media influencers in advertising is an interesting one. The patent doesn’t pinpoint specific social media platforms that would be used the way that Klout does. Interestingly, Klout does use Google+ as one of the social media networks that they use to generate Klout Scores.

How Google May Rank Websites Based Upon Their Databases Answering Queries

03/29/2017 by Bill Slawski 103 Comments

NASA Computer

Imagine that some sites might be ranked by Google based upon how their databases might answer queries. A patent from Google refers to this approach as one that looks at database service requirements to rank large sites such as sites that cover products, jobs, travel, recipes and movies. Such sites might include some static pages that provide examples of the capabilities of their databases, such as being able to provide answers to queries such as: “Brand X Cameras for less than $300.00”.

The patent provides some examples of the types of sites that are covered by this patent:

Many websites for which data available in resources store the data in large databases of structured information. For example, job search websites may have respective job databases, and respective resources (web pages) that include forms to search the databases. Likewise, recipe websites have respective databases for recipes, and movie websites have respective databases for movies. Requesting information for a certain recipe or movie causes the website to query its respective database and generate a webpage that presents the information in a structured format.

Google’s Related Questions Patent or ‘People Also Ask’ Questions

03/06/2017 by Bill Slawski 18 Comments

Google Related Questions

When you search at Google, the answers you receive sometimes now include additional questions, that often have the label above them, “People Also Ask.” I was curious if I might be able to find a patent about these questions, and I saw that they were sometimes referred to as “related questions.”

An article at Moz today on the topic was interesting: Infinite ‘People Also Ask’ Boxes: Research and SEO Opportunities. The answers about how these related questions are decided upon seems to have a simpler origin as described in Google’s patent, but it is interesting comparing the ideas from that post with the patent.

I searched through Google patent search for “related questions” and I came up with a patent named, “Generating related questions for search queries”. When I looked at the screenshots that accompanied the patent, they appeared to be very similar to the “People also ask” type questions Google shows us today in search results.

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