On Target With 3 Developments in SEO

One on the elements of strong online studio is building sites that load fast and are on strong servers. This is something I’ve been focussing alot of my work on lately, trying to look into the future of server speed and it’s influence on how search engines view my content.

Not only does site speed effect search results, but it also has a major influence on user experience – especially when we are trying to teach physical movement through a training portal. Think about how many times you have tried to follow along with a video only to get discouraged at the video freezing every ten seconds.

So while the variable of speed is super important, there are thousands (if not tens-of-thousands) of other variables that search algorithms use to properly direct their customers to the most accurate result for a query or position the right content in front of them, at the right time.

The more of these variables you know, the easier it is for you to create a strategy to keep your online studio and other sites ranking strong.

Of course nobody builds a site based off of every variable – but what’s important are staying focussed on two variable sets,

Relevant value
Recency value
Of course your content must be relevant to both your search query and online behaviors of your target audience. But also … different variables for SEO range based on what your desired outcome might be. Yes, Google has a deep list of things they look at on your site, but fundamentally there are about 18 elements that you need to focus on. Those elements are going to have different priority based on what your needs are.

There are many influencing factors for your site’s placement in the search engines and the more you know, the closer you can come to developing a strategy to raise your site’s position. The problem is trying to determine what is currently keeping your site from performing better.

However, there are three recent developments in Google’s algorithms that may provide an excellent place to start and deserve to be part of your optimization efforts.

Locale-Aware Crawling

In January 15’ Google announced the introduction of locale-aware crawl configurations for websites that return different content based on the perceived country or language preference of the search query or browse locale.

Because Google uses a default IP address from the United States, some content runs the risk of not indexing, meaning Google isn’t picking it up. Google is now aware of sites that use locale-adaptive content and uses locale-aware crawling in order to index that specific content for search queries from different parts of the world. Pretty important stuff especially for those of us building our global online community

To dig down into this and learn more, click here

Design and SEO

Back in late 2014, design elements began being seriously looked at by Google and there’s no stopping this factor when considering how sites will be indexed. My opinion is that this will only increase in value.

Google’s indexing system renders the page it’s crawling, similar to viewing the page in a browser, which means design elements, such as JavaScript and CSS are now visible to Google.

This is important because if your robots.txt file is set to disallow access to the JavaScript and CSS files, Google will not be able to correctly render the page when it is indexed. That’s bad.

This can impact how the page is interpreted by the ranking algorithm and the page may not rank as high as it could.

I saw this change happen in mid 2015 when sites I built on Weebly began pulling much better rank results in local SERP, just because most of my client’s competitors were running on half assed WordPress pages that didn’t have clean UI.

Semantic Markup

Google has introduced semantic HTML elements (or markup) to its algorithm. This is pretty important stuff.

HTML has always been used as a design element to distinguish different elements on your site from each other. But semantic markup used in HTML5 provides new code that offers design elements more accurate definition to the search engines. In other words, cleaner more precise coding. This defines the importance of the actual text within the HTML hierarchy.

Here’s an example:

This is regular text within a site element, simple.

Now, Text emphasized or bold would hold a higher importance within that paragraph.

Moving up the markup ladder,

tags would be considered the most important headline and an

tag would be of secondary importance to the

tag.

So as you can see the HTML markup becomes semantic in that how sentences, words and phrases are marked, showing their importance within the document and thus influence search relativity.

In terms of designing your Online Studio’s pages, these are three new areas you should consider a priority in terms of recent SEO. When functions like site speed were critical, and still are, we are beginning to see an equal and growing priority in site design and the value of more detailed code elements.