Now, the factors on the page have grown in complexity and importance.
First, classify the page; then get the click rate on your list – now there are some options and opportunities that could (oh god) ‘add value’ and well sure someone else in your market will implement them so maybe it’s worth taking a moment or three to ponder.
The search engine listing is now wearing long pants: Google has experimented with extended snippets, which they seem to have retired, and has now added links in snippets. For any given page, this could be good or bad, but in either case we can decide, or at least influence, whether to turn on or off, based on how we handle our page markup.
And then there’s the panto SEO villain (‘He’s after you!’): yes folks, it’s FLP, or First Link Priority, forcing us to consider sweeping markup changes to accommodate search. Assuming you believe in that sort of thing.
Previously, SEO only had a modest impact on page markup; now, it can be extensive.
- classification
- title tag
- meta description
- body copy
Not much to say about that, I mean, obvious, right? Well, yes and no, you’d be surprised how much misinformation is out there. For the record, yer onner, 69 characters, including spaces, for the title, 156 characters, including spaces, for the meta description. Body text: literate, informative, and keyword-rich. The next thing, after qualifying, is to click…
- click for ratings
- title tag
- meta description
- Body Copy Markup Order
The challenge here is that the ad that appears in the search results is not the one we wrote. Instead, the search engine writes it for us by finding the User’s search expression in context within our copy of the page. There are a number of things we can do to guide the quality of the resulting list and this will affect the extent to which the ranking generates traffic and how much of that traffic is the right kind of traffic.
- snippet links
- Anchors on the page
And just when you think you have it covered, Google creates new types of snippets, which include anchor links within your page. As a search engine, I find these to be really useful, almost a smaller version of sitelinks, but only for the single page that ranks, not the entire site. Time will tell if snippet links are better overall than just a longer text description; we will see.
- Priority of the first link
- Link markup order
- link stacking
And finally, why deviate at this late game from the Panto theme? – there’s the Ugly Betty of them all: the curmudgeonly, scheming, egotistical characteristic that we’ll refer to as, oh, something vaguely scientific…umm, oh, now I’ve got it: ‘first link priority’. Dear Google, thank you very much, as if SEO isn’t all CSI New York like it was (I should point out that SEO CSI Miami is for those of you with a sunnier disposition, intoxicated with the notion that SEO is, like, a walk through a sun-kissed beach lined with tall buildings of gleaming glass, like a mouth full – or should it be a mouthful? – of porcelain veneers).
On the plus side, if you can get on the FLP firecracker, well, you might know something your competitor doesn’t: you’ll get a better ranking, and that makes you better at voodoo visibility.
