What is a child theme?

Let’s cover the basics first. What’s a child theme, and why should I consider using one.

Firstly, I’m assuming that you know what a WordPress theme is. If not, then playing around with child themes is a step too far. You need to go back in the paddling pool with your water wings before you jump into this deep pool!

OK, enough of the metaphors. As you know, themes are ways of implementing a website design in WordPress, often with the addition of extra functionality over and above ‘vanilla’ WordPress. Most modern themes allow a degree of flexibility over that design implementation. For instance, they will provide a means of uploading your logo. Often allowing you to easily change the colour scheme too. In short, they let you tweak the theme to make it unique to you and your business.

Great, so that’s all I need, right?

Well, possibly. But if you have worked with WordPress for a while, you’ll know that often there is a need to go beyond a theme’s built-in customisation. Let’s look at a typical example that we come across on a regular basis.

For many business websites, adding breadcrumbs to a site design is desirable. From an SEO point of view, they make it pretty obvious to Google (and other search engines) how your site is structured. From a usability viewpoint, they make it easy for a site visitor to work their way back up a hierarchy. This might be needed if, for instance, they follow an external link to a product page, and want to explore other, similar products.

Some themes include breadcrumbs as additional functionality, many others don’t. If we are building a site for a customer and the chosen theme doesn’t have breadcrumb functionality, then it’s fairly easy to add it.

Our usual method of adding breadcrumbs to a website is to utilise that aspect of the Yoast SEO plugin. This excellent plugin adds all the essential SEO functionality that most websites will need, and gives you a couple of nifty extras too, one of which is the ability to construct meaningful breadcrumbs. All you need to do is add a couple of lines of code to the relevant php files.

Add code? That makes me nervous.

Quite rightly so, adding code to a website shouldn’t be undertaken lightly. But lets just assume you, or your web developer, have taken all the necessary precautions and managed to add the code successfully. You now have breadcrumbs on all the relevant pages of your website and Google is happy!

In time, being a security-conscious site owner, you see that there are updates required on your site. You know keeping everything up-to-date is an effective way to plug security holes, so you take a backup, and start updating. The core WordPress update goes through, and your site is fine. Great, so you then update your plugins, including Yoast SEO. Again, no adverse effect on your website.

Finally, you see that there’s a new version of your theme available. So you go through the update process (sometimes this is a bit more involved than plugin updates), and your breadcrumbs disappear! How did that happen?

How do WordPress updates really work?

Whether you are updating WordPress itself, plugins or themes, the update process effectively downloads the new version of the plugin/theme, and overwrites the relevant files in your hosting account with the new ones. Any configuration that you may have done for the theme or plugin is retained, as all that information is stored in the database, and that is not touched by the update process.

If you remember, though, we implemented the Yoast SEO plugin’s Breadcrumbs by adding some code to certain theme files. So when the theme is updated, those updated files get overwritten by the standard files in the new version of the theme, which don’t contain the breadcrumb code. The end result: your breadcrumbs disappear!

A Child Theme will avoid that?

Yes indeed! Let’s have a quick look at the basic principle behind a child theme.

A child theme is similar, in principle, to looking at a picture through a filter. If the filter is clear, then you see the exact same picture as you would without a filter. If the filter, however, is tinted, then you see an altered version of the original picture, even though nothing has actually changed in the original.

A child theme is a filter for your active theme. It allows you to selectively alter aspects of that theme without having to change the theme’s files.

In slightly more detail, if a particular php file exists within a child theme’s file structure, then that file will be used in preference to the original file. So, with our breadcrumb example, we typically copy the relevant php files (e.g. single.php) to the child theme’s file structure and make the necessary alterations there. Then, when there is an update to the original theme, the original file can be replaced without the alteration made to the child theme’s version being lost.

So I only need a child them when I want to change something?

Technically, that is correct. However, it is much better to implement a child theme early on than wait until you know you will need to change a theme’s files. That’s why we’ve made it standard practice here at Four Lakes.

If you want to get your hands dirty and try implementing a child theme yourself, then there’s a great guide over at the ManageWP blog. However, the good news it that there are a number of plugins that will do the work for you, and utilise some of the lesser-know features of child themes to boot.

For our favourite theme, Divi, there is the excellent Divi Children plugin.

For other themes, the Child Theme Configurator plugin is pretty straightforward and effective.

Of course, if you’d like us to help you with this, or any other aspect of setting up or maintaining your WordPress website then all you need to do is get in touch.

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To be honest, we have been intending to do this for some time. It was slightly embarrassing to build great-looking, responsive websites for our clients whilst not having precisely that for our own online presence.

I guess the old adage about tradesmen tending to their own houses last has an element of truth to it!

With our new site we have remained true to the Four Lakes brand whilst evolving the website in line with more recent online design developments. In doing we, we have taken the opportunity to highlight some of the great features that we offer clients. Look around the website to see such items as…

• a truly responsive design, accessible across all devices
• great use of striking imagery and bold design elements, within a clean and simple layout
• strong integration with multiple social media platforms

Behind the scenes we have features that aren’t readily apparent to visitors, but are very important to website owners…

• powerful SEO capabilities
• strong security to protect from hackers and malware
• easy-to-use content management facilities
• detailed website analytics
• and much more

We hope you like the new design. As always, we are open to constructive criticism, so if you happen across something that doesn’t look right to you, or behaves differently to your expectations, then please do get in touch, or leave a comment below. If you really like the new look, then we’d love to hear from you too.

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fe3 is a change and leadership communication consultancy based in London. They work closely with organisations to help make them attractive to potential customers; in other words increasing their corporate magnetism!

Karen Drury, the founder and driving force behind fe3, contacted Four Lakes when she realised that her existing website not only contained out of date information, but was also in dire need of a design revamp.

We worked closely with Karen, following a highly iterative process, to ensure that the new website’s design, structure and content were an accurate reflection of the standard of work fe3 offers to their own clients.

Features

• Blog
• Content Management
• Mobile/Tablet oriented responsive design
• Enhanced SEO functionality
• Use of strong imagery to convey the organisation’s ethos

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GAP Systems are the developers of Smartflow – the market leading software solution for new product development, marketing and artwork approval. Smartflow consistently streamlines and enhances the processes associated with bringing new products to market, and is applicable to pretty much any vertical market, including those with stringent regulations such as food and pharmaceutical packaging. GAP Systems have an impressive portfolio of clients, including such household names as Kingfisher, 3663, Next, Habitat and Castorama.

GAP Systems initially contacted A1WebStats with a view to enhancing the online profile of their existing website, and improving conversion of visitors to enquiries and, ultimately, customers. It quickly became apparent that their existing website needed a major overhaul in order to allow those ambitious targets to be met. As we have worked successfully with A1WebStats on a number of projects, they had no hesitation in recommending Four Lakes as the right company for the project.

Whilst GAP were keen to retain their existing website design cues, Four Lakes quickly identified that there was an opportunity to rebuild the website from the ground up so that that all the features needed to attract and convert visitors could be added, whilst also implementing a modern, responsive design. This would ensure that mobile users in particular were not disenfranchised, an increasingly common issue. We even took the opportunity to utilise Smartflow to manage the creation and layout of page content across the site. The resulting website looks superficially similar to GAP’s existing site, but under the skin offers them a much more powerful marketing tool.

Features

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As one of the leading, and long-standing, violin experts in the South East of England, Malcolm Tysoe Ltd. needed a web presence to match. Four Lakes was engaged to create such a compelling website, one that would showcase the incredible instruments that Malcolm Tysoe offer and demonstrate their knowledge and expertise. Malcolm Tysoe were also keen for the website to allow them to sell instruments and accessories online for the first time.

We helped Malcolm Tysoe choose an appropriate WordPress theme, and extended the functionality to ensure that a great browsing and shopping experience is offered to website visitors. We were even able to implement automated processes that take into account the unusually complex worldwide shipping options, such as sending a cello case to Japan!

Features

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Four Lakes were engaged by the US distribution and marketing arm of this famous French cheese, manufactured in the Jura region and one of the first cheeses to obtain AOC designation. The brief was to produce a website that would provide all the necessary resources the US retailers need to successfully sell the cheese, whilst following the Comté site design guidelines.

Four Lakes modified a WordPress theme, and added extra functionality through the use of carefully selected plugins, resulting in a site that marries great features with a compelling design.

Features

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From the small business point of view, this is a huge help. Greater priority on the content of a page, and less on the other SEO factors that have traditionally been easier to manipulate when you have a big budget (such as inbound links, social signals, etc.) means that it is easier for genuine expertise to gain traction in organic search results.

This doesn’t mean that there is no longer a need to optimise your website for SEO purposes. It is still the case that a page that is “SEO friendly” will outperform a page that is not optimised with search engines in mind. But there is now no need to obsess over the fine details. Creating great content that people want to read and share with their social circles should be first and foremost in your mind.

Schema Markup

So why are we talking about a new technique for optimising page content? Simply because it is a fairly recent enhancement to the HTML standard that could give certain types of content on your website a further boost!

But first of all, what is it? Rather than re-invent the wheel, I would encourage you to read an excellent article by Ana Hoffman called Schema Markup: How to Make Your Content More Clickable and Shareable.

Ana describes the new Schema Markup standard, and shows you how you can implement it pretty easily on a WordPress-based site (and you know how much I love WordPress!)

Once you’ve read the article you’ll see that Schema Markup is specific to certain types of content, such as reviews, products, recipes, events, etc. What may not be quite so apparent is that more generic content can, and should, be marked up as an ‘Article’. This will help Google understand better what type of page it is, and how to display it in search results. The good news is that the WordPress plugin mentioned in Ana’s blog will default all posts to ‘Article’ unless you specifically choose on of the other options.

To see this in action, have a look at the Google Rich Snippets output for last week’s blog post. Near the bottom of the page you should see this:

This is now telling Google that this particular blog post is actually an in-depth article on how to set up authorship on a website, and should be treated as such in search results.

If you have other content on your site, for instance review, then you can use the plugin to add the relevant Schema Markup to that post too.

Why bother?

Seems like a lot of work still, doesn’t it? Even with the WordPress plugin doing a lot of the heavy lifting for you. Is it worth it?

In order to answer that you need to consider the direction in which search is headed. Semantic Search is all about adding intelligence to the whole process. Hummingbird has, primarily, made understanding the intent of search queries better. Other enhancements such as Authorship give great content a boost. But it’s not just about an incremental improvement to the existing search process. Rather, I believe search is undergoing quite a fundamental change.

The proliferation of mobile devices (phones & tablets) opens up both challenges and opportunities. The challenge (to Google) is to provide results that will be appropriate for someone not on a relatively large screen PC or laptop. I don’t believe mobile-friendly websites are prioritised in mobile searches just yet, but that may come. There is a kind of self-regulating process there already, though. If a page is not mobile friendly, then mobile users will not stay there long. Too much of that behaviour will have a negative impact on the page’s search engine ranking anyway.

However, when someone search from their mobile they are potentially giving Google some extra information to help with that search, namely their location. If they are a Google+ user then Google also has their profile information, the people in their circles, and their content history. All of this helps to contextualise the search, and could be used to filter the results appropriately.

Even on desktop search that contextualisation of search is also happening, with Google aggressively encouraging people to create and use Google+, and offering the ability to carry out voice search within the Chrome browser (thus providing a richer, longer search query).

If, as a business, you have a strong Google+ presence and a website that contains all the right markup, then you are ensuring that your content will be in prime position to be served where appropriate. It may not mean you get more search traffic, but it should mean that you get better targeted search traffic.

So don’t delay…get Schema Markup onto your site today!

Further reading

If you want to know more about the fine detail then I can recommend a great blog on Schema Markup and Microdata by Sean Murray of Virante. 

Next week

Now that you have all the building blocks in place, we’ll start to look at how you can build targeted traffic to your site. It’s time to start making your website work a bit harder for your business!

Image courtesy of Gerlos

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Why set up Authorship on your Website?

The next step in getting ready for Semantic Search is to link your website content back to your Google+ profile. Why? Simply because this closes the loop and lets Google know who is the author of the content.

If you remember, we set up your Google+ profile to be, in Google’s eyes, your definitive online identity. By linking the blogs and articles you create online back to this identity, it allows you to build up a trove of content that Google recognises as belonging to you.

Over time you will naturally build up more and more content, and that content will be assessed by Google and it will impact on your online authority.

But you can’t just create any old content. It needs to be useful, and Google use a number of techniques in order to determine how useful it is. Most of those have been familiar for some time – the presence and frequency of relevant keywords, the length and readability of the article, the amount of links to it (both from websites and social media) and so on.

In the past the authority of a single article or blog remained tied to that website. With Authorship, your Google+ ID now benefits too. It’s a fundamental change to SEO, and it requires that you link your content appropriately. So let’s look at how you do that.

Why WordPress?

Before we do, one quick aside. We’ll be looking at setting up a self-hosted WordPress site (i.e. wordpress.org and not wordpress.com) for a couple of reasons:

• WordPress is the most common Content Management System (CMS) in use today for websites link
• WordPress is under constant development, both the core product and the many, many plugins (extensions to the functionality) so it usually keeps pace with the latest in web technology
• There is a thriving market of themes (designs) for customer to choose from so they can achieve just the sort of look and feel they need
• We create customer websites using WordPress, (for some very good reasons) so we know the platform better than anything else
• We believe it is a great choice for small and medium businesses for their website

So let’s have a look at setting up Authorship on your site.

WordPress out of the box

I’m assuming you have managed to get WordPress installed, either using your web hosting providers ‘one click install’ facility, or the famous WordPress 5-minute install. Either way, it’s up and running and you’re now faced with the initially daunting admin panel.

As it stands, the site does not have the facility to implement authorship. Nor will it contain the ‘rich snippet’ information that will make it semantic search friendly.

Adding Authorship to a WordPress website

So let’s look at one easy way to add Authorship capabilities. It’s not the only way, and other WordPress developers may tell you something different. That’s OK, it’s just a reflection of the flexibility of the platform.

My personal preference is to use an SEO plugin called “WordPress SEO by Yoast“. It’s a very flexible plugin that offers, for free, a wide range of facilities to boost the search engine friendliness of your website. Even without the Authorship facility I would recommend it, so this makes it even more useful.

Installing it is simple:

1. Hover over ‘Plugins’ on the left-hand side
2. Click on ‘Add new’
3. Type ‘wordpress seo by yoast’ in the search box and click on ‘Search Plugins’
4. Click on ‘Install Now’ under the relevant plugin listing
5. Confirm that you really, really want to install this plugin
6. Click on ‘Activate plugin’ when the install is complete

You’ll be asked if you want to allow tracking. This helps the plugin developers understand how the plugin is being used and ultimately benefits everyone, so I’d recommend you do so.

You will end up with a new menu on the left-hand side called ‘SEO’. If you go to the ‘Dashboard’ sub-menu then there is a brief tour which takes you through the various settings for this plugin. It’s worth familiarising yourself with these as they will benefit your website. However, we’ll just have a look at the Authorship-specific settings for now.

Setting up rel=publisher

Publisher? This is something we haven’t talked about much, and it’s not essential to enabling Authorship. However, it’s useful as it provides a link between your website and your company profile page on Google+.

If you’re in business and you haven’t got a company page, then you should set one up now. The reasons are many, but in short it’s about having a brand identity on G+ that you can use to engage customers and prospects.

So, in order to make that link from your website to Google+ you have to follow these simple steps…

1. Click on SEO | Social
2. Click on the Google+ tab
3. Enter your Google+ Page URL into the ‘Google Publisher Page’ field
4. Click on the ‘Save Settings’ button

That’s it! You have now set up the publisher link. Easy, huh!

Setting up Authorship

OK, setting up the rel=publisher link was easy, so lets have a look at what’s needed to set up Authorship.

Remember, the purpose of Authorship is to link the in-depth content that you create to your Google+ profile. That way Google can determine your level of expertise and rank your content accordingly in search results.

WordPress already has one of the important building blocks in this process, as all content (i.e. static pages, blog posts, and other content types dependant on the theme) have the internal author linked already. So in order to extend that link back to the Google+ profile we have to do one simple thing…

1. Click on ‘Users | All users’
2. Choose to edit the appropriate user profile (in case it’s not yours)
3. Put the user’s Google+ profile URL in the Google+ field within the ‘Contact Info’ section

That’s it! Now every page on the site that is linked to that Author will have the correct ‘rel=author’ markup applied.

Hold on, though. There’s one more thing you really should do to finish the job off properly. Right near the bottom of the user profile there’s a section that could use a little love…

Putting appropriate details in here makes sure that the Author’s archive on your site has meta information that makes sense. You’d hate for your online profile to be raise through all this Authorship effort, and for that to be undermined by not having a good author page on your own site, right?

So that’s it. Your site should now be set up properly for Authorship, even if you have multiple authors.

Testing it out

It’s always good to have a way of testing your code changes, and Google have provided a very useful tool that will tell you if your attempts to set up Authorship have been successful. It’s called the Structured Data Testing Tool, and you should use it to validate the work you’ve carried out. It’s a very simple process, you merely have to enter the URL of the page you wish to validate and the tool will list out the relevant structured data elements, as well as showing how the page will look in search results. This allows you the opportunity to make sure your carefully chosen profile picture really will work in this format.

The tools shows other kinds of structured data, as we will look at in a later article. For Authorship you simply need to look at the ‘rel=author’ and, if implemented, the ‘rel=publisher’ elements.

Not using WordPress?

We’ve focussed on instructions for WordPress in this article, but there are, of course, many other ways of creating a website. However, the same principles still apply to setting up Authorship, regardless of platform…

• Have a ‘rel=publisher’ link to your Google+ business page in the website header (recommended)
• Have a ‘rel=author’ link to the author’s Google+ page in the header of appropriate pages (i.e. contain information or opinion, and are authored primarily by them)
• Have a page that summarises the author’s content on the site, also linked using ‘rel=author’

If you are using another CMS then there may be add-ons that achieve this in a manner similar to the WordPress SEO plugin described above. If not, then the code changes are pretty trivial.

The next steps 

Once Authorship is set up, you are ready to start putting your amazing insights and fresh information onto your website, secure in the knowledge that that’ll be appropriately presented to searchers. But there are some further enhancements you can make that, much of the time, will give your content even more of a boost on the Semantic Web. In the next article we’ll look at how you can enable these on your website too, and make your website fly!

If you’d like to receive these articles straight to your mailbox, in a convenient monthly summary, then please sign up to our newsletter in the side-bar. Or you can follow me on Google+, Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn but clicking on the links below.

Image courtesy of vignetfishnet

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We have also seen that the correct implementation of Authorship has the potential, purely from from higher visibility in search results, to have a significant impact on click-through rates. Coupled with personalised results, it can also give certain search results a definite boost up the rankings.

There is one thing that is core to all this marketing goodness, and that’s a Google+ profile. Without one, you will not have a central identity that Google can use to assign Authorship. Without one you will be unable to utilise the 2nd largest social network in existence to connect with like-minded people and promote your products and services.

Creating a Google+ Profile

So how do you go about creating a Google+ profile? It’s actually pretty straightforward…

First you need to navigate to http://plus.google.com where, if you do not have a Google account, or you are not logged in, you will see a screen like this…

You will be asked to log in. If you already have a Google account (e.g. Gmail or Google Apps) then just enter the credentials, if not then click on the ‘Create An Account’ button highlighted above.

The next screen differs slightly depending on whether you have a pre-existing Google account or not. Either way, though, you will be asked to enter or confirm some personal details such as name, gender and birthday. If it’s a new account you will also be asked for a username (to create an email address), an existing email address and a mobile number (both for password recovery purposes).

You should enter all these details. Be aware that Google frown on nicknames or pseudonyms, and you might find your account suspended in future if you don’t provide accurate details here. 

There will be another couple of screens asking you to find family and friends to connect with (or ‘circle’ in Google+ terminology). This isn’t essential and you can skip through these with no problems.

Personalising your Google+ Profile

Once you have a presence on Google+, you then need to make sure it is optimised appropriately. Rather than re-invent the wheel on this, I will let my good friend Martin Shervington explain how to get your Google+ profile off to a great start.

Note: this video was created a few months ago, so the profile page looks slightly different now. The core principles remain good, however.

Martin covers the basics of creating an engaging Google+ profile, but there is one particular aspect of your profile that you need to pay close attention to for Authorship purposes that I particularly want to focus on…the ‘Contributor to’ section.

You’ll find this under the ‘Links’ card in your Google+ profile…

The ‘Contributor to’ section is where you tell Google to which websites you actively contribute content. It can, and should, contain your business site(s), but could also contain other sites where you post original thoughts (e.g. slideshare).

Filling this section in accurately will tell Google where on the internet you create content. Since only you should have control over the contents of your Google+ profile, it’s an important part of a two-stage process that Google uses to ensure accurate allocation of content to its author.

Just filling this section in will not automatically enable Authorship, though. Next week we’ll look at the other side of the equation, namely the changes you need to make to your website.

Author Rich Snippet

Lets have a quick look at a search result that utilises authorship, referred to as an Author Rich Snippet, to see what impact all this work has.

There are 3 areas I’d like to focus on….

1. The first obvious difference between this and a normal search result is pretty apparent, in that your profile picture is added to the snippet. This really emphasises the benefit of having a picture that is recognisably you when scaled to this size (i.e. 44px by 44px). However, less obvious is that, if you click on the profile image, the current search is refined by restricting results to yours alone. So, if you build up a body on work on a particular subject, there’s a fair chance that someone could click on your image and end up seeing all of it!
2. The Author Name is also a link, and it behaves in exactly the same way as clicking on the profile image.
3. Finally, the number of Google+ circles that you are in is shown. This is one way in which someone might get a feel for your authority just from looking at the rich snippet. It’s certainly an incentive to get yourself into lots of people’s circles! However, yet again this is a clickable link, this time taking the searcher to the posts tab of your Google+ profile. So it’s worth ensuring that at least some of your latest posts are relevant to the type of content people might be expecting.

Using Google+ Effectively

Once you have filled out your profile then there’s nothing else you need to do for Authorship purposes. However, this would be a bit like choosing your brand new car, ensuring the spec is just right for you, then sticking it in the garage once its delivered never to use again. Technically you have transport, but it’s no use unless you get in and drive it!

Driving Google+ will definitely bring you benefits as far as promoting your business goes, and ultimately is a great way to bring traffic to your website where you can look to convert visitors to serious enquiries, or even customers. As we’ve seen from the rich snippet above, there is also a significant benefit to being added to lots of circles, and to having some relevant and recent posts on your profile. We’ll come back to this subject in a couple of weeks time when we look at sharing your content, with particular focus on using Google+ to do so.

In the interim, I can heartily recommend a site to which I contribute (as you can see from the ‘Contributor To’ section of my Google+ profile). The site is called Plus Your Business and contains a huge amount of information on using Google+ for business promotion. In particular, the Introduction to Google+ section takes you a step beyond creating your Google+ profile.

Plus Your Business requires you to register to access the training courses, but registration is free and very easy if you use your shiny new Google+ ID for the purpose.

Update

A few days after posting, Stephan Hovnanian created an infographic that shows a number of techniques you can use to boost your Google+ visibility and help gain an audience for your online activities. It shows you 10 great ways in which you build your profile, and is perfect for those new to Google+

Have fun setting up your Google+ Profile, and come back next week when we’ll look at the changes you’ll need to make to your website. Don’t forget to circle me on G+, follow on Twitter, like on Facebook or connect on LinkedIn. All the relevant links are below. You can also get a monthly summary of these articles delivered straight to your inbox by signing up to our newsletter over in the sidebar.

The post Creating a Google+ Profile for Semantic Search appeared first on Four Lakes Internet Services.

With the recent ‘Hummingbird’ announcement from Google, made on their 15th birthday, Semantic Search seems cemented at the core of Google’s algorithms. Search Engine Land gave a good overview of the change that has impacted over 90% of searches and is seen as possibly the biggest algorithm update ever!

Any doubt about the implementation of semantic search at Google has now been removed, indeed Hummingbird has been active for a month now and any impact on search traffic should already be apparent. So lets have a look at what that impact is, particularly for small to medium businesses.

More accurate search

If you remember from last week’s article, we now know that semantic search places more emphasis on understanding the intent of the search, and if possible uses knowledge of the person making the search to refine the results further still.

Some of the Hummingbird algorithm is about using the whole query, rather than picking certain keywords out and using them as the basis of the search. Other parts are about understanding a series of queries, so that the same keywords don’t have to be repeated each time.

This is a huge shift in the intelligence of search on the input side of the equation, and for small businesses trying to attract web traffic it can mean that certain tactics may no longer work. For instance, if you previously got significant traffic from optimising pages on your site for misspellings of a popular keyword or phrase, then you’ll probably find that traffic dropping off even more now (Google have been correcting misspellings for some time, though).

Missing keywords

Another impact of this change is that you may find traffic hitting your site even though the phrase they used for that particular search doesn’t contain the keyword for which you have optimised the page.

How? Consider the example voice search we saw in last week’s article…

A person searches for information about ‘Thanksgiving’ as is returned details about Thanksgiving in the US. Their next search is ‘I meant the Canadian one’, and in the context of those searches Google knows to return results for Thanksgiving in Canada.

So if you have a page optimised for ‘canadian thanksgiving’ that appears on page 1 of the results, it’s feasible that searches without that phrase will still find you.

At first glance this seems great (and it’s certainly not a bad thing), but you need to be careful when measuring the effectiveness of your SEO efforts that you take this into account. After all, if you decide to change the page’s keyword to something else on the basis that not enough searches for ‘canadian thanksgiving’ are resulting in visits, then you could end up shooting yourself in the foot!

Authority

This aspect of Semantic Search is likely to have a relatively minor impact on organic search traffic, and indeed could even result in a boost for certain phrases. But there are other algorithm changes that have the potential to be more penal unless you ensure your website, and other aspects of your SEO strategy, are correctly aligned.

A prime example is Authorship markup. This is a term used to describe how content is linked to your Google+ profile, which Google are promoting as the hub of your personal online identity. Through a relatively simple process, the content that you create on your website, or on other sites/blogs/etc, is tagged with your Google+ profile address. This is a process I will describe in more detail in a future article.

Once that link is in place, the SEO benefits of that content flow through to you, and on to your business. Over time, the accumulation of SEO goodwill from your articles will result in a growing Google reputation, and increasing trust in your authority in relevant subject areas.

Its important to state that, at the moment, there is no indication that authorship has any direct impact on the ranking of a page in search results. But as Mark Traphagen says in his article, there are definite side-benefits to authorship that can have a positive impact on search traffic and rankings now.

It is also important to see where the wind is blowing as far as search is concerned, and Google have made it very clear that authors that produce fresh, relevant, original content will continue to have an advantage over other types of content.

So what should you, as a business, do to position your organic SEO strategy for the present and the future? 

Steps to take now

1. Create a Google+ profile
   Whether or not you agree with Google’s strategy for adding a social layer to their products, the fact remains that they are using Google+ IDs to validate the whole authorship process.

   We’ll look at the important aspects of your Google+ profile in next week’s article.

2. Make your website Google-friendly
   Google has certain expectations of websites when it comes to the way they are organised. Ensuring that all these are in place, and in particular that appropriate links back to your Google+ ID and, if it exists, your company’s Google+ page, are important to ensure that the SEO value of the content is attributed correctly.

   Over the next few weeks we’ll take a look at how our favourite website content management system, WordPress, can be configured to ensure all the boxes are ticked. Don’t worry if you use another CMS, or none, though. The same principles apply to every site.

3. Write regularly
   Producing regular content in your area of expertise will do a number of things. Firstly, it starts building up a body of work that demonstrates to Google that you are a source of knowledge on a particular subject.

   Equally important, it begins to raise your profile amongst peers and the wider community, although you need to give it a helping hand too (as we’ll see).

   Your own blog is an ideal way of enabling this, although not essential. You can guest blog, or add articles to appropriate forums. There’s even a strong argument for using  Google+ as your publishing platform. Whatever approach you take you need to ensure that the content you produce is linked back to your Google+ profile appropriately.

   Over the next few weeks we will take a look at some strategies you can employ when creating content to ensure it draws people back time and time again. Google loves that!

4. Share your content
   Whilst “If you build it, they will come” may have worked in the film ‘Field of Dreams’, it really doesn’t work with online content. In order to get people to view, and appreciate, your hard work, you need to let them know that it’s there.

   Social media has proven to be a great way of getting that notification out to interested parties. Each platform has its foibles and techniques, though, and it pays to understand them to some extent before you come across as a spammer. The good news is that you’ll already have created a Google+ account, and good interaction on there can be more effective in SEO terms than on other profiles.

   Again, we will have a look at ways of using social media effectively in a later article.

5. Measure the impact, and feed that back into the loop
   It’s very rare for someone to get all this right from the beginning. So we will look at ways in which you can measure how effective your strategy is, and how you can use that information to tweak your processes.

Conclusion

Optimising your website to the n^th degree won’t help if your product/service isn’t in demand, and you don’t have great content to promote it. That should always be your first reality check.

However, assuming you have a great product, and you can communicate your passion for it in an effective way, then following the steps outlined above will maximise the chances that you will benefit from organic search traffic. In other words, you will receive visits to your website from people at the very point at which they are looking for a product like yours.

It doesn’t get much better than that!

Want to learn the detail? My next article will look at getting your Google+ profile set up correctly and linked to your website. You can sign up to monthly newsletter updates in the sidebar. You can also follow me on Google+, like our Facebook page, hook up on LinkedIn or follow us on Twitter…all below.

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