subject: SEO Updates You Might Have Missed [print this page] SEO Updates You Might Have Missed SEO Updates You Might Have Missed
Those who like to keep themselves updates on the latest of SEO trends would find the following piece of informational rather interesting. For starters, none of the following suggestions are breakthrough in any regard or challenge the basics of SEO techniques that nearly every online marketing expert or optimizer follows. Still, both the listed options provide an easy way of engaging the attention of the Google crawlers in a safe, effective manner.
How long are your Page Titles?
Most SEO developers would agree that forming short and meaningful page titles for web-pages is perhaps the most basic thing to do when optimizing a site. The practice of inducing keywords as a part of the title has become something of a norm. Most optimizers have a tendency to make the titles slightly descriptive.
This solves two purposes. Firstly, it tells the crawlers exactly what the page contains and secondly, it provides room for inserting more, appropriate keywords. It has now been established by independent firms that know how to decode Google's crawling/indexing preferences that long page titles aren't really a help unless they are 80 characters or shorter in length.
This invariably means that whatever keywords or content is present on the page title beyond the 80-character count is not going to make a substantial difference in terms of getting the web-page indexed.
Placement of Dates and Links
At first, it seemed too trivial an issue to pay notice but now many members of the SEO community have confirmed something that I didn't believe would actually influence the crawling preference of search engines. Something as simple as placing the date on a newly-posted article or a blog does hold a certain degree of importance in terms of getting that web-page indexed a bit sooner.
We all realize that posting the date is held important since it underlines the freshness of the content. Now, it is being said that the date should be placed below the title of the blog or the main heading of an article, just like it is done in most press release formats. This pattern of presenting the date ensures that the search engines can immediately decipher that latest or fresh content. Similarly, any kind of commercial banner or an ad linking should be placed outside the body of the article.
This is because presence of such links breaks-up the continuity of the text. Since indexing volumes are always high, this creates the risk of the content following the link being partially or incompletely indexed. This is in stark contrast to the anchor text links that need to be placed within the article body.
