Video Transcript – Google News Teaches SEO

Google News Teaches SEO – original post here

Welcome back, Rankers! I’ll let you in on a little bit of a secret: Google Penguin has not yet been released; not yet, but it will be. “Any day now,” apparently, that we’ve been saying for two months. Thank you, Google, again making us look like knobs. At least when Matt Cutts was in charge of the Webspam team and the announcements and everything, he was pretty measured and accurate. These days, it’s like last year; Google announcements are coming out very, very erratically, and certainly having warnings attached to them that bear absolutely no relevance to what actually happens, like in the mobile update last year.

Now, because we still don’t have a Google Penguin, I want to talk to you a bit about it today. I’ve had this story in my back pocket. I haven’t heard anyone talk about it, but last year Google sent out this email to their news publishers and we’ve got a couple of clients that are news publishers so we get the article. I’ve been doing recently, over here where there are three kinds of football – there’s soccer, Australian-rules football and rugby, and I mean, there’s two versions of rugby but no one really cares – but we were doing some work for one of the large soccer organisations in the country, one of the national bodies, and we were having to look at all the Google news. They were doing a few things wrong which could be improved and all the rest of it, and I thought, it’s probably a good idea to tell regular folk who don’t actually or can’t actually submit to Google news, what Google news tells us, its publishers.

So, this came out last year, and it’s interesting because one of the things that they talk about is inaccurate article titles, meaning that Google, when it scans articles for news, it sometimes will have inaccurate titles displayed in the results because of the way that the publisher has set up the web pages. Now with Google news, you actually have to be approved by someone at Google to have your site feature in Google news. There are different rules; say, for instance, the content in the site map can only be 48 hours old. You must link your verified Google My Business Profile page to your Google Publisher console. So, there’s all these sorts of different rules, and I think one of the old ones used to be you have to publish at least three articles a day just to be even considered, but one of the things that Google says here for Google news really, really works well for just standard organic SEO. So, for instance, make sure that your page title matches your ‘Heading1’ at the top of your page. That’s what we tell everyone here; that’s what we do here. If you’re building a target page for something, just get that H1 matching your title – and also your URL – as much as you possibly can.

Here it is in black and white. I’ve heard people many, many, many times say, “There’s no such thing as SEO best practice.” Well, I beg to differ, because in this email I’ve received from Google it says, “We’d recommend the following best practices.” There it is in black and white, literally. Of course, all the other things apply that we talk about, like getting your key phrase into your images, into your alt tags, and one of the other things that this email says is, “Don’t go and link your heading tags.” We see that a lot. We see people using H2s and then they’ll link them, or they’ll have the H1 and then they’ll link it. Well, it’s a heading tag; if it’s a heading tag, logically it’s a heading of the article, right? You want people to stay there and read the heading and then read the article. You know what’s it like? Putting a link in an H1 tag is a little bit like putting the word ‘enter’ on an exit door, pretty much, so don’t do it, right? Keep your heading tags free of links – whether they are H2s, H1s, and H3s, whatever – but certainly use your keywords in your title and your H1, and make sure they match.

The other thing that’s interesting out of this particular article, it says here, “Check that your article title includes at least ten characters and is between two and 22 words.” So, sometimes we get questions asked that’s like, “Why did Google change the page title in the search results of my page?” Usually it’s because Google didn’t like it. Usually it’s because the page title may have only been one word, or the page title was not accurate based on what Google saw other sites linking to it, or other pages linking to it, and so Google will sometimes change the title, but one of the main reasons it will change the title is if you’ve only got one word in there, or if it’s – it says here – no more than 22 words. Well, if you’ve got a page title that’s 50 words, Google might change that in the search results. So, there are some really good tips that you can take from what Google says in other arenas that they play in and use them for just your organic SEO.

Now, I wanted to tell you something else. I’ve been doing live video daily since about early November, I think. I don’t know how many I’ve done. I’ve done a lot. I’ve been doing it mostly on Periscope. I have done Meerkat as well, which is another live video streaming tool. Basically, I go live and we just take questions from the audience and we help people with their SEO. So, today Google has just opened its doors to Facebook Live to everybody, not just the glitterati of the digital age; it’s open to everyone now. You can go and start streaming live video on Facebook to all your friends, so I’m going to start doing that as well. The time of day it happens in Australia is Australian Eastern Summertime, 7:30 a.m. I think in the U.K. that works out to be about 6:30 at night, something like that; I’ll have to do the numbers. We are plus-ten hours GMT or UTC, whatever you want to call it. I’m doing it at that time of day because I find that it fits into the U.S. and parts of Europe. We seem to get a lot of French people on at that time, so it’s interesting. Anyway, I’ll be there at 7:30 in the morning doing live SEO help, so if you want some help with your SEO, then you can just make sure you hook up to our media page on Facebook. That’s Facebook.com/MelbourneSEO, or follow me on Twitter, @jimboot, and we’ll make sure that you’re alerted when we’re doing live video. Thanks very much and we’ll see you next week. Bye.