SEO in the Age of Apps: Diversifying Your Mobile SEO Strategy

The increasing adoption of responsive design is paving an easier path for mobile SEO within browsers; it's not always the ultimate silver bullet, but it's a welcome relief to brands looking for a single-site solution to cross platform content. But mobile devices have ushered in a whole new set of search challenges in the form of apps, forcing SEO professionals to diversify their search strategy beyond the browser.

Search is widely acknowledged to be the number one mobile browser activity – actually, it's the number one mobile activity overall. The browser factor is no surprise – it's logical that most of us would automatically transfer our desktop search behaviors to our mobile devices.

But an increasing number of us seem to prefer apps for many mobile activities, search included. The top 10 U.S. mobile smartphone apps are either directly search-focused (e.g. the Google Search and Maps apps) or search-oriented in nature (e.g. Google Play, iTunes), according to comScore.

The reasons we're gravitating toward apps are fairly obvious – the interfaces tend to be more user-friendly, the content and results more streamlined. The reasons why this shift in behavior matters are less readily apparent but rest assured that the move toward app-based search is a game-changer for search marketers.

Why?

• As users gravitate more and more towards apps for search, the types of content a search leads to will diversify – it's not just about browser-based content anymore.
• Search destinations will diversify as well – most brands must focus on apps from the major engines while also striving for visibility within niche engine apps and directories.
• The old SEO rules still apply, but new SEO best practices are evolving as apps become more and more popular and the search ecosystem splinters into myriad proprietary indexes and directories.

Mobile SEO: Browser Basics

To succeed as this app-based search ecosystem evolves, brands need to understand the relevant apps on the market, the value proposition of each, and how to build rank and findability.

Desktop preferences seem to translate to mobile search in a big way – if you're a Google person on the desktop, you'll be using Google your mobile device as well. Or Bing, or Yahoo, and so forth.

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Original Article :http://searchenginewatch.com 

Panda, Fresher Results, Spelling Top Google’s January 2012 Search Updates

A minor update to Google’s Panda update was released in January. This was just one of 14 other search changes Googleannounced. Others included fresher results, improvements to autocomplete, better spelling corrections, and auto-disabling Instant.

Google also made note of a couple other significant algorithmic updates: the launch of Search Plus Your World, which brought “social” results into Google’s search results, and the page layout algorithm, which targets ad-heavy websites.

Google also reminded website owners that Google reserves the right to change how your title appears in Google’s search result pages – which is hardly a new practice. As Google explained:

"We use many signals to decide which title to show to users, primarily the title tag if the webmaster specified one. But for some pages, a single title might not be the best one to show for all queries, and so we have algorithms that generate alternative titles to make it easier for our users to recognize relevant pages. Our testing has shown that these alternative titles are generally more relevant to the query and can substantially improve the clickthrough rate to the result, helping both our searchers and webmasters. About half of the time, this is the readmore

Article written by Danny Goodwin, February 7, 2012 for www.searchenginewatch.com

Serious Robots.txt Misuse & High Impact Solutions

Some of the Internet's most important pages from many of the most linked-to domains, are blocked by a robots.txt file. Does your website misuse the robots.txt file, too? Find out how search engines really treat robots.txt blocked files, entertain yourself with a few seriously flawed implementation examples and learn how to avoid the same mistakes yourself.

The robots.txt protocol was established in 1994 as a way for webmasters to indicate which pages and directories should not be accessed by bots. To this day, respectable bots adhere to the entries in the file...but only to a point.

Your Pages Could Still Show Up in the SERPs

Bots that follow the instructions of the robots.txt file, including Google and the other big guys, won’t index the content of the page but they may still put the page in their index. We’ve all seen these limited listings in the Google SERPs. Below are two examples of pages that have been excluded using the robots.txt file yet still show up in Google.

Cisco Login Page

The below highlighted Cisco login page is blocked in the robots.txt file, but shows up with a limited listing on the second page of a Google search for ‘login’. Note that the Title Tag and URL are included in the listing. The only thing missing is the Meta Description or a snippet of text from the page.ReadMore

Original Article from:http://www.seomoz.org and the Author is Lindsay

Google Upgrades Punctuation Search Results

Google has updated its search results for queries involving punctuation marks and symbols. Searching for the symbol equivalent of a period, comma, carat, percent sign and more symbols now will return search results – though they aren't always exactly relevant, Google Operating System reported.

Punctuation marks now generating search results, generally where the Wikipedia page about the symbol ranks as the top link, include:

• . (full stop/period)
• , (comma)
• : (colon) – however, the colon that is a piece of the large intestine currently outranks the punctuation mark of the same name
• ; (semicolon)
• # (number sign)
• % (percent sign)
• @ (at sign)
• ^ (caret)
• ( ) { } [ ] (bracket) – parentheses, brackets and curly brackets are all combined into the same search result
• ~ (tilde)
• | (vertical bar)
• “ (quotation marks)
• < (less-than sign)
• > (greater-than sign)
• $ (dollar sign)

Other symbols and punctuation marks that Google can recognize and will return results for:

• ! (exclamation point)
• ‘ (apostrophe)
• & (ampersand)
• _ (underscore)
• - (minus sign)
• + (plus sign)
• = (equals sign)
• \ (backslash)
• / (slash) – however, guitarist Slash currently outranks the punctuation mark of the forward slash Read More

SOPA, PIPA On Hold, But a New Threat on Horizon

Late last week, announcements came down putting both PIPA and SOPA on hold. Nevada Senator Harry Reid has postponed the Protect I.P. vote, while House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith announced the committee will “postpone consideration of the legislation until there is wider agreement on a solution.”

Meanwhile, Smith is again pushing his Protecting Children from Internet Pornographers Act of 2011; it has been amended, passed the required committees, and was put back on the Union Calendar December 16, 2011. Who wouldn’t want to protect children, you ask? They must be monsters! This is precisely the mentality that may see H.R.1981, known as the Data Retention Bill by protesters, pushed through, as it aims to force all U.S. Internet service providers to retain all customer IP addresses for 18 months.

Don’t count either PIPA or SOPA out for the count. Though this type of backlash is a politician’s worst nightmare in an election year, vested parties are none too pleased the bills didn’t pass and will continue to pressure lawmakers to enact anti-piracy legislation. ReadMore

Tablet Visitors Spent 54% More Than Smartphone Visitors in 2011

People using tablets spent $123 on average per purchase in 2011, 54 percent more than visitors using smartphones, according to an Adobe study.

"Mobile is no longer a one-size-fits-all-strategy. It's like saying you have an Internet strategy. You have to get more granular. Audiences are really different," John Mellor, VP of business development for Adobe's Digital Marketing Business, said in an interview. He recommends that retailers segment their customers to account for the different audiences and their behaviors. ReaMore

World IPv6 Day

World IPv6 Day is an event sponsored and organized by the Internet Society and several large content providers to test public IPv6 deployment.^[1] It started at 00:00 UTC on June 8, 2011 and will end 23:59 the same day.^[2] The main motivation for the event is to evaluate the real world effects of the IPv6 brokenness seen by various synthetic tests. On World IPv6 Day, major web companies and other industry players will come together to enable IPv6 on their main websites for 24 hours.The goal is to motivate organizations across the industry – Internet service providers, hardware makers, operating system vendors and web companies – to prepare their services for IPv6 to ensure a successful transition as IPv4 address space runs out.

For more information :http://www.worldipv6day.org/