Archive for August 15, 2012

How Optimizing My Ugly Google+ Pic Increased Free Traffic 35%

Posted by Cyrus Shepard

The following topic was presented at MozCon 2012.

Over the years, SEOs have employed many techniques to control how their site appears in search results. These included:

  • Writing compelling Title Tags 65-75 characters long
  • Descriptive Meta Descriptions
  • Use of NOODP and NOYDIR meta tags
  • Keyword rich URLs

By controlling how our snippets appear in search results, we could greatly improve our click-through rates and the amount of free traffic we saw.

But times are changing. For better or worse, Google has now stepped up its title tag rewriting algorithm so that webmasters can no longer predict how their title tags will display. This major bummer that is only compensated by the fact that Google has given us something much better in the form of rich snippets.

In particular, Google+ gave us author profile photos.

Huge Unfair Advantage

This was a huge win. Or so we thought.

After seeing other authors earn the coveted profile pic in Google's search results, I worked for months trying to get my photo to show up. After navigating Google's often confusing markup instructions, my photo finally appeared in search results.

Imagine my disappointment when my traffic stayed flat. I wasn't alone. … Read the rest

August 15, 2012  Tags: , , , , ,   Posted in: SEO / Traffic / Marketing  No Comments



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