16 May 2013

Great post by Jill Whalen of Search Engine Marketing

16 May 2013

Every site has tons of traffic from keyword phrases where they don’t appear to rank highly in Google. This is why I cannot stress enough how futile it is to use rankings as a measure of success. Yet it seems that no matter how many articles I write saying this (most all of them!) or how many times I tell companies that it’s a futile exercise, many people just can’t be convinced of this. (And many SEO companies are the worst culprits.)

You have to remember that every single person (or browser) has their own browsing history that gets recorded by Google. In fact, if you do one search in Google and then do another, Google often mashes them together to try to get a better feel for exactly what you’re looking for. You can imagine that no two people do the same two searches in a row, which can make everyone’s search results somewhat different. There are probably hundreds of different factors that go into anyone’s personalized search results. Even something (or all the things) that one person searched upon last week might factor into the search results they see this week.

You don’t need to see rankings to test the effectiveness of your titles. It doesn’t matter whether you see the same results as someone else or not. Like most ways of measuring your website’s effectiveness, you have everything you need within your web analytics program.

I covered measuring your success through Google Analytics recently, so I won’t go into it again, but basically, you’d look to see if your organic search traffic for specific landing pages and keywords has gone up or down after a title tag change (or any change). Just be sure you’ve waited a sufficient amount of time and have a good amount of data before you make any determinations.

As to your question about your slide show images and captions, it depends on how it’s set-up and what you mean by a caption. Some captions are words on the page and would certainly be seen by Google and the other search engines. Others might be alt attribute descriptive text (alt tags), which are seen only when you mouse over the image (and only in certain browsers).

While Google does see and index the information in alt tags, if the image isn’t a clickable one, Google may or may not weigh it the same as they would weigh text on the page. To see if Google even sees the captions of the images beyond the first one for your page, view the page via Google’s “text cache.” This will usually show you what Google can see and what they can’t. To do this, replace example.com/sample-page with your own URL using this link:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.example.com/sample-page&hl=en&prmd=imvns&strip=1
That should show you what Google sees on the page. Look for the words that are contained within your captions and see if they’re visible or not. If they’re not, then you probably want to change the way you display your images, assuming that you feel it’s important for the caption words to be indexed.
Also, if your captions are created using alt tag descriptions, the fact that they’re not clearly visible on the page doesn’t mean that you can or should stuff them full of keywords. They need to describe the image and/or the page that the image points to, in the case of navigational images.
Hope this helps!
Best,
Jill Whalen