Tag Archives: industry news

Meta descriptions are one of the most important onpage SEO elements, with webmasters often spending large amounts of time thinking about, researching, and testing different variations to find the most effective description for each page of their site. Together with a page's meta title, the meta description forms a snippet that helps search engines understand and rank a page, while also serving as a "sales pitch" to entice potential visitors.

For years, it's been said that meta descriptions limited to 160 characters are optimal for Google's search results - but it may be time to throw the old playbook out.

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Twitter usage has had its share of ups and downs, but it was hoped that a boost seen earlier this year - thought to have been caused by what is perhaps its most infamous user - would kickstart an upward trend throughout the year. Unfortunately for stockholders and marketers, however, it now looks as though the so-called "Trump bump" has turned out to be a bust.

Last week, it was reported that Twitter lost 2 million monthly users in the U.S. during the second quarter of this year. Could a new subscription-based model for promoting Tweets help keep the network relevant and provide ROI for marketers and advertisers?

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You know that getting referral traffic is just as important, if not more, than organic traffic to your site. Referred visitors often land on your page due to a recommendation (in the form of a link or social share) from a trusted source. This means that these visitors aren't just casually or accidentally arriving at your site - they're already interested or engaged with your content or products.

Traditionally, Facebook has been an excellent resource - dwarfing other social networks in terms of social referral traffic. Now, Facebook has topped Google in referral traffic to media sites overall.

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One of Mark Zuckerberg's goals is to make Facebook's News Feed a "perfect personalized newspaper" for every user. To do this, the News Feed algorithm attempts to show users the updates, birthdays, events and shared stories that it thinks would be most important to them. It follows that news sites have been very successful under this system.

In fact, with so many news sites getting more and more referral traffic from Facebook, the network's influence has never been more powerful. But what will happen when they finally decide to directly host content instead of having publishers post a link? We're about to find out.

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When it comes to business recommendation sites, Yelp is undoubtedly the leader. It currently has around 86,000 local business accounts, and it attracts 135 million monthly visitors. Companies strive for good reviews on the site, as Yelp ratings can have a huge effect on sales.

The Apple Maps app, despite its rocky start, was attracting around 35 million users at the end of 2013. When displaying local search results, the app would only ever show Yelp ratings - until now. This change is important for small businesses, and it comes at a time when Yelp's reputation is taking some hits.

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