Tag Archives: search engine results

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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Back in November, Google announced they'd be labeling sites as "mobile-friendly" in the search engine results when those sites meet a specific set of criteria. Later, as you're probably aware, Google announced they'd be changing their algorithm to rank sites more highly if they're mobile-friendly. This has many webmasters scrambling to improve their sites' mobile capacity, as the change will begin rolling out in less than a week.

What you may not have noticed, however, is that Bing has been making the same changes at about the same times.

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First came the addition of mobile usability features to webmaster tools. Then it was announced that mobile usability will absolutely become a ranking factor in mobile searches. Then came the announcement that Google's mobile-friendly algorithm will begin it's rollout on April 21.

While it may or may not deserve the term that some have given it - "mobilegeddon" - the fact remains that this adjustment could have an even bigger effect than Google's infamous Panda and Penguin algorithm changes. Now, Google has provided some advice for webmasters trying to prevent the loss of mobile traffic.

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Google users may remember back in 2009 when live tweets started appearing in search results in near-real time. Google described the idea as a way to provide up-to-the-minute data related to users' queries, while also being financially beneficial for both Twitter and themselves.

That agreement lapsed in 2011 due to the two companies disagreeing about how exactly Twitter's data would be used and displayed. The creation of Google+ at that time may also have caused Google to become disinterested in supporting another social network. However, according to Bloomberg, the deal is back on.

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Even if you're not familiar with the term "knowledge graph," you've probably had experience with Google's Knowledge Graph technology. Whenever detailed information about your search pops up directly on the search engine results page, that's the Knowledge Graph at work. For example, a Google search for "Benjamin Franklin" returns birth and death dates, works written, images and much more in a box placed prominently on Google's results page.

Yesterday, a digital marketer noticed that song lyrics are showing up in the SERPs. This is great for users but potentially ruinous for lyrics sites.

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