SEO, SEM and Internet Marketing- Yes, a lot of it is Bullshit

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Ask/Tell > Business, Finance, and Careers > SEO, SEM and Internet Marketing- Yes, a lot of it is Bullshit

Brut: Aug 21, 2007; Can't post for 23 days!

What is your opinion of Screaming Frog's spider tool? What are some common things it (or a tool like it) would typically pull up that you would find most actionable?

What would be the key things with which differentiate a marketing strategy for a company advertising on-demand services (say, an emergency plumber) vs one promoting something product-based that people may find out about in advance and decide to purchase at their leisure (like a pizza shop or whatever)?

# ¿ Mar 11, 2016 22:54

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# ¿ May 16, 2024 18:39

Brut: Aug 21, 2007; Can't post for 23 days!

Efexeye posted:

I use Screaming Frog nearly daily The most actionable things it will pull up is error/unresponsive pages, and duplicate metadata (titles and descriptions).

Can you speak a bit about the changes that seem to have occurred over the last few years in terms of meta fields importance? I remember meta keywords were super important (over a decade ago) and eventually became completely unused due to their spamming. It seems like the new version is H1-6 tags, should I even worry about having anything at all in terms of meta keywords on my pages? Do I care about maintaining some kind of specific relationship between the meta description of a page and the H1 tag on that page?

I'm having trouble phrasing this as one cohesive question but basically it seems to be pretty hard to find a real best practices guide with all these different tags.

Additionally, it looks like over the past couple of years a system called JSON-LD is being widely adopted for better (compared to some other system that was previously used for this? I'm not too sure) cross-site data management and retrieval, I'm still wrapping my head around all of the things it can do but it seems like the primary use for my purposes would be the LocalBusiness classification ( https://schema.org/LocalBusiness ), I see that google have a tool ( https://developers.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool/ ) that allows me to check my JSON-LD syntax to make sure I didn't mess up in terms of the formatting/brackets etc, however it does not show a preview of any sort in terms of what google will actually do with that data in terms of populating their infoboxes. One of the things we are trying to accomplish is getting google to properly identify our social media pages (gplus, facebook, yelp, etc) as belonging to the domain, so that when that domain shows up in the search results, it will show up with it's review score directly attached to the search result.

Does it seem like my understanding of this is generally correct? Am I missing something? Whatever insight you might have on this whole thing would be fantastic!

Great thread so far btw!

# ¿ Mar 14, 2016 20:43

Brut: Aug 21, 2007; Can't post for 23 days!

Sorry, I was kind of grouping the google local page and yelp page (which have reviews) with other pages such as facebook and G+ when I said social media pages.

What I mean is, if I search for "Plumber Manhattan" I get an organic search result that looks like this:

My initial impression was that this was directly pulling that rating from their reviewable pages, however upon looking closer to write this post I'm realizing that this may be even more manufactured than I thought, it looks like their actual page code just has this:

code:

<div class="local-page-heading page-navbar" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/LocalBusiness">
    <div class="container roto-container">
        <div class="row">
            <div class="col-lg-11 col-md-12 col-sm-11 col-xs-12 center-block roto-container-inner">
                <div class="navbar-wrapper">
                    <div class="gutterless-col col-lg-6 col-md-6 col-sm-7 col-xs-12"
                         itemprop="aggregateRating" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/AggregateRating">

                        <meta itemprop="ratingValue" content="5"/>
                        <meta itemprop="ratingCount" content="50"/>

This seems to be dictating to Google that this page has 50 reviews at an average of 5 stars, as far as I can tell there is no actual verification happening as to the validity of that information. On the actual page there is a clickable link that leads to a general review page (on their site), which LOOKS like it pulls reviews from yelp/angies/google however might not actually be, I'm not quite sure.

Now, the above code is using Microdata from schema.org, but JSON-LD is also a form of schema.org markup, finalized in 2014 and adopted in 2015. For example i http://schema.org/LocalBusiness, scroll down and the code examples are given in various formats, the newest of which (and as far as I can tell, recommended for everyone to switch to) is JSON-LD

As far as I can tell, the intended use of this particular code type is for websites like Yelp to show other review scores just like you mentioned, however what is actually happening is that the website itself is pretending to BE a review site, and is referencing review's of it's own page as if that page was a separate business that they are hosting reviews for. Yikes.

I guess the equivalent JSON-LD would be something like:

code:

<script type="application/ld+json">
{
  "@context": "http://schema.org",
  "@type": "LocalBusiness",
"aggregateRating":{"@type":"AggregateRating","ratingValue":"5","ratingCount":"50"}
}
</script>

Along with all the other stuff that would be in there like the usual business info.

EDIT: second code snippet syntax now actually correct

Brut fucked around with this message at 23:30 on Mar 14, 2016

# ¿ Mar 14, 2016 23:03

Brut: Aug 21, 2007; Can't post for 23 days!

Is <div class="h1">Heading here</div> seen by search engines the same as <h1>Heading here</h1>, or can I use it to maintain h1-looking css while making search engines ignore it?

# ¿ Mar 28, 2016 20:34

Brut: Aug 21, 2007; Can't post for 23 days!

Efexeye posted:

This is where I'd refer you to your programmer

...but I'd also ask what it is you're trying to accomplish, to help me better understand the question.

I'm in a jack of all trades position (coming from an IT background) doing various corrections to wordpress installations originally created by outsourced offshore "web developers", one of their habits was to use H1 and H2 tags in their custom themes rather than individual pages, thus basically making entire websites essentially have duplicate content. I'd like to go through and simply remove the tags from the themes but doing so breaks some visual styling. I'd like to change instances of <h1>thing</h1> to <div class="h1">thing</div> so that the visual style stays the same but those parts are not treated as duplicate content by search engines.

Eventually someone will go through all of the pages affected by these themes and put in proper h1/2/etc tags based on the actual page content, but that's someone else's job and there's a lot of pages.

# ¿ Mar 28, 2016 21:48

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