Core Principles of SEO for JavaScript

The shift to JavaScript crawling is one of the more significant changes in technical SEO in the last few years, but the conversation around it historically has been limited. When it is explored in-depth, it’s typically platform-specific or jargon-heavy. Many SEOs have a lot of confusion when managing requests from developers about JavaScript. However, the days …

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How Do Users Interact with Predictive (Queryless) Search?

The growth of mobile and the prevalence of personalization data has empowered the growth of proactive search systems, which push out information in a predictive fashion. While reactive search (user enters a query) remains the dominant aspect of search, platforms like Google Now and Microsoft Cortana are increasing the sophistication and frequency in which users interact with …

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How to Use Internal Search for SEO

Internal search data provides useful insights on how your customers search. Basically, your customers are giving you free keyword research.

1. Information Architecture

Look at how your customers are searching and compare that to the information architecture. Does your category system match how customers search?

2. Indexable Search Pages

Don’t limit your landing pages to your defined category pages. Create indexable search pages. You’ve probably heard Google doesn’t like to index search pages, but they do.

Really, the difference between a category page and a search page is design and content. You can fix this. This means design, a heading, maybe get rid of some of those facets. That’s all you really have to do.

We’re just making it look more curated than automated. This also means adding a title and meta description that make sense. And if a search page returns only a few results, make sure to go ahead and noindex it. This will help you avoid Panda and duplicate content problems.

3. Related Search on Search & Category Pages

It can also power related search, think “people who searched for this also search for that.” There are a lot of ways to do this, so just pick one that works. Now you have an internal search driven linking system that will expose these indexable search pages.

4. Related Search on Product Pages

Don’t limit this to your category and search pages. Think “people who found this product also searched for this.” Practically, it’s a search-driven tagging system.

5. International Keyword Research

Do this for international sites. Internal search is basically keyword research in its targeted language. This is invaluable for sites that don’t have resources to translate content for all their international domains.

6. Trending Searches

Make sure you’re using search deltas. Top search terms are great, but trending is better. This modifies your internal linking structure based on seasonality and events. By doing this, you can drive internal link value to pages while their demand is the highest.

7. Search Pages in XML Sitemaps

Include your dynamic search pages in your XML sitemap. Concatenate your top search terms into your URL pattern for your new indexable landing pages. I highly recommend filtering this list by adult terms, search volume, and grammar.

Now just submit them to Google. Depending on your domain authority, you can get a significant number of pages indexed this way.

So if you’re currently not using your internal search data, find a way to get your hands on it.

 

How to Optimize Your Android App for Google Play

Optimizing your Android app for the Google Play Store is a little different than optimizing for the Apple App Store. Google Play doesn’t have a keyword field like Apple does, so you’ll need to work keywords in your description (about five times each) to maximize visibility and downloads. Titles need to be much shorter, too. Check out the guide and learn more below.

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How to Optimize Your App for the App Store

Once you create a great app, you need to make sure people can easily find it in the App Store. (If you’re looking for Android help, check out our Google Play guide.) Optimizing your app listing can help you improve your rankings and visibility, getting you more downloads and more revenue. Here are some best practices for creating your Apple App Store listing.

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How do users interact with SERPs on mobile devices?

As search becomes increasingly mobile, getting closer to being the majority of search visits every month, how we think about user engagement on search results needs to be updated from the old desktop paradigms of the Golden Triangle (which suggest attention sticks to the upper left and decays down and to the right). Mobile search use …

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Talking Back To Conversational Search

Search is becoming increasingly conversational in nature, and the growth of mobile in search is only perpetuating this trend (and the technology that powers it). This shift in search is fundamentally changing how content is discovered, crawled, indexed, understood, and ranked. To understand where SEO is going next, it’s important to understand some of the …

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