Monday, 13 July

On Monday, Distilled gave the public access an open-source tool for checking rel-alternate-hreflang annotations. The head of R&D at the company, Tom Anthony released this article which teaches us how to access and use it, but first begins by presenting a checklist of 5 common mistakes that you’ll need to look out for when looking at rel-alternate-hreflang annotations.

Once this is done, Anthony deems us ready to meet Polly (the hreflang checker library) and their free tool, hreflang.ninja. The post takes us through the details of using it and just what it can do for you.

Tuesday, 14 July

Search Engine land published an article on the 14th which provides 5 tips for taking advantage of the ‘year of mobile’ and improving your mobile efforts for better paid search performance.

The article, written by Benjamin Vigneron, takes us through the best ways to up our mobile SEM game – something he thinks is not getting as much attention as it should. Read it here to see if you’re making the grade.

Wednesday, 15 July

On Wednesday Google  announced that its ‘buy button’ is finally here – only, it’s not a button. The new feature, called ‘Purchases on Google’ aims to make buying easier for those browsing on mobile devices and will do so by displaying ‘buy on Google’ messaging on product listing ads.

The desired outcome is that customers will choose Google for faster, easier purchasing on mobile and that those who advertise through mobile ads on Google will see improvement in their conversion rates (and ultimately spend more on it).

The announcement of this feature has been eagerly anticipated for over a year now, however the official rollout will only begin once this initial trial stage is over. At present, Google is testing the feature  on a handful of selected retailers.

Marketing land has more details here.

Thursday, 16 July

Google wants to improve its organic search rankings. Yes – apparently even search engines want to rank higher on search engines – and they’re hiring a new SEO manager to make that happen.

According to their official post:

As a Program Manager for Technical SEO, you will work with cross-functional teams across Marketing, Sales, Product Development, Engineering and more to help drive organic traffic and business growth. You will take part in website development and optimization, help shape blog and social strategy, improve website code hygiene and define web architecture for international websites.

Apparently, experience in link building is not required.

So, SEOs – if you’ve ever wished Google had more empathy for those in the trade, perhaps now they will. Have a look at this SEL article for more details.

Friday, 17 July

WordPress is a vast and powerful platform: something which you no doubt already know if you use it. As with any major hosting platform, it can take a bit of time to get used to, but it’s worth taking a moment to make sure you’re utilizing its many features and using it as effectively as possible.

In answer to this, Search Engine Journal released a guide by Stoney G deGeyter on Friday, which covers the all basics of WordPress, with particular focus on how to optimize your WordPress site for search, how to optimize it for visitors and other general WordPress housekeeping issues.

If you’ve built your website using WordPress, this 101 guide is well worth a look. Give it read here.

Tags: hreflang, SEO