SEO Archives - Mike Arnesen

The Lifecycle of an Agency Recommendation

Earlier this week, I was speaking with a potential client and she was telling me about the types of SEO recommendations that she’d been getting from her agency parter over the last few years. As our conversation was wrapping up, I realized that the common thread between all of those recommendations and the reason why she was understandably frustrated was because each recommendation died much too soon.

It was tragic.

I love the sales calls that really make me think and I cherish the ones that cause me to ponder something hours after I hang up. As I kept thinking about this person’s experience, I had a realization that every agency recommendation has a cycle that it needs to go through if it’s to have any impact at all. [Read more…] about The Lifecycle of an Agency Recommendation

Tonight is the Night! Semantic & Social Markup in PDX

SEO

Just wanted to throw up a quick post because I’m super stoked about what’s happening tonight. I’ll be speaking at SEMpdx’s February educational event called “Under the Hood: Advanced Markup for SEO & Social Media“. Semantic SEO and social sharing enhancements are two of my favorite topics, so I’m beyond excited to get to talk about that with people who are also getting worked up about it.

And it gets even better: I’m sharing the stage. I’m tag teaming the topic with none other than the great Will Hattman. Have you heard of Will? Maybe not yet, but you will. As recently as a year ago, I had the pleasure of having Will on my SEO team over at SwellPath and was lucky enough to be able to teach him a few things about SEO. Now he’s moved on to heading up the SEO offering at SEMpdx mainstay Anvil Media.

Tonight really is going to be an amazing reunion for us. We actually haven’t seen each other in person since we were working together. I know it probably won’t happen and I know it sounds cheesy, but I just really hope he opens with this when I see him…

Will: We meet again at last. The circle is now complete. When I left you, I was but the learner. Now I am the Master.
Me: Only a master of evil, William.

So, if you’re in Portland, Oregon tonight and you want to learn everything you need to know about structured data, semantic markup, and social metadata and why it matters, join us! There are still tickets left and you can buy them at the door, too.

See you there!

Tickets

Optimizing Mobile Page Title & Meta Description Length

SEO

Let’s start with the quick answer.

Mobile Page Title Length

58-60 characters max

Mobile Meta Description Length

115 characters max

Mobile Meta Description Length and Page Title Length

Recently, I’ve been focusing more and more on making sure the sites that I work on get super mobile-friendly metadata. Mobile search traffic go to the point this holiday season where I had eCom clients who were getting the majority of their organic search traffic from mobile devices and tablets. That’s freakin’ nuts!
So one of my New Years resolutions is to make sure that the metadata I write jives with the length that mobile search results can handle. #LamestNewYearsResolutionEver

If more than half of a site’s search traffic is coming from mobile search, holy heck, the site better be optimized for mobile! Now, of course there are plenty of other things we need to do for mobile, too, like use a responsive design, have great page speed, yada, yada, yada, but that’s not what this post is about. It is about the small everyday deeds of ordinary SEOs that keep the darkness at bay… small acts of optimization, and mobile search.

Now what we really need

Now what we really need is a new set of meta tags for mobile-specific metadata. We have to optimize metadata for mobile, but we’re much more limited. Google and Bing are telling us to ditch mobile-specific sites (heck, I hate them, too), so what are we to do? Pick one or the other?

Can’t we just get a new standard put in place so that we can specify a standard set of metadata and a mobile set? That would be amazing!

My ulterior motive in writing this post about mobile page title & meta description length

Well, it’s not ulterior any more, since I’m stating it…but I’ve been Googling the ideal length for mobile page titles and meta descriptions pretty often. Trouble is, it always takes me way too long to find a decent post with that information. I always ended up just pulling out my iPhone and literally counting the characters in meta descriptions. So, to save time, I wrote this post so I can have something to Google when I need to get a result for the query, “mobile page title length” or “mobile meta description length”. Shameless? Maybe. Lazy? Definitely. Putting way more work into this that if I had just wrote it down as a note somewhere? Oh, for sure.

What Does the SEO Say?

SEO

Speaking at MozCon was one of the highlights of my career (life?)

Yesterday was my last speaking engagement of the year. Yesterday was my last speaking engagement for some time. I’m not giving up speaking on the SEO conference circuit, but I am taking a break. It’s a break that’s much needed.

Since November 2012, I’ve spoken at 11 industry events (SMX East 2012, SEMpdx, PDX Bloggers, SMX Social 2012, SMX West 2013, SwellPath Presents, Emerald Marketing Association, MozCon 2013, SMX East 2013, SemTech Biz 2013, and State of Search 2013). Speaking at all these awesome events has been an incredible experience and I can say, without qualification, that I’ve been able to improve as a presenter in some way every time I’ve stepped in front of an audience. For me, the fact that I even took that step in front of an audience is huge. [Read more…] about What Does the SEO Say?

Don’t Sit On The Rooster

Off Topic, SEO

If you make typos on Twitter, this is what happens.

@Mike_Arnesen @smx Once and for all: STOP SITTING ON THE ROOSTER HE DOESN'T LIKE IT!!!

— Rebecca Bridge (@rebeccabridge) August 8, 2013

Be careful out there.

This picture may or may not be Photoshopped.

…and that’s how I ended up in the Knowledge Graph for “Rooster” searches

Article Semantic Markup Becomes Meaningful Today!

SEO

excited So, today Google announced that article markup from schema.org is actually going to be used for something! I’m super stoked, but I only have 10 minutes to drop my thoughts on it (I set a timer), so let’s get right into it!

Google made an announcement today that they’d like to enable users to find in-depth articles on broad topics via Google search results. That’s an admirable and awesome goal; not just letting people search by topic, but by a highly-refined type of content about that topic (not just limited to websites, news, blogs, images, videos, etc). In the official post, Google said that in order to make that feature of search a reality, they’ll be leaning on some specific factors, notably… [Read more…] about Article Semantic Markup Becomes Meaningful Today!