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Will Hattman

You Can Now Take Up Less Space in the SERPs If That’s What You Want

October 22, 2019 by Will Hattman Leave a Comment

On September 24, Google announced the imminent rollout of new preview markup — namely one new HTML tag and three new meta robots attributes — that promised site owners stricter control over the preview snippets that represent their pages in search results. By “preview snippets”, they mean the descriptive paragraphs in each search result that show below the page’s title and URL. You know, these:

This one did actually come from our meta description, but don't be fooled into thinking that's how it always goes.

If you’re in SEO, the phrase “meta description” began knocking around in your head after reading that sentence; isn’t that what they’re talking about? Why don’t they just say that? [Read more…] about You Can Now Take Up Less Space in the SERPs If That’s What You Want

Filed Under: SEO

How to Prepare Your GTM Container for a Site Redesign

July 3, 2019 by Will Hattman Leave a Comment

If you’re like me, you long ago committed to using Google Tag Manager as your one and only platform for configuring your site’s event tracking (and — though it perhaps isn’t the optimal way to go about it — maybe your structured data markup too). To set this up in GTM, you had to create Custom JavaScript variables that used CSS or jQuery selectors to identify the correct elements on the page, and then create tags that arranged those variables into scripts that would pass data to Google Analytics, and/or to Google Search, in a comprehensible format. Those CSS or jQuery selectors were precisely tuned to the unique HTML of the pages where the tags needed to fire, relying on the signature attributes —like id or class — of the key elements in order to identify them. You might have had to go through a frustrating trial and error process to configure some of those variables so that they would populate correctly every time, on every page, but you got there.

And now you hear that the site is going to be redesigned from top to bottom, and the HTML signatures you relied on are all going to vanish or change. PANIC!

[Read more…] about How to Prepare Your GTM Container for a Site Redesign

Filed Under: Analytics

Solving the Google Tag Manager 404 Error Message

April 23, 2019 by Will Hattman 22 Comments

Google Tag Manager is top of the heap and still growing in popularity as a tag management solution, and there’s no reason why it shouldn’t be, given its ease of use, clean interface, and shall we say tempting retail price of $0.00. Despite the reservations I always feel when I find myself becoming dependent on a new Google product, I’ve quite liked the experience of using it, and one of the great strengths of that experience is how marvelously not buggy the platform is. Google Analytics, by contrast, has probably thwarted me with 20 or more crazy inexplicable bugs in my seven years’ experience using it (their issue tracker lists the total number of issues tracked as “many”), but GTM hasn’t even let one come to the surface that I’ve been aware of, and I’m not exactly new to GTM either at this point. The other day, however, our fearless leader brought to my attention something that sort of qualifies as a bug, and given that 1) lots of people are finding it frustrating, 2) I completely understand why, and 3) the fix is dead simple but also completely counterintuitive, I thought it would be worth taking a few minutes to outline a solution.

I’m talking about the error message that shows in the Chrome console or in Google Tag Assistant when you’ve placed code for a new container on a site, but have yet to publish the container. In the console, it reads: “Failed to load resource: the server responded with a status of 404”, and it looks like this:

[Read more…] about Solving the Google Tag Manager 404 Error Message

Filed Under: Analytics

UpBuild’s SEO Audit: Where Is It Now?

March 19, 2019 by Will Hattman 6 Comments

There comes a time in every SEO agency’s life when it has to reexamine its audit template, to give the audit an audit, if you will. That time ideally comes every 18 months or so, though some agencies go years upon years without updating their audit templates, owing to institutional stagnation or simply to the fast pace of work typical of SEO. In UpBuild’s case, it wasn’t quite that long a wait, but it was a bit longer than 18 months, and boyyyyyy are we glad we set aside time to do it when we did.

[Read more…] about UpBuild’s SEO Audit: Where Is It Now?

Filed Under: SEO

Working from Nowhere Near Home

November 14, 2018 by Will Hattman 1 Comment

I spent the entire month of August in Iceland, and I think some of my clients didn’t even know it. If that’s not the ultimate testament to the practicality of remote work, it’s got to be pretty dang close.

A hill we pulled over to hike on the road to Vík.

Reason #1 I was able to do this was because my incredible wife Alissa was accepted to an artists’ residency program in Iceland, and this particular program allows spouses to tag along. Reason #2 is because my incredible job makes it possible for me to work from Iceland. So please count me a lucky guy for the record, and I guess the story can proceed from there.

[Read more…] about Working from Nowhere Near Home

Filed Under: Culture

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