SEO

Well, it happened again: Google went and made new rules, and gave us a startling reminder of how deeply we had dug in on the old ones. On some level, we SEOs go to bed every night believing that the game will be the same tomorrow as it was today, even as we constantly attend and deliver talks about how much it has changed over the years. I don’t know where that disconnect comes from, but it’s probably just an impulse to protect our sanity; if we really took time at the end of each day to reflect on how many times the very definition of our job and our industry has changed since we first got started, who knows how many more tomorrows we could bring ourselves to face.

Featured snippets first arrived in 2014 and sent shockwaves through the content strategy world immediately. The fact that Google had created a special class of search results page that offered an organic position superior to #1, and that access to that position could be (in theory, anyway) attained on content alone, shook up a lot of our old talking points.

[Read more…] about The Great Featured Snippet Shake-Em-Up

Webmasters are taking web accessibility (websites, tools, and technologies designed and developed so that people with disabilities can use them) more seriously, especially since usability has become critically relevant to SEO — browser behavior signals associated with user engagement have become ranking factors. At UpBuild, accessibility has become a priority, which has become reflected in our SEO audits; we now have an entire section of our SEO Audit devoted to this important topic. 

However, making a website accessible is not just for ranking signals. It’s important to make content accessible to a wider range of people, including those with disabilities. People with blindness, low vision, deafness and hearing loss, learning disabilities, cognitive limitations, limited movement, speech disabilities, photosensitivity, etc., all deserve equal access to the web, and focusing on accessibility in design helps make the web a more equal space for everyone. 

[Read more…] about The Importance of Video Accessibility

Over the years, we’ve worked with clients to overcome challenges they’ve had in righting the SEO ship across their international site iterations. When these clients come to us, they’ve often invested time and energy in the past to get international SEO tasks implemented, but have seen initiatives quickly fall to the wayside due to time zone differences, differing priorities, and ambiguous next steps and never saw international SEO successfully taken over the finish line.

This is where we’re so happy to come in. Because international offices are basically remote cohorts, working with them is our jam at UpBuild. We fully understand what it’s like when you’re communicating with people who aren’t simply sitting in the cubicle next to you.

[Read more…] about International SEO Implementation Tips for International Teams

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:

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