Best of Austin

Roster includes new stunt and mo-cap categories from The Austin Chronicle – Daily http://bit.ly/2ESVjUE via Austin Statesman from WordPress http://bit.ly/2VgyRuA

Got a house full of guests this holiday? Here’s how to entertain ’em. from The Austin Chronicle – Daily http://bit.ly/2R9MM6u via Austin Statesman from WordPress http://bit.ly/2EITaMg

Eight dining options to save you from cooking from The Austin Chronicle – Daily https://ift.tt/2POqguZ via Austin Statesman from WordPress https://ift.tt/2UQQUqW

Civic and education leader dies at 84 from The Austin Chronicle – Daily https://ift.tt/2S8jlig via Austin Statesman from WordPress https://ift.tt/2SUUWwK

Watch the latest short from Austin’s Chris McInroy from The Austin Chronicle – Daily https://ift.tt/2LfNcmk via Austin Statesman from WordPress https://ift.tt/2zXKRYY

Here’s a bold statement: “SEO in the travel industry is immensely challenging.” The sheer number of pages to manage, complexities of properties, flights, accommodation, availability, occupancy, destinations, not to mention the crazy amount of APIs and databases to make a travel site function, can all make life tricky for an SEO, particularly when it comes to the development queue… Having said that, there are still common mistakes and missed opportunities out there that have the potential to be really impactful and believe it or not, they don’t actually require a huge amount of resource to put right. So, here’s a list of the six most common travel SEO mistakes to get right for 2019: Forgetting about index bloat There are a LOT of facets and filters when it comes to commercial travel category pages, arguably the most of any industry. Typically with every facet or filter, be it; availability, location, facilities, amenities nearby, occupancy etc. A URL is created with the asso...

The appearance of Google CEO Sundar Pichai in front of Congress yesterday has been eagerly anticipated by those of us following the company’s tumultuous year in the face of criticism from international press, human rights organizations, and its own staff. The hearing – lasting more than three hours – was titled Transparency & Accountability: Examining Google and its Data Collection, Use and Filtering Practices and promised to give Pichai an opportunity to publicly clarify the search giant’s position on consumer rights in regards to privacy in an increasingly data-dependent world – as well as reflecting on its openness as a business in the political context at home and abroad. Overall, the hearing was a bit of a mixed bag. This was less to do with the substance of Pichai’s answers and more to do with the flawed questioning from the assembled. Here are what I took away as good and bad responses from the Google chief, as well as a few of my frustrations. The good Some of Pichai’s...

Adhering to the whims and fancies of Google’s unpredictable nature can be a tasking ordeal for content creators around the world. What once seemed like a harmonious relationship, the bond between consumers and producers of content has become somewhat volatile, asking marketeers to be agile in their approach to content. As click-through rates and organic opportunity steadily drops, what are we required to do with our content to compete in the SERPs? In this post, we’ll reflect on the recent ‘ zero results ’ update, mobile web, featured snippets and Google’s ‘biases’ can inform the next steps for 2019, ensuring a bright content-filled future for all. Staying mobile? Mobile web has been subject to immense change in recent times, and while the stats may prove daunting, the stakes have never been higher for producing valuable content on the platform. In years gone by, Google has appeared to be giving preferential treatment to mobile over desktop. In 2015, the mobile-friendly update o...

Five Austin films in contention for the annual award from The Austin Chronicle – Daily https://ift.tt/2Pxko9C via Austin Statesman from WordPress https://ift.tt/2zSgm6M

SEO moved beyond exact keyword matching long ago. These days, in order to rank, we need to create content that includes related concepts, satisfies intent and provides value. With such an important and complicated task in front of us, there’s never such a thing as too many tools. Every keyword tool below has something new to bring to the table when it comes to helping you understand the topic better, expand your keyword list and diversify your organic rankings: 1. TextOptimizer TextOptimizer  is probably the most interesting tool on the list. For any term you put it, it will look at Google search result page, extract search snippets and apply semantic analysis to generate the list of all related topics, terms and concepts that form your topic cluster. For example, for [grow tomatoes] it will generate the list of the following terms: If you already have a page that you want to rank for that query, the tool will compare your existing text to the snippets Google returns for tha...

It’s a well-known fact that there are over 200 ranking signals used by Google . And every year it keeps on tweaking and refining its algorithm introducing new ranking signals and changing priorities. I know that the idea of having to optimize for all of them will probably make you shiver with horror. The good news is there are not so many ranking signals optimizing for which is simply a must. Please note: in the light of mobile-first indexing , according to which mobile websites are being indexed in the first place, it’s most important that mobile sites are optimized for the below listed ranking signals. So, without further ado, here is the list of the most important ranking factors for you to dominate search in 2019. Relevance I guess it’s more than obvious for any SEOs out there that Google is going nuts about getting into people’s heads and providing them with the most relevant search results. Now that we live in the age of semantic search, Google aims to figure out the meanin...

Austin pickers earn Best Bluegrass Album nod from The Austin Chronicle – Daily https://ift.tt/2PoaWFv via Austin Statesman from WordPress https://ift.tt/2QkAxoa

Event to fund photographer’s book showing the decade in Austin from The Austin Chronicle – Daily https://ift.tt/2G5FvAa via Austin Statesman from WordPress https://ift.tt/2rzgL9H

Canadian kid-friendly sci-fi story playing Other Worlds Austin from The Austin Chronicle – Daily https://ift.tt/2BYgP8K via Austin Statesman from WordPress https://ift.tt/2Qn1GGP

Page speed has been a part of Google’s search ranking algorithms for quite some time , but it’s been entirely focused on desktop searches until recently when Google began using page speed as a ranking factor for mobile searches as well. Have you checked your page speed scores lately? How do your speeds match up against your competition? If your pages are loading slower than competitors, there’s a chance you’re taking a hit in the SERPs . While relevance of a page carries much more weight than page speed , it’s still important to ensure your pages are loading fast for users and search engines. Here are 5 ways to increase page speed and improve SEO results. Compress images Large image files can have a significant negative impact on page speed performance. Images often represent the largest portion of bytes when downloading a page. This is why optimizing images generally returns the biggest improvement in speed performance. Compressing your images using an image compression tool ...

Austin Shakespeare gives a peek at a modern Measure Saturday from The Austin Chronicle – Daily https://ift.tt/2EiHrnl via Austin Statesman from WordPress https://ift.tt/2Uo1zt9

Keeping up to date with what people search for online can be invaluable to your business. Whether you’re looking to inform your latest paid search campaign or just need some fresh, trending content for your blog, these tools can help. However, with over 3.5 billion searches each day worldwide, it’s hard to know how to narrow all that data down to help you improve your SEO. Here are some of the many great tools available to help you discover what people search for: the most popular topics, keywords, and trending stories. Google Trends When asking what people search for, it makes sense to start with the largest, most commonly used search engine in the world – Google. Due to its sheer size, Google has some great stats, trends, and insights to dig your teeth into. Let’s look at Google Trends, for example. This gives you a very quick overview of the searches with the most traffic overall, which is continually updated. You can enter a keyword and see how search volume has varied for th...

In the previous article on 7 Things That Hurt Your SEO Rankings and How to Fix Them , we found how a drop in SEO rankings can be one of the worst things that can happen to a website. A bad SEO entails practices that are outside the boundaries of Google webmaster guidelines and it affects the optimization of your website for search engines. There are many techniques that can hurt your SEO rankings if implemented. Serpstat, in 2017, found about 300 million errors when they indexed 175 million pages with an SEO audit tool. These errors stemmed from not doing SEO the right way and while we have discussed 7 of these errors, here are more things that could hurt your rankings and how you can fix them. 1. Accessibility and indexation The accessibility and indexation of your site contribute greatly to how your website pages can be seen on search engines. Some of the categories to consider include: Canonical Tag: duplicate content makes it difficult for search engines to decide on a page...

This year’s TechSEO Boost, an event dedicated to technical SEO and hosted by Catalyst , took place on November 29 in Boston. Billed as the conference “for developers and advanced SEO specialists,” TechSEO Boost built on the success of the inaugural event in 2017 with a day of enlightening, challenging talks from the sharpest minds in the industry. Some topics permeated the discourse throughout the day and in particular, machine learning was a recurring theme. As is the nature of the TechSEO Boost conference, the sessions aimed to go beyond the hype to define what precisely machine learning means for SEO, both today and in future. The below is a recap of the excellent talk from Britney Muller, Senior SEO Scientist at Moz, entitled (fittingly enough) “Machine Learning for SEOs.” What is machine learning? A quick recap. The session opened with a brief primer on the key terms and concepts that fit under the umbrella of “machine learning.” Muller used the definition in the image bel...