ATM provider had 'no choice' over introducing £1.99 cash withdrawal charges at Southern Rail stations

Cash machines are no longer free to use at all Southern Rail operated stations

from Surrey Live - News https://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/atm-provider-no-choice-over-15353236

Guildford's Star Inn manager 'shocked and dismayed' by order to keep the noise down

Georgina Baker said: "At what point does someone stand up and say no, we can't keep prioritising developers over the economy and culture of the town?"

from Surrey Live - News https://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/guildfords-star-inn-manager-shocked-15353501

Locked up in Surrey: The criminals put behind bars in October

Here's a breakdown of all the people who were jailed in Surrey in October to support the work of the law and courts

from Surrey Live - News https://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/locked-up-surrey-criminals-put-15353276

What is a snippet?

The snippet is a single search result in a set of search results and generally consists of a title, a URL and a description of the page. The content of a snippet matches parts of the search query and you’ll see your keyword highlighted in the snippet description. Search engines often use pieces of your content to fill in the parts that make up the snippet. In most cases, search engines determine the best possible snippet for you, but you can try to override that by adding a meta description to your page. In this post, we’ll dive deeper into what is a snippet.

A snippet as found on a search result page

The snippet is one of your most valuable pieces of online real estate. This is the doorway to your site, and you should make it as enticing as possible. You need people to click your link — without misleading them, of course. While search engines have the last say in how these snippets appear, you can give them options. If they deem these worthy, they’ll use it. Even Googles John Mueller says you should fill out your meta description:

I'd generally recommend specifying one, you know your content best.

— John (@JohnMu) October 29, 2018

Regular snippets, rich snippets, and featured snippets

The snippet in the screenshot you saw at the beginning of this article is a regular, static snippet but there are many variations to be found. Search engines love to experiment with different ways of highlighting particular results within the search results pages.

For some time now, we’ve seen rich results appear in different forms. Rich snippets are regular snippets with added information, like product details, availability, reviews and a lot more. Here’s a rich snippet for the search term [Fender Standard Precision Bass sunburst]. You’ll notice that this snippet is much ‘richer’ so to say. It has ratings, review, pricing, stock availability and some product highlights. This is a specific product rich snippets, but there are similar snippets for recipes, reviews, videos, events, courses and much more. Adding structured data is a necessity for some types of these rich results.

A rich snippet found while searching for [Fender Standard Precision Bass sunburst]

Another type of snippet is the featured snippet. This is a new kind of result that appears at the top of the search results pages, even before the first organic search result — at position 0 so to say. The content for these featured snippets comes from pages that best answer that specific question in its content. You can’t sign up for this — you have to earn it with your content. Here’s one of our featured snippets, this one for the search term [what is a meta description]. This feature snippet takes the full answer to that question from our article and puts it right at the top of the page.

A featured snippet for the search term [what is a meta description]

SEO title and meta description

Earlier, I pointed out that search engines sometimes prefer to pick their own text from a website to use in the snippets. While they are pretty apt at making up something nice, in a lot of cases you’d probably want to control how your page appears in search. One of the ways you can influence this is by adding a meta description to your page. This is a short piece of text describing your content in a way that makes it attractive for both searchers as well as search engines. You can also edit the SEO title of your article if you want to override the standard way search engines show your page title. Yoast SEO helps you do all this.

Snippet preview in Yoast SEO

Enter the snippet preview in Yoast SEO:

The snippet preview gives you an idea of how your post will appear in the search results

The snippet preview in Yoast SEO gives you a good idea of how your post or page might look like in search engines. Also, you can edit the SEO title if you want it to be something else then your regular page title. If you want you can use variables, so you can automate stuff. You’ll also find the meta description field in which you can add the text you want to suggest to search engines to use. Learn how to make your site stand out in search results and how to write an awesome meta description.

Now you know all about the snippet

A snippet is a deceptively simple thing: a single search result. However, it has great power. A good snippet will help you get those clicks. You don’t just want to appear at the top of the search results, no, you want those clicks! And to get people to click, you need a brilliant snippet.

The post What is a snippet? appeared first on Yoast.

from Yoast • SEO for everyone https://yoast.com/what-is-a-snippet/

South Western Railway strike threatens Twickenham travel for England rugby international

Rugby fans are advised to allow more time than usual to get to Twickenham on Saturday (November 3)

from Surrey Live - News https://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/south-western-railway-twickenham-strike-15354848

South Western Railway strike threatens Twickenham travel for England rugby international

Rugby fans are advised to allow more time than usual to get to Twickenham on Saturday (November 3)

from Surrey Live - News https://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/south-western-railway-strike-threatens-15354848

Egham man, 23, arrested following Feltham train station rush-hour incident

British Transport Police and Metropolitan Police officers boarded the train and removed the man

from Surrey Live - News https://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/feltham-station-arrest-weapon-wednesday-15354365

Number of hoax fire calls in Surrey surges to more than 100

There were 5,185 false fire alarms that were not malicious too

from Surrey Live - News https://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/number-hoax-fire-calls-surrey-15351966

Aldershot and Farnborough tip visitors will need permit to avoid £5 charge

The charge will be introduced to help tackle the cost of non-Hampshire residents dumping their waste

from Surrey Live - News https://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/hampshire-news/aldershot-farnborough-tip-visitors-need-15352386

Budget 2018: Surrey could get £8m for potholes but council warns it still needs to make cuts

The local authority said it would not alter the fact it still needs to save more than £200 million by 2021

from Surrey Live - News https://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/uk-world-news/budget-2018-surrey-could-8m-15353021

Surrey County Council to spend £20 million converting 89,000 street light bulbs

It says the move will save money and reduce energy consumption

from Surrey Live - News https://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/surrey-county-council-spend-20-15352990

'Beyond the normal type of mindless damage': Cars targeted by '20 youths' near Shepperton fishing lake

All of the windows and wing mirrors were smashed and tyres damaged

from Surrey Live - News https://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/beyond-normal-type-mindless-damage-15351428

'Four or five' wheelie bins set alight in mystery overnight Leatherhead spree

Leatherhead fire station attended the scene

from Surrey Live - News https://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/four-five-wheelie-bins-set-15352277

HMP Bronzefield prisoner repeatedly 'self-harmed' before death, inquest hears

Kirsty Walker died in hospital two days after she was found unresponsive in her cell

from Surrey Live - News https://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/hmp-bronzefield-prisoner-repeatedly-self-15347684

Marks and Spencer recruiting for Christmas with 135 temp jobs in Guildford, Camberley and Haslemere

Looking to earn a bit of extra cash over the Christmas holidays?

from Surrey Live - News https://www.getsurrey.co.uk/whats-on/whats-on-news/marks-spencer-recruiting-christmas-135-15344431

Driving in a bus lane anywhere in Surrey could soon land you a £60 fine

A pilot scheme using camera enforcement in Woking is to be rolled out across Surrey

from Surrey Live - News https://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/driving-bus-lane-anywhere-surrey-15352131

Man arrested following fatal crash in Horley

A 19-year-old man died when a van hit a tree in Outwood

from Surrey Live - News https://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/man-arrested-following-fatal-crash-15351964

Firefighters using reusable plastic water bottles saves Surrey County Council £3k

Surrey Fire and Rescue saved an annual waste of 29,515 plastic bottles this financial year

from Surrey Live - News https://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/firefighters-ditching-plastic-water-bottles-15351590

Surrey County Council to consider relocating its HQ

Five larger hubs could be set up in towns, with 20 smaller satellite hubs with at least one in every district and borough

from Surrey Live - News https://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/surrey-county-council-relocate-headquarters-15351499

'Suspicious' fight between man and woman in Burpham prompts police appeal

"Did you see something that didn’t look quite right?" police are asking

from Surrey Live - News https://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/suspicious-fight-between-man-woman-15351366

Pumpkins carved in tribute to teenager killed in Epsom motorbike crash

Sonny Thomerson died after his motorbike hit a lamppost in Christ Church Road

from Surrey Live - News https://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/pumpkins-carved-tribute-teenager-killed-15350419

Dorking county councillors react to 'unacceptable' and 'outrageous' proposals that could see recycling centre closed

Surrey County Councillors Stephen Cooksey and Hazel Watson have spoken out about Tuesday's (October 30) announcement

from Surrey Live - News https://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/dorking-county-councillors-react-unacceptable-15350802

New 420-pupil primary school at Westvale Park in Horley moves closer

The school is expected to open for its first Reception and nursery children in 2020

from Surrey Live - News https://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/new-420-pupil-primary-school-15344752

Designs released as flats at Redhill's former Odeon and Liquid Envy site go on show

Crest Nicholson is promoting the one and two-bedroom apartments in conjunction with Rainier

from Surrey Live - News https://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/designs-released-flats-redhills-former-15348056

Meet 91-year-old Kevin Court, the 'UK's oldest tennis player' who still plays twice a week

The aptly-named Mr Court celebrated his birthday last week with a two set match

from Surrey Live - News https://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/meet-91-year-old-kevin-15324426

Rural parking charges needed 'to protect countryside', claims senior councillor

More than 3,500 people have signed Surrey Live 's petition calling for the parking charges to be scrapped

from Surrey Live - News https://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/rural-parking-charges-needed-to-15349669

Why you should use a focus keyphrase only once

Your focus keyphrase is the keyword you want your post or page to rank for. If you’re particularly eager to rank for a specific keyword, you’ll probably be tempted to optimize many articles on your site for that keyphrase. But, that’s not what a focus keyphrase is for! You should only ever use a focus keyphrase once. But why? And what do you do if you desperately want to rank for that one particular keyphrase? Don’t despair: I’ll tell you all about it in this post.

If you want to optimize your posts for synonyms and related keyphrases, use Yoast SEO Premium! You can add multiple keyphrases, so you can optimize your articles for different terms.

Don’t compete with your own articles

The main reason why you shouldn’t use your focus keyphrase more than once is that you don’t want to compete with yourself for a position in Google. If you optimize two different articles for the same focus keyphrase, you’re telling Google that both are suitable for people searching for that keyword, and you want both of them to appear in the search results. While that’s not necessarily impossible to do, you’ll find it very hard.

You need to have a site with quite a lot of authority to rank two articles in the top ten search results for the same query. If one of your articles already ranks with that term in the search results, you may have enough authority to try and rank with a second one. If you’re not already ranking for a focus keyword, never use it twice! Update and improve your original article and write another post that covers a slight variation of the keyword.

Ranking for your desired keyphrase

What do you do if you want to rank for that particular keyphrase you’ve set your heart on? Imagine you’re starting an online store for horse feed. You probably want to rank for [horse feed], but as you’re just starting, that’ll be pretty hard. Optimizing all of your posts for [horse feed] is not the right strategy. So what should you do? Your keyword research will give you some ideas about which other terms to target.

Content for your blog

If you have a blog – which we’d advise! – you could write an awesome, long cornerstone article about all different aspects of feeding your horse well and optimize it for the term [feeding your horse] using our Yoast SEO plugin. Then mark this article as cornerstone content in our plugin.

This is where you’ll enter your focus keyphrase and where you can mark an article as cornerstone content in Yoast SEO

You’ll need to write a lot of posts, each covering a different aspect of your ‘head’ term. For instance, you could write articles and optimize them for focus keyphrases like [best type of hay for your horse], [pasture management], [feeding thin horses], [feeding sport horses] and so on. These focus keywords are called long tail keywords. If you link from these long tail articles to your ‘head term’ article, you’ll be telling Google which of your articles is the most important, and that’ll help with the ranking of your most valuable article. At the same time, you’ll also be attracting traffic for those long tail articles.

Content for your store

So, what if you have lots of product pages for a type of horse feed? Let’s say you have a big assortment: feeds for thin horses, feeds for fat horses, feeds for sport horses etc. Should you optimize all your product pages with feeds for thin horses for [feeds for thin horses]? In this case, it makes more sense to optimize your category page for this term instead of all those individual product pages!

Should I use a focus keyphrase more than once?

Ranking for a focus keyphrase is possible if you write an awesome cornerstone article about that particular focus keyphrase. And, don’t forget you’ll need a kickass site structure around it to make sure that article will start ranking! But, unless you’re a high authority site and already ranking well for a particular keyphrase, you should NEVER use a focus keyphrase more than once.

Read more: The ultimate guide to content SEO »

The post Why you should use a focus keyphrase only once appeared first on Yoast.

from Yoast • SEO for everyone https://yoast.com/use-focus-keyword-once/

Leatherhead traders call on council to splash some cash on north of the town

The joint managers of B@titude have asked for just 1% of the Transform Leatherhead budget to be spent in the area around Kingston Road

from Surrey Live - News https://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/leatherhead-traders-call-council-splash-15349741

Guildford Local Plan hearings to re-open after council calls to cut housing target by 10%

Cllr Paul Spooner added that the council would not adopt the plan if it included the modifications proposed in August 2018

from Surrey Live - News https://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/guildford-local-plan-hearings-re-15348746

Body of man found in woodland near River Thames in Sunbury

"Enquiries are under way to establish the circumstances of the man’s death," police said

from Surrey Live - News https://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/body-man-found-woodland-near-15350143

Ash dieback: Surrey Wildlife Trust to chop down 'thousands' of diseased trees

The trust said it had 'no choice' because of fears the trees may fall on top of people

from Surrey Live - News https://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/ash-dieback-surrey-wildlife-trust-15329567

Police involved after two mums fight each other at Bocketts Farm play area in Leatherhead

One of the women underwent surgery for a torn ligament in her thumb as a result

from Surrey Live - News https://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/two-mums-police-fight-sons-15349430

Chris Grayling given nearly £1,000 worth of free Manchester United tickets

The Manchester United fan even bagged himself a pair of tickets to watch this year's FA Cup semi-final at Wembley

from Surrey Live - News https://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/grayling-free-manchester-united-tickets-15331762

Police recover moped stolen from Epsom Hospital but are still looking for driver and passenger

The moped was stolen from Epsom Hospital in September but was found in Chertsey on Sunday (October 28)

from Surrey Live - News https://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/police-recover-moped-stolen-epsom-15344972

Priory mental health nurse struck off for failing to safely provide medicine to patients

Ann Marie Devono Parker, who has since retired, described the incident as 'trivial'

from Surrey Live - News https://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/priory-mental-health-nurse-struck-15335442

Balaclava-clad man armed with axe threatens staff and steals cash from Coral bookmakers

Surrey Police is appealing for witnesses following the raid in Horley

from Surrey Live - News https://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/balaclava-clad-man-armed-axe-15348058

Elstead man jailed for throwing acid over neighbour's face during wifi row

Douglas Ryalls became embroiled in an heated argument with his long-term neighbour after he was cut off from accessing his internet

from Surrey Live - News https://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/elstead-man-jailed-throwing-acid-15345607

Horley crash victim named locally as tributes pour in from friends and the community

Friends have described a "real iconic village character" who will be missed by everyone who knew him

from Surrey Live - News https://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/horley-crash-victim-named-locally-15345743

All the cuts Surrey County Council is proposing as it launches consultation on services

The county council is launching five consultations, including proposals to close 31 children's centres

from Surrey Live - News https://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/cuts-surrey-county-council-proposing-15345234

Fewer children in Hampshire are having rotten teeth removed than ever before

Young children in Hampshire are far less likely to need rotten teeth taken out as children in other parts of the country.

from Surrey Live - News https://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/hampshire-news/fewer-children-hampshire-having-rotten-15341548

Chelsea FC Stadium Tour - what to expect and how to book tickets

A first timer's guide to visiting Stamford Bridge, home of Chelsea Football Club - and what you can really expect on the 60 minute tour

from Surrey Live - News https://www.getsurrey.co.uk/whats-on/family-kids-news/chelsea-fc-stadium-tour-what-15341648

Midwife at East Surrey Hospital didn't give woman adequate anaesthetic when she was being stitched

Evangelia Kalampoki made 31 serious errors between June 2015 and June 2016 before resigning

from Surrey Live - News https://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/midwife-east-surrey-hospital-didnt-15342299

Coming soon: brand-new Site structure training!

We’ve got good news for you! Coming November 1st, we’ll release a completely renewed and improved Site structure training. Are you struggling to make your most important pages rank? Are your new articles not showing up properly in the search results? Or do you want to maintain control over your content on your growing website? Then this training is for you. Curious as to why we renewed the training? And to what you’ll learn in this course? Read on!

Why is site structure important?

A solid site structure is crucial for SEO. First of all, it benefits your users: if your site is easy to navigate, visitors will know their way around your website and easily find what they are looking for. In addition, more visitors will end up on the pages you want them to reach, like sales pages. As a result, a good site structure will benefit your SEO. Search engines use so-called user signals to find out how visitors experience your website. If they spend a lot of time on your site and return often, they probably enjoy your site and find it useful. Google uses this information to rank your site higher!

Site structure is also important because search engines need links to find your content and put it in their index, so people can find your site. If you don’t have a clear site structure, chances are that Google can’t find your page, and this means people won’t see your page in the search results! Moreover, by setting up a good linking structure, you can show search engines which of your pages are most important. It helps them understand which pages should rank for important keywords.

Read more: What is the importance of site structure »

In short, you really need a solid site structure, so people and Google understand what they can find on your site. Still, most people seem to forget about their site structure. And unfortunately, this isn’t something a plugin can solve. You need to do this yourself. So, if you want to get ahead of your competition, this Site structure training is your chance!

Why did we create a new course?

Currently, we are in the process of revising our Academy training courses. Site structure has changed a lot over the years, as has our understanding of it. Context in text, and the context of links, has become increasingly important over the last couple of years. We thought the way we ourselves, and other SEO outlets, were approaching site structure left something to be desired. So we decided to completely redefine the concept of site structure in this training.

What’s different in the new course?

In this renewed course, we tackle site structure based on two types of internal linking: organizing and classifying links, and contextual links. On the one hand, you use links in menus, breadcrumbs, and taxonomies to organize your website and make it easy to navigate. On the other hand, you use links within your content to facilitate another way of navigating your site. We also discuss different types of websites, like blogs, online shops, and company website. So, after this training, you’ll know exactly what you should do to improve the structure of your website!

What will I learn?

In this course, we’ll teach you how to organize every aspect of your site, including your homepage, categories, and your site-wide navigation. In addition, you’ll learn how to guide your visitors and Google through your site. We’ll teach you how to choose your most important pages and let Google know which pages you want to pop up highest in the search results. Moreover, you’ll learn how to go about crafting good landing pages for both blogs and eCommerce sites, so people find the pages you want them to find! And last but certainly not least, we’ll teach you how to maintain your site structure. You’ll learn how to use redirects, how to check your internal linking structure, and how to prevent competing with your own content.

Online and on-demand

This new Site structure training is an online course that allows you to learn about site structure anytime and anywhere you like. It consists of five modules, which are divided into several lessons. Each lesson contains interesting videos, in which our SEO experts – like Jono Alderson – explain everything you should know about site structure. To improve learning retention, we’ve also created reading materials. In these PDF files, we explore topics more broadly and we use different examples from the ones we use in the videos. To complete a lesson, you take a quiz. These quizzes test whether you understand the theory, and if you’re able to apply this new knowledge to realistic example cases.

Get ready: available November 1st!

Are you ready to help Google understand – and rank! – your site better? We’ll launch this brand-new Site structure training on November 1.

Don’t want to miss the launch? Subscribe to our newsletter!

The post Coming soon: brand-new Site structure training! appeared first on Yoast.

from Yoast • SEO for everyone https://yoast.com/coming-soon-site-structure-training/

Gatwick Airport job fair will offer more than 1,500 jobs from almost 50 employers

A video pod will also be available so potential applicants can practice and build confidence at interviews

from Surrey Live - News https://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/gatwick-airport-job-fair-offer-15345852

Ashtead man admits part in Leatherhead estate attack in which victim lost an ear

James Montgomery admitted charges of affray and ABH although it's unclear how the victim lost his ear so a charge related to that was dropped

from Surrey Live - News https://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/ashtead-man-admits-part-leatherhead-15344959

Man dies after collapsing at Dorking Tesco Express

Members of the public who performed CPR on the man have been praised by emergency services for their efforts

from Surrey Live - News https://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/man-dies-after-collapsing-dorking-15345497

E-fit released in connection with multiple Weybridge burglaries

Properties on Oatlands Drive, Ellesmere Road and St George’s Avenue have all been targeted in recent weeks

from Surrey Live - News https://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/e-fit-released-connection-multiple-15345705

Teenage girls who went missing from Thorpe Park 'left abruptly', police say

Surrey Police says it is "particularly concerned" and has renewed its appeal to find the teenagers

from Surrey Live - News https://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/teenage-girls-who-went-missing-15345806

Parents urged to look out for signs of hand, foot and mouth disease

The childhood illness is caused by a virus and is most common in children under 10

from Surrey Live - News https://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/parents-urged-look-out-signs-15344039

Cranleigh windows damaged by 'ball bearings fired from catapults'

Police are partcualy keen to speak to a driver of a white 4x4 seen to be in the area

from Surrey Live - News https://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/cranleigh-windows-damaged-ball-bearings-15345563

Family 'loses everything' as fire destroys West Ewell mobile home

Residents are rallying around the family following the devastating blaze

from Surrey Live - News https://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/family-loses-everything-fire-destroys-15343747

Woman left 'terrified' after man 'exposes erect penis' outside Walton station

The alleged incident occurred outside the station in Mayfield Road, Walton on Thames at around 3.30pm last week

from Surrey Live - News https://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/woman-left-terrified-after-man-15343352

Thieves steal World War I medals from Chobham home

The alleged incident occurred two weeks ago at a property on Beta Road in Chobham

from Surrey Live - News https://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/thieves-steal-world-war-medals-15343028

Prince William knew Leicester helicopter crash pilot and they 'recently flew together', Palace says

A spokesman for Kensington Palace said it is understood Prince William knew Camberley pilot Eric Swaffer

from Surrey Live - News https://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/prince-william-knew-leicester-helicopter-15343209

There are currently nearly 800 registered sex offenders living in Surrey

It is the equivalent of one sex offender for every 1,350 people aged 10 and over

from Surrey Live - News https://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/currently-nearly-800-registered-sex-15336735

Reigate man Jamie Gillett jailed for sex offences against underage girls

Gillett, of Prices Lane in Woodhatch, pleaded guilty to five offences including sexual assault of a female under 13

from Surrey Live - News https://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/reigate-man-jamie-gillett-jailed-15342810

Camberley pilot 'may have saved hundreds of lives' by crashing helicopter in Leicester stadium car park

"It’s still a tragedy, but it could have been much, much worse,” an eyewitness to the Leicester helicopter crash said

from Surrey Live - News https://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/leicester-helicopter-crash-pilot-camberley-15342302

Pilot couple from Camberley among five who died in Leicester helicopter crash

The couple, who both died in the accident at Leicester FC's ground on Saturday, lived in Camberley

from Surrey Live - News https://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/leicester-football-helicopter-crash-saturday-15341599

Building Links with Great Content - Natural Syndication Networks

Posted by KristinTynski

The debate is over and the results are clear: the best way to improve domain authority is to generate large numbers of earned links from high-authority publishers.

Getting these links is not possible via:

• Link exchanges
• Buying links
• Private Blog Networks, or PBNs
• Comment links
• Paid native content or sponsored posts
• Any other method you may have encountered

There is no shortcut. The only way to earn these links is by creating content that is so interesting, relevant, and newsworthy to a publisher’s audience that the publisher will want to write about that content themselves.

Success, then, is predicated on doing three things extremely well:

1. Developing newsworthy content (typically meaning that content is data-driven)
2. Understanding who to pitch for the best opportunity at success and natural syndication
3. Writing and sending pitches effectively

We’ve covered point 1 and point 3 on other Moz posts. Today, we are going to do a deep dive into point 2 and investigate methods for understanding and choosing the best possible places to pitch your content. Specifically, we will reveal the hidden news syndication networks that can mean the difference between generating less than a handful or thousands of links from your data-driven content.

Understanding News Syndication Networks

Not all news publishers are the same. Some publishers behave as hubs, or influencers, generating the stories and content that is then “picked up” and written about by other publishers covering the same or similar beats.

Some of the top hubs should be obvious to anyone: CNN, The New York Times, BBC, or Reuters, for instance. Their size, brand authority, and ability to break news make them go-to sources for the origination of news and some of the most common places journalists and writers from other publications go to for story ideas. If your content gets picked up by any of these sites, it’s almost certain that you will enjoy widespread syndication of your story to nearly everywhere that could be interested without any intervention on your part.

Unfortunately, outside of the biggest players, it’s often unclear which other sites also enjoy “Hub Status,” acting as a source for much of the news writing that happens around any specific topic or beat.

At Fractl, our experience pitching top publishers has given us a deep intuition of which domains are likely to be our best bet for the syndication potential of content we create on behalf of our clients, but we wanted to go a step further and put data to the question. Which publishers really act as the biggest hubs of content distribution?

To get a better handle on this question, we took a look at the link networks of the top 400 most trafficked American publishers online. We then utilized Gephi, a powerful network visualization tool to make sense of this massive web of links. Below is a visualization of that network.

An interactive version is available here.

Before explaining further, let’s detail how the visualization works:

• Each colored circle is called a node. A node represents one publisher/website
• Node size is related to Domain Authority. The larger the node, the more domain authority it has.
• The lines between the nodes are called edges, and represent the links between each publisher.
• The strength of the edges/links corresponds to the total number of links from one publisher to another. The more links from one publisher to another, the stronger the edge, and the more “pull” exerted between those two nodes toward each other.
• You can think of the visualization almost like an epic game of tug of war, where nodes with similar link networks end up clustering near each other.
• The colors of the nodes are determined by a “Modularity” algorithm that looks at the overall similarity of link networks, comparing all nodes to each other. Nodes with the same color exhibit the most similarity. The modularity algorithm implemented in Gephi looks for the nodes that are more densely connected together than to the rest of the network

Once visualized, important takeaways that can be realized include the following:

1. The most “central” nodes, or the ones appearing near the center of the graph, are the ones that enjoy links from the widest variety of sites. Naturally, the big boys like Reuters, CNN and the NYTimes are located at the center, with large volumes of links incoming from all over.
2. Tight clusters are publishers that link to each other very often, which creates a strong attractive force and keeps them close together. Publishers like these are often either owned by the same parent company or have built-in automatic link syndication relationships. A good example is the Gawker Network (at the 10PM position). The closeness of nodes in this network is the result of heavy interlinking and story syndication, along with the effects of site-wide links shared between them. A similar cluster appears at the 7PM position with the major NBC-owned publishers (NBC.com, MSNBC.com, Today.com, etc.). Nearby, we also see large NBC-owned regional publishers, indicating heavy story syndication also to these regional owned properties.
3. Non-obvious similarities between the publishers can also be gleaned. For instance, notice how FoxNews.com and TMZ.com are very closely grouped, sharing very similar link profiles and also linking to each other extensively. Another interesting cluster to note is the Buzzfeed/Vice cluster. Notice their centrality lies somewhere between serious news and lifestyle, with linkages extending out into both.
4. Sites that cover similar themes/beats are often located close to each other in the visualization. We can see top-tier lifestyle publishers clustered around the 1PM position. News publishers clustered near other news publishers with similar political leanings. Notice the closeness of Politico, Salon, The Atlantic, and The Washington Post. Similarly, notice the proximity of Breitbart, The Daily Caller, and BizPacReview. These relationships hint at hidden biases and relationships in how these publishers pick up each other’s stories.

A More Global Perspective

Last year, a fascinating project by Kalev Leetaru at Forbes looked at the dynamics Google News publishers in the US and around the world. The project leveraged GDelt’s massive news article dataset, and visualized the network with Gephi, similarly to the above network discussed in the previous paragraph.

This visualization differs in that the link network was built looking only at in-context links, whereas the visualization featured in the previous paragraph looked at all links. This is perhaps an even more accurate view of news syndication networks because it better parses out site-wide links, navigation links, and other non-context links that impact the graph. Additionally, this graph was generated using more than 121 million articles from nearly every country in the world, containing almost three-quarters of a billion individual links. It represents one of the most accurate pictures of the dynamics of the global news landscape ever assembled.

Edge weights were determined by the total number of links from each node to each other node. The more links, the stronger the edge. Node sizes were calculated using Pagerank in this case instead of Domain Authority, though they are similar metrics.

Using this visualization, Mr. Leetaru was able to infer some incredibly interesting and potentially powerful relationships that have implications for anyone who pitches mainstream publishers. Some of the most important include:

1. In the center of the graph, we see a very large cluster. This cluster can be thought of as essentially the “Global Media Core,” as Mr. Leetaru puts it. Green nodes represent American outlets. This, as with the previous example, shows the frequency with which these primary news outlets interlink and cover each other’s stories, as well as how much less frequently they cite sources from smaller publications or local and regional outlets.
2. Interestingly, CNN seems to play a unique role in the dissemination to local and regional news. Note the many links from CNN to the blue cluster on the far right. Mr. Leetaru speculates this could be the result of other major outlets like the NYTimes and the Washington Post using paywalls. This point is important for anyone who pitches content. Paywalls should be something taken into consideration, as they could potentially significantly reduce syndication elsewhere.
3. The NPR cluster is another fascinating one, suggesting that there is heavy interlinking between NPR-related stories and also between NPR and the Washington Post and NYTimes. Getting a pickup on NPR’s main site could result in syndication to many of its affiliates. NYTimes or Washington Post pickups could also have a similar effect due to this interlinking.
4. For those looking for international syndication, there are some other interesting standouts. Sites like NYYibada.com cover news in the US. They are involved with Chinese language publications, but also have versions in other languages, including English. Sites like this might not seem to be good pitch targets, but could likely be pitched successfully given their coverage of many of the same stories as US-based English language publications.
5. The blue and pink clusters at the bottom of the graph are outlets from the Russian and Ukrainian press, respectively. You will notice that while the vast majority of their linking is self-contained, there seem to be three bridges to international press, specifically via the BBC, Reuters, and AP. This suggests getting pickups at these outlets could result in much broader international syndication, at least in Eastern Europe and Russia.
6. Additionally, the overall lack of deep interlinking between publications of different languages suggests that it is quite difficult to get English stories picked up internationally.
7. Sites like ZDnet.com have foreign language counterparts, and often translate their stories for their international properties. Sites like these offer unique opportunities for link syndication into mostly isolated islands of foreign publications that would be difficult to reach otherwise.

I would encourage readers to explore this interactive more. Isolating individual publications can give deep insight into what syndication potential might be possible for any story covered. Of course, many factors impact how a story spreads through these networks. As a general rule, the broader the syndication network, the more opportunities that exist.

Link Syndication in Practice

Over our 6 years in business, Fractl has executed more than 1,500 content marketing campaigns, promoted using high-touch, one-to-one outreach to major publications. Below are two views of content syndication we have seen as a result of our content production and promotion work.

Let’s first look just at a single campaign.

Recently, Fractl scored a big win for our client Signs.com with our “Branded in Memory” campaign, which was a fun and visual look at how well people remember brand logos. We had the crowd attempt to recreate well-known brand logos from memory, and completed data analysis to understand more deeply which brands seem to have the best overall recall.

As a result of strategic pitching, the high public appeal, and the overall "coolness" factor of the project, it was picked up widely by many mainstream publications, and enjoyed extensive syndication.

Here is what that syndication looked like in network graph form over time:

If you are interested in seeing and exploring the full graph, you can access the interactive by clicking on the gif above, or clicking here. As with previous examples, node size is related to domain authority.

A few important things to note:

• The orange cluster of nodes surrounding the central node are links directly to the landing page on Signs.com.
• Several pickups resulted in nodes (publications) that themselves generated many numbers of links pointing at the story they wrote about the Signs.com project. The blue cluster at the 8PM position is a great example. In this case it was a pickup from BoredPanda.com.
• Nodes that do not link to Signs.com are secondary syndications. They pass link value through the node that links to Signs.com, and represent an opportunity for link reclamation. Fractl follows up on all of these opportunities in an attempt to turn these secondary syndications into do-follow links pointing directly at our client’s domain.
• An animated view gives an interesting insight into the pace of link accumulation both to the primary story on Signs.com, but also to the nodes that garnered their own secondary syndications. The GIF represents a full year of pickups. As we found in my previous Moz post examining link acquisition over time, roughly 50% of the links were acquired in the first month, and the other 50% over the next 11 months.

Now, let’s take a look at what syndication networks look like when aggregated across roughly 3 months worth of Fractl client campaigns (not fully comprehensive):

If you are interested in exploring this in more depth, click here or the above image for the interactive. As with previous examples, node size is related to domain authority.

A few important things to note:

1. The brown cluster near the center labeled “placements” are links pointing back directly to the landing pages on our clients’ sites. Many/most of these links were the result of pitches to writers and editors at those publications, and not as a result of natural syndication.
2. We can see many major hubs with their own attached orbits of linking nodes. At 9PM, we see entrepreneur.com, at 12PM we see CNBC.com, 10PM we see USAToday, etc.
3. Publications with large numbers of linking nodes surrounding them are examples of prime pitching targets, given how syndications link back to stories on those publications appear in this aggregate view.

Putting it All Together

New data tools are enabling the ability to more deeply understand how the universe of news publications and the larger "blogosphere" operate dynamically. Network visualization tools in particular can be put to use to yield otherwise impossible insights about the relationships between publications and how content is distributed and syndicated through these networks.

The best part is that creating visualizations with your own data is very straightforward. For instance, the link graphs of Fractl content examples, along with the first overarching view of news networks, was built using backlink exports from SEMrush. Additionally, third party resources such as Gdelt offer tools and datasets that are virtually unexplored, providing opportunity for deep understanding that can convey significant advantages for those looking to optimize their content promotion and syndication process.

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Remkus’ Roundup: Twenty Nineteen, GlotPress & ACF Gutenberg integration

As we’re getting closer to the release of WordPress 5.0, the amount of WordPress 5.0 related news is increasing. Today, we have news for you on the new Default WordPress Theme, the Gutenberg integration of Advanced Custom Fields and GlotPress. Welcome to the third edition of my roundup!

New Default WordPress Theme is here:

Since the release of WordPress 3.0 – hello 2010! – WordPress shipped with a new default theme. We started with Twenty Ten as we’re approaching 2019, WordPress is getting ready to ship the next default theme with WordPress 5.0.

Twenty Nineteen will be a theme that focuses on writing great content for both bloggers and small businesses. And, as you may have been suspecting already, Twenty Nineteen will fully support the new Gutenberg editor. If you’re already curious to see what Twenty Nineteen will look like, do check out the introduction post.

ACF Gutenberg integration

If you’ve been building content-rich WordPress websites, there’s a good chance you’ve been doing this by using the Advanced Custom Fields plugin, or ACF for short. It allows you to easily add all kinds of metaboxes for all types of content. Given the fact that the Gutenberg editing experience changes the way metaboxes look and work, the team behind ACF decided to find a way to integrate ACF with the Gutenberg blocks. And they’ve succeeded.

Our friends at Delicious Brains have written a great post on how ACF lets you create easily create beautiful rich content Gutenberg blocks. I highly encourage you to check it out. It does get a little technical, but ACF’s solution is by far the easiest way to create Gutenberg blocks right now.

By the way, if you are using ACF, have you seen our ACF Content Analysis for Yoast SEO plugin?

WordPress 5.0 Beta 1 has been released

Slightly behind schedule, WordPress 5.0 Beta 1 has been released. From the release post:

There are two ways to test the WordPress 5.0 beta 1: try the WordPress Beta Tester plugin (you’ll want “bleeding edge nightlies”), or you can download the beta here (zip).

It’s important to mention that this software is still in development. So we don’t recommend you run it on a production site. Consider setting up a test site to play with the new version. And if you are using an existing test site be sure to update the Gutenberg plugin to v4.1.1.

If you’re curious about the planning for the release of WordPress 5.0, do check out the granular timeline that’s available.

GlotPress 3.0

There’s a good chance, if English isn’t your first language, that you’re using an internationalized version of WordPress. In other words, WordPress is fully translated in your language. The software that powers the translation of WordPress, but also themes, plugins and more, is called GlotPress.

Greg Ross, who recently took over the lead-developer role from Dominik Schilling, has announced what needs to happen for the next big version of GlotPress. My favorite new feature is for GlotPress to support locale versions. What’s yours?

 

The post Remkus’ Roundup: Twenty Nineteen, GlotPress & ACF Gutenberg integration appeared first on Yoast.

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Log File Analysis 101 - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by BritneyMuller

Log file analysis can provide some of the most detailed insights about what Googlebot is doing on your site, but it can be an intimidating subject. In this week's Whiteboard Friday, Britney Muller breaks down log file analysis to make it a little more accessible to SEOs everywhere.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Hey, Moz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Today we're going over all things log file analysis, which is so incredibly important because it really tells you the ins and outs of what Googlebot is doing on your sites.

So I'm going to walk you through the three primary areas, the first being the types of logs that you might see from a particular site, what that looks like, what that information means. The second being how to analyze that data and how to get insights, and then the third being how to use that to optimize your pages and your site.

For a primer on what log file analysis is and its application in SEO, check out our article: How to Use Server Log Analysis for Technical SEO

1. Types

So let's get right into it. There are three primary types of logs, the primary one being Apache. But you'll also see W3C, elastic load balancing, which you might see a lot with things like Kibana. But you also will likely come across some custom log files. So for those larger sites, that's not uncommon. I know Moz has a custom log file system. Fastly is a custom type setup. So just be aware that those are out there.

Log data

So what are you going to see in these logs? The data that comes in is primarily in these colored ones here.

So you will hopefully for sure see:

• the request server IP;
• the timestamp, meaning the date and time that this request was made;
• the URL requested, so what page are they visiting;
• the HTTP status code, was it a 200, did it resolve, was it a 301 redirect;
• the user agent, and so for us SEOs we're just looking at those user agents' Googlebot.

So log files traditionally house all data, all visits from individuals and traffic, but we want to analyze the Googlebot traffic. Method (Get/Post), and then time taken, client IP, and the referrer are sometimes included. So what this looks like, it's kind of like glibbery gloop.

It's a word I just made up, and it just looks like that. It's just like bleh. What is that? It looks crazy. It's a new language. But essentially you'll likely see that IP, so that red IP address, that timestamp, which will commonly look like that, that method (get/post), which I don't completely understand or necessarily need to use in some of the analysis, but it's good to be aware of all these things, the URL requested, that status code, all of these things here.

2. Analyzing

So what are you going to do with that data? How do we use it? So there's a number of tools that are really great for doing some of the heavy lifting for you. Screaming Frog Log File Analyzer is great. I've used it a lot. I really, really like it. But you have to have your log files in a specific type of format for them to use it.

Splunk is also a great resource. Sumo Logic and I know there's a bunch of others. If you're working with really large sites, like I have in the past, you're going to run into problems here because it's not going to be in a common log file. So what you can do is to manually do some of this yourself, which I know sounds a little bit crazy.

Manual Excel analysis

But hang in there. Trust me, it's fun and super interesting. So what I've done in the past is I will import a CSV log file into Excel, and I will use the Text Import Wizard and you can basically delineate what the separators are for this craziness. So whether it be a space or a comma or a quote, you can sort of break those up so that each of those live within their own columns. I wouldn't worry about having extra blank columns, but you can separate those. From there, what you would do is just create pivot tables. So I can link to a resource on how you can easily do that.

Top pages

But essentially what you can look at in Excel is: Okay, what are the top pages that Googlebot hits by frequency? What are those top pages by the number of times it's requested?

Top folders

You can also look at the top folder requests, which is really interesting and really important. On top of that, you can also look into: What are the most common Googlebot types that are hitting your site? Is it Googlebot mobile? Is it Googlebot images? Are they hitting the correct resources? Super important. You can also do a pivot table with status codes and look at that. I like to apply some of these purple things to the top pages and top folders reports. So now you're getting some insights into: Okay, how did some of these top pages resolve? What are the top folders looking like?

You can also do that for Googlebot IPs. This is the best hack I have found with log file analysis. I will create a pivot table just with Googlebot IPs, this right here. So I will usually get, sometimes it's a bunch of them, but I'll get all the unique ones, and I can go to terminal on your computer, on most standard computers.

I tried to draw it. It looks like that. But all you do is you type in "host" and then you put in that IP address. You can do it on your terminal with this IP address, and you will see it resolve as a Google.com. That verifies that it's indeed a Googlebot and not some other crawler spoofing Google. So that's something that these tools tend to automatically take care of, but there are ways to do it manually too, which is just good to be aware of.

3. Optimize pages and crawl budget

All right, so how do you optimize for this data and really start to enhance your crawl budget? When I say "crawl budget," it primarily is just meaning the number of times that Googlebot is coming to your site and the number of pages that they typically crawl. So what is that with? What does that crawl budget look like, and how can you make it more efficient?

• Server error awareness: So server error awareness is a really important one. It's good to keep an eye on an increase in 500 errors on some of your pages.
• 404s: Valid? Referrer?: Another thing to take a look at is all the 400s that Googlebot is finding. It's so important to see: Okay, is that 400 request, is it a valid 400? Does that page not exist? Or is it a page that should exist and no longer does, but you could maybe fix? If there is an error there or if it shouldn't be there, what is the referrer? How is Googlebot finding that, and how can you start to clean some of those things up?
• Isolate 301s and fix frequently hit 301 chains: 301s, so a lot of questions about 301s in these log files. The best trick that I've sort of discovered, and I know other people have discovered, is to isolate and fix the most frequently hit 301 chains. So you can do that in a pivot table. It's actually a lot easier to do this when you have kind of paired it up with crawl data, because now you have some more insights into that chain. What you can do is you can look at the most frequently hit 301s and see: Are there any easy, quick fixes for that chain? Is there something you can remove and quickly resolve to just be like a one hop or a two hop?
• Mobile first: You can keep an eye on mobile first. If your site has gone mobile first, you can dig into that, into the logs and evaluate what that looks like. Interestingly, the Googlebot is still going to look like this compatible Googlebot 2.0. However, it's going to have all of the mobile implications in the parentheses before it. So I'm sure these tools can automatically know that. But if you're doing some of the stuff manually, it's good to be aware of what that looks like.
• Missed content: So what's really important is to take a look at: What's Googlebot finding and crawling, and what are they just completely missing? So the easiest way to do that is to cross-compare with your site map. It's a really great way to take a look at what might be missed and why and how can you maybe reprioritize that data in the site map or integrate it into navigation if at all possible.
• Compare frequency of hits to traffic: This was an awesome tip I got on Twitter, and I can't remember who said it. They said compare frequency of Googlebot hits to traffic. I thought that was brilliant, because one, not only do you see a potential correlation, but you can also see where you might want to increase crawl traffic or crawls on a specific, high-traffic page. Really interesting to kind of take a look at that.
• URL parameters: Take a look at if Googlebot is hitting any URLs with the parameter strings. You don't want that. It's typically just duplicate content or something that can be assigned in Google Search Console with the parameter section. So any e-commerce out there, definitely check that out and kind of get that all straightened out.
• Evaluate days, weeks, months: You can evaluate days, weeks, and months that it's hit. So is there a spike every Wednesday? Is there a spike every month? It's kind of interesting to know, not totally critical.
• Evaluate speed and external resources: You can evaluate the speed of the requests and if there's any external resources that can potentially be cleaned up and speed up the crawling process a bit.
• Optimize navigation and internal links: You also want to optimize that navigation, like I said earlier, and use that meta no index.
• Meta noindex and robots.txt disallow: So if there are things that you don't want in the index and if there are things that you don't want to be crawled from your robots.txt, you can add all those things and start to help some of this stuff out as well.

Reevaluate

Lastly, it's really helpful to connect the crawl data with some of this data. So if you're using something like Screaming Frog or DeepCrawl, they allow these integrations with different server log files, and it gives you more insight. From there, you just want to reevaluate. So you want to kind of continue this cycle over and over again.

You want to look at what's going on, have some of your efforts worked, is it being cleaned up, and go from there. So I hope this helps. I know it was a lot, but I want it to be sort of a broad overview of log file analysis. I look forward to all of your questions and comments below. I will see you again soon on another Whiteboard Friday. Thanks.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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Boy, 16, killed in Epsom motorbike crash named by police

Police are continuing to investigate the crash in Christ Church Road on Sunday night (October 21)         

from Surrey Live - News https://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/boy-16-killed-epsom-motorbike-15331169

Oxted, Limpsfield and Westerham residents unite in fight against third application for new parcel delivery depot

A number of organisations against the depot plans believe DPD's figures on the number of vans that will deliver from the site are incorrect

from Surrey Live - News https://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/oxted-limpsfield-westerham-residents-unite-15274925

Huge fly-tip at Byfleet station - but no one wants to deal with it

The council says the issue involves many different agencies, but no one is taking ownership of the land

from Surrey Live - News https://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/huge-fly-tip-byfleet-station-15321857

Demolition of eight blocks of Aldershot flats makes way for 'very exciting future'

The demolition will last approximately 20 weeks and pave the way for 356 new homes

from Surrey Live - News https://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/hampshire-news/demolition-eight-blocks-aldershot-flats-15327744

Man who dropped cigarette in Woking taken to court and must pay hundreds of pounds

Paul Smith, of French's Wells in Horsell , was sentenced for littering at a Royal Mail depot

from Surrey Live - News https://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/man-who-dropped-cigarette-woking-15330134

Farnham songwriter pokes fun at 'middle class commuter town' with hilarious songs

Pete Crutchfield's witty repertoire includes tracks such as Farnham's Got a Poundland and Driving Home to Farnham

from Surrey Live - News https://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/farnham-songwriter-pokes-fun-middle-15300320

Friends start mental health campaign in the hope of showing others they are not alone

Freya Selman and Jasmine Flanagan, both 19, have made a film titled ‘You Can Help’ to to inspire young people to speak out

from Surrey Live - News https://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/friends-start-mental-health-campaign-15290993

Police renew appeal for £40k ram raid at Farnham jewellers

Surrey Police  is appealing for witnesses after jewellery "worth in excess of £40,000" was stolen from Andre Noir in Lion and Lamb Way last week

from Surrey Live - News https://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/police-renew-appeal-40k-ram-15329466

Certain blood pressure drugs linked to increased risk of cancer

The study looked at data for nearly a million patients over a 20-year period.

from Surrey Live - News https://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/uk-world-news/certain-blood-pressure-drugs-linked-15328933

Disappearance of mum-of-five Sarah Wellgreen who has links to Farnborough being treated as potential murder

Sarah Wellgreen has not been in contact with her family since she was reported missing more than two weeks ago

from Surrey Live - News https://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/hampshire-news/disappearance-mum-five-links-farnborough-15328245

The Yoast SEO Premium analysis: new vs old

Yoast SEO Premium 9.0 fulfills a long lasting wish of many bloggers and content writers, including me. The Yoast SEO premium analysis is able to do something it has never done before: take word forms into account (amongst other things). As one of Yoast’s linguists pointed out: “Google knows word forms, so should we.”

Testing the new analysis for you!

For the people who follow Yoast, I might not be a stranger. But if you somehow stumbled upon this post by accident, or by sheer curiosity, I’ll start by introducing myself. I’m Caroline, I’ve been with Yoast for 4 years now and I’ve seen Yoast SEO and its premium version evolve into a better and friendlier product with every release.

Am I the best person to test this analysis for you? You might think not, as I’m a Yoast employee. However, as a blogger for Yoast and for my own Dutch mom blog, I’m one of the people in the company who rants and raves about the plugin out in the open. The developers know what I think of certain aspects of the plugin. Because of my work on GitHub, my blog posts on Yoast.com and my contacts with bloggers worldwide, I know exactly what the cons of the plugin are. So yes, I am the best person to test our new version!

Keyphrase recognition no matter what the order of words is

Our linguistic team worked for months on this release. They got me excited the moment they explained they were overhauling the entire way we were doing keyword recognition. If you’re unsure what this means: until now, we could only match the exact keyphrase in the SEO analysis. This means that if your keyphrase is ‘yellow chair’, we couldn’t match for [yellow chairs] or [chairs that are yellow]. Google knows that [yellow chairs] and [chairs that are yellow], is the same as [a yellow chair], but Yoast SEO did not.

Create better content more freely

In Yoast SEO the word order doesn’t matter anymore. And, in Yoast SEO Premium recognizes plurals and other word forms (for now just in English) like Google does. This means we can provide you with feedback that’s more true to how Google views your content. Not having to worry about exact matches anymore, enables you to focus on creating awesome content.

These new functionalities make sure that your old posts that were, according to us, not particularly optimized for SEO, suddenly are optimized very well. Test it yourself: there’s a huge chance that posts that scored bad or mediocre according to our plugin, now score higher than they did before.

Synonyms

Although the word form recognition only works for English – with more languages to follow soon! – this doesn’t mean the release is useless for non-English users. On the contrary: all our premium users, regardless of language, will benefit so much from this release. In a previous version we’ve introduced synonyms in the plugin. We reevaluated which checks should take synonyms into account. These checks have been completely revised and now rely on both the keyphrase and its synonyms when calculating the SEO score. This means that, despite writing in a non-English language, you can write compelling texts without worrying about the analysis not recognizing synonyms.

What does this mean for my SEO?

Considering the above, we can say for certain that the SEO score will be matching Google’s scoring algorithm more closely. Although no one knows the exact algorithm Google uses, we have come one step closer in providing you the perfect tools to optimize for Google and your visitors.

I can prove this to you by using a post I wrote on Yoast.com this summer. I wrote an article of which the keyphrase is: ‘blogging in summer’. Its score? Orange. Yet, if you Google ‘blogging in summer’, or ‘blogging during summer’ this post scores number one. With the new analysis the SEO score is green, without changing a single line of text. Is this more in line of what we see in Google? Yes, it definitely is. As you can see in the screenshot below, a lot of the checks have gone from red to orange or even green. If I change the keyphrase to ‘blogging during summer’, the analysis stays green, which reflects Google in this as well.

The old Yoast SEO Premium analysis versus the new one

SEO analysis and non-English websites

So far it might seem this release is only interesting for the people who maintain English websites. This is not the case. This release is very interesting for non-English users as well. How so? The function words are filtered out for eight additional languages. For these languages the synonyms are taken into account as well. This results in posts receiving a higher SEO score as well, as seen in below’s print screen of one of my blog posts in Dutch:

SEO Analysis Premium 9.0 for foreign languages – previous release versus 9.0

Filtering out the function words works – in the free version as well – for the languages: German, Dutch, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Russian and Polish.

Synonyms work in Yoast SEO premium only, but aren’t language specific, i.e. work in every language.

Conclusion

What I think of this release? I feared, for an instant, that this release was only impacting the English sites, but I found out this works very well for other languages too. The developers definitely thought of non-English users as well. I can’t wait for the full functionality to be rolled out in all other languages!

Test the plugin yourself

If you still have questions regarding my post or still fear I am not the best person to test this plugin, then I ask you to test it yourself. Our premium plugin has a 30 day refund policy, no questions asked.

Get Yoast SEO Premium now »Only $89 $79 (ex VAT) for 1 site

The post The Yoast SEO Premium analysis: new vs old appeared first on Yoast.

from Yoast • SEO for everyone https://yoast.com/yoast-seo-premium-analysis-new-vs-old/

Marks and Spencer is selling Porn Star Martini in a can

Say hello to the Porn Star Martini... in a can

from Surrey Live - News https://www.getsurrey.co.uk/whats-on/shopping/marks-spencer-selling-porn-star-15325263

Family receives compensation after patient falls from bed and dies at Frimley Park Hospital

Susan Marilyn Walton, 67, fell at the hospital, hitting her head and dying days later

from Surrey Live - News https://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/family-receives-compensation-after-patient-15291804

Dalmation puppy who survived life-threatening illness gets second chance at happiness at new home

The RSPCA have warned of the dangers of buying a puppy online

from Surrey Live - News https://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/dalmation-puppy-who-survived-life-15297297

Farnborough homes could experience murky water coming from kitchen taps - here is why

The process, called flushing, stirs up naturally-occurring sediments which build up over time, such as iron or manganese

from Surrey Live - News https://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/hampshire-news/farnborough-homes-could-experience-murky-15326182

Royal Parks issue warning after girl 'gored in the thigh' by stag in Bushy Park

The incident occurred on Wednesday afternoon in Bushy Park, Hampton

from Surrey Live - News https://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/royal-parks-issue-warning-after-15325524

Three people, including 17-year-old girl from Dorking, arrested after 'domestic' outside flats in Crawley

Witnesses reported seeing around nine police vehicles at 8.50pm on Tuesday

from Surrey Live - News https://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/three-people-including-17-year-15323225

Remembrance Sunday services and events in Surrey and Hampshire 2018

A guide to wreath-laying ceremonies, church services and remembrance parades around Surrey and Hampshire

from Surrey Live - News https://www.getsurrey.co.uk/whats-on/whats-on-news/remembrance-sunday-services-events-surrey-15298766

This car was ripped apart by a lorry in a village that's plagued by HGVs

Nobody was hurt  in this incident in Stanwell Moor but residents are demanding action

from Surrey Live - News https://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/car-ripped-apart-lorry-village-15310764

Teenager 'sexually abused' for more than a year at Headley Court in 1970s, court hears

George Wanless, who was then in his 20s, has denied nine counts of indecent assault, one count of buggery and one count of rape

from Surrey Live - News https://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/teenager-sexually-abused-more-year-15320401

10-week closure of Newdigate road imminent plus plans for A24 and Dorking roadworks

Kingsland in Newdigate will be closed from Monday (October 29) to install a new water main

from Surrey Live - News https://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/10-week-closure-newdigate-road-15318391

Staines could be getting an Iceland store

The supermarket chain intends to open the store by March 2019

from Surrey Live - News https://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/staines-could-getting-iceland-store-15289825

Heartwarming story of man whose battle to overcome 'horrible' lifelong stammer led to public speeches

70-year-old Chris Cooksey is speaking about his experiences in aid of International Stammering Awareness Day

from Surrey Live - News https://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/heartwarming-story-man-whose-battle-15319278

Surrey County Council could propose closure of 37 children's centres, according to sources

Rising demand for services twinned with years of cuts in funding from central Government has been blamed

from Surrey Live - News https://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-county-council-could-propose-15320257

On Google’s related entities patent: Write awesome posts!

Film crew from BBC antiques show Bargain Hunt spotted in Dorking

Workers and passers-by in West Street looked on with interest

from Surrey Live - News https://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/film-crew-bbc-antiques-show-15323647

Man stabbed multiple times in Stanwell street - the second knifing in six months

The victim suffered stab wounds to his arm and chest six months after another man was stabbed in the abdomen in the same street

from Surrey Live - News https://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/stanwell-stabbing-dutch-barn-close-15323291

Stunning time-lapse video shows Woking Victoria Square progress as construction schedule released

"There are only 23 months left before the first phase of the Victoria Square scheme delivers a big step forward for Woking and the surrounding area"

from Surrey Live - News https://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/stunning-time-lapse-video-shows-15315506

This is when the Hunter's Moon will light up Surrey's skies tonight

There are only three full moons left in 2018

from Surrey Live - News https://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/hunters-moon-surrey-sky-tonight-15321512

Karate black belt kicked neighbour into hedge before he was doused in ammonia, court hears

The trial at Guildford Crown Court centres on events of June 18 this year, and an alleged fight between two neighbours

from Surrey Live - News https://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/karate-black-belt-kicked-neighbour-15319261

Surrey motorists 'hit hardest' as fuel and diesel prices soar in last 12 months

More than a fifth of motorists admitted they are spending more on fuel than on days out with their loved ones

from Surrey Live - News https://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-motorists-hit-hardest-fuel-15321306

Was it you? Mystery Woking lottery winner claims £1m prize a month after numbers drawn

It follows an appeal by the National Lottery saying it was "desperate to find" the mystery winner

from Surrey Live - News https://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/you-mystery-woking-lottery-winner-15321223

'Nightmare' delays on South Western Railway due to strike and signal fault

Surrey Live went to Woking station to speak to frustrated commuters caught up in the "chaos"

from Surrey Live - News https://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/nightmare-delays-south-western-railway-15321143

'Devastated' dog owner issues warning as beloved spaniel dies after eating pet shop treats

The dog owner, from Wales, wants her warning to be heard by as many people as possible to prevent future deaths

from Surrey Live - News https://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/uk-world-news/devastated-dog-owner-issues-warning-15321179

Police dog finds £1,200 of cannabis hidden in woodland near Dorking

PD Sox found multiple bags when searching the area with fellow police dogs

from Surrey Live - News https://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/1200-cannabis-police-dog-found-15320508

You could win £25,000 in Guildford's new community lottery

And no, you don't have to be from Guildford to play

from Surrey Live - News https://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/you-could-win-25000-guildfords-15320549

Legoland joint bottom for children's healthy food in Soil Association's league table

The charity has released a league table ranking 22 of the UK’s most popular visitor attractions on the food and service they offer to families

from Surrey Live - News https://www.getsurrey.co.uk/whats-on/food-drink-news/legoland-joint-bottom-childrens-healthy-15316896

Can You Still Use Infographics to Build Links?

Posted by DarrenKingman

Content link building: Are infographics still the highest ROI format?

Fun fact: the first article to appear online proclaiming that "infographics are dead" appeared in 2011. Yet, here we are.

For those of you looking for a quick answer to this strategy-defining question, infographics aren’t as popular as they were between 2014 and 2015. Although they were the best format for generating links, popular publications aren’t using them as often as they used to, as evidenced in this research. However, they are still being used daily and gaining amazing placements and links for their creators — and the data shows, they are already more popular in 2018 than they were in 2013.

However, if there’s one format you want to be working with, use surveys.

Note: I am at the mercy of the publication I’ve reviewed as to what constitutes their definition of an infographic in order to get this data at scale. However, throughout my research, this would typically include a relatively long text- and data-heavy visualization of a specific topic.

The truth is that infographics are still one of the most-used formats for building links and brand awareness, and from my outreach experiences, with good reason. Good static visuals or illustrations (as we now call them to avoid the industry-self-inflicted shame) are often rich in content with engaging visuals that are extremely easy for journalists to write about and embed, something to which anyone who’s tried sending an iframe to a journalist will attest.

That’s why infographics have been going strong for over a decade, and will continue to for years to come.

My methodology

Prophecies aside, I wanted to take a look into the data and discover whether or not infographics are a dying art and if journalists are still posting them as often as they used to. I believe the best way to determine this is by taking a look at what journalists are publishing and mapping that over time.

Not only did I look at how often infographics are being used, but I also measured them against other content formats typically used for building links and brand awareness. If infographics are no longer the best format for content-based link building, I wanted to find out what was. I’ve often used interactives, surveys, and photographic content, like most people producing story-driven creatives, so I focused on those as my formats for comparison.

Internally, you can learn a ton by cross-referencing this sort of data (or data from any key publication clients or stakeholders have tasked you with) with your own data highlighting where you're seeing most of your successes and identifying which formats and topics are your strengths or weaknesses. You can quickly then measure up against those key target publications and know if your strongest format/topic is one they favor most, or if you might need to rethink a particular process to get featured.

I chose to take a look at Entrepreneur.com as a base for this study, so anyone working with B2B or B2C content, whether in-house or agency-side, will probably get the most use out of this (especially because I scraped the names of journalists publishing this content — shh! DM me for it. Feels a little wrong to publish that openly!).

Disclaimer: There were two methods of retrieving this data that I worked through, each with their own limitations. After speaking with fellow digital PR expert, Danny Lynch, I settled on using Screaming Frog and custom extraction using XPath. Therefore, I am limited to what the crawl could find, which still included over 70,000 article URLs, but any orphaned or removed pages wouldn’t be possible to crawl and aren’t included.

The research

Here's how many infographics have been featured as part of an article on Entrepreneur.com over the years:

As we’ve not yet finished 2018 (3 months to go at the time this data was pulled), we can estimate the final usage will be in the 380 region, putting it not far from the totals of 2017 and 2016. Impressive stuff in comparison to years gone by.

However, there's a key unknown here. Is the post-2014/15 drop-off due to lack of outreach? Is it a case of content creators simply deciding infographics were no longer the preferred format to cover topics and build links for clients, as they were a few years ago?

Both my past experiences agency-side and my gut feeling would be that content creators are moving away from it as a core format for link building. Not only would this directly impact the frequency they are published, but it would also impact the investment creators place in producing infographics, and in an environment where infographics need to improve to survive, that would only lead to less features.

Another important data point I wanted to look at was the amount of content being published overall. Without this info, there would be no way of knowing if, with content quality improving all the time, journalists were spending a significantly more time on posts than they had previously while publishing at diminishing rates. To this end, I looked at how much content Entrepreneur.com published each year over the same timeframe:

Although the data shows some differences, the graphs are pretty similar. However, it gets really interesting when we divide the number of infographics by the number of articles in total to find out how many infographics exist per article:

There we have it. The golden years of infographics were certainly 2013 and 2014, but they've been riding a wave of consistency since 2015, comprising a higher percentage of overall articles that link builders would have only dreamed of in 2012, when they were way more in fashion.

In fact, by breaking down the number of infographics vs overall content published, there’s a 105% increase in the number of articles that have featured an infographic in 2018 compared to 2012.

Infographics compared to other creative formats

With all this in mind, I still wanted to uncover the fascination with moving away from infographics as a medium of creative storytelling and link building. Is it an obsession with building and using new formats because we’re bored, or is it because other formats provide a better link building ROI?

The next question I wanted to answer was: “How are other content types performing and how do they compare?” Here’s the answer:

Again, using figures publisher-side, we can see that the number of posts that feature infographics is consistently higher than the number of features for interactives and photographic content. Surveys have more recently taken the mantle, but all content types have taken a dip since 2015. However, there’s no clear signal there that we should be moving away from infographics just yet.

In fact, when pitting infographics against all of the other content types (comparing the total number of features), apart from 2013 and 2014 when infographics wiped the floor with everything, there’s no signal to suggest that we need to ditch them:

Year	Infographics vs Interactives	Infographics vs Photography	Infographics vs Surveys
2011	-75%	-67%	-90%
2012	-14%	-14%	-65%
2013	251%	376%	51%
2014	367%	377%	47%
2015	256%	196%	1%
2016	186%	133%	-40%
2017	195%	226%	-31%
2018	180%	160%	-42%

This is pretty surprising stuff in an age where we’re obsessed with interactives and "hero" pieces for link building campaigns.

Surveys are perhaps the surprise package here, having seen the same rise that infographics had through 2012 and 2013, now out-performing all other content types consistently over the last two years.

When I cross-reference to find the number of surveys being used per article, we can see that in every year since 2013 their usage has been increasingly steadily. In 2018, they're being used more often per article than infographics were, even in their prime:

Surveys are one of the "smaller" creative campaigns I’ve offered in my career. It's a format I’m gravitating more towards because of their speed and potential for headlines. Critically, they're also cheaper to produce, both in terms of research and production, allowing me to not only create more of them per campaign, but also target news-jacking topics and build links more quickly compared to other production-heavy pieces.

I think, conclusively, this data shows that for a solid ROI when links are the metric, infographics are still competitive and viable. Surveys will serve you best, but be careful if you’re using the majority of your budget on an interactive or photographic piece. Although the rewards can still be there, it’s a risk.

The link building potential of our link building

For one last dive into the numbers, I wanted to see how different content formats perform for publishers, which could provide powerful insight when deciding which type of content to produce. Although we have no way of knowing when we do our outreach which KPIs different journalists are working towards, if we know the formats that perform best for them (even if they don’t know it), we can help their content perform by proxy — which also serves the performance of our content by funneling increased equity.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to extract a comment count or number of social shares per post, which I thought would be an interesting insight to review engagement, so I focused on linking root domains to discover if there is any difference in a publisher's ability to build links based on the formats they cover, and if that could lead to an increase in link equity coming our way.

Here’s the average number of links from different domains for each post featuring a different content type received:

Impressively, infographics and surveys continue to hold up really well. Not only are they the content types that the publisher features more often, they are also the content types that build them the most links.

Using these formats to pitch with not only increases the chances that a publisher's post will rank more competitively in your content's topic area (and put your brand at the center of the conversation), it’s also important for your link building activity because it highlights the potential link equity flowing to your features and, therefore, how much ends up on your domain.

This gives you the potential to rank (directly and indirectly) for a variety of phrases centered around your topic. It also gives your domain/target page and topically associated pages a better chance of ranking themselves — at least where links play their part in the algorithm.

Ultimately, and to echo what I mentioned in my intro-summary, surveys have become the best format for building links. I’d love to know how many are pitched, but the fact they generate the most links for our linkers is huge, and if you are doing content-based link building with SEO-centric KPIs, they give you the best shot at maximizing equity and therefore ranking potential.

Infographics certainly still seem to have a huge part in the conversation. Only move away from them if there’s proof in your data. Otherwise, you could be missing out for no reason.

That’s me, guys. I really hope this data and process is interesting for everyone, and I’d love to hear if you’ve found or had experiences that lead to different conclusions.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

from The Moz Blog http://tracking.feedpress.it/link/9375/10641012