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Seeing Stars in the SERPs – Rich Snippets and Structured Markup
John Vantine | March 16th, 2012
We’re all used to seeing star ratings in the SERPs for things like movies (IMDB/Rotten Tomatoes), products (Amazon) and restaurants (Yelp). Over the past month or so, I’ve noticed them appearing alongside listings/rich snippets in the organic search results for regular websites and blog posts. This seemed out of place to me, so I did some research. As it turns out, it’s pretty simple to get a star rating in the SERPs for any old run-of-the-mill page. I used the following format to add a “review” to the homepage of johnvantine.com. <div class="hreview"> <span class="reviewer">Name of reviewer</span> <span class="dtreviewed" title="YYYY-MM-DD">Date of review</span> <span class="summary">Review summary</span> <span class="description">Review body</span> <span class="rating">Numerical rating (from 1-5)</span> </div> The review is not fake, mind you! It was written by Ryan Farrell. Anyway, I added the review to the homepage on Wednesday. I checked the SERPs on Thursday morning, and the star rating was showing up along with my listing. At the time of this writing, it still is. You’ll also notice that my meta description is being truncated – normally the full description (157 characters) is displayed, but since the star rating showed up, it’s being cut off at 139 characters. The addition of “3 days ago” is probably causing this. How is this done? In the above example, the hReview microformat was used. hReview is just one part of the Microformats standard. Microformats are used to help search engines understand what they’re looking at. When they’re added to a site, it will still Continue reading…
Tags: hreview, microdata, microformats, rich snippets, schema.org, star ratings, structured markup
Posted in SEO | 2 Comments
Wpromote Participates in Olive Crest Holiday Toy Drive
John Vantine | December 22nd, 2011
Wprovide (Wpromote’s philanthropic division) decided to celebrate the holidays by organizing a children’s toy drive. After doing some research, we decided to work with Olive Crest. What makes Olive Crest unique is that they match each participant with an abused child or teen, and participants receive wish slips with the name, age and gender of the child that they’ll be shopping for. The wish slip describes what the child wants – this makes the effort feel a bit more personal, because you’re not just blindly purchasing a toy and assuming it’ll be paired up with someone who will enjoy it. Our efforts were not in vain. Wpromoters were able to make Christmas a little brighter for 30 children this year! Aside from the Olive Crest toy drive, I was involved in a Toys 4 Tots toy drive, and I purchased a Transformers toy (Optimus Prime) that I know I would have loved when I was younger. Did you participate in a holiday toy drive this year? If so, what did you buy? If you’re considering organizing a toy drive next year, be sure to keep Olive Crest in mind. Happy holidays! Save this Post!
Google – Behind The Numbers (Infographic)
John Vantine | December 5th, 2011
Did you know that Google’s 2010 revenue (29.3 billion) is more than that of the combined GDP of the 28 poorest countries in the world?
A whopping 97% of Google’s revenue comes from advertising?
$2.5 billion of Google’s revenue comes from mobile ads… And that number is expected to double by the end of year?
Read more fascinating facts from the search giant in the following infographic!
Introducing Our Web-Based SEOAudit Tool
John Vantine | November 2nd, 2011
There are a tons of great SEO tools freely available on the web. I’m always trying new ones out myself, constantly on the hunt for the next tool that’ll simplify my job as an SEO. However, most of the SEO tools that I use regularly are either programs I’ve installed or browser extensions. The web-based SEO tools that I use are all for very specific purposes. Wpromote set out to create a general purpose SEO tool that was fast and convenient. We were looking to create something that you could quickly turn to when you didn’t know much about a site, and wanted to get a basic idea of its strengths and weaknesses. And with that, I introduce to you our brand new web-based SEOAudit Tool! This bad boy is super helpful, especially if you’re in a rush. Simply enter a URL and click “audit”. Within a few seconds, you’ll have access to a wealth of useful stats, such as the number of pages indexed in Google, a backlink count, WHOIS info, SEOMoz metrics such as Domain Authority and MozRank, Alexa rank, the number of backlinks according to Yahoo, and a whole lot more. The tool also displays social stats, such as the number of Facebook likes, Twitter shares, Diggs, etc. Want to compare two sites? We thought you might – that’s what the “add a URL to compare” link is for. Clicking this will display a second URL field, allowing you to view all of the aforementioned metrics (and Continue reading…
A Stroke Of Bad Luck In NYC & The Continued Expansion Of Yelp
John Vantine | July 19th, 2011
This past Tuesday I returned to Los Angeles from an awesome week on the east coast with my girlfriend. The trip was jam-packed with fun – I got to see lots of friends and family, and we covered a lot of ground. We flew into Philadelphia, and then drove to upstate New York for Camp Bisco, which was ridiculously fun. After Camp, we drove to NYC. I was driving a minivan which was jam packed full of stuff from the festival – coolers, clothing, camping stuff, etc. After sitting in traffic in the Times Square area for over an hour trying to find reasonably priced parking, I gave up and pulled the van into the first parking garage I could find. Take note that there was no real research behind my parking choice, only frustration and a strong desire to get out of the car. The parking attendant seemed shady, and at first I was slightly hesitant to leave my keys with him, but I was too tired to care at that point. We grabbed our bags and headed to the Hyatt. Fast forward to the following morning. After inhaling a delicious bagel, we checked out of the hotel and headed back to the car to drop some things off. Not only were the attendants at the garage shady, they were also incredibly rude this time. I suppose it’s understandable – after all, what kind of scumbag returns to his car after parking it unless he’s leaving? Anyway, I noticed Continue reading…
Tags: google places, love and theft, manhattan, new york city, online reviews, yelp
Posted in Local Search | 3 Comments
Site Speed Report Now Available In Google Analytics
John Vantine | May 6th, 2011
On Wednesday, May 4th, Google rolled out a new Analytics feature: Site Speed reporting. If you’re an Analytics nerd/data junkie like myself, this is exciting news. Back in 2010 (on April 9th, to be specific) Google announced what many of us had already suspected – that site speed is a factor in their algorithm, and can have a direct affect on your rankings. From that point on, more and more webmasters started to take load time seriously. The weight of page speed (as a signal) in the overall scheme of things was ripe for debate. Some SEOs seemed to feel that it wasn’t very significant, but this was mostly speculation. Regardless, it was established that it was something that people needed to pay attention to. Now that Google has implemented speed reporting directly into Analytics… Well, it’s pretty clear that everyone should be paying attention. Webmasters can use the Site Speed report to measure load times across their sites. So how is this useful? Well, beyond the obvious benefit of having this useful data conveniently available in your analytics account, you can now view it in the context of other analytics data. A few ideas: View load time by page type Compare load time by geographic location Compare load time by ISP Compare load time by browser/operating system Compare load times of different mobile devices Compare load time of users that have logged in vs those that have not logged in View load time of your top pages – especially Continue reading…
Tags: google analytics, google analytics beta, gtmetrix, page speed, site performance, site speed
Posted in Analytics, Google | No Comments
