The Evolving SEO Mindset In 2013 ( 25 Points)

Author : Bharati Ahuja

Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land recently hosted the Whiteboard Friday at MOZ where he spoke about how search had evolved since the early days of the search engines. Search has surely evolved and will keep on evolving but along with it the mindset and the thought process of an SEO has also evolved or rather should evolve side by side.

25 Points That Point Out The Evolving SEO Thought Process:

1. Adapt to web developments before Google incorporates them in the search algorithms.

2. When Google announces an algorithm update wait for the update to be executed, check for the changes in the WMT and GA reports and then tweak the website accordingly.

3. All updates may not affect all sites.

4. Be prepared. Adhere to WWW standards of web development even if they are not integrated in the algorithms yet.

5. Focus on Content and context and then connect on social media so that the content gets correlated correctly .

6. Forget “Keywords” and focus on “Keyness”. http://blog.webpro.in/2012/04/forget-keywords-and-focus-on-keyness.html

7. Forget “PageRank” and focus on “Authorship”. http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2214849/Googles-Knowledge-Graph-Implications-for-Search-SEO

8. Follow Google Guidelines for mobile search. http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.in/2013/06/changes-in-rankings-of-smartphone_11.html

9. Represent content on site as data as per www.schema.org especially for videos, reviews and local contact details.

10. You may use any third party SEO tools but always have a presence on Google WMTs and Google Analytics.

11. There may be umpteen social media sites but Google+ Account and Google+ business page are the passport to your online identity.

12. Value and encourage UGC (User Generated Content) in the form of reviews and comments.

13. On-page SEO forms the foundation for indexing hence can never be ignored.

14. Correct Technical SEO ensures the site to be future-proofed hence needs apt attention.

15. Off-page optimization is all about trust and authority and not about links.

16. Page one rankings may increase traffic but the social media signals and UGC will influence sales.

17. It is a knowledge sharing economy and people look for answers on the search engines . The content on your site should offer solutions.

18. SEO is not limited only to the SEO team but each and every team member needs to be aware of how social media , content and SEO are integrated . Neither is SEO a onetime process, hence SEO has to be an ongoing process and has to be integrated in the whole marketing mix.

19. SEO is less about bots but more about people. Customers will love the company only if the employees love it first. Hence, educating the whole team about SEO should be an on going process and the SEO should include training the client about the new developments as a part of the SEO project.

20. The SEO is not only working on the keywords and rankings of the site but is helping the business to develop an online brand and also helping the business to establish the trust and authority factor by helping these signals integrate , get correlated and also get indexed by the search engines ensuring long term presence.

21. SEO is not about SERPs but the importance of SERPs cannot be ruled out. High Rankings lead to a high CTR (Click Thru Rate) which leads to increased traffic with a potential for good conversions.Hence, SEO is beyond rankings does not mean that high SERPs are no longer a long term goal of an SEO campaign but it means that the website has to reach out and branch out and gain quality web presence before it is ensured of a good high ranking search presence.

22. Though SEO is earned media, its success is heavily dependent on the owned and shared media. Hence, constantly keeping a track of the owned and shared media cannot be ignored by the SEO even if they are managed by another agency.

23. Increase in the number of visits from search engines indicates that the SEO is working in the positive direction.

24. Increase in sales indicates that the social media signals are generating the right kind of WOM in your favour.

25. Though some companies may call SEO by some other term, never believe in the clichéd statement ...”SEO IS DEAD”.

Today a true SEO does not limit herself only to Google Algorithms but looks beyond and thinks about how a website can adapt to the web standards which are applicable and integrated by search engine algorithms as of now and also works on the standards which have a potential of being integrated by search algorithms in future . This does not only ensures a long term good health of the website but also makes it prepared to face any algo updates without getting adversely affected.

SEO should not only limit its self to perform repair functions on the site to get into search results but just like a good engineer applies scientific, economic, social, and practical knowledge in order to design, build, and maintain structures, machines, devices, systems, materials and processes.

A good SEO needs to apply technical specifications that define and describe aspects of the World Wide Web which directly or indirectly affect the development and administration of web sites and consider include the interoperability, accessibility and usability of web pages and web sites from the WWW perspective. Instead of dissecting the algorithms we need to understand the standard norms of web design and development which will make the web a better place and websites robust technically.The SEO industry is at that point of the graph where its going to scale new heights and emerge as more meaningful and essential for website owners and search engines as well. Content and quality have been king since the first web page was published but Google has been successful in penalizing the low quality content and help clear the content and the linked clutter on the web with its algorithmic updates recently.

As the web evolved the search engines evolved and only when the SEO mindset will also evolve side by side the status and the reputation of the SEO industry will achieve the due respect and importance in the coming years.

SEO - 07/10/2013

Advanced SEO Means Adapting To WWW Standards Before Google Integrates Them In Search Algorithms

Author : Bharati Ahuja

We all in 2013 are convinced that a good online presence is as needed for a businesses to exist and grow as sunlight is needed on Earth for the flora and fauna for the same reason. Every business big or small is struggling to achieve a good online presence and trying out various online platforms to put their best foot forward.

The integrated use of the paid media, earned media and owned media are the 3 main routes to overall web presence.

Earned Media:

Organic Visits
User Generated Content
Reviews
WOM on Social Media Via Likes, Mentions and ripples

Owned Media:

Branded Website
Company Blog
Branded Social Media Accounts
Branded Content Published on various platforms

Paid Media

PPC
Display Banners
Sponsorships
Video Ads.
Paid Video Content

The customer’s online journey is getting increasingly complex with the emergence of new devices, media and new technologies. The intersection set of earned , owned and paid media is what gets the business owner the maximum benefit.

Valuable informative content is at the crux for establishing an online thought leadership and creating the trust for any brand. Content Marketing is an online strategy which helps the brand to harness the benefits of all the earned, owned and paid media and dive into the sea of online opportunities.

The SEOs today are leaving no chance to call Content Marketing as the New SEO but, this statement is as misleading like the statement “Link Building Is SEO” was when black hatters resorted only to link building as SEO when PageRank Technology was implemented by Google.

In 2013 SEOs have to think from a wider perspective because, when we speak about the convergence of the earned, owned and the paid media we are referring to the web as a whole and not only to the search engines.

Content marketing is a good SEO strategy but it is not the new SEO. Today a true SEO does not limit herself only to Google Algorithms but looks beyond and thinks about how a website can adapt to the web standards which are applicable and integrated by search engine algorithms as of now and also works on the standards which have a potential of being integrated by search algorithms in future . This does not only ensures a long term good health of the website but also makes it prepared to face any algo updates without getting adversely affected.

Search engines are not the WWW. They are a subset of the WWW superset. Search engine algorithms try to get quality signals from the web and constantly endeavour to improve the search results so that they can cater quality search results to the user. Instead of running after the algorithmic updates and changes if we as SEOs focus on what makes the web a better place and implement the quality factors on the websites as per web standards then we can be prepared before the search engines use them in their algorithms.

For example Microformats is not a new concept www.microformats.org domain was registered on 26th January 2005 and since then the site is adding content on how microdata can be added to the websites.

But, it is in 2012 when Google launched the Knowledge Graph that the SEOs started focusing their attention on microdata.

Why did SEOs wait for Google to add structured data to WMT and in their algorithms for it to be called it a standard? Microfromats was already a standard in early 2000 but Google was able to integrate it to its algorithms partially only in 2011. Whether it is your website or the social media presence all the platforms have a web standard to adhere to, I think we should not wait for the search engines to integrate those standards to start using them but logically implement them as we make our online presence felt on that platform.

http://www.W3c.org is online since 1998 and since then has been sharing knowledge regarding web standards. Currently w3c.org has content on :

Web Design and Applications
Web Architecture
Semantic Web
XML Technology
Web of Services
Web of Devices
Browsers and Authoring Tools

W3C laid the foundations of today's Web with standards such as HTML (in 1997) and XML (in 1998). The figure below shows the large number of forward-looking W3C recommendations that emerged from these earlier technologies, and shows the organization's current focus on device-independent data and the promise of a "Semantic Web".

Efforts to achieve the "long-term growth for the Web" that is enshrined in W3C's mission statement, are today guided by the principles of "accessibility, internationalization, device independence, mobile access and quality assurance". In the orange bar of the figure below, these priorities underpin W3C technology recommendations that include standards such as Extensible HyperText Markup Language (XHTML) and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), listed under "Web Applications".

By giving importance only to the Google algorithms we are paving the way for Google algorithms to become the standard and helping it to monopolize the web.

Google in order to get complete social signals data introduced the Google+ social media platform and has integrated authorship markup and local search such a way that everyone is compelled to have a Google+ account if they want to keep their search presence alive.

From the time the term SEO has been coined, SEOs have been executing repair functions on the websites to make them search engine friendly but its high time we move on from thinking about search engines and start thinking about the quality standards which are friendly to the web eco system and build and structure our online presence (earned and owned) as per the web standards before they get accepted by the search engines.

For this change of approach the SEOs also need the support of the website owners who need to accept that SEO cannot be considered purely as advertising but need to accept that SEO means making your site so robust technically that when the search engines trying to crawl and index the site it is able to do so and extract the relevant data despite the frequent algo quakes by the search engines.

Just like a good engineer applies scientific, economic, social, and practical knowledge in order to design, build, and maintain structures, machines, devices, systems, materials and processes. A good SEO needs to apply technical specifications that define and describe aspects of the World Wide Web which directly or indirectly affect the development and administration of web sites and consider include the interoperability, accessibility and usability of web pages and web sites from the WWW perspective. Instead of understanding what Google wants, we need to understand the standard norms of web design and development which will make the web a better place and websites robust technically.

Only when the website, the social media accounts and the paid media are following the ethics and the science of the WWW the web presence will get the needed visits, mentions, shares and the WOM which is expected as the ROI for the whole integrated effort put in. If your SEO focuses only on the search engine aspects like some SEOs did in mid 2000 by focusing on link building only to be attacked by the Penguin update later and you have to restart backwards by putting effort to remove all the links that you built. This reminds me of the snakes and ladders game that we played in childhood where the player reaches almost the finish of the game but has to go back all the way because he comes across a snake just one square before the finish box.

Today it is not only about search engines but also about users who have become more tech savvy and the consumer attention which is getting fragmented with digital channels proliferating, with people having access to devices and the internet on the go 24x7x365. The ability of being constantly connected has made the decision making process directly dependant on the UGC and WOM generated on networking sites by.

A user relies more on what his fan, follower, friend or a person in his circle has to say rather than what the website owner has claimed on his website. Hence the content on your website and the content generated on the various social media platforms by your customers, employees, etc. has to be in sync. for the company credibility to be established which in the long run adds to the trust factor.

SEO ensures the ability of the web presence to get indexed and crawled and get correlated to the targeted search queries. The quality of the content defines the ability of the content being shared further on social media which in the long run establishes the thought leadership and the trust factor. Good quality SEO may get the site page 1 rankings for the targeted keywords but conversions may be a challenge without gaining the trust factor which is an offshoot of the semantic web.

Search engines either integrate web standards like XML sitemaps, Schemas, Meta tags,etc. or they create their own standards like the Google created the Authorship Markup. As an SEO we have to tune and tweak the websites as per the search engine preferences but also focus on the standard procedures specified by the WWW and as an SEO process make the site immune to all the algo changes by focusing on the user and the WWW as a whole.

Google / SEO - 06/24/2013

Matt Cutts Answer To : Does using stock photos on your pages have a negative effect on rankings?

Author : Bharati Ahuja Images are a very important aspect of any website. Images speak louder than words but to select the right images for a website is always a time consuming task. Many opt for the stock photos available on the web. But, does the use of stock photos have a negative impact on search engine rankings. This is what Matt Cutts – the head of the spam team at Google has to say. In August 2010 we wrote a blog Post http://blog.webpro.in/2010/08/type-of-images-you-use-on-your-website.html which shared the following thought regarding this question. A picture speaks louder than words. Images on a website have got their own importance from the search engine’s bot perspective as well as from a visitor’s perspective. Hence the images that we add on each every page should be well thought of and of related to the content. The images add the color coefficient to the web page and also offer text content to the search engine robots in the form of ALT TEXT which is one of the on-page optimization factors for SEO.

handshake isolated on business background (Photo credit: SalFalko)

Usually, we see most of the sites buy ready images from the numerous websites available for the same. We see board room images, people shaking hands denoting partnerships and finalizing deals. These images have perfect models modeling for the pictures and having perfect smiles which may be a dentist’s delight. But, the questions asked in this context are: • Do these images project the right impression of your company? • Is your team so well-groomed (look-wise) as depicted in the website images? • Don’t you think that such images are an insult to the hard working team that you have? I am sure you have the answer for the above questions. No company has a perfect looking team and the atmosphere at work is constantly not all grins and smiles and achievements. To reflect the true image of your company the images put for the product page,’ the team ‘or ‘about us’ page should be the actual pictures of your team members and the actual shop floor pictures of the product being manufactured or the of the office in which your staff is working to make the targets set by you a reality. Having no images on the site is better than having the artificial smiling images. If you just adopt this change I am sure it will add to the credibility of your online business. Focus on the content and value your product and people by putting them forward on the real estate of your web page. Putting the right content and reflecting the true image of your company is like adding the soul to your website. Matt Cutts in the video mentions that maybe in future Google might think about this. Hence according to me letting the website be an actual reflection of the business image you have real time and the website reflecting the actual infra structure and team is always a better option than having stock photos reflecting people and the office place as something totally opposite of what your actual business is or you and your team are. As Matt Cutts mentions in the video original photos may be considered as a quality factor but though they are not a ranking factor now but it is pure logic that having a true identity will surely add to the trust factor in the minds of the visitors and gradually when Google incorporates this in the algorithms then it surely will add on to the online trust factor too. As Google says cater to the user qualitatively and the search engines too are taken care off eventually, when they are ready and have updated their algorithms to add those signals.

SEO - 06/18/2013

The Digital World Challenge Faced By The Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) In 2013

My first guest post for SEJ in September 2010 was about the shift from the traditional media of marketing to the internet media of marketing http://www.searchenginejournal.com/the-traditional-media-of-marketing-to-the-internet-media-of-marketing/23947/ at that time this question of who should manage the digital media which demands a multiple partner proliferation had just started brewing . In 2013 it has reached a turbulent stage as is described by the 2012 CMO Insights survey by Accenture.

The 2012 CMO Insights survey is the third in a series of studies sponsored by Accenture and aimed at understanding the opinions, challenges and points of view of senior marketing executives from around the world.

Results are based on online surveys across 10 countries with 405 senior executives who are key marketing decision makers in their companies.

According to this survey,

Turbulence is the new normal for chief marketing officers (CMOs). The main reason being competing business demands, proliferating channels and partners, and a disconnect between the talent they have and the capabilities they need.

Every digital marketing company I am sure will be able to relate directly to this as we face a real challenge when an overall ROI has to be calculated. It becomes more challenging when there are multiple marketing services providers but the tasks of each of these service providers are mutually inter-dependant for overall success.

For example if SEO , Social Media , Content Creation are handled by different agencies with no clear strategic leader coordinating all these activities then a lot of confusion, chaos and the blame game begins which is not less than a catch22 situation.

According to the survey for business survival CMOs need to:

• Fundamentally change the marketing operating model.

• Build new skills internally.

• Get the right set of partners.

• Drive digital orientation throughout the enterprise.

The Partner Proliferation list according to the survey is as follows:

When all these activities are to be managed in-house it requires a very big budget and specialized skill sets or if outsourced it needs precise coordination. The challenge that the online business owners small or big brands face today is how to the get the maximum ROI from the selected set of the above activities they decide to focus on for a wider and a qualitative digital presence.

From the list above it is very clear that the digital orientation is the most important demand of the day but 19% of the CMOs say that digital orientation suffers from the lack of integration across the business and when it comes to other partners they are weak at execution and delivery.

Hence the need of the hour is to:

· Fundamentally change the marketing operating model

· Build new skills internally

· Get aligned with the right set of partners

· Drive digital orientation throughout the enterprise

The main focus being the digital orientation which is needed throughout the organization. The shift is not only on the media used for marketing but a shift is needed towards a whole new process of thinking from the digital perspective in order to gain a profitable overall ROI .

The whole survey is summarised as below and the full report can be downloaded on http://www.accenture.com/SiteCollectionDocuments/PDF/Accenture-CMO-Insights-Report-PDF.pdf

SEO - 06/09/2013

The Concentric Circles Of Quality Web Presence

Today a quality web presence is the lifeline of every organization. In early 2000 anyone who had a website and had submitted them to search engines took pride on being visible in the search results and proudly printed the website URLs on the business cards and letter heads.

A decade down the line the world wide web is a more sophisticated place with the search engines and the search behaviour both having evolved qualitatively.

Today having a web presence does not mean only having a website. One needs to have a correlated quality web presence across the web. In order to achieve that objective a planned approach and a dedicated team is needed. SEOs and digital marketers have been filling the blogosphere with this message but yet when it comes to the website owners there is an aura of confusion and there is a need to understand the connectivity and correlation among all the online platforms – SEO, Social Media, and Regular Content Creation.

All these activities supplement each other and boost the quality search presence in the long run. One cannot focus only on one activity and then immediately jump to another just because it is being declared as the latest trend by some. This is very misleading for website owners.

Blog posts like SEO Is Dead, Content Marketing is the new SEO, Email is Dead, Social Media marketing is the latest online trend, etc. make the website owners especially the SMBs who have limited budgets skip from investing in one activity to another without actually benefitting from any.

Just the other day an SEO client wrote to us an email strictly mentioning that the coming months were the peak season for their business and we should have an aggressive SEO strategy to increase the traffic to the site.

We started working on their site in Dec. 2012 and till date the increase in organic and overall traffic is as follows . As the site deals in seasonal products the period of comparison is very important.

Hence we took to compare the period of Dec. 2012 to April 2013 (After Our SEO Efforts) v/s Dec. 2011 to April 2012 (When the Site was Optimized by some other company)

As you can see that the SEO efforts have succeeded and the traffic has improved and yes the traffic is targeted and also the site is having a good search presence for most of the keywords. The SEO has done his bit. Now the client has to understand to enhance the quality of this search presence there needs to be an additional focus on content marketing, social media presence, take necessary steps as per the analytics reports, work on call to action, try out A/B testing to improve conversions, etc.

But just because you branch out to an additional activity you stop focusing on the previous one is not a viable solution. The saying, “The rolling stone gathers no moss “, proves to be very true here. Hence a coordinated effort to supplement the benefit from each activity is needed.

All these activities are like the concentric circles drawn around the same centre but with different radii.

Usually people start with developing a website and at the most sign up for an SEO contract and then expect for the overall results to accrue but that is like drawing a small circle or drawing just a part of the circle. The search presence or the SEO circle is one of the concentric circles.

The Concentric Circles Of Long Term Quality Web Presence:

The website is at the centre hence each circle originates from there.
SEO via the on-page, off-page and technical factors increases the probability of the website and content to be found by users who are searching for the relevant information. It takes necessary steps to see that the site is being regularly crawled and indexed by the search engines. SEO also keeps track of the algorithmic updates and helps the site to be as per the norms of the search engines.
Regular quality content creation backed by authorship extends the quality aspect of the search presence and makes the SEO of the site worthwhile and helps develop your online brand and helps to build trust and relationships. Quality content further has the potential to generate valuable user generated content which has a multiplier effect on the quality factor.
Social Media gives the necessary leverage to the content strategies and helps you to listen to the voice of your potential and existing customers and also helps you to understand your competition better. It helps you to establish the online reputation and gives you an online persona.
Google Analytics & Webmaster Tools monitoring gives you the data to measure the ROI. This data helps you to track and monitor the SEO efforts, the social media efforts and also gives you an insight about your website and other crucial metrics to gear the efforts in the right direction.

A website owner can outsource each activity to different service providers or all these can be managed by one company but the correlation between all these activities will determine the actual success. As all these circles have the website as the centre as you draw each circle you go on increasing the circumference of the outreach.

This can be also co related to the structure of an atom where the website is the nucleus and each circle is an orbit which possesses the electrons of influence and outreach.

SEO is a necessity, content marketing is a strategy and social media is the channel.

If just one of the steps mentioned above are executed even with full sincerity, precision and dedication it will yield limited results only. In order to measure the overall ROI first one needs to measure the ROO (Return On Objective) of each outer circle . The objectives achieved with the activities of each circle will determine the total ROI (Return On Investment).

Today the challenge for the website owner is how to keep these activities coordinated and connected and make each task benefit from the other and get an overall boost to the online presence by capitalizing on the digital assets created thereby. It becomes more challenging if these tasks are performed by different services providers.

SEO / Social Media - 06/08/2013

SEO Is A Necessity, Content Creation Is A Strategy And Social Media Is The Channel

Author : Bharati Ahuja

SEO in 2013 is about quality web presence, thought leadership, popularity, user generated content, company blogs , social media, guest blogging and every foot print on the web which helps you in implementing this online. SEO in 2013 has evolved to such a stage that it is a necessity and is finely woven into each and every online activity which helps you determine your search and web presence.

Social media has recently been the most rapidly growing channel which helps you get the much needed outreach whether it is B2C or B2B business.

According to a recent eMarketer survey the statistics are as follows:

As we can see above, FaceBook and Blogging (Content Creation) are the 2 main social media platforms and the major benefits accruing from these platforms are increased exposure and increased traffic.

No brand can afford to neglect the social media presence as the benefits which can get accrued via social media are multifold and again are woven into each and every online marketing activity which any brand decides to opt for.

SEO is a necessity, social media is the channel and the content creation strategy determines your online brand identity.

As we can see above the benefits from social media mentioned above are interdependent and one benefit leads to another.

Social Media presence helps you to get increased exposure , this increased exposure increases the inbound traffic, the increased traffic and content on your site helps develop loyal fans which spreads a good WOM (Word Of Mouth) and generates leads, increase business partnerships and thereby increase sales. All the footprints and social signals created in the process give a boost to the SEO which in turn again generates all these benefits via search presence.

In theory this sounds very simple and logical but when put in practice a lot of effort, insight and an eye for defined goals is needed else all the time, money and effort can just go down the drain.

Bing / Google / SEO - 05/29/2013

What Is Responsive Web Design? Why We Should Opt For It?

Author : Bharati Ahuja

What Is Responsive Web Design?

Responsive web design (RWD) is a web design approach aimed at crafting sites to provide an optimal viewing experience across a wide range of devices -from desktop computer monitors, tablets to mobile phones. Responsive web design is the latest web design trend of 2013 and becoming a standard practice for the web design industry .

A website developed using Responsive Web Design adapts the design of the page depending on the device it is going to be viewed. Hence, RWD uses fluid proportion based grids, flexible images and CSS3 media queries.

The fluid grid concept calls for page element sizing to be in relative units like percentages, rather than absolute units like pixels or points.
Flexible images are also sized in relative units, so as to prevent them from displaying outside their containing element.
Media queries allow the page to use different CSS style rules based on characteristics of the device the site is being displayed on, most commonly the width of the browser.

Why Is Responsive Web Design Becoming The Hottest Web Design Trend Of 2013 ?

The Forrester Research Mobile Advertising Forecast, 2013 To 2018 (US) predicts that mobile ad spend (smartphones plus tablets) will represent more than 29% of the total online ad spend in the US by 2018.

According to eMarketer the devices used to access the internet by US consumers from July 2011 to Jan 2013 were as follows:

As you can see the desktops use was reduced 3 %, the use of tablets increased by 6%, and the use of mobile phones increased by 10.5% which means an over all increase by 16.5% for hand held devices.

The time spent on Mobile Internet by US Mobile Users in the first quarter of 2013 by activity is as follows:

As we can see that email and social networking are at the top which directly is related to business hence as the smart phones become smarter and people become more dependent on them no company website can ignore responsive design in the coming future.

If the use of various devices by the user is increasing on a regular basis and the choice of the device depends on the place the user is surfing from, then surely the website has to get adapted to the device and display the right content according to the size of the display unit of the device.

According to Jeffrey Veen (The Vice President of products for Adobe):

“Day by day, the number of devices, platforms, and browsers that need to work with your site grows. Responsive web design represents a fundamental shift in how we’ll build websites for the decade to come.” Earlier to assure a good browsing experience the web designers had to keep in mind the browser and accordingly write code to assure the correct display for the users. Now it is about having one site for screens of various devices used commonly.

According to - Jeremy Keith :

“Stop Thinking in Pages. Start Thinking in Systems”.

Jeremy Keith in the video on http://vimeo.com/50745034 explains some of the following points and much more:

Responsive Web Design requires the rewiring of our brains to think about designing for the web just as we started thinking differently when we started using CSS and separated the content from the design.
Responsive design is not about taking your existing device specific design and shrinking it for smaller devices. One needs to start from scratch.
We need to think about content outwards rather than about canvas inwards as on the web we don’t know the canvas. Content over here is not necessarily copy , text or words but can be anything from a task or a user flow like the check out function on a shopping site or a post to a forum page, etc. are all fundamental units of content.
Prior to Responsive web design visual designers sort of dictated the system requirements to the user like the browser used, internet speed specifications , javascript capabilities, etc. but responsive design is more like a dialogue between the designer and the user and ensures that the website meets the user wherever he is.
If you want to be future friendly one of the best techniques is to be backwards compatible.
He ends the presentation with a constructive thought that responsive design is not about mobile but about the web.

Responsive Web Design And SEO: Does Google Support RWD?

Yes, Google supports Responsive Web Design

1. Google supports sites which use same URLs for different device specific layouts i.e the HTML is the same for every device but only the CSS changes as per the display required for the specific device.

2. Or, if the URLs remain the same but the HTML and the CSS change as per the user agent.

3. Or, have separate sites for mobile and web.

4. Be sure not to block the crawling of any Googlebot (i.e for the web or mobile) for the page assets (CSS, javascript, and images) using robots.txt or otherwise. Being able to access these external files fully will help Google algorithms detect your site's responsive web design configuration and treat it appropriately.

5. Googlebot and Googlebot-Mobile should should automatically be able to detect this setup while crawling the page assets like HTML, CSS, Javascript.

6. The Vary HTTP header helps Googlebot discover your mobile-optimized content faster, as a valid Vary HTTP header is one of the signals Google uses to crawl URLs that serve mobile-optimized content.

7. If the responsive design servers use different URLs for desktops and mobiles then on the desktop page, add a special link rel="alternate" tag pointing to the corresponding mobile URL. This helps Googlebot discover the location of your site's mobile pages.On the mobile page, add a link rel="canonical" tag pointing to the corresponding desktop URL.

8. This rel="canonical" tag on the mobile URL pointing to the desktop page is required to avoid duplicate content issues which have an adverse effect on the SEO.

9. Google supports the rel="alternate" annotation for the desktop pages in Sitemaps as follows but the required rel="canonical" tag on the mobile URL should still be added to the mobile page's HTML.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9" xmlns:xhtml="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">

<url>

<loc>http://www.example.com/page-1/</loc>

<xhtml:link rel="alternate" media="only screen and (max-width: 640px)" href="http://m.example.com/page-1" />

</url>

</urlset>

Is HTML5 The Right Choice For Responsive Web Design?

Matt Groener, Intel Developer Zone development team manager says:

"HTML5 is the backbone of the new and interactive features of responsive Web design,"
"Developing in HTML5 benefits all of the ecosystems because you get to market faster,"
"You don't create an iOS app and then, when time permits, bring it to Android or Windows. You can do it in any or all ecosystems at exactly the same time."
“It will only get better for developers as HTML5 matures, becomes faster and adds more features that put it on par with native application development. The future is more responsive rather than less responsive. I don’t see that ever changing.”

Responsive Web Design with HTML5 and CSS3 from Coca Akat

Don’t you think it is high time to opt for Responsive Web Design and let your virtual presence flow to fit any device the user has?

What do you say?

Google - 05/18/2013

Company Logos In Google SERPs using " Organization Mark Up"

Author : Bharati Ahuja

Google launched the support for organization mark up as per schema.org . This mark up is for organization logos which is a way to connect a site with its iconic image.

For example, a business whose homepage is www.example.com can add the following markup using visible on-page elements on their homepage:

Markup like this is a strong signal to Google algorithms to show this image in preference over others, for example when we show Knowledge Graph on the right hand side based on users’ queries.

In fact lately I had observed many people adding the rel = “me” tag on static sites and by way of cross-linking their profile to their Google+ page the relevant image was getting displayed in SERPs.

This totally beats the purpose of the authorship mark up because in such cases I usually observed the site owner pics. which were getting displayed. As the publishership mark up did not get the green signal from Google this organization markup will surely help to keep a check on this and help the content to get correlated to the rightful authors which will in turn establish their thought leadership and of course the authority will also get passed on to the organization for which they write.

But the Rich Snippets Tool currently not displaying the logo in the preview although it detects the structured data on the URL tested.

Google / SEO - 05/16/2013

Google I/O 2013 : Just Say “OK Google” To Search Hands Free in Chrome

Amit Singhal presented the future search experience which had a focus on the following 3 aspects of search:

Answer
Converse
Anticipate what the user might ask and offer the answers before the user can ask further questions.

He said, all this is possible due to the Knowledge graph which Google announced last year. Now Knowledge Graph is available in Polish, Turkish, Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese languages.

Google has updated its voice search feature with what it calls a "no-interface" approach for Chrome and Chrome OS.

Singhal revealed that there are now over five hundred and seventy million entities in the Knowledge Graph.

Singhal said, “Last year when we launched the Knowledge Graph, it was a huge advance in search technology. Knowledge graph enabled Google to move beyond keywords and understand real world entities.

The user can ask questions to Google like a friend and Google will answer back. This kind of verbal command is already being used by Google Glass and the command has to start with “OK Google....”

The conversational voice search and hot wording experience is soon coming on chrome and what is different is that Google says you’ll be able to continue the “conversation” to keep searching and it will understand where you are and when you ask how far is the airport from “here” then Google already knows without having you to say name of the place.

View the demo by Johanna Wright - VP Search And Assist Mobile at Google

Google - 05/15/2013

Penguin 2.0 And What Is In Store For SEO In The Next Few Months For Google

Matt Cutts had been announcing on Twitter lately that there soon is going to be a major algorithmic update and yesterday the WebMaster video by him gave an idea about what to expect out of it in the near future.

Matt Said:

Google is on the verge of launching a new generation of Penguin updates i.e Penguin 2.0 which is more comprehensive than Penguin 1.0 which will go deeper to combat spam.
If you pay for Ads. Then those ads. should not flow PageRank. There should be a clear and conspicuous disclosure if an Ad. is displayed on the site so people know that it is a paid display.
Search queries that tend to be spammy in nature, such as [pay day loans] or some pornographic related queries, will somewhat be less likely to be a target for Google’s search spam team at the moment but will surely get Google's attention soon.
Google has some nice ideas to deny value to link spam and Google is working on a more sophisticated system for link analysis.
Google hopes to detect hacked sites better and communicate with webmasters better to help clean up the hacked sites via webmaster tools and many other resources.
If you have been doing high quality SEO you should not worry about these changes.
Google is doing a better job now to detect authority in a particular space and will make sure that they rank higher.
Google is looking for ways to “soften” the impact of the Panda Update for sites which are found in the grey area and have some high degree of quality signals.
Once you see a cluster of results of one domain then you will see less of that site in the results as you go deeper in the results so that they can keep the results as diverse as possible.
People who are doing link spam and black hat are less likely to show up by the end of summer after this update and Matt Cutts thinks that this will give small businesses and webmaster following white hat rank better.