Month: November 2017

The Latest Research Reveals Only 7% of People Actually Trust Google’s Featured Snippets

Posted on by Mario

Only 7% of People Actually Trust Google's Featured Snippets_YWF

The word “snippet” surely carries a number of meanings, according to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, the definition you’ll find is, “a small part, piece or thing; especially: a brief quotable passage.” So, what does that mean in the context of marketing?

In marketing, it could be an excerpt from a larger piece of content in the form of a blog post. Moreover, it could also be a fragment from an e-book used as marketing copy or it could pertain to search engine results. Regarding the search result, you surely want to have a featured snippet that works well in search engine results. In the following explanation, we are going to discuss about what people think of the featured snippet; what is it, and can it be trusted? If you are working in an SEO service agency or if you are one of the people who are curious to find out more about featured snippet, you can keep reading this article.

What Is a Featured Snippet?

In general, a featured snippet is a summarized response to a search engine query that appears on top of results. The text is taken from a page’s content that Google believes will be the best answer to your question, and is displayed with the page title and URL.

For example, you are looking for an answer on Google; you will see the page  used for the featured snippet usually shows up as the top-ranked one in the search engine result page (SERP) for this query. However, in some cases, that isn’t always the case; in fact, Search Engine Land recently reported that Google is testing the option to remove featured snippet pages from the following results altogether.

So, it will be possible to get an answer from the featured snippet, which is in the #2 position. This shows that a featured snippet does not always equal a top rank in the SERP.

Do People Trust the Featured Snippet?

If you are planning to snippetize your content, you should keep in mind that the featured snippet isn’t perfect. In fact, a research which is conducted in Australia, the UK, and the U.S. shows that only 7% of respondents truly trust featured snippet results. This study compares that with the 21% who never trust them, and the 36% which are neutral about them.


Why Is this the Case?

To find out, let’s take an example, such as writing for a question on Google, “why are dogs so great?”

As the answer, Google will show you the results above, in which the featured snippet will serve you with some nice information about the history of dogs becoming domestication, but unfortunately it doesn’t explain anything, such as about what specifically makes them such great little creatures.

This thing also happens to other queries, for example, you are searching for, “How long does it take to make caramelized onion?”


In the featured snippet, it clearly reads, “about 5 minutes”. The text was actually pulled from an article, in which the writers indicate the time it takes to make caramelized onions. Unfortunately, the text quoted in the featured snippet was quoted from an unreliable source where a recipe pointed out for its incorrect cooking times.

Even though it is a low risk query since no adverse condition will happen once you undercook onions, it will surely upset the readers who try it out.

What if the inaccurate featured snippet results carry greater consequences, such as when a featured snippet explains totally wrong information about the history and the current events? It will surely cause a risk of widespread information, right? However, most of the examples featured in it have been corrected.

In other words, you still have a good reason why you need a featured snippet, especially as a marketer, you could invest some time into optimizing your pages for the snippet. Of course, a featured snippet that is meant here is a featured snippet that comes from the accurate and truthful information, since they’ve shown to beat out even the #1 ranking results in the SERP below them.

That’s what you need to know about featured snippets! Just like the other algorithms, Google will also improve many things related to the featured snippet front for a better performance in the future.

8 Excellent Tips for Improving Your Low Quality Content Creation

Posted on by Mario

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Nowadays, content marketing has become the forefront for all businesses. No wonder that many businesses and SEO services are always looking for ways to create effective content that can stand out from others and bring you closer to your goals. However, in many times your content marketing seems like it doesn’t produce you a satisfying result. So, what should you do if you happen to come across low quality content on your site? Is it better to delete it or improve upon it? Well, according to Google’s John Mueller, in general, when it comes to low quality content, that’s something where we see your website is providing something but it’s not really that fantastic. Therefore, it will be better to improve it since it will save your time instead of creating a totally brand new content. In the information below, we provide you with 8 ways that can enhance your content creation which hopefully can increase your traffic and satisfy your readers. Here are the first eight of those tips.

Scheduling a Writing Process

Creating a structured writing process not only can help you save time, but it also makes you become more productive. Besides, people nowadays are thirsty with information, so the need for content creation is terribly high.  Therefore, you have to know the best process that can help you focus on content creation.

For example, putting aside all distractions, you can manage a set block of time on your calendar for content writing. Furthermore, you may need to take a break or get someone else read it for a fresh perspective.

Creative Brainstorming

Working with other team members will help you a lot in collecting a new content idea. Therefore, make sure that you set aside time for this brainstorming moments with other team members. Furthermore, you may realize that sometimes an idea seems to pop up in your mind every time, if this often happens to you, we recommend you keeping a notebook which you can use to jot down any ideas that comes to your mind. Whatever ideas that comes to your mind may offer you a new perspective on your content goals, so just write them down.

Grabbing the Reader’s Attention

We know that the competition to draw user’s attention in the digital world is quite challenging. The last study says that the attention span is limited to no more than 8 seconds, not to mention a huge number of content available online, so the best solution is to think about a formula that can make your site stands out from the rest. The important point is to keep your users reading, or watching, or listening to your content.

Exploring Different Types of Content

Mixing up your content marketing formats is a great way to convince users to pay more attention to your content marketing. You can see several content types below, in which each of them serves a different purpose.

Images

Images are still the most popular type of a visual content, since nothing can offer a better impact on a message and they certainly create a memorable experience. Besides, it is easier for human to process an image, as 65% of people are visual learners, so you will increase a greater possibility for your content to be remembered when you put relevant images in it.

Infographics

Infographics are graphic visual representations of information; the data and information are provided in such a way to present information quickly and clearly. This method can also make complex information look more appealing and shareable.  In fact, a research shows that readers tend to spend more time processing an infographic, compared with a written text, and that’s what makes them engaging. Besides, infographics are more shareable than other types of content and usually get liked three times more than any other visual content.

Video

Over the last two years, video content is also considered as one of the most popular visual types of contents, a trend which has been boosted by social media. According to Cisco, videos will make up 80% of all internet traffic; this shows how video is getting more important. A video is a powerful tool, especially if you want to explain about, share tips and “how-to” ideas, build trust, increase management, and add value.

GIFs

GIFs is a not a new type of content, in fact, it has been developed more than 30 years ago. However, many still believe that it is a quick way to share a visual content that straddles the line between an image and a video.

In fact, GIFs offer benefits that you might never obtain if you are using an image or a video, since GIF is more powerful than an image, yet they are also smaller in size than a video. Besides, GIF is a perfect choice if you want to show your casual side as it is usually funny and informal.

Quality and Quantity of Your Content

In the era of ‘bite-sized’ content, many content marketers think that it seems more logical to serve readers with shorter content, but is that always true?

The answer reveals that the length of your content won’t guarantee the success of your content. In other words, readers still value long-form content as long as it is interesting. Besides, the length of your content also defines the depth of the topic you’re covering. In fact, long content is great for increasing awareness, building trust and offering value.

Clear Structure

Having a clear and organized content will surely be appreciated by your readers. Therefore, you don’t have to create a big chunk of sentences, but make sure that your content can be optimized for all devices. Therefore, we recommend that you test your content on all devices before you publish it.

Bullet point is also another way that can allow readers to get back to the things they need to remember from what they’ve just read. However, you have to be careful, since too many bullet points can result in the opposite result.

Formatting your Content

Formatting is slightly different than structuring, it has more something to do with the way you present your actual content rather than the way you organize the sentences. These two are important in their own way, with the ultimate goal being to convince readers to spend more time on your content.

If you want to do the formatting, you have to pay attention to the headings. It allows you to divide your content into logical sections and don’t be afraid to use plenty of them. You can also use a range of different header sizes to label certain sections of your content with subheadings. In fact, headings can make your content structure easier to parse and therefore helping to highlight important bits. Furthermore, by this way, you are also going to help your content rank well in search.

Setting a Goal for Your Content

It is useful to set a goal before diving into content writing. By having a clear goal, one can focus on producing content. Once your post is published and you’re tracking metrics, you can return to the initial goal and see whether you’ve come close to achieving it or not. Bear in mind that you should not turn your content into an automatic machine of business jargon while setting a goal for your content.

The points above are given to enhance your content marketing performance, if you have had some contents before, you can always fix your content according to the 8 tips above. Hopefully, by applying the tips above, you can see the difference immediately.

All About WordPress’ Protection: How Secure is WordPress?

Posted on by Mario

Is-WordPress-Secure

As one of the most used websites in the world, WordPress has mostly been trusted by people for many purposes; however, many web developers are still wondering about whether or not WordPress is secure, since it surely has its flaws too. It is definitely not only the WordPress team’s responsibility to protect the underlying core of WordPress, but the responsibility also ultimately falls on your shoulders too.

Since WordPress is generally discussed online, consequently, the weaknesses of the platform are widely known. This is why hackers can easily target WordPress websites. Therefore, it is important to learn about how secure a WordPress is. Let’s figure out the explanation below.

What You Need to Know About the WordPress Project and Security

Below are things that you may need to know, regarding the WordPress Project and what they are doing to maintain the security of the core.

The WordPress Security Team

The WordPress security team is responsible for identifying security risks in the core. Aside from that, they are also good at reviewing potential issues with the third-party-submitted themes or plugins and then making recommendations on how they can harden their tools or patch known breaches. They also work on their own to identify and resolve issues, even though they may need some other experts in the field sometimes.

How WordPress identifies Security Risks

There are several ways that are used by the security risks to identify and resolute process work.

  • An issue can be identified by anyone. It can be someone from the security team or from outside of the team. For non-project members, you can communicate these detected issues by emailing security @wordpress.org.
  • A report is logged and the security team acknowledges receipt of it.
  • To verify that the threat is valid, team members need to work together on a walled-off and private server.
  • Then, they can track, test, and repair any security flaws detected.
  • After that, the security patch then gets added to the next minor WordPress release.
  • If you have a mild problem, WordPress will notify you within the WordPress dashboard whenever an automatic release occurs.
  • On the other hand, the release will go out immediately and WordPress.org will announce it on the News page of the website in more urgent issues.

Even though WordPress doesn’t always announce these security patches immediately, they will always take immediate action to resolve problems.

A Note about Automatic Updates

WordPress is able to push minor updates automatically to all websites, since version 3.7. In this way, the WordPress security team can get urgent patches out as timely as possible without having to wait for users to accept and make the update on each of their websites.

However, as a WordPress user, you can opt out of these automatic core updates. In fact, if this happens to you, please keep in mind that this may put your site at additional risk, especially when you don’t have time to monitor all your sites all the time for the latest and greatest update.

WordPress Plugins and Themes Security

Even though it may sound impossible to manage the  tens of thousands of plugins and themes out there, at least WordPress can keep a close eye on them to ensure nothing seriously insecure slips through the cracks.

When a security issue is detected, the WordPress Project is the team, responsible for working with developers. However, before that, there is a team of volunteers assigned to review each and every theme or plugin submitted to WordPress. This team is specially formed to work with developers and ensure that best practices are followed.

Nevertheless, there will always be security vulnerabilities found and that’s why we need security team to step in to:

  • Provide documentation for WordPress developers on plugin and theme development and security best practices.
  • Monitor plugins and themes for potential security flaws. Any issues detected will then be brought to the attention of the developer.
  • Remove harmful plugins or themes from the directory if the developers are unresponsive or uncooperative.

Later, when those security patches are available, WordPress will then notify its users via the WordPress admin.

OWASP’s Top 10

With the purpose of protecting organizations from software and programs that could potentially do harm, the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) Foundation was created back in 2001. What you may be surprised to learn is that the WordPress Project aims to abide by OWASP’s Top at all times.

Below are the top 10 list comprised by the OWASP of known and very serious security risks. By using the list, the WordPress security team uses those trends to define their own top 10 list of ways to defend the core. Basically, their goal is to protect the core from the following risks:

  1. User account management abuse
  2. Unauthenticated access requests to the WordPress admin
  3. Unwanted or unauthorized redirects
  4. Exposing users’ private data
  5. Requests for access to direct object reference
  6. Server misconfiguration
  7. Unauthorized code injection
  8. Cross-site scripting from unauthorized users
  9. Cross-site request forgeries whereby hackers misuse WordPress nonces
  10. Corrupted third-party plugins, themes, frameworks, libraries, etc.

Summary

Knowing that there is a dedicated team working that keeps the WordPress core secure at all times will surely let WordPress users feel at ease. Still, we have to do what we can do to secure it from every angle, since no matter how good the WordPress Project is at monitoring and securing the platform, hackers will find a way in.