Like many webmasters, I sometimes obsess a bit too much on how my webpage will show up in the search engines. To turn Google searches into visitors, I tweak and fine-tune my <title> and <meta name="description"> tags so that they’ll stand out in the search result pages.
To do this I use a Google SERP Preview tool. There are many great options out there, from SEOmofo’s iconic tinkling lad to the polished tool from Mangools. But they were never 100% to my liking. I wanted to be able to see both a mobile and desktop preview, something clean and not too opinionated. After severely underestimating how much work it would be, I decided to build one to my own liking. Some 65 commits later —dozens of JavaScript and responsive CSS woes— I can introduce to you: SERPcomposer.com
“There are many like it, but this one is mine”. Give it a whirl next time you’re optimizing your tags, I think you’ll like it as well:
Dual view for mobile & desktop SERPs
Optimized for all screen sizes. The form stays sticky in view on laptops and the previews elegantly shrinks down for smaller screens
A “Fetch Data” link that pings the site in question to autofill the title/meta
Autofill the fields with GET parameters ?url=, &title=, &description=
I’ve developed a teeny little browser extension called Google SERP Counter. It does only one thing: It adds the position of a result next to the search results on Google. This is what that looks like:
The extension supports variable results per pages and keeps track of the last visited page to display the correct count.
Best way to use it?
In your Google Search Settings you can change how many results display per page. I have it set at the highest of 100 per page. In chrome://extensions/ you can also tick the “Allow in incognito” box (Extension contains no tracking scripts) so it works in Incognito mode. Lastly, you might want to right-click on the extension icon in the Omnibar and click “Hide in Chrome Menu”.
Now that you are all set-up you’ll never have to count again! This is especially useful when analyzing SERPs, and you’ve jumped halfway down the page with a “Find” command.
UPDATE: This extension has been deprecated as off 2022-07-04. Thanks for using my extension these years!
v1.6.1 (2022-01-18)
Skip featured snippets (position #0)
Fix counter not working with indented results
v1.6.0 (2022-01-17)
Rewrite visibility detector for serp features like PAA
Fix counter not displaying due to new html layout
v1.5.0 (2022-01-10)
Fixed: Counter not working with “People also asked” box with new serp layout
Changed Hex color to match dark theme URL color
Added support for Swiss locale (About 282’000’000 results)
v1.4.1 (2021-01-17)
Replace innerHTML with textContent
v1.4.0 (2021-01-16)
Fixed: Extension not working after class name change
v1.3.2 (2020-05-07)
Add user-select: none; to element so the position doesn’t get copied when selecting
v1.3.1 (2020-02-27)
Set featured snippet to position #1 (previously #0)
Fixed bug: Incorrect count on pages > 1
v1.3.0 (2020-01-16)
Added support for new SERP layout
Fixed bug: extension not working for queries without “results per page” box, now defaulting to 10
v1.2.6 (2019-11-15)
Fixed an issue with results being counted incorrectly due to invisible PAA box results
Added support for SERP layout w/ favicons and moved URL
Renamed files to include extension name
v1.2.5 (2019-11-05)
Fixed bug: featured snippets are now again counted as result #0
Moved .js-counter 2px down for better alignment with smaller titels
v1.2.4 (2019-10-20)
Fixed incorrect counting with “People also ask” results, hopefully a permanent solution this time.
v1.2.3 (2019-01-07)
Fixed an issue where the count was wrong for locales using a space as a thousand separator
v1.2.2 (2018-09-26)
Don’t count “People also ask” results
v1.2.1 (2018-09-20)
Set featured snippet to results to #0
More accurate count by keeping track of the last page and last count using localStorage
This is especially useful with pages that switch the number of results (e.g. 6 results on page 1, 10 on page 2)
v1.1.0 (2018-03-08)
The alignment of Google’s “People also search for” box has been fixed
Cryptocurrencies are very interesting to follow. Not only because it’s the future of payments but also because it’s still in relative early stages.
If you look at the average altcoin website you’ll find a technical website filled with jargon and without a clear unique selling proposition. You’ll be lucky to find a technical whitepaper and a link to the BitcoinTalk page. It’s certainly not targeted towards the ‘beginner’ in the crypto world and instead to other developers and power users. Plenty of room to improve in the coming years if you ask me.
This also shows in the choice for top level domain names. While most business would rather change the name than register an .info this is not uncommon for cryptocurrencies. To see if there are some more uncommon TLD’s in the crypto world I put together a list of the most popular extensions based on coins found on CoinMarketCap.
To test if Google does any Optical Character Recognition (OCR) on images found on websites and uses that information in it’s index I wanted to run a small experiment. So I published an article with new images contain some simple text and waited to see if the page would rank for the words on the images.
