5 SEO Trends for 2013

04. December 2012 · Write a comment · Categories: Google SEO, SEO · Tags: , ,

 

 

2012’s most attention grabbing digital marketing headlines were once again reserved for social media news and trends. But there were also huge changes in the world of search marketing and SEO, driven by Google’s Penguin and Panda updates.

The impact of Penguin and Panda is still being felt, with a number of websites almost disappearing from the rankings, and several of the less ethical SEO companies struggling to recover from the collapse in effectiveness of their link networks and content spinning efforts. Overall, though, the changes at Google are really positive. They will clean up results pages and let websites that invest in useful content reap the benefits.

Although search in 2013 will no doubt experience more changes (will we see Polar Bears at some stage?), what are the key trends that we anticipate heading into next year?

Algorithm changes and challenges

Google algorithm changes will continue to have an impact on SEO during 2013. But core considerations for businesses will remain the same. The rise of authorship is important and businesses will implement relevant changes to impact search results. Ultimately, there will be more emphasis on the individual as a source of authority, contributing to the idea of a website as a whole passing authority. We’ll also see increasing investment in content, thanks to the rise and rise of social signals. Finally, Google has recently introduced the ability to disavow links in Webmaster Tools. This will create hot and bothered debate about how offending links can be identified and whether or not they should be discredited. You have been warned!

Tag management, analytics and CRO will become prized assets in 2013’s stop/start economy

Due to economic pressures, smart marketers invest more in multichannel tagging, web analytics and conversion rate optimisation (CRO). With marketing teams coming under ever increasing pressure to identify what’s driving online sales, gaining a deeper understanding of the customer journey has become more important than ever.

With multiple channels contributing to sales, it’s crucial to be able to identify which channel is having the most significant impact; which is where multichannel tagging comes in. Web analytics platforms such as Google Analytics (GA) have become increasingly sophisticated over the last year, enabling an intelligent understanding of the complete purchase funnel, drilling down into detailed click attribution analysis and insight. Such a thorough understanding means the wheat can be separated from the chaff so that budgets can be allocated more efficiently. But when crucial tools such as GA are perceived as free, marketers have a history of undervaluing their use and under-investing in proper implementation. This is very short sighted. Insightful analytics are the best way to prove the positive ROI impact of search, as much as any other online marketing activity. Such solid ‘proof’ is probably the only way to secure increased search budgets from purse string holders during next year’s challenging economic climate.

Behavioural retargeting will grow beyond display to encompass search

Consumers are now used to being haunted by previous searches in the form of display-centred behavioural retargeting. But 2013 will mark the point where retargeting becomes even more effective by catching people at a later – and therefore more conversion-friendly – point in the buying cycle. This is big news for brands as it’s a move that is likely to impact e-commerce in a big way.

Google Shopping… no such thing as a free shop

Amongst the many developments that we are likely to see from Google, one that is likely to have a significant impact on digital marketing budgets in 2013 is the fact that the search giant’s internet marketplace – Google Shopping – is moving from an entirely free model to a paid-for basis. Currently rolling out in the US, it’s inevitable that businesses in the UK will be charged for Google Shopping services at some point next year.

Big media agencies will lose their hold on search marketing

September 2012 saw UK digital media professionals frothing at the mouth over Shicklegate – a bitter resignation email from an MEC employee that exploded over both digital and traditional media channels. The incident gave client-side marketers an insight into the working culture at some big media agencies, where the fact that digital marketing teams are frequently completely overstretched is often hidden under the cover of big media buying prowess. Shicklegate could mark a turning point in the client-agency relationship, where clients will want more reassurance that their SEO and PPC accounts are being cared for by a dedicated team of specialists able to invest the time that effective search marketing really requires to make it effective.

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Negative SEO

30. April 2012 · Write a comment · Categories: Negative SEO · Tags: , ,

 

The idea behind negative SEO is that rather than doing good, positive things that will promote signals in the search engines that bump up your rankings, there are ways to do bad, terrible, negative things. Now, obviously you could do these on your own sites, but hopefully you’re smart enough not to do that. There may be things that other site owners, webmasters, marketers, or black hat SEO’s, mostly we’re talking about black hat SEO’s, spammers, and even people doing very illegal things to bring down your website in the rankings or to even take your website offline.

There are classic types of things, like malware, hacks, and injections. So this is the first one I’m going to talk about. Basically, what we’re saying here is that you’ve got your site, it has some pages on here, and hackers may find security vulnerabilities in your site, in your FTP logins. It may be a WordPress install. Earlier this year I had a hacker essentially come in and inject spam and malware onto my personal blog at RandFishkin.com/blog. The idea is that they all inject spam, links to spam sometimes, sometimes very subtly. They will make changes to your site. One of the classic examples of this is someone going and editing your robots.txt file to block Google bot or to restrict all IPs from a certain range, or those kinds of things. Obviously, that’s going to take your site out of the search engines. Or inject viruses or malware that will install itself on computers that visit you.

Unfortunately, I was actually visiting MozCation.com, which Gianluca Fiorell, one of our Pro members from Spain – he’s Italian but from Spain – had set up last year to promote MozCation in Barcelona, in Spain. Unfortunately, it looked like some spammers had injected some malware on that site, and it had been on there a little while. I think he’s taken care of it now, but these are the types of problems. What you’ll see is a download will go into your cache, and sometimes Microsoft Security Essentials will alert you that that’s happened, hopefully if you’ve got it installed. So this is something to watch out for. You want to close those security holes.

The other kinds of things to watch out for is spam reporting. Sometimes a lot of people, unfortunately, in the SEO-sphere still do manipulative kinds of link building. Obviously, most of the people who watch Whiteboard Friday are not in that group, but some of you probably are. Maybe you buy a few directory listings. You go on Fiverr and you buy some cheap links. You find some spam through some forums that potentially works. You’re doing sorts of things that are on the grey hat/black hat borderline, in terms of link acquisition, and sometimes you will see that your competitors might spam report you. So this guy’s going to go over to Google and maybe he’ll leave a threat at the webmaster forums, or he’ll send it through a spam report in his Google Webmaster Tools. A lot of this spam reporting, I think they said they get tens of thousands of spam reports each month, I believe it was. Actually, fewer than I’d expect, but a lot of people do report spam to Google. These might be your competitors. These might be other webmasters. They could just be random people on the Internet who are like, “Why isn’t this site ranking here?. This looks terrible. I don’t like this.”

When this happens, Google might take a closer look at your backlinks, and obviously this might bring you down. There are arguments about the ethics inside the search engine industry. Personally, I think that removing low quality crap from the Internet is all of our jobs, and I like to be part of that. I think that it’s a good thing to make the Internet a better place, and if you’re not making the Internet a better place, I hope that you’re not doing web marketing because it makes the rest of our industry look bad.

However, certainly reasonable minds can disagree. Aaron Wall, from SEO Book, who I highly respect, who I grew up with in this industry and think the world of, takes a complete opposite view. He thinks that because I support disclosing spam and manipulation to Google and to search engines that this makes me a bad person. That’s too bad. That’s frustrating, but I think reasonable people can disagree. Certainly whatever angle you are on, on this, you should at least be aware that this stuff happens and know that it’s a potential risk, particularly if you’re doing highly manipulative things.

The last one I want to talk about is actually the biggest one and probably the most important and the most salient and relevant to what we’ve been talking about today. That is pointing nasty links to your website. Now this has been something that a lot of webmasters have been discussing actively over the last couple of weeks in this sphere, essentially kicked off by a forum thread on Traffic Power Forum. I haven’t previously spent a lot of time there, but it’s a very active forum populated by a wide mix of white hat folks, grey hat folks, some pretty dark black hat folks, which I’ll show you in a minute.

Two members there, Jammie and Pixelgrinder, hit two different websites. One is called SEOFastStart.com, that’s owned by Dan Thies. Dan, of course, early keyword research guru in the SEO space, big industry mover and shaker. Spoke at a lot of the early search engine strategies conferences. I’ve met him a number of times, really good guy, solid guy. He complimented Matt Cutts, the Google Webspam Chief, on the search quality team. He complimented him over Twitter on knocking out some spam. Some people on the forum felt that it was, I don’t know, in poor taste. Right? Essentially they felt that because he was being complimentary to Google for kicking out webspam, that he should then be the target of this negative SEO. The other site was NegativeSEO.me, which was essentially a website offering services to get someone banned from the search indices, and this a little concerning in and of itself.

Now the thing that’s interesting about these sites, and Dan admitted this about SEOFastStart. Not a very big site. Right? Not a lot of great brand or link signals. Potentially some small amounts of not wholly white hat types of activities already happening around these sites. So we’re not talking about (a) big brand sites, or (b) sites that have no idea about the SEO world and aren’t doing anything manipulative and are clean as the driven snow. These are a little off that track. These were both hit by these guys, at least presumably, according to the forum thread, and lost a lot of their rankings.

When I say hit, what I mean is this type of thing happens. So here’s your site.com up here. Right? Essentially, what’s going on is you’ve got some nice white hat, editorially given, earned links, high quality stuff, and that’s great. Then there’s some kind of this dark cloud of black hattery, spammy, manipulative posts. They talked about a number of things, XRumer blasts, buying links on Fiverr, buying links from some link networks, pointing some links that they had seen get hit on other sites at this site, and essentially trigger this loss of rankings. Now, they didn’t get banned from the index, but they fell from, I think Dan Thies’ site in particular fell from ranking #1, for his personal name, to number30, 35, somewhere around there, and hits like that similar across both these sites.

The second example was another forum thread started by a user with the user name, Negative SEO, and that was for the domain JustGoodCars.com. Now again, Just Good Cars unfortunately looks like they were doing a little bit of things that might be construed as manipulative, even prior to this attack on them by the Negative SEO guy. Some links that were of questionable sources or how they were acquired, and then a big network of websites that were all pointing back and forth to each other from many different pages on these many different sites. This guy took it upon himself to say, well they were . . . I guess this website had been complaining in the Google webmaster forums about some other sites outranking them, so this person took it upon themselves to do some pretty nasty, evil stuff.

Now I can’t support this in any way. I’m frustrated that unfortunately this is a part of our world. But you should be aware of it, because what they did was creative, almost to the point of ingenuity, but definitely dark and evil, maybe even bordering on illegal depending on the legalities. I’m not really sure. Here’s what they said they did. Of course, I can’t prove that they actually did these things, but here’s what they said they did. So they did go do a lot of manipulative, nasty backlinking to the site from a lot of those sources we talked about. They mentioned a few XRumer blasts. They posted a lot of duplicate content. They set up fake WordPress splogs, essentially a spam blog, and then they re-posted the content that existed on JustGoodCars.com on tens of thousands of pages across the Web so that Google might say, “Oh, well why is this duplicate content?” I don’t know that that’s actually highly concerning in and of itself. A lot of people copy content from all over the Web for both good and bad reasons.

Then they did something that’s really nasty. They went to Fiverr and they asked for people to post fake reviews to Google Reviews to make it look like Just Good Cars was manipulating Google Reviews, and actually got them thrown out of that program. According to the forum post, anyway, that’s what happened. They got their stars and their Google Reviews and their ratings removed, and all that kind of stuff, which that’s whew, that’s really low. That sucks if that’s what really happened.

It’s even more terrifying, but they sent fake emails. They set up email addresses that looked like they came from Just Good Cars, and sent fake emails to websites that had posted good editorial, positive links, saying, “Hey, you should stop linking to this site. There are these problems with it. We’re requesting a DMCA take down action against it. Our attorneys will be in touch if you don’t remove your links.” Those kinds of things. So really just, oh man, that’s really evil. But stuff that we definitely need to be aware of in terms of the world of negative SEO and what this kind of stuff can happen.

Now, it’s very tough to verify anonymous users on an anonymous forum posting and whether all of this stuff actually happened, but certainly the ideas behind it are very concerning. What I want to express today is that there are some things you can do on your site that will make you higher risk and lower risk to these kinds of things.

Higher risk is going to be, like some of these other sites, you’ve already done a little bit of manipulative linking. Right? You’ve already done some spammy stuff. You have manipulative on-site stuff. Meaning for example, like Just Good Cars there’s kind of that footer with all these links pointing to all these other places. This was mentioned in the forum thread. So I’m not giving away new information here, but there’s stuff on this site that looks like it might be not wholly kosher, not wholly white hat.

Your site has few high quality brand signals. High quality brand signals, things like lots of people searching for your domain name and brand name. Lots of mentions of you in the news and press, in outlets that are high quality. Lots of offline sorts of signals. Lots of user and usage metrics types of signals. Lots of verification kinds of things. Using high quality providers of everything from the IP address, where your website’s hosted, to the domain registration link, to the services you might have installed on your site, Akamai or any of the CDN networks suggest you’re very popular. Any type of signal like this that looks like a highly brand intense signal.

Lower risk is going to be the opposite. Right? So things like a totally clean backlink profile. Never done any kind of manipulative linking, at least not intentional outbound backlink building. Don’t forget, everyone’s going to have some spam links. Even if you’ve never done any manipulative backlinking or any backlinking or marketing of any kind, you will have some bad backlinks, because the Web, just there are all sorts of weird crawlers and bots that host links all over the place. It’s fine. Don’t sweat those. It’s the normal volume. Things like having a beautiful, elegant, high quality UX. A great UX is a fantastic defense against a lot of spam and manipulation. It’s even a great tactic for folks who are trying to do SEO. It’s just a great signal in general. Right? Having a great UX is going to get you more conversions and more people using your site. Anyone who is browsing your website, say, from the Google Search Quality team or the webspam team, or the Google reviewers, which Google hires, or from Bing, any of those folks who are looking at your site are going to say, “Oh this is clearly a great site. We want to have this in our index.”

If you review some of these other sites, you can take them or leave them. One that does not feel very SEO. I think you all know what I mean. There’s sort of that sixth sense of, boy, they’re doing a lot of things on the page and off the site that don’t feel like they’re natural, don’t feel like they’re for users. Whenever you have that sixth sense around a site, that’s going to put you in a higher danger category. Not doing that, having that very natural sort of site, you can target keywords, do a good job with your titles, do a good job with your content, do a good job with your internal linking, but make it feel very natural. I’ll give you good examples. Amazon, very well SEO’ed, but doesn’t feel SEO’ed. Zappos, doesn’t feel SEO’ed. Even SEOmoz, it doesn’t feel very SEO’ed, but it’s doing a good job. TechCrunch, doesn’t feel SEO’ed, but ranks phenomenally well.

Finally, having those strong brand signals, the branded searches, lots of people searching for your brand name specifically. Good links, good mentions, good press, good user and usage metrics, all these types of things are going to protect you from a lot of these types of spam attacks.

That being said, there’s nasty stuff that other people can do. So you want to (a) keep your eyes wide open. Make sure you’re registered with Google Webmaster Tools so you can get any of these warnings ahead of time. If you happen to see an influx of really nasty looking links, you might want to send a preemptive reconsideration request to Google saying, “Hey, we don’t know where these came from and we have nothing to do with this. We just want you guys to know that this is not our activity. Please feel free to disregard or not count these links.” 99% of the time Google is not going to say, “Oh these bad links that are pointing to you, we’re going to count those as reducing your SEO and bringing you down in the rankings.” They’re instead going to say, “Oh well, we’re going to ignore these. We’re going to remove the value that these pass.” They’re not going to pass PageRank or anchor text value or link trust, or whatever it is. We’re just going to count the good stuff.

I remember being in a session, this was years ago, probably five or six years ago, with Matt Cutts, the head of webspam for Google. He was looking at a site on his computer, and the person asked about their website from the audience, and he said, I see, I don’t remember what it was, 14,000 odd links pointing to this site, but Google’s actually only counting about 30 of them. That’s why you’re not ranking very well. Most of those links we’ve removed all the value that they pass. So it’s not that they were having those bad links hurt the site. It’s just that they’re saying, “Oh these are not going to pass any more link value.”

Now, what I would suggest here is, if you see stuff that looks like manipulative and negative SEO, you just be careful. We are trying to do some things here at SEOmoz to help with this. One of the things our data scientist, Dr. Matt Peters, is working with some folks here at Moz to build a large list of spam so we can do some classification, and eventually inside the Mozcape index, which will appear in Open Site Explorer, show up in your Pro-web app, show up in the Mozbar, we’ll try and classify sites to say, “Hey we’re pretty sure this is spam. This looks like the kind of thing where we’ve pattern matched and seen Google penalize or ban a lot of these sites.” We’re also trying to build some metrics to show what are really good, high quality, and editorially given sites. So domain authority and page authority already exist to try and do that.

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Google Algorithm Changes 2012

25. April 2012 · Write a comment · Categories: Google Algorithm · Tags: , , ,

 

2012 Updates

Parked Domain Bug – April 17, 2012

After a number of webmasters reported ranking shuffles, Google confirmed that a data error had caused some domains to be mistakenly treated as parked domains (and thereby devalued). This was not an intentional algorithm change.

Updated: Google Update April 2012? Over SEO Penalty? (SER)

Dropped In Rankings? Google’s Mistake Over Parked Domains Might Be To Blame (SEL)

March 50-Pack – April 3, 2012

Google posted another batch of update highlights, covering 50 changes in March. These included confirmation of Panda 3.4, changes to anchor-text “scoring”, updates to image search, and changes to how queries with local intent are interpreted.

Search quality highlights: 50 changes for March (Google)

Google’s March Updates: Anchor Text, Image Search, Navigational Search & More (SEL)

Panda 3.4 – March 23, 2012

Google announced another Panda update, this time via Twitter as the update was rolling out. Their public statements estimated that Panda 3.4 impacted about 1.6% of search results.

Google Says Panda 3.4 Is ‘Rolling Out Now’ (SEL)

Search Quality Video – March 12, 2012

This wasn’t an algorithm update, but Google published a rare peek into a search quality meeting. For anyone interested in the algorithm, the video provides a lot of context to both Google’s process and their priorities. It’s also a chance to see Amit Singhal in action.

Video! The search quality meeting, uncut (Google)

Panda 3.3 – February 27, 2012

Google rolled out another post-”flux” Panda update, which appeared to be relatively minor. This came just 3 days after the 1-year anniversary of Panda, an unprecedented lifespan for a named update.

Google Confirms Panda 3.3 Update (SEL)

Confirmed: Google Panda 3.3 (SER)

February 40-Pack (2) – February 27, 2012

Google published a second set of “search quality highlights” at the end of the month, claiming more than 40 changes in February. Notable changes included multiple image-search updates, multiple freshness updates (including phasing out 2 old bits of the algorithm), and a Panda update.

Search quality highlights: 40 changes for February (Google)

Venice – February 27, 2012

As part of their monthly update, Google mentioned code-name “Venice”. This local update appeared to more aggressively localize organic results and more tightly integrate local search data. The exact roll-out date was unclear.

Understand and Rock the Google Venice Update (SEOmoz)

Google Venice Update – New Ranking Opportunities for Local SEO (Catalyst eMarketing)

February 17-Pack – February 3, 2012

Google released another round of “search quality highlights” (17 in all). Many related to speed, freshness, and spell-checking, but one major announcement was tighter integration of Panda into the main search index.

17 search quality highlights: January (Google)

Google’s January Search Update: Panda In The Pipelines, Fresher Results, Date Detection & More (SEL)

Ads Above The Fold – January 19, 2012

Google updated their page layout algorithms to devalue sites with too much ad-space above the “fold”. It was previously suspected that a similar factor was in play in Panda. The update had no official name, although it was referenced as “Top Heavy” by some SEOs.

Page layout algorithm improvement (Google)

Pages With Too Many Ads “Above The Fold” Now Penalized By Google’s “Page Layout” Algorithm (SEL)

Panda 3.2 – January 18, 2012

Google confirmed a Panda data update, although suggested that the algorithm hadn’t changed. It was unclear how this fit into the “Panda Flux” scheme of more frequent data updates.

Confirmed: Google Panda 3.2 Update (SEW)

Google Panda 3.2 Update Confirmed (SEL)

Search + Your World – January 10, 2012

Google announced a radical shift in personalization – aggressively pushing Google+ social data and user profiles into SERPs. Google also added a new, prominent toggle button to shut off personalization.

Search, plus Your World (Google)

Real-Life Examples Of How Google’s “Search Plus” Pushes Google+ Over Relevancy (SEL)

January 30-Pack – January 5, 2012

Google announced 30 changes over the previous month, including image search landing-page quality detection, more relevant site-links, more rich snippets, and related-query improvements. The line between an “algo update” and a “feature” got a bit more blurred.

30 search quality highlights – with codenames! (Google)

Google Announces “Megasitelinks,” Image Search Improvements & Better Byline Dates (SEL)

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SEO: Evaluating the Competition

24. April 2012 · Write a comment · Categories: SEO Compeition · Tags: , , , ,

Why bother about your competitors? Well, a stupid question, I know. You can’t possibly think that you can enter a new niche and get on top without looking into what has been done before you. When done properly, competitor analysis will answer your most important strategic planning questions:

  • Is it worth trying to enter this niche? Will I be able to overdo my competitors? How fast? Will long and hard victory be worth the effort? What’s my expected ROI?
  • What should I do to succeed in this niche? What shouldn’t I?
  • Who are my perspective readers/customers? What are they used to? What do they like?
  • Well, and many more, but I will stop here for now not to miss the point.

Step 1. Evaluating your overall competition.

You can either do it ‘at home’ using Google search and Excel or try paid tools returning complete competitor’s report. I usually perform all possible ways of analysis because I (1) cannot fully rely on reports compiled by someone else (be it an automatic tool or another person); (2) do not feel I have the full understanding of a niche unless I spend long hours on searching Google and compiling data into tables (yep, preferably multiple ones, and then combining tables into one table; but that’s just me, you can safely get along with a single solid report).

The idea is simple: you throw all your keywords into a spreadsheet and add the following information:

  1. Google daily/monthly estimated reach (I was using data provided by Aaron’s keyword research tool);
  2. Overall number of results in Google (broad match);
  3. The site ranked #1 for each term;
  4. Number of results for [intitle:keyword];
  5. Number of results for [inanchor:keyword];
  6. Number of results for both [intitle:"keyword" and inanchor:"keyword"] (hat tip to Ciaran) – this is your exact competition, i.e. those who use SEO (optimized titles and incoming links anchor text).

To save time you can get this information via SEOMoz keyword difficulty tool (it will also provide you with lots of other useful information: average PageRank of the top 10 sites, how many root URLs can be found in top 10 results, etc). Naturally, the best combination is when #1 is high, #2 is low (not necessarily) and #4, #5 and #6 are the lowest possible – the cases framed in green:

overall competition

Step 2. Finding your direct competitors

After you compiled your targeted keyword list, you can sort by ‘#1 in G‘ column and see the sites that is most often ranked high in Google for your chosen keywords:

direct competitors

Be sure to explore your most successful competitor’s on-site optimization: titles, H1 and H2 tags, internal site architecture, etc. I have singled out two approaches that help me to perform this kind of analysis:

  1. Don’t be too skeptical. Unfortunately most often experienced SEOs analyzing onpage optimization think they can do much better. This thought can bring you to wrongful conclusions.
  2. Learn from their mistakes. (I know, this somehow interferes with the first one, so the most important is balancing between the two.) We all know how to do it right. So analyzing what a competitor did well doesn’t help a lot. The art of seeing mistakes and at the same time being able to keep from underestimating (see #1) always brings to the right solution in the end.

And now a few tools that can also prove helpful:

1. Google Adwords Keyword Tool (free) is useful for comparing Google advertisers’ competition data and your own findings and also for differentiating commercial terms from non-commercial ones. Keywords enjoying high advertisers‘ competition are most likely targeting potential customers (while more informative [and hence less competitive] phrases usually attract people who are collecting information rather than are really willing to buy). A good way to overcome high competition while sticking to more commercial phrases is to turn (moderately) commercial phrases into long tail (e.g. per our table: ‘Tennessee fsbo‘ into ‘townsend Tennessee fsbo‘).

2. Compete.com (paid with a few trial searches) also provides some helpful type of analysis that can help you to evaluate your competition:

  • “Keyword Share” shows the percentage of total referrals a site receives from a particular keyword compared to its other referrals (= this keyword referrals/other keywords referrals).
  • “Keyword Engagement” shows the average time visitors tend to spend on the site after being referred by this keyword.
  • “Keyword Effectiveness” all people referred by this term/total time spent on the site.

While these metrics represented by Compete.com look really promising and useful, I mostly use them for self-education and out of curiosity – just because I am more used to ‘old school’ method of looking into my referrals and learn people’s actual behavior in practice. However this can still be very useful for learning the competitors’ referrals and visitors’ [probable] behavior.

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10 Ways to Improve Google Place Ranking

19. April 2012 · Write a comment · Categories: Google Place Ranking · Tags: , , ,

 

What?

Ranking locally is much more critical with the evolvement of local listings across the web such as Google Places, Bing BBP, Yahoo local and the various social media channels. Google Places seems to consistently drive more traffic than any other local channel, sometimes upwards of 40% share of referring traffic for many of our clients.

Why?

Google has 65% market share at the moment, making Google Places the most important local listing to focus your attention on. This should be followed by Bing & Yahoo.

In October, Google updated their SERPs to showcase local listings alongside your organic result making your local listing that much more important. It’s now absolutely crucial to have your local listing 100% optimized and in sync with your on page/off page website strategy as well.

Google Places Listing

How?

So what can you do to improve your chances of ranking well locally? Below are the top 10 things you can do to improve your chances of ranking high and converting traffic from your Google local listings.

  1. On-page optimization: Use the correct geo-location in all on-page optimization. Do not use the geo-location that you would like to rank for. For example, if you are located in Sunnyvale, you should use “Sunnyvale hotel” and not “Santa Clara hotel”. Its fine to use “Hotel near Santa Clara” but to state “Santa Clara Hotel” would not be accurate or helpful to your local strategy.
  2. Local Submissions: Submit your website/business information to local data providers such as Acxiom, InfoUsa and Localeze. These data providers will feed your business information across the web to other business information channels, helping you build credibility across the web. In the long run, local submissions help you gain more local relevance and trust with the search engines and public users.  It is critical to ensure your business information on your website is accurate and consistent across all of these sources. Incorrect business information will result in distrust from search engines and the public, and will negatively impact your local ranking and conversion.
  3. Claim Google Places listings:  The ability to optimize your listing is only possible once it is claimed and verified by you, the owner. This is a great way for you to control the information about your business.
  4. Optimize Your Local Listing Account to 100%:  Ensure each of the below buckets are optimized and completed.
    • Correct business information: Ensure name, address, and phone number  (NAP) on listing & website is correct.
    • Categories: this is how Google knows what type of business you are.
    • Hours of Operation
    • Photos
    • Videos
    • Additional Details
    • Update Place Page: Promote specials or events with specific calls to action
    • Google Reviews Management Response: Respond to Google reviews via your Google Places account.
  5. Encourage Online Reviews:  Online reviews play into the local ranking algorithm. It’s not so much about the amount of reviews your hotel receives, but the quality of your reviews.  Research which third party review sites are important to your industry/location and target those first. Don’t forget to encourage online reviews directly via your website as well. Google can now index your website reviews and pull them into your local listing. The more reviews, the better!
  6. Respond to reviews:  Doing so can help build/improve your hotel’s online reputation as it shows that management places great importance on customer service and satisfaction. Not only will this result in higher trust, but it can also lead to return visitors/guests.
  7. Build citations from credible/authoritative sources:  Online citations for your business are the equivalent to online referrals for your website.  Citations are not links necessarily, but can be simple mentions of your NAP.  The more credible online citation sources you accumulate, the more likely it is that your Google local listing will rank well.
  8. Claim Hyperlocal listings:   It’s important to claim your Facebook Places, Foursquare, and Gowalla listings. Hyperlocal listings give you local credibility, allow you to gain local relevance, and help you build a stronger local community following.
  9. Ensure you cross-optimize and apply what works on your site to your Places Local Listing:
    • Promote successful packages
    • Promote most viewed/converting pages
    • Promote Social Media channels
  10. Google Boost: Participate in Google Boost to get some early traction to your local listing.  You cannot control which keywords you appear for but it’s a great way to gain some additional exposure.

Conclusion

There is no doubt that local strategy has grown to be much more critical than in the past and your Google Places listing is a great place to begin optimization.   However, make sure you optimize correctly, strategically, and effectively across all buckets for a comprehensive local marketing strategy. It’s the only way to win the local game in the long run.

Created by Omaha SEO Company also follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

SEO: Google vs Bing vs Yahoo

18. April 2012 · Write a comment · Categories: SEO: Google vs Bing vs Yahoo · Tags: , , , ,

 

Originally Yahoo had refused the alliance with Bing however as is common knowledge nowadays most of Yahoo’s search results are actually Bing powered.
The Microsoft search alliance gives a much better platform and scope of opportunity for search engine optimization for one very simple reason, together Yahoo & Bing power 30% of the searches. Now taking into consideration that there are a staggering 6,400 million searches per month the results show that Bing is powering 1,920,000,000 searches per month.

Search Engine Optimization Mistakes

The biggest problem I tend to find in SEO is the lack of understanding of the importance of using at least the top three search engines for gaining leverage in the market place, especially for new websites this is imperative, too often we overlook Yahoo and Bing during SEO and allow all our focus to go onto Google, the trouble with this is that nearly all your competitors are also competing over Google.

Bing The overlooked rising star?

However as things stand based on COMSCORE’s estimates 29.7% of the market share in search engines belongs to Yahoo & Bing, now another important point to make about the subject is that, Microsoft (Bing) and Yahoo have a search alliance going on between them, meaning that efforts made on these two platforms do result in combined results.

The other interesting point that begs to be made is a simple logical conclusion that although Google owns the greatest market share for search results it may not be the best place for you to place your energy, main reason is that your competitors are mainly targeting Google users, this leaves you a gap to target users of other search engines and possibly get different types of traffic then you would through Google, if you can drive traffic from these search engines you may be competing with a different set of competitors that you are better positioned to beat.

Another point I would like to make is that Bing is on the rise and slowly gaining market share, meaning that optimizing for it now could yield great long term results. A quick test of a number of search terms relating to my business interests finds me placed in exactly the same position on Yahoo and Bing, effectively optimizing for either of the two I am gaining position on both.

The next point I would like to make is that focusing my efforts on Bing and Yahoo has improved my position in Google however I tend to see a much faster rise in position on Bing and Yahoo, which allows me to assume that there is less competition on these search engines.

So what other salient points can we make with regards to SEO on these search engines? Well first off I would suggest that you check the searches for relevant search terms to you on Google and Bing you may be surprised to find out that the general search terms used, the quantity of searches for that search term and a few other interesting factors are actually quite different, this would lead me to believe that there are different demographics using the different search engines so I went off to try and find some statistics to prove my point.

Gender breakdown by search engine

For the big three here, there are significant differences. A study carried out recently by Hit-wise showed that 55% of Google users are male, whereas 58% of MSN users were female. Ask Jeeves and AOL were also more favored by women than by men. Yahoo searches were split roughly evenly between men and women, with slightly more male users. The percentages may seem small, but when you’re talking about the entire internet population, the numbers soon add up.

Age breakdown by search engine 

Here again we see significant differences. Yahoo and Google are the most popular sites with those under the age of 34, whereas those over the age of 55 tend to prefer MSN

Buying rate by search engine

 Visitors to Google sites were 42% more likely to buy online than the average Internet user, versus Yahoo visitors who were 31% more likely to purchase; MSN users who were 48% more likely to purchase; AOL users, 3%; and Ask Jeeves users, 17%.

(Sourced from – http://www.leadgenerators.co.uk/articles/search-engine-demographics)

These are only a few quick points to take into consideration when choosing which search engine you are targeting, as well as the type of advertising you use, for example if you are targeting Bing powered searches and advertising you know you have a higher content of users over the age of 55. This knowledge should help you  reflect upon your wording, information style, website usability and other factors. You also know that a larger percentage of Bing users are female, which is another element to take into consideration.

Created by Omaha SEO Company also follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

SEO Bing vs. Yahoo

17. April 2012 · Write a comment · Categories: SEO Bing vs. Yahoo · Tags: , , , ,

With some lower traffic smaller sites it is easy to get outlier data that is skewed & somewhat irrelevant (especially true if you have a website which happens to have relevant content in a category that Ask is spamming the heck out of Google in), but one nice thing about comparing Yahoo! and Bing against each other is that they are generally driven by the same relevancy algorithm. Of course Yahoo! and Bing may have different promotions added to their interfaces for certain query types, but if you take websites that are ranking for a wide basket of keywords you can generally see how the search engines are doing against each other at driving traffic.

Some categories (think mom from the mid-west who is a casual internet user) might have a bias toward using Yahoo! Search, but outside of areas where you might expect that sort of skew, I am seeing Bing drive more organic search traffic than Yahoo! is. Here are analytics images from 3 different websites so far this month that get quite a significant search traffic stream. These sites target different demographics from people in their 20′s to 30′s to 40′s. And all 3 of them are getting more search visits from Bing than Yahoo! Search. And, looking at the data, this shift has been fairly significant over the past couple months.

This site gets tons of longtail traffic & ranks across a wide array of keyword.

This site is primarily driven by a few popular keywords & ranks #1 in both Bing and Google for them.

The reason this 3rd one is so Google heavy is because the Google algorithm likes the older site more & it does not have as many fresh links (which Bing seems to like more). It is primarily focused on a few core keywords where it ranks #1 to #3 in Google and #4 to #7 in Bing.

I suspect that Bing is still somewhat more selective with showing search ads than Yahoo! is (as Microsoft’s online operation has been losing billions of Dollars per year & Bing is trying to win marketshare from Google, whereas Yahoo! is all about maximizing revenues per search). Yahoo! ads likely get a greater portion of the search clicks due to…

  • ads being shown more frequently & more aggressively
  • ads taking up more visual space (when Bing puts 4 ads above the organic results they put the URL and the description on the same line, whereas Yahoo! spreads them out across multiple lines)

Since Bing is sending more searchers onto the organic search results it means their real search share is over-represented if you look only at organic search visitors, but then as an SEO that is the main thing you are looking for – opportunity. It is a bit of a shame that on the above sites Google is still driving ~ 84% of search visitors, whereas Bing is still in the 16% range.

As Google comes over the top to bury the organic results by…

  • expanding the default AdWords ad units to have longer headlines and a boatload of extensions
  • entering broad consumer verticals like books and finance and offering customized local results
  • running self serving ads in a bunch of categories like project management and even wedding planning

…they kill a lot of opportunity as their ecosystem becomes more closed and perverted.

If the trends hold true, then in some cases it seems like Google might drive SEOs below the fold for core keywords while still pushing strong traffic into tail. Bing still doesn’t have the index depth to match Google’s relevancy on longtail keywords, but at least they are not crowding out the organic results anywhere near as aggressively on core keywords.

How are you seeing Bing fare against Yahoo! & Google? Are you seeing growth from Bing? What sorts of sites are you seeing Bing do well on & what sorts of sites are you seeing Bing do poorly on?

Update: It appears this sharp increase in Bing traffic over the past month has been driven by a partnership with Conduit.

Created by Omaha SEO Company also Follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

Bing SEO – How Does it Differ from Google

16. April 2012 · Write a comment · Categories: Bing Vs. Google · Tags: , , , , , , ,

Well I am sure we’re all just about sick and tired of hearing about Bing? Have we all given it a whirl already? :)

Despite the widespread attention I thought I would do a post on it anyway but as always from a 100% SEO point of view. What I really want to do with this post is look at what makes a site rank No.1 on Bing in comparison to Google? What SEO techniques are going to get you exposure on Bing that won’t necessarily do the same for you on Google.

In true SEO Wizz style I picked a keyword and took a look at the top ranking sites on Bing and Google.

“seo services” was the keyword, I figured we may as well keep it relevant plus this is a highly competitive keyword, with a top ppc price of £3.77, not overly high but competitive enough for our purposes.

Ok, we put together the following figues, take a look over them we’ll try to explore them a little.

The two sites I looked at are as follows:-

Whitehatmedia – ranked 1 on Bing

and

Smart Traffic – ranked 1 on google

bing seo

Right let’s break this down a little.

On Page Factors

The Google site is slightly better optimised on page but in my opinion the differences are not enough to suggest anything major. Maybe Google takes into accounut on page optimisation more than the new bing search engine.

Every time I do these comparisons the top Google sites always seem to implement the meta keywords, yet they don’t use them to determine rankings anymore, right? I’d keep using them anyway, what’s the harm.

Off Page Factors

This is where we see clear differences between the 2 sites.

The Google No.1 has a massive link popularity and a better link diversity. The Google site even enjoys a more focused anchor distribution.

It’s nice to see the younger domain doing better on Google, half the age of the site on Bing :)

Linking Pages

The pages that link to a site have always played a major role when ranking for keywords. On Google the idea is that you should acquire links from pages that are as relevant as possible.

This part of the table shows that the Google site has a higher percentage of links from pages with the keyword in the body, however the bing site has more links from pages with the keyword in the title tag. Is this the key to better Bing rankings?? Could be.

Looking down the table it is quite clear to see what Google focuses on and why sites rank higher on Google. Link popularity, diversity, anchor distribution. On the other hand it is quite interesting to note that the site with the higher PageRank does better on Bing.

So top tips from SEO Wizz…..

If you want to rank higher on Bing:-

  • Make your domain age increase :)
  • Try to acquire links from pages with your keywords in the title tag

To be fair both of these tips would help your Google campaign but it seems that more emphasis is put on these factors by Bing.

Another thing I noticed was that both sites have implemented heavy article marketing, so keep writing and distributing that keyword focused content, it works.

Created by Omaha SEO Company also follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

9 SEO Tips for Attractive Web Design

09. April 2012 · Write a comment · Categories: SEO Web Design · Tags: , , , , ,

SEO: time-intensive, ever changing, and highly misunderstood. Creating a website design that is appealing, while also search engine friendly, is one of the hardest parts about SEO web design.

If you’re a designer, are your designs really search friendly?

A lot of misconceptions about SEO still exist in the web design community and many designers, who have at least some knowledge, are often acting with outdated information. Once a designer understands the value of SEO, there is still the concern of how to keep a design attractive, while also being search friendly.

Designers love beautiful websites and SEOs love optimized content and code, but neither should fool themselves, because these days, both matter. In that spirit, I’ve put together a list of 9 SEO tips that help keep your stunning website optimized for search engines. Instead of focusing on SEO design basics, I’ll be covering some design-focused SEO tips, to show how SEO and beautiful design elements can co-exist.

1. It’s not the same old SEO

SEO can be hard to keep up with, because it is always changing. Today, SEO doesn’t mean a site has to be ugly.

First, forget everything you’ve learned about keyword meta tags and keyword stuffing, because those days are over. This is a great thing for designers, because search engines are looking for great content, written in natural language. Metrics, like keyword density, which make sites look hideous, are a thing of the past.

If you’ve been a designer for several years, start fresh and learn search engine optimization from a source that keeps up with all things SEO. Don’t let out-of-date SEO practices make you think pages have to be riddled with repetitive keywords.

2. Links talk

Links tell search engines what pages are about. This holds true on-site as well as off-site. The words you use in your designs to link to other pages do matter. The web has matured and no longer needs to be told “click here”.

This is just another form of the dreaded “click here”. There is an opportunity wasted here, where the designer could link out with the keyword-rich headings like “HR solutions”. The “learn more” link is great for users, but leaves search bots blind to what is on the other end of that link. As a human, we make the connection, and know that this link is about “HR Solutions”, but you’re telling search engines it is about “learn more”.

CSS can be used to keep the style, but the site would benefit from either linking the major headings, or changing the link text to something like “Learn More about HR Solutions”. This would drastically improve the site’s internal linking, with minimal impact on design.

3. Design is linkbait

This is great news for designers. Much of the life of an SEO is focused around baiting links from the link-giving portion of the web. The amazing thing is that this portion of the web loves great looking websites. Great design improves credibility and the user experience.

If you design great sites, use services like The CSS Gallery List to get your site submitted to CSS showcases across the web, or at least do it by hand.

4. Look at search bots as browsers

Earlier I mentioned how using “learn more” leaves a search engine blind. Considering a search bot as a disabled user or another type of browser, is exactly the type of approach needed for search friendly web design.

Search bots are extremely disabled and unintelligent users who use a dreadfully outdated browser. This user’s ability to understand your site may mean the difference of thousands or millions of dollars for a business.

One of the best SEO tips I can give a designer is to test as if Lynx was one of the web’s major browsers. If you can properly navigate your site, and understand its content in a browser like Lynx, then you are on your way to being a great SEO web designer. Other tools, like the Web Developer toolbar, really help test a site without elements like CSS, images, and JavaScript.

Keep up on the Google webmaster guidelines, so you know the limitations of this highly impaired user of your site. Focus on creating beautiful designs that gracefully degrade for this limited web user, “the search bot.” Or, instead of designing the site and working backwards, start with the lowest common denominator (the search engine), and work up.

Let’s Get Tactical

5. Smoke some hash

#

That little symbol, the hash mark or pound symbol, is an extremely powerful SEO tool in the hands of a developer who knows what to do with it. The hash mark creates an element in the URL that is not considered unique by the search engines, so it is dropped.

There are a lot of great ways to use this. I’ve seen it used well on sections where new pages hardly justify having a unique URL. One example I’ve seen recently is a “people” section where only minor content changes are seen on each page. The designer assigned each employee’s profile with “#name”. These multiple, near duplicate, pages are all seen as one page by the search engines. There are plenty of other great uses for the hash.

6. Use SEO friendly JavaScript

Any time you touch technologies like JavaScript, you need to tread carefully. I love Javascript technologies, and all the amazing things we can do with them, but they can create huge problems.

Traditionally, AJAX is not SEO friendly because calls are made through JavaScript, which cannot be executed well by search engines. The result is that the content is never rendered or indexed by search bots. I like what can be done with jQuery, since you can have html link navigation in place (for search engines), and still have jQuery effects.

If not done correctly, you can run into problems though. For example, jTip, which is a nice little Jquery Tool Tip, can create some nasty problems. The tooltip is nice and all, but the static html links point to a page that looks like this.

That is the whole page. This page has no title and no link back to the site. This can create multiple near duplicate versions, which can be indexed in the search engines. This also creates many hanging pages on a site. I did an audit on a site recently that used jTip extensively. The site had over 80 pages indexed in Google, with only one sentence per indexed web page. None had titles, and none linked back to the domain.

Creative design solutions can allow a designer to use jQuery while still being search friendly. Check out Jon Raasch’s post about how he used jQuery to Animate his portfolio in a very search friendly way.

7. Flash is OK, sometimes.

Ask your average SEO about flash and you’ll be told how horrible it is for SEO. Ask someone who casually follows SEO news, and they’ll tell you flash can now be crawled. So how should a designer approach flash?

While Google is improving, you should not depend on Google to figure it all out. Here are some basic Flash rules to keep in mind.

  • Do not include an entire site on one page.
  • Do not use flash as the navigation.
  • Do not include important content in flash.

Search engines are nearly blind to flash, so do not use it for important page elements. Use of flash for design elements and non-important content is ok.

Flash can be used in a search engine friendly design. You can enhance web fonts by using slfr. Since the flash does not replace the HTML content, but styles it, search engines are still able to read the titles. It’s even Google approved.

8. CSS image replacement

CSS image replacement is one way to make a site look great, while also being search friendly. There are a couple different ways to do this, but the biggest concern boils down to intent.

Google says:

“If your site is perceived to contain hidden text and links that are deceptive in intent, your site may be removed from the Google index, and will not appear in search results pages.”

The two words to focus in on here are “perceived” and “intent”. During a manual review Google will try to interpret your intent; a practice that has come under fire recently whenGoogle profiled SEO.

I think CSS is a common tactic and a fine solution to SEO web design. If your intent is to improve the visual experience, and you make this intent clear, you should be fine. Do not use this method to stuff keywords or manipulate with hidden content.

9. Have great linking with footers

If you have a design that will be compromised by the inclusion of a robust navigation above the fold, a solid footer is a great solution.

Sometimes footers get the job done, like Yelp’s boring, but effect footer. And sometimes they highlight content you want to rank, like the footer over at We Build Pages. But, they can also look beautiful, impressive, and creative.

Bonus Tips for Designers!

Three mini bonus tips that are exclusively for designers to use to promote their business.

Many designers drop an attribution link in the footer of their designs like so:

“Website Designed by Creative Company Name”

Here are 3 Mini SEO Tips

  1. Include a keyword in that attribution link. Stop linking your company name only and at least include the “Website Designed” portion. Even better, use something like “Designed by: Company Name – A New York Web Design Company.”
  2. Once you design a few sites with your keyword-rich attribution link, change the wording. It doesn’t need to be drastically different, but create some variation. Do this periodically.
  3. Create a pre-sale page on their site that features a testimonial and links back to your site. Then, link to this pre-sale page site-wide from the footer of their design. This will help you avoid the negatives of the run of site links, while getting a link from a page with a lot of internal PageRank flowing to it.

If you’re a designer, I hope these tips help you find some elegant design solutions to common SEO design problems. If you’re an SEO, I hope these tips are something you can forward to your designer.

I’d love to hear any tips or techniques you use in your designs to handle complex design needs in a search engine friendly manner. If you have any great SEO tips, ideas, or questions please leave a comment.

Created by Omaha SEO Company and follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

How to Use HTML Meta Tags

06. April 2012 · 1 comment · Categories: Meta Tags · Tags: , , , , , , ,

 

Want to get a top ranking in search engines? No problem! All you need to do is add a few magical “meta tags” to your web pages, and you’ll skyrocket to the top of the listings.

If only it were so easy. Let’s make it clear:

  • Meta tags are not a magic solution.
  • Meta tags are not a magic solution.
  • Meta tags are not a magic solution.

Meta tags have never been a guaranteed way to gain a top ranking on crawler-based search engines. Today, the most valuable feature they offer the web site owner is the ability to control to some degree how their web pages are described by some search engines. They also offer the ability to prevent pages from being indexed at all. This page explores these and other meta tag-related features in more depth.

Meta Tag Overview

What are meta tags? They are information inserted into the “head” area of your web pages. Other than the title tag (explained below), information in the head area of your web pages is not seen by those viewing your pages in browsers. Instead, meta information in this area is used to communicate information that a human visitor may not be concerned with. Meta tags, for example, can tell a browser what “character set” to use or whether a web page has self-rated itself in terms of adult content.

Let’s see two common types of meta tags, then we’ll discuss exactly how they are used in more depth:

 

Meta-example

In the example above, you can see the beginning of the page’s “head” area as noted by thetag — it ends at the portion shown as.

Meta tags go in between the “opening” and “closing” HEAD tags. Shown in the example is a TITLE tag, then a META DESCRIPTION tag, then a META KEYWORDS tag. Let’s talk about what these do.

 

The Title Tag

The HTML title tag isn’t really a meta tag, but it’s worth discussing in relation to them. Whatever text you place in the title tag (between theandportions as shown in the example) will appear in the reverse bar of someone’s browser when they view the web page. For instance, within the title tag of this page that you are reading is this text:

How To Use HTML Meta Tags

If you look at the reverse bar in your browser, then you should see that text being used, similar to this:

Meta-title

Some browsers also supplement whatever you put in the title tag by adding their own name, as you can see Microsoft’s Internet Explorer doing in the picture above.

The title tag is also used as the words to describe your page when someone adds it to their “Favorites” or “Bookmarks” lists. For instance, if you added this page to your Favorites in Internet Explorer, it would show up like this:

Meta-bookmark

How did that little Search Engine Watch logo also show up? Everyone always asks. The article below provides more help:

Creating Your Own Favicon.ico Icon For IE5
Web Developer’s Journal, March 7, 2000
http://www.webdevelopersjournal.com/articles/favicon.html

But what about search engines! The title tag is crucial for them. The text you use in the title tag is one of the most important factors in how a search engine may decide to rank your web page (see the Search Engine Placement Tips section for more details). In addition, all major crawlers will use the text of your title tag as the text they use for the title of your page in your listings.

For example, this is how Teoma lists the page you are reading:

Meta-teoma

You can see that the text “How To Use HTML Meta Tags” is used as the hyperlinked title of this page’s listed in Teoma’s results.

In review, think about the key terms you’d like your page to be found for in crawler-based search engines, then incorporate those terms into your title tag in a short, descriptive fashion. That text will then be used as your title in crawler-based search engines, as well as the title in bookmarks and in browser reverse bars.

The Meta Description Tag

The meta description tag allows you to influence the description of your page in the crawlers that support the tag (these are listed on the Search Engine Features page).

Look back at the example of a meta tag. See the first meta tag shown, the one that says “name=description”? That’s the meta description tag. The text you want to be shown as your description goes between the quotation marks after the “content=” portion of the tag (generally, 200 to 250 characters may be indexed, though only a smaller portion of this amount may be displayed).

For this page you are reading, I would like it described in a search engine’s listings like this:

This tutorial explains how to use HTML meta tags, with links
to meta tag generators and builders. From SearchEngineWatch.com,
a guide to search engine submission and registration.

Will this happen? Not with every search engine. For example, Google ignores the meta description tag and instead will automatically generate its own description for this page. Others may support it partially. For instance, let’s see again how this page is listed in Teoma:

Meta-teoma

You can see that the first portion of the page’s description comes from the meta description tag, then there’s an ellipse (.), and the remaining portion is drawn from the body copy of the page itself.

In review, it is worthwhile to use the meta description tag for your pages, because it gives you some degree of control with various crawlers. An easy way to do this often is to take the first sentence or two of body copy from your web page and use that for the meta description content.

The Meta Keywords Tag

The meta keywords tag allows you to provide additional text for crawler-based search engines to index along with your body copy. How does this help you? Well, for most major crawlers, it doesn’t. That’s because most crawlers now ignore the tag. The few supporting it can be found on theSearch Engine Features page).

The meta keywords tag is sometimes useful as a way to reinforce the terms you think a page is important for ON THE FEW CRAWLERS THAT SUPPORT IT. For instance, if you had a page about stamp collecting — AND you say the words stamp collecting at various places in your body copy — then mentioning the words “stamp collecting” in the meta keywords tag MIGHT help boost your page a bit higher for those words.

Remember, if you don’t use the words “stamp collecting” on the page at all, then just adding them to the meta keywords tag is extremely unlikely to help the page do well for the term. The text in the meta keywords tag, FOR THE FEW CRAWLERS THAT SUPPORT IT, works in conjunction with the text in your body copy.

The meta keyword tag is also sometimes useful as a way to help your page come up for synonyms or unusual words that don’t appear on the page itself. For instance, let’s say you had a page all about the “Penny Black” stamp. You never actually say the word “collecting” on this page. By having the word in your meta keywords tag, then you may help increase the odds of coming up if someone searched for “penny black stamp collecting.” Of course you would greater increase the odds if you just used the word “collecting” in the body copy of the page itself.

Here’s another example. Let’s say you have a page about horseback riding, and you’ve written your page using “horseback” as a single word. You realize that some people may instead search for “horse back riding,” with “horse back” in their searches being two separate words. If you listed these words separately in your meta keywords tag, THEN MAYBE FOR THE FEW CRAWLERS THAT SUPPORT IT, your page might rank better for “horse back” riding. Sadly, the best way to ensure this would be to write your pages using both “horseback riding” and “horse back riding” in the text — or perhaps on some of your pages, use the single word version and on others, the two word version.

I’m using all these capital letters on purpose. Far too many people new to search engine optimization obsess with the meta keywords tag. FEW crawlers support it. For those that do, it MIGHT! MAYBE! PERHAPS! POSSIBLY! BUT WITH NO GUARANTEE! help improve the ranking of your page. It also may very well do nothing for your page at all. In fact, repeat a particular word too often in a meta keywords tag and you could actually harm your page’s chances of ranking well. Because of this, I strongly suggest that those new to search engine optimization not even worry about the tag at all.

Even those who are experienced in search engine optimization may decide it is no longer worth using the tags. Search Engine Watch doesn’t. Any meta keywords tags you find in the site were written in the past, when the keywords tag was more important. There’s no harm in leaving up existing tags you may have written, but going forward, writing new tags probably isn’t worth the trouble. The articles below explore this in more detail:

Death Of A Meta Tag
The Search Engine Report, Oct. 1, 2002

Meta Tags Revisited
The Search Engine Report, Dec. 5, 2002

Still want to use the meta keywords tag? OK. Look back at the opening example. See the second meta tag shown, the one that says “name=keywords”? That’s the meta keywords tag. The keywords you want associated with your page go between the quotation marks after the “content=” portion of the tag.

Inktomi says that you should include up to 25 words or phrases, with each word or phrase separated by commas. More advice from Inktomi can be found on its Content Policy FAQ.

FYI, in the past, when the tag was supported by other search engines, they generally indexed up to 1,000 characters of text and commas were not required.

Meta Robots Tag

One other meta tag worth mentioning is the robots tag. This lets you specify that a particular page should NOT be indexed by a search engine. To keep spiders out, simply add this text between your head tags on each page you don’t want indexed. The format is shown below (click on the picture if you want to copy and past the HTML for your own use):

Meta-noindex

You do NOT need to use variations of the meta robots tag to help your pages get indexed. They are unnecessary. By default, a crawler will try to index all your web pages and will try to follow links from one page to another.

Most major search engines support the meta robots tag. However, the robots.txt convention of blocking indexing is more efficient, as you don’t need to add tags to each and every page. See theSearch Engines Features page for more about the robots.txt file. If you use do a robots.txt file to block indexing, there is no need to also use meta robots tags.

The meta robots tag also has some extensions offered by particular search engines to prevent indexing of multimedia content. The article below talks about this in more depth and provides some links to help files. Search Engine Watch members should follow the link from the article to the members-only edition for extended help on the subject.

Image Search Faces Renewed Legal Challenge
The Search Engine Report, August 22, 2001

Other Meta Tags

There are many other meta tags that exist beyond those explored in this article. For example, if you were to view the source code of this web page, you would find “author,” “channel” and “date” meta tags. These mean nothing to web-wide crawlers such as Google. They are specifically for an internal search engine used by Search Engine Watch to index its own content.

There are also “Dublin Core” meta tags. The intent is that these can be used for both “internal” search engines and web-wide ones. However, no major web-wide search engine supports these tags. More about them can be found below:

How about the meta revisit tag? This tag is not recognized by the major search engines as a method of telling them how often to automatically return. They have never supported it.

In Conclusion

Overall, just remember this. Of all the meta tags you may see out there:

  • Meta Robots: This tag enjoys full support, but you only need it if you DO NOT want your pages indexed.

  • Meta Description: This tag enjoys much support, and it is well worth using.

  • Meta Keywords: This tag is only supported by some major crawlers and probably isn’t worth the time to implement.

  • Meta Everything Else: Any other meta tag you see is ignored by the major crawlers, though they may be used by specialized search engines.

More Resources

At the bottom of this page are more resources about meta tags, including tutorials and meta tag building applications. But first.

If you’ve been following the “Next” buttons to read the numbered sections of the Search Engine Submission Tips guide in order, you’ve now reached the last page. Congratulations!

There’s still more information you might find helpful, however. Please review the rest of the articles on the SEM Basics section for additional assistance with search engine marketing issues.

In addition, do consider becoming a Search Engine Watch member, for access to even more information on search engine marketing issues.

Now, here are those additional meta tag resources and articles.

Meta Tag Generators, Builders and Evaluators

SiteUp’s Meta-Tag Generator
This is a software-based package for Windows that creates meta tags. It is a freeware package — no registration fee required.

Meta Tag Builder
This form allows you to create very complicated meta tags using much more than the keywords and description tags, if you wish. Note that it will place a commented credit line into the tag. This can easily be removed, if you wish.

Created by Omaha SEO Company also follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

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