Posts Tagged ‘Meta Description Tag’

Should Meta Tags Be Used With Search Engine Optimization?

Saturday, September 26th, 2009

I deal with many questions from curious website owners everyday. One question I have a new answer for is, “Should I use META tags on my site when do search engine optimization?” Old Answer: It couldn’t hurt, but don’t worry about them, the search engines ignore them for the most part. New answer? Read on…

Should I really use a META tag? Really?

The new answer is yes, you should use META tags on your site. The keyword META tag is still not used by search engines but when submitting to directories, a valuable use of time by the way, the META keywords are used in many cases to automatically fill in the keywords for your site in that directory.

Even more amazingly, the META description tag has soared in importance. How so you ask? Google has started showing the META description in its search results when certain criteria are met.

The criteria being used appears to be very simple, unlike many of the other things Google does. When the keyword or search terms appear in the META description, the META description is used instead of the snippet of text containing the keyword on your page.

For example, if you do a search in Google for ‘Big Oak SEO’ you will see our site in the first listing and the description used is our META description tag. All three words being searched for are also in our META description.

If you do a search for ‘big oak client’ you will see the first listing is pulling a snippet of text from the page itself. Since ‘client’ is not in our META description, it uses a snippet of text from the page where all three words can be found.

Where should you use a META description tag?

Every website should use a META description tag on the home page at the very least. This way you can say exactly what you want and not worry the snippet of text being used is not best choice for your message. What this really means is Google is giving us some measure of control.

And now that we have this knowledge and control, how best to use it? This allows us to take off our search engine optimizer hats and don our search engine marketer hats. Think of what you can say in the brief sentence that will entice a user to click your link rather than the one above or below. You can put your phone number in the META description for starters or how about being really creative and offer a discount or advertise a sale. Tell them your unique selling proposition. It should be a one sentence phrase already in your head. The only caveat to remember is that your META description will only show if the search term is in the META description. While this can be tricky, it can be done with some forethought. You can do this for all of your targeted pages and have dozens of marketing messages.

Use the META description wisely: target your market and entice your customers. Do not abuse this control and put outlandish, untrue or slanderous statements as I am sure Google will be watching; and if this technique is abused the META description may have seen its last search result this time.

[Sponsored] Bryan Seawell is the proud owner of this article and he owns a site called: “sem business blueprint“. See how he can help you with his site: “sem business blueprint” and allow him to share with you his best known secrets here at his exclusive site, “sem business blueprint review“. Thank you for your trust and belief in Bryan. Hope it will benefit you and others. Have a wonderful day ahead. [Sponsored]

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The Heavily-Optimised SEO Article As Legitimate Search Engine Doorway Page

Saturday, September 26th, 2009

The doorway page, the satellite page, the channeling page, the information page, the landing page, the entry page, the bridge page…, whatever you call them they’ve long been considered the bete noir of seo or search engine optimisation. Everyone’s got their own definition but all of them embrace roughly the same principle, a heavily optimised keyword or keyword phrase-riddled page built solely to attract the search engines that then links back to a main web site.

Some of these will be made up of pure and absolute nonsense bar the top paragraph, that will be proper English with a link back to the main site using the keyword or key phrase as anchor text in the backlink or IBL (Inbound Back Link). The same keyword or phrase will similarly appear in the page’s title tag, the meta description tag and the header or H1 tag, while the rest of the page will be utter gobbledegook, machine-generated Babel spam with the keyword or key phrase sprinkled randomly through the content just to a density which will appeal to the search engines.

Others will be made up entirely of this machine-generated keyword or phrase riddled spam and will automatically redirect through use of javascript or a meta-refresh to a completely different site. SEO techniques like this, when (not if) discovered will inevitably suffer some kind of search engine penalty if not necessarily an outright ban.

Traditionally it will characteristically also be a page that stands alone outside the main body of a site, existing on it’s own as an individual entity. It will have no incoming (IBL) links from the site; any that it does have will probably be coming from series of similar pages, all created with the same aim in mind, to rank highly in all or a particular engine for a particular specific search term.

If you do a search for doorway page in Google amazingly there are still adverts for companies who openly announce their dubious expertise in this frowned upon SEO practice despite the very highly-publicised decision by Google to ban BMW for, among other things, their blatant use of this forbidden SEO technique.

Perhaps a better approach would be to note that now, though, you can legitimately use this basic optimisation technique by making each page into an article and submitting it to an article distribution site. No-one seems to have realised yet, or if they have they haven’t drawn any particular attention to it, that while using doorway pages is still very much a Black Hat SEO technique, one that can and has been known to get sites banned, you can exercise good White Hat SEO by creating articles that perform exactly the same SEO function as a doorway page and no-one will complain or even adversely comment. It seems that, in the eyes of the engines, if you hang the label “article” on a certain kind of doorway page it then becomes perfectly acceptable to all.

For instance, is this article linked to from my site? No it is not. Is this article heavily optimised with keywords related to SEO and key phrases related to search engine optimisation? Indeed it is. It fulfils, then, at least some of the criteria exponents of so-called “Ethical SEO” would use to label it as search engine spam, but manifestly, in commenting on the phenomenon it is itself a part of, it isn’t spam at all, more (I believe myself) an example of social commentary on the search engine optimisation or SEO industry.

So then, is this article itself a doorway page? Like so much in search engine optimisation, that really depends on your own individual point of view. My advice? Look not at what I say I do, look instead at what results from what I do - if I have a high-ranking stand-alone page for popular SEO keywords with a link back to my main site from it, one that can not be banned for being a doorway page because it is in fact an article that’s about doorway pages, what will the consequences actually be?

Strange, Grasshopper, strange are the ways of the SEO!

[Sponsored] Bryan Seawell is the proud owner of this article and he owns a site called: “save the marriage review“. See how he can help you with his site: “save my marriage today” and allow him to share with you his best known secrets here at his exclusive site, “save my marriage today review“. Thank you for your trust and belief in Bryan. Hope it will benefit you and others. Have a wonderful day ahead. [Sponsored]

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Google And Your Domain Name

Sunday, July 5th, 2009

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Google, being the largest and most used search engine and is extremely important to optimize your website for. As a matter of fact, if you optimize your website just for Google you?d find your rankings in Yahoo! and MSN will jump up higher than your ranking in Google. I?ve optimized many websites that show up in at least the top 20 listings in Google and found that in each case they ranked higher in Yahoo! and MSN usually in the top 3 positions with most in the number one spots.

Most everyone agrees that with Google content is king. So writing good copy with just the right amount of keyword phrases, for keyword density is important. And natural anchor text links is second to the throne, which takes lots of work and proper timing to do properly.

Third in line are keyword phrases (notice I said phrase because single keywords are almost impossible to optimize for), which need to be researched to find the right phrase for you and not used to often in the content/text to get the right density. Used to often and you?ll hurt your ranking.

Fourth in line are the Meta Description Tag which when used properly can actually bring visitors to your website who wouldn?t normally come there. Of course there are several other factors involved with getting that elusive number one spot.

But what most everyone often overlooks is what I call the fifth element which Google uses to determine their ranking of a website and that’s the domain name.

People, even SEO companies, don?t either know the importance of the domain name to Google or take the time to chose the proper name for the website. Most just use their company name or what they conceder a “Cool” name for their websites. Now, unless your company is well known or at least well known in its field, using a basically unknown company name is pointless. Even more pointless is the “Cool” name.

The entire reason you optimize your website is to get visitors from search engines, so why not use all the tools available to get the best ranking possible for your website.

Use your domain name as one of those tools. Instead of your company name or the “Cool” one, use a keyword phrase, one that describes your product or service. Take your time in choosing the proper name. Make sure that it will work best for your website. If you not sure ask your friends and relatives what keywords they would use to find your product or services on the Internet. You might be surprised at what they would use.
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You have the keyword phrase that you know will work. But before you jump online and get that domain name there are a couple of things you may still need to do.

Let’s say you’re the owner of Mike’s Bikes and you specialize in Colorado Mountain Bikes so you figure to kill two birds with one stone and use the domain name mikescoloradomountainbikes.com to keep your name in it along with using the keyword phrase. Now this might make sense to you but you?re not Google. You’re not going to like it but you need to drop the mikes out of the name because it’s dead weight.

So now you’ve got coloradomountainbikes.com but wait before you burn up the keyboard use Colorado-mountain-bikes.com instead. Why? Because Google sees this as three different words and would see coloradomountainbikes.com as a single word. When people are doing a search they will not be using coloradomountainbikes, they are going to use Colorado mountain bikes. The bonus is that your domain name now becomes a keyword phrase used by Google when it performs a search.

Grab free information in the topic of free traffic - this is your personal knowledge base.

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