SEO Tips

I remember the good ol’ days of search engine optimization before Page Rank and all those annoying quality indicators.  It was a simpler day when all you needed to get into the top ten was  cram variations of the same keyword phrases into the Keyword and Title tag.  Then you could get extra fancy and create some incredibly repetitive description tag like: “Widget Emporium has red widgets, blue widgets, camping widgets, car widgets, and more.  Stop by today to get more widgets, widgets, widgets”.  Yes it really was that easy at first, but today’s search engine isn’t as naive as it was in the early days.  From the looks of a lot of sites I’ve been reviewing lately they didn’t get the memo.

If it was 1997, and judging by the stock market’s performance it just might be, the era of stuffing keywords into meta tags is long over.  The Keyword tag has been ignored by Google for years.  Some of my colleagues believe it helps in Yahoo.  Frankly, I’ve started leaving it out all together and my sites still show up in the top 10.  

As for the Description tag, its use for ranking is nominal at best, but it is still quite useful.  When someone sees your website in the search engine rankings, the Description tag is often used as the snippet under the link.  Yes, there are exceptions like pulling a description from DMOZ but generally speaking the Description tag is used.  Think of this tag as an opportunity to convince the surfer your website is exactly where they want to visit.

So what is useful?  We already discussed the handy but not rank worthy Description tag and the virtually worthless Keyword tag.  The last one, and one of the more important tags on your site, is the Title tag.  Not only is this one used for ranking, but it also shows up as the link that people click on when they find your site in the search engines.  Combine a compelling Title with a persuasive Description tag and you’re one step closer to getting that person off the search engine and onto your web site.  Plus, it helps with your ranking, so always use this tag and make it unique! 

SEO is about doing a lot of little things right that add up to a big leap in the search engine rankings.  Make sure to keep an eye on the little things that matter like the Title and Description tags and spend little to no time with the lowly Keyword tag. 

When it comes to SEO, everyone wants to rank in the top 10 for their keyword. As a Phoenix SEO, that is the reason people hire me. But what a lot of people don’t understand is the value of key word phrases. Today’s search engine users are getting more and more sophisticated. Back in the early days, people would type in their keyword and up would pop results.  Often those results did not return exactly what they are looking for. While most of the major search engines have been good about improving their results, users have learned to narrow their search by performing searches for phrases instead of individual words. For instance, someone looking for “cars” would get millions of results, only some of which are actually useful. So to improve those results, people perform more specific searches like “used cars” or “Honda used cars.” We in the SEO industry refer to hits for these phrases as the “long tail.”

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Ask yourself this question, “Who buys products on your site? Search Engines or people?” Obviously, the answer is people.  So why are you writing your sales text for search engine spiders? I know, you’ve read online that you have to stuff your pages with relevant keywords so the engines will love you and rank your site in the top 10 in the search engines. But, when you write your text solely for the purpose of search engine spiders, your message may fall flat with consumers. For example:

“Our mega store has NFL footballs for sale at low prices. NFL Footballs are a great gift for children of all ages. Buy our NFL footballs on line right now.”

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On Saturday, I was having some technical trouble with one of my Linux web servers. After scouring the web for an answer with no solution in sight, I decided to call in reinforcements and ask a question over at Web Hosting Talk. Being ever persistent, I went back and started toying with my server some more. Then my computer-nerd-ADD set in, and I decide to go back to Google and type in the specific error code I was getting, just in case I missed it the last 20 times I did a search. As my eyes scanned the SERPs, my heart leapt when I saw my exact error code nice and bold. But wait, this link points to Web Hosting Talk forums. I read the blurb a little further and realize that it’s my post! In less than 10 minutes Google had spidered WHT and indexed it.

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