Archive for July, 2009
July 8th, 2009 by Patrick Hare
Note: We have a free Meta Tag Generator for DIY SEO Enthusiasts . This article does not show actual meta tag HTML because the examples were confusing the blog software template. You can see some meta elements here.
For people who are just getting started in the website optimization world, meta tags are generally the first element addressed in the SEO (search engine optimization) process. Unfortunately, they are sometimes the only SEO attention that a site gets, which is unfortunate, since metatags alone won’t create rankings. SEO professionals do not hold metatags in high regard, despite the basic importance of having good tags. This is because there are many other elements that determine search engine rankings, like on-page content and links. However, the right meta tag choices will definitely improve your search engine standings.
First and most important is the Title tag, which doesn’t use the word “meta” in its HTML designation, but is part of the metatag group given that it is written at the same time as other tags. Proper title tag writing has a significant impact on search engine rankings. In some cases, all you have to do is change your title to get better search engine positions. There are many multimillion dollar enterprises that have not caught on to this fact. Normally the first 60 characters of the title tag will show up in search engine results above a description or snippet of page content. The most important keywords should go near the beginning of your title, especially on the homepage.
Second is the Description tag. This should be a concise (between 200 and 250 character) description of the page contents and your business. A snippet of this tag is likely to be used in search engine results, although the search engine has the prerogative to grab any piece of text on your site for the snippet. Make sure to use the page’s most important keywords in the description, and write it so it grabs a reader’s attention. A description tag should have sentence structure, and should not be a list of keywords separated by commas.
Third is the Keywords tag. The keywords tag should be a list of keywords separated by commas. It should not be longer than 500 characters, but you should assume that the search engines aren’t going to care about the keywords tag anyway. This is because people abused the keywords tag when it first came out. We have noticed that Yahoo still reads the keywords tag (we found this out when we put common typos into the keywords tag, and nowhere else, and the pages got indexed in Yahoo) and even a fractional amount of traffic can sometimes bring in good sales. From an SEO standpoint, many people leave the keywords tag out entirely, with no ill effects, but it may still have an incremental value. In general, put keywords in order of importance, and don’t repeat any keywords in the list or you may be suspected of spamming the search engine.
For the first three metatag categories (title, description, and keywords) it is important to prevent duplicates. Each tag should be unique. Titles should be relevant to each page’s content. Descriptions can have a single unique sentence at the beginning and a common tagline for the next two sentances, but ideally they should be 100% unique. If you are monitoring your site in Google Webmaster Tools, Google will indicate duplicate descriptions and titles. These should be addressed as quickly as possible. If you have a site with several thousand pages, there are ways to use dynamic insertion to make each title and description unique.
There are multiple other meta tag designations, like rating, author, city, state, and copyright, which may be used by search engines, but aren’t treated as highly as other tags. If you are going to use a “rating” tag, it should be appropriate for the content, so you don’t exclude people from all-ages sites and you do exclude them from sites with profanity or adult content. There is a revisit-after tag, but normally we don’t recommend using this one because you may be telling search engines to only look at your site periodically, which means that it takes longer for changes to your website to get noticed.
Some metatags can hurt you if they are not used correctly. If you have a “robots” metatag that says “noindex, nofollow” then search engines are going to ignore every page that contains the metatag. If you use meta refresh tags on pages with minimal content, your site could be mistaken for having “doorway pages” which are an old SEO trick that creates serious penalties for your site.
Sometimes a meta tag is necessary if Google or Yahoo is showing a site description based on your listing in the Open Directory, or DMOZ.org. Normally this description is not up to date, or may be very brief. The way to fix this is with a “noodp” tag which tells the engines to use your own meta description or a snippet instead of this tag.
The big rule for meta tag usage is to make sure that the tags match up seamlessly with the content you have on the relevant webpage, and with the links that are pointing at your site. The title tag, above other tags, describes what the page is about, so it should match up with actual searches for your product, service, or message. Properly focused meta tags improve rankings and click volume. Consistency goes a long way with people and search engines, since the engine gets its credibility from serving up accurate results, and people will jump off a site (or “bounce”) if they don’t see what they are looking for. By having the right metatags based around the best keywords, you can increase traffic, make more money, and build your brand in the search engines. Even though metatags are just the first step in the journey of search engine optimization, they will have a definite impact on everything that comes afterward.
Tags: meta tags, metatag, metatags
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July 7th, 2009 by Patrick Hare
If you’re trying to get first page placement on the Google search engine, you need to know what you’re up against. Several years ago, the standard way of getting good website rankings was to look at the top 10 results for a competitive search term, and examine the structure of the sites that had the best rankings. Google changed the game by placing greater emphasis on links to your website. In the search engine optimization (SEO) industry, these are known as “backlinks” and they play an important role in Google and Yahoo positioning. If you want to find out what it takes to get a top ranking, you need an SEO tool that tells you how many back links your competitors have.
Our SEO Competition Report shows you the top 10 sites in Google, along with other information you may find useful. The reporting system also lets you download a PDF copy once it is finished, so you can save it for later.
Here is the information that the SEO Competition Report will give you:
- Google Ranking – As expected, the rankings will be listed from 1 to 10.
- Yahoo Ranking – Yahoo rankings vary, especially given that Yahoo still practices paid inclusion, which effectively lets you buy your way into the “natural” results. Don’t be surprised if some competitors rank highly in Google but are nowhere in Yahoo.
- Number of indexed pages – The number of pages that the search engines have found for the site. Note that big sites may have thousands of pages, but you can still get good rankings with less than 10. If you know that you have more pages, you probably have a problem with your website that is preventing search engine spiders from reading it.
- Backlinks – The number of links pointing at the site. If your competitor has a high number of links, keep in mind that relevance is a highly important factor. For example, Wikipedia usually has about 3.7 million links, but only the relevant links play a part in rankings. Another big factor in its rankings involve on-page relevance and trust factors. One of the great things about SEO is that you can get a handful of relevant links from trusted sources and beat sites with thousands of low quality links.
- Registration Date – When the domain name for the site was registered, or renewed if it lapsed. Older sites generally have a better chance of getting good rankings.
- Archive Date – The site’s first appearance in Archive.org. Note that if a domain name lapsed, you can see an archive date older than the registration date. In general, search engines should have found the site around the same time, and a site’s trust factor “clock” starts when it is cached by the engine. If you buy an old domain name that never had a site on it, you are effectively starting now.
- PageRank – Also known as the “toolbar PageRank,” this is the relative value of all the links pointing at the site. As always, note that PageRank is not an endorsement about anything else on the site, especially relevance. As we say in the SEO business, “PageRank is a good place to start, but a bad place to finish.” Still, you may notice that all the competing sites have high PageRank, which means you should be building a robust link structure to counter the weight of the links against you. A general rule about PageRank is that high PR sites tend to get crawled more frequently, sometimes as often as every few minutes in the case of a PR10 site like CNN.com.
These results may differ slightly from the Google results you see because they are taken from a Google datacenter closer to our own IP address. Google shows different results to different searchers, because it tries to provide the best information based on the searcher’s geographical area. Someone in Salt Lake City searching for “Jazz” may get basketball team information, while someone in Nashville doing the same search will probably get more results about musicians and jazz clubs.
If you find that you are trying to get into a field that has a high rate of competition, or that your site is not as old as most sites on the list, then Web.com Search Agency can help you evaluate your options. We have several different custom SEO and link building packages that can level the playing field. As always, the most profitable keywords require more advanced and aggressive level of optimization. Some of the top players in the SEO field may be actively adding links and optimized content on a daily basis in order to keep their clients in the top 10. Even without the head start, it is still possible to position your site among strong competitors, assuming you have the resources to do so. In any case, hiring a search engine optimization agency is highly recommended, given that advanced link building must be done in a strategic and search engine friendly manner.
Tags: backlinks, competitor backlinks
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July 6th, 2009 by Patrick Hare
Many of our customers have businesses that serve a limited geographical area. Over a year ago, Google started adding a selection of local results into its search results when searches were done on specific geographical areas, or for specialized terms. For example, if you type in “roofing contractors” you may or may not see a map of roofing contractors in your general area.
Naturally, the big question is how to get found in this space. Aside from the techniques used by spammers to dominate map listings, Google makes it possible to achieve results by adding your site to the Local Business Center , which lets you put multiple local locations into your map results, so people searching in a nearby suburb will see one of your branch offices.
Claiming your business in Google Local is also imperative for any business owner. This is because there are people who will impersonate your business or hijack your listing and put their own information on it, which is not only confusing for potential customers, but also could be a black mark against you if you’re being impersonated. Florists and Locksmiths have found themselves victimized and pushed out of listings by shady operators who replace legitimate phone numbers with local ones that forward to out-of-state call centers. In the case of locksmiths, a random “free agent” is often dispatched to your location and the price is invariably higher than the quote you received when you made the call.
One way to make sure your business is considered legitimate is to have an established local address, so Google can confirm your business identity through one of three verification methods. Verification is an important part of claiming your account, and it gives you the ability to use the many advanced features available with this free service.
By being registered in the Local Business Center, it is possible to add features like hours, alternate phone and fax numbers, a description of your business, and other information. One tip for savvy small businesses involves using the Google Keyword Tool to discover the most common search terms relative to your local business. This lets you write a business description that incorporates the high quantity and quality phrases that are more likely to bring customers. It also gives you competitive market intelligence on what new services you can offer, and the relative demand for service offerings that you may already have.
Some of the new features of the Google Local Business Center include traffic statistics, keyword usage, and even requests for driving directions. Information of this kind allows for the business owner to understand the local demand for products and services, and identify opportunities for expansion relative to customer growth. For services that have mobile dispatch, this kind of information lets you know what part of town to “loiter” in while awaiting the next service call. This saves on fuel costs while improving customer satisfaction and overall efficiency, since less time spend on the road equals more time servicing multiple clients.
Aside from the local results incorporated into Google maps, local and geotargeted pay-per-click (PPC) are also great ways to make sure you show up when people are looking to patronize local shops and trades. City targeted PPC campaigns generally have a lower cost per click (CPC) than national campaigns, and the customer conversion rate is higher because you can add local phone numbers and regional terms into your ads. By adding PPC ads to Google Maps, you also have the ability to put in small images and messaging that helps you stand out among the other red dots on the page.
One other secret to local results involves the ability for people to write reviews of the product, service, or (in the case of restaurants) food quality experienced. There is a school of thought in search optimization that says you will get better results if your listings have reviews. Whenever possible, encouraging customers to review your business will set you apart from the listings that have bad reviews, or no reviews at all. We would not encourage people to write “fake” reviews for a restaurant, trade, or shop, but it is being done by people who want to stand out.
Finally, there are other important local listing services like Bing and Yahoo Local which are also very important tools for people who work out of limited geographical areas. By controlling your local online presence, you can ensure that your potential customers are finding out everything you want them to know about your business. Furthermore, improvements in local search matching are going to increase the presence and use of local results over the next few years. Staking a claim on these results can give your local business a competitive advantage in a slow economy, and a huge head start when conditions improve.
Tags: google local, google local submission
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July 2nd, 2009 by Patrick Hare
The relative ease of instant website design has its drawbacks. Plenty of novice webmasters have hung out a shingle for “web design” despite a laughable level of knowledge and experience in the web design trade. With the use of instant website creators, free templates, and borrowed designs, it is easy to make a website and sell it to small brick-and-mortar companies who are not knowledgeable about what a standard site should have. After a few months with no traffic, or no visitor conversion, many of these business owners start to wonder if there is a problem.
There are still a surprising number of web designers who do not take search engines into consideration when designing a website. At Web.com Search Agency, we know this because people come to us and ask why they aren’t getting any traction in Google. Normally it takes only a few seconds to see that the site has been designed entirely in Flash, or it has a bad title, or its on-page content has been embedded in images. Any one of these factors can effectively make your site invisible to search engines. A classic design mistake is to have a homepage title that begins with “Welcome to” and ends with the business name. Usually this mistake is repeated on every page. At a more advanced level (if there is such a thing as advanced incompetence) there are designers who use every JavaScript trick in the book, from flyout menus that can’t be read by search spiders, to cursor tricks that looked neat back in 1997. When we see a new site that looks like it was designed for a free web hosting space, we don’t usually have to look too hard to find readability problems.
At the other end are modern looking ecommerce sites with shopping carts that are definitely not SEO (Search Engine Optimization, or the process of getting your site found on search engines) friendly. This is kind of surprising to us because a search engine friendly shopping cart can be the difference between success and failure for a company, and we are always telling our customers to go back and ask the cart designer for SEO features like unique titles, search engine friendly URLs (also referred to as mod rewrites in PHP) and XML sitemap functionality. A proper shopping cart should also be able to spit out a Google Shopping feed (AKA a Froogle Feed) for Google Base, which adds your product list to the world of Google. Many open source shopping carts have available upgrades for a few dollars more, or built by third party entrepreneurs, but this is also an indicator of poor planning on behalf of the shopping cart designer. A truly competitive online shopping cart would have all of these features in place at the base level. Shopping carts that aren’t SEO friendly are a disservice to their customers, because the whole idea of selling things online involves getting found in the internet arenas where sales are made.
How do you find out if your web designer does SEO friendly work? How can you tell if the shopping cart you want is search engine compatible? Ask for working samples. Even if you don’t know what to look for, most search engine optimization companies can look at the sample and tell you what would be lacking if the same model was applied to you. For shopping carts, you can always do a query in Google with the question “Is (shopping cart name here) SEO friendly” or “(cart name) SEO problem” and see what comes out. Many shopping carts have updated themselves over the past few years, so if you see forum postings that are old, find out if upgrades have been made. Finally, if the shopping cart salesperson tells you that the cart isn’t friendly yet but an update is on the way, you may want to look elsewhere, since such updates can take years and may not bestow full functionality. We had one customer find out that the update worked for the “new build” of the cart, but he could not update his cart because he had the “old build” and making a change would ruin his existing rankings.
(Special note: Given that our parent company Web.com practices SEO friendly web design, we would be remiss if we did not make a note of that fact in this posting.)
Finally, you should see if your web designer has basic SEO knowledge. Many self-styled webmasters will claim to know everything about SEO, in which case you should ask for examples of superior placement. Search engine optimization firms usually will work with your webmaster for updates, but there is often friction when a webmaster says that the business owner “doesn’t need” to add content, change titles, add analytics, or fix several small items that slow search engine spiders. Sometimes a webmaster will be using SEO tricks that worked five years ago, but will get you thrown out of the Google rankings today. A certain degree of SEO knowledge on the webmaster’s behalf will ensure that basic tenets of search spiderability are in place during the design phase. Advanced agency advice can help in the naming of files, pages, and images. Agencies can also write or edit SEO content in order to ensure that “keyword blurring” does not confuse the search engines and leave you with artificially low rankings. No matter what the size of your new site or redesign, an SEO compatible site design produces dividends in the form of cheap daily traffic for your business website.
Tags: seo friendly design, web design
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July 1st, 2009 by Patrick Hare
Many of our customers are curious about SEO (search engine optimization) for the Bing “decision” engine. The short answer is that if you were found on MSN Live Search, you are likely to have the same positions on Bing. This is because Bing’s search results are nearly identical to their previous incarnations on Live Search, but Bing’s interface and functionality have been upgraded to present people with more choices in the “related search” menu at the left of the page, and also shows you previous searches in the same area. The related search feature is the “decision engine” factor, but overall you still need to show up near the top of the list of results if you want to get found.
Over the past few weeks, one of the differences for our customers involved an increase in traffic compared to previous MSN Live Search data, which was noted once Google updated its Analytics to track Bing as a search engine. The traffic increase is likely due to the fact that Bing has quickly taken a bigger market share over Yahoo search, probably because Microsoft is spending a few hundred million dollars on advertisements. How long Bing keeps its share of the marketplace is anyone’s guess, but overall people seem to be having a positive search experience.
One of the problems with Bing and its predecessor Live Search has to do with the volatility seen in search results. Web.com Search Agency tracks results for several clients, and their competitors, and MSN’s volatility has been noticeable for multiple sites, not all of which are even using SEO practices. Keywords will move several spaces up or down, even from week to week, with a churn rate that almost always exceeds Google or Yahoo search results. Combined with the fact that MSN was always the #3 search engine, there was little interest in optimizing MSN over Google, or even Yahoo for that matter. One of the differences between Bing and other engines is that its algorith is not necessarily as dependant on link popularity, so on page factors are more paramount.
For people who want to be found in Bing, several of the old MSN Search rules apply. First, you need to cached by Bing, which is done by submitting your site. MSNbot is still the crawler that will visit your website, so make sure you aren’t excluding it in your robots.txt file. MSN also has a Webmaster Center, which is not as famous as Google’s, but still highly recommended if Bing is important to you or your clients.
Second, you want to make sure your site has fresh content. What is fresh content? Essentially, updates to pages, added functionality, and more information about products or services will give you a boost. One way to keep content fresh involves updating a blog regularly, or referencing new press releases from your homepage. You should also be doing periodic keyword research to see if there are any new phrases that are worth going after, and then build fresh content around those keywords. Many sources on the internet report that MSN’s algorithm is more keyword oriented, but you should still keep in line with rules that Yahoo and Google use to prevent keyword stuffing.
Third, ensure that your metatags are descriptive and reference your major keywords, since the general SEO consensus is that Bing and its predecessor use these as part of their indexing. As always, try to avoid keyword stuffing and keep in mind that you don’t want to go too deep into any gray areas, because Bing may also be spending more dollars on algorithm improvement in the future, which will help it to filter out lower quality sites. One potential advantage you may have with Bing is that you can look at the “related search” menu and see if you have any relevant topics that you can build into your own site. Assuming that people who search for general topics will follow this menu, you have a chance to sharpen your relevance in one or more of these fields. If Bing retains its position over Yahoo or takes a greater market share, you will have the opportunity to get in on the ground floor. Another topic of note is that Bing, like Google, has a certain preference for exact match domain names, but it also will list .tv and .cc domains among its results, which is less common for Google. Therefore, a truly competitive or low volume/high margin term from one of these extensions may be profitable.
As a rule, a site that is good for Google will fall into line with Yahoo and MSN, but new content appears to get a better boost, at least for awhile. New sites almost always show up first in MSN/Bing, which may create a credibility gap because there are a lot of new sites that aren’t good resources for their topic matter. For people who try out different search engines, the quickest correct answer is going to be the determining factor in market share longevity. Any improvement to the search experience is going to keep internet users coming back, which means that search engines are always going to be looking for the best possible resource related to the topic typed into the search box. Aside from all the talk about semantic matching, link-based algorithms, and domain trust, the main takeaway for anyone interested in optimizing for Bing (or any other engine) is that creating a useful, readable site is the first step to SEO success.
Update (7/15/09) : CNN posted an article that breaks down some of the differences in Google Search vs. Bing which also incorporates observations on market share and upcoming software platforms.
Tags: bing, optimizing for bing, seo for bing
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