This definitive blog post and video from Matt Cutts (below) finally confirms what all SEOs have suspected for a while – that the “keywords” meta tag does not impact search rankings AT ALL. The theory was that keywords meta tags, being the low-hanging fruit of SEO for so long, were spammed so extensively by webmasters that search engines stopped taking them into account. We knew this yet, like an old habit fighting hard not to die, we felt neglectful not adding a few keywords in your pages’ tags, just in case in some scenarios they did weigh in.
This video has finally put this one to rest and it even gives a reason why it may even be saving you a hassle (in addition to the two or three minutes that you save to type in these meta tags) if someone decided to sue you for copying their “keywords” meta tags or for using their brand name in your tags.
The description meta tag, however, continues to play a role and is sometimes used in search result snippets, so this is a better place to spend those few extra minutes.
Search Engine Strategies Coming To Toronto
May 27th, 2009This coming June 8 – 10 the SES Conference will be taking place in Toronto’s Sheraton Centre. Sessions include topics such as PPC management, keyword research, SEO, social media, local, mobile, link building, duplicate content, multiple site issues, video optimization, site optimization, usability and more.
Eighty8 Online will be there to share ideas on the latest in SEO and SEM with other professionals.
Use Anchor Text Stretegically In Your Linking Efforts
April 7th, 2009As we discussed earlier, linking is an important part of your SEO strategy since it helps give search engines an idea of what your site is about and what others are saying about it. Think of linking as your online PR (as in “Public Relations”, not as in “Page Rank”!). A critical part of your PR is not just getting people to talk about you but also making sure they are saying good and relevant things about you. You can’t always get people to put in a good word for you but you can try to influence the language they use when talking about your business so the public is getting a consistent message. In online PR the language used around your links is important also because it helps search engines determine what your website is about and therefore it can help improve your rankings. One way to do this is paying attention to the anchor text in links. This matters for both internal and external links.
What is anchor text? Anchor text are the words that are hyperlinked within a page, i.e., the clickable text. The following are examples of how to employ anchor text on both external and internal linking.
External links: When doing link exchanges you can suggest the HTML that should be used for the inbound link so that the text uses relevant keywords. For example, if someone is making a blog about your site on crafts for children they could say something like “Check out this site for children’s crafts.” (where “this site” is hyperlinked”), or they could say “This site is great for children’s crafts.” (where “children crafts” is hyperlinked). By hyperlinking the keywords, the second example will help tell the search engines that the destination website is about crafts for children. This will help improve your clickthroughs and the search engine ranking for the second page. Keep this in mind when suggesting link exchanges and don’t be shy to forward your HTML code (with the appropriate anchor text) to your contacts. Most people will be happy to not have to write the HTML code themselves.
Internal links: Say your site has a two-page article on “beach vacations”. At the end of the first page you can use a hyperlink with the text “Page 2″ or you could have a hyperlink with a brief description of what is in the second page of the article such as “family friendly accomodations”. The more descriptive hyperlink will give search engines and users an indication of what the content on the second page is about.
Thinking strategically about your linking can help give your rankings a boost. Remember that the small details can have a big impact when it comes to your SEO strategy.
I Launched My Website. Now What?!
March 26th, 2009You spent the past number of months planning your business idea, talking to designers about your website vision or perhaps building your website or online store yourself. Now, how do you tell the world that you’re open for business?
Much like in conventional marketing for a retail business, you can pay for advertising on local papers for example, and you can also rely on word-of-mouth to attract business. You secure the latter by selling a great product, offering a great service, providing outstanding customer service and inviting all your friends and neighbours to your store opening. Once people know and respect your business they will start spreading the word. Online businesses work in a similar fashion. You can drive traffic by paying for advertising on other websites or running a PPC campaign, for example. The word-of-mouth kind of traffic is what we call organic traffic, and the place to start, the key to unlocking your front doors, is inviting the search engines to come look around. The goal of telling search engines that you’re open for business is having the pages on your website indexed so people can start finding your website when they do searches on Google or Yahoo! or their search engine of choice.
So how do you tell the search engines you exist? Follow these easy steps:
1. Submit your website to Yahoo! and Google. Both search engines allow you to submit your URLs for free. There are services that will submit your site to a number of search engines for you but it takes only a minute to submit it yourself to these two and these are really the most important ones.
2. Submit a sitemap of your website to Google. Google allows you to also submit a sitemap, which is a document in either .txt or XML format that basically explains the structure of your website. An XML sitemap also tells Google how frequently you update each page and the relative importance of each page. It’s especially a good idea to submit an XML sitemap when there are pages in your site that are not accessible via links on your navigation or text. There are free sitemap generators that will do the job for you if your website has less than 500 pages. Then all you have to do is place the contents in a file and upload these to the root folder of your website (or get your webmaster to do this for you).
3. Sign up for Google Webmaster Tools. Add your URL and follow the steps to verify your site. Here you will be able to submit your XML sitemap. Webmaster Tools is a valuable resource to complement your traffic analytics.
Now that you have invited the search engines to come look around, make sure to spread the word through linking.
What’s In A Title? Five Guidelines To Writing Titles That Drive Traffic.
March 17th, 2009When it comes to promoting your business, there are some strategies that take time to build, while others are quick to implement and can have a big impact. this is the top-right quadrant, the low-hanging fruit that anyone running a business hopes to find. One such strategy can be, quite simply, naming the titles of your pages. Page titles are one important place to indicate to a search engine what the content of your page is about. Page titles are displayed both on the top left corner of your browser window and as the page title on the search result listing.
Use the following five guidelines when coming up with titles for each of your pages. Make sure that:
1. Each page has a unique title
2. Titles are rich in keywords. To help determine which keywords may be important to focus on you can do some simple keyword research using SEO Book’s keyword tool.
3. Titles are not overly long. To avoid keyword stuffing, a practice frowned up on by search engines, your goal should be to optimize different pages for different keywords so you are not trying to unnaturally insert all your important keywords in your page titles and copy.
4. The content of your page, your copy, matches the title. Do not write an appealing title simply because you think it sounds catchy or has some good keywords. Make sure that your title is representative of the content of your page in order to make it relevant for search engines.
5. Place the more important terms closer to the front of your title. If you are a small business with a brand that is not yet well known chances are most of your traffic will be coming from people searching for your product using generic terms. Place your company name at the end of your title then. For example, if you have a coffee shop called Mercury and you sell organic coffee, one page description could be Organic Coffee – Mercury. People are more likely to search for the term organic coffee than for your brand.
While titles may not be the holy grail of SEO, they are a very important (and not very costly) way of optimizing your pages for search engines. Be sure to follow the guidelines above and you will be well on your way to improving your organic traffic.
To Link Or Not To Link? There Is No Question.
March 14th, 2009Linking with other businesses in the web is one important way to promote your business. The good news is that it is (or should be) free; the not so good news is that it takes time to do proper link-building. The key thing to remember is that it is essential to driving traffic to your site. So to optimize your website for search engines there is no question that you should be seeking out linking opportunities, both inbound and outbound. We will focus on inbound links at this point.
Why Is Linking Important?
Search engines use a number of factors, both internal and external to your site, in order to rank your site accurately. Remember that they are looking to provide results that are relevant to the search term of the user and also that are from reliable, trustworthy sources who are an authority in their subject matter, who produce quality content, and who are reputable. Linking speaks to this last point – reputability. One of the ways that search engines gauge your reputation is by looking at which resources are linking in to your website. Inbound links from other websites will tell search engines how important people consider your content to be.
High quality inbound links, therefore, are ones with the following qualities:
- The website linking in to yours is highly relevant to the topic of your website
- The website linking in to yours has a high Page Rank or PR (Google’s relative ranking of all web pages)
- The inbound link is a one way link (i.e., you’re not reciprocating with an outgoing link to their website)
How Do You Start A Linking Strategy?
The ideal links are from sources such as publications or blogs who are giving an honest review or comment on your site. This, however, may be difficult to come across if your website or brand is not well known yet. One way to start building links then is to seek out link exchange opportunities with relevant resources and to submit your website to directories. For the first you may start by posting a link on your site to a resource that you think would be useful to visitors to your site, such as a complementary product or service. If the owner of the website you have linked to is paying attention to his traffic stats, he will see an inbound link coming from your site. Ideally he will choose to reciprocate without you having to request a link back, simply for the sake of providing a better service to his client. A more proactive approach is to introduce yourself and your business to the website owner, praise their website and point out the fact that you are linking to them already, and suggest that perhaps they would want to do the same. People are usually open to these requests as long as they are relevant and done tactfully.
Directories are a good place to start with a linking strategies. Directories, as the name implies, list a lot of websites by topic; some are focused by topic, while others are general and cover a wide breadth of topics. Think of directories as your online Yellow Pages, except there is no one authoritative directory. You should start then by listing your website on a number of relevant directories that have a Page Rank or PR of at least 3. (Install this application on your Firefox browser in order to see a page’s PR on your toolbar.) The way they usually work is that you submit your site for listing and you are notified when your listing has been approved. Most directories use automated processes to approve listings, except for the Open Directory Project, or dmoz which is a human edited directory. Since submissions are approved by people, not machines, the dmoz approval process takes longer than others.
Submitting your website to dmoz should be on your top things to do when starting your linking efforts. You can find other directories by typing ‘directories’ and a topic keyword in your search engine of choice. Keep the points above in mind when selecting which one to submit your website to. While directories with low PR will not hurt your rankings they are also not a very good use of your time.
As a small business, link building is a must-do strategy to increase your traffic that requires no dollar investment but certainly a significant amount of your time.
How Do Search Engines Work And Why Do They Matter?
March 10th, 2009Search engines (Google, Yahoo!, MSN and Ask being the more important ones) are your means to your clients. In an age when people are empowered to find so much information related to a purchase online you canot afford not to come up in the search results.
So how is it that these almighty search engines do their computations to figure out who should come up in their results? The short answer is – No one really knows. But the truth is we have some good ideas about which factors are important to search engines based on what we know about their algorithms. Search engines run automated programs called “spiders” to metaphorically “crawl” websites. This is a term you will hear often when referring to search engines. Basically it means that the programs will follow all the links in your pages starting from your home homepage to find other pages in your site and to extract the content from each page. To extract the content or meaning from your pages, SE’s will use the text that is on your pages, as well as information about your page that resides within your code (your meta tags, page titles), as well as external factors such as how many people are linking to your web pages. The SE then creates an index of the pages in your website in their records, along with the billions of other pages it has crawled in the world wide web. When a user submits a search request, the SE will sort and search through the billions of records it has in its index quickly to extract the results that it will display to you.
When processing a request a search engine will extract all the pages that match the search term. For example, if you enter family summer vacations into Google you will receive over 10.5 million results. If you enter “family summer vacations” with the apostrophes, Google will display 6,280 results. In the second scenario, with the apostrophes, Google extracts only pages that match the exact term with the three words in the same order; in the first it extracts all records that have any of these words in any order, including plural and singular versions.
When a request is submitted to a search engine (that is, when you type words into the search box of a search engine and press enter), it first extracts all the pages that match the search term and then it ranks them and sorts them in an order that lists the most relevant pages first. The search engine’s algorithm does this calculation and although the algorithm is constantly changing we have a good idea of what factors are considered in the ranking.
So as you see, SE’s are complex mechanisms but the good news is that you don’t really need to know the ins and outs of how they do their processing. Continually optimizing your site to allow search engines to extract your content, and writing quality, relevant content are the first steps to improving your organic traffic.
Keep Your Zen for SEO
March 7th, 2009First inversion of the day. Go easy. Go slow.
These soothing words are music to my ear as Pat, my yoga instructor, predictably encourages us to take our time, ease into things on our first downward dog. In the next two hours she will take us through the most excruciating routine of sun salutations, contortions, head stands and back bends, pushing our mind and body into shapes and states you never imagine you can reach before you start, all while breathing deeply. I relish my Saturday morning routine not only because I come out feeling completely cleansed and energized but also because it reminds me of how much you can achieve if only you set things in motion and take the first step. The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step, right Lao (Tzu)?
This is why today I finally take the first step that I have been coaching all my SEO clients they must take if they want to improve their business – start a blog. I’ve put in my two hours of yoga and have a clear mind and my conscience is telling me, it’s time!
As with any large project you embark on, driving traffic to your website takes time and dedication. But it is the collection of efforts and techniques that will eventually establish you as a credible online authority to make you be successful. So why not start with fixing the little things, one at a time and eventually taking on the larger, more time consuming jobs (like writing a daily blog), rather than let yourself be overwhelmed by this thing called SEO and being on the web and how do I get people to visit my site now!? There are infinite things you can do to drive traffic to your website. Check this space regularly for actionable SEO tips that you can implement on your site.
First things first, whether you are a retail business, an online publisher, a web based service, make sure you are writing quality copy. Think about the words that are important to describe your business and that users may use to find your business and make sure that those words are present in the descriptions of your store, service or products. Do not aim to overpopulate your pages with text but make sure each page has at least two paragraphs (if possible more) of useful text and that your keywords are within that text. Sounds simple enough? You’d be surprised how easy it is to miss this basic point when you are concerned with how your website looks, and, well, running a business!
Why?
Search engines (Google, Yahoo!, Ask, MSN) need text in order to determine what your website is about. They are not able to interpret images on their own, for example, so if you have an image describing what your business does, make sure you have surrounding text explaining it. (We’ll get into other technical ways to achieve this.) Using relevant, quality text on your pages is one of the techniques that allow search engines to gauge the quality of your site and compare it against other sites. The more relevant the text in your site is to a search term, the more likely the search engines will return your website in the results. The first step is to come up in the search results, the next step is to rank highly and to drive relevant traffic to your site in order to improve your conversions (i.e., turn that traffic into business).
Breathe in. Breathe out. You can do it!
