Monday, April 20, 2009

The Truth about the "Keyword" Meta Tag

Hello everyone,

As an Online Marketing Consultant, I constantly get asked questions about SEO and the importance of meta tags. More specifically, the Keyword tag, seemingly the most important meta tag to many people, whom feel it is the key to SEO success. "Why isn't my website achieving a high ranking?" they ask me. "Well", I tell them, "Where you do you want to rank?" And the answer is almost always... Google!

To all you keyword tag fanatics... some sad news... Google does not use the keyword tag, and actually no meta tag for that matter, anymore. Other search engines though, like Yahoo and MSN, still take it into account. But, due to "keyword spamming" in the early days of Search Index Alogorithms, it has less relevance now than it ever has. The "description" tag and "title" tag actually have more merit than any other tag.

Ultimately, content is king with Google. A keyword is more relevant if it is dominant on your web page content and info. Keyword Density on each page is ultimately what is going to get you good ranking attention on your website. That being said, I do not reccommend getting rid of the keyword tags at all. Remember that when your website gets indexed by the search engine bots, they scroll down all the code and words on each webpage. Since they begin at the top of the page, all the way down to the bottom, Your title tag and other tags serve as an intro paragraph to the theme of your web page. Being uniform, concise, and offering relevant keyword density and content is the best method to get your site indexed well for the set of keywords you like.

But remember, keep your keywords very limited per page. I usually tell clients to keep it down to 2-3 keywords or phases per page. You want to be clear on the theme each page has, and trying to add and do too much can hinder the importance and relevance of content. Keep it simple but informative, and you should be good.

Now, go out and do it!!

Thursday, April 9, 2009

How to Improve your Page Rank on Google

Hey Gang,

I assume your thinking about improving your page rank.. who isn't right? Why search the web for articles or buy expensive software when you can easily do it yourself!
Just use Google's Webmaster Tool's- a free tool that can work wonders for your SEO and Page Rank goals. Because, ultimately, who knows more about how to improve your PR than Google?

A little about it

Page Rank or PR - It's The Holy Grail of webmasters.
I've searched the web and have read many articles describing what the method of Page Rank is and how to use some sort of gadget to improve it instantly. Some of them give clues how to increase this value. It is interesting to me that, for many people, this indicator seems to be a little artificial. Everyone aims for PR10, which means maximum page rank exposure, but few know the real reason. If a website has good content, it will eventually be displayed on top of the searches for interesting keywords even if it has poor page rank!

Useful clues
All articles, blogs and Google tips leads me to the conclusion that the content of your website is the most important factor. Don't try to cheat web crawlers or don’t rely only on exchange links with other websites. If the site is interesting, and content is relevenat, its PR will improve sooner or later. Yes, I know that everybody prefers sooner, but you should do it right from the start.


Some recommendations:

Attain as much external links on the website as you can, on a consistant basis. If people find something interesting on our website, they will link to it.

Create many subpages. Websites with useful content will grow either by content from author, company or community.

Existence in catalogs. Add your website to internet catalogs either related to business or technology. For technology, a good example is to at least attain an absolute minimum with, for example, www.dmoz.org and dir.yahoo.com. Even Google admits that it uses them.

Google Webmaster Tools
Just login to your Google account (or create one if you don't have one). In the section "My Services", follow the link Webmaster Tools. Insert url of your website and press OK.

Verification
Once you create the account, the first step is to verify that you are the owner of the website. There are two approaches. The first is adding a Meta Tag on your home page or, 2, uploading a file with a given random id inside the page root directory. It’s quick and easy - just follow the information’s on the screen!

Diagnostics
After the verification process, we can start exploring information that Google has gathered about your website. This tab allows you to check if, for example, your robots.txt file is correct, and how often the site is crawled.

Statistics
This tab shows search statistics that are related to your website. I allows you to see which pages were crawled by googlebot, what their page rank is, and which of them have the biggest value. Page analysis shows the keywords that Google has indexed. It also shows words used in external sites to link to the site.

Links
This tab is, I think, the most interesting of all. It provides a listing of all urls used in external websites , and much more related to links- even internal links too. Each link is described by number of pages that use it. You can also view details and find the paths to links that are not valid or can't be crawled by Google.

Now you know the page rank principles! After reading this blog post, hopefully you have a better understanding of PR. Since Google is constantly becoming more popular and important for businesses looking to expand their visibility online, knowing these kinds of methods, and understanding them, are king.