Search Engine Marketing Spot

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As reported by Jill Whalen at Highrankings.com Google is coming out with a new tag, “Unavailable_after” which is similar to the “Expires” meta tag. The new tag by google will simply tell them that after this date to no longer crawl the page and no longer index it in there SERP’s. I personally do not see a good reason for this tag as it results in a page no longer being indexed by Google. If I am offering a promotion and I know the page will not be any good after a certain date I will just make a redirect to an offer, service, product that is similar. You do not want to lose the traffic from that promotional page, try and keep the visitor there because they could be interested in something else you have to offer.

Just like a blog, it seems that a lot of people have a directory of some sort these days.  They start out with taking free submission’s from any site to build up there listings and some switch over to a payment only system taking anywhere from $2-$30 to submit your site.  I understand people want there directory to make them money and try to become the next BOTW.  I just see a lot of directories that are crap and accept any listing that gets submitted.  Other directories are like 6 links deep and your link gets buried with 99 other links on the page.  I know you want to try and get every link you possibly can on the internet so the engines (in most cases, Google) will increase there trust with you in and raise your PR.  I would be careful though on some directories that list any website.  When your website is linked with all the drug company and gambling spam on the same directory I will bet Google will look down on that if they do not already do so. 

 

Don’t get me wrong, I understand people want to make money with your directory.  Make the directory for the search engines though, why bother making it for the “end user” when hardly anyone even uses directories to find what they want.  Make your directory liked by the search engines and then it will be liked by the “end user” who is looking to purchase links.  I bet since you run a clean, well maintained and SEO friendly directory more people will go there because more people will hear about it.  They will hear more about it due to the fact the search engine’s actually like the content.  That is my rant for the day, time to get back to work.

Your main goal for SEO is to increase SERP’s, bring quality traffic that makes you money. However a lot of people who are just starting out in the world of SEO fail to look at what I think the most important factor is, keyword research. I have read debates that state what is more important to improving your ranking with the search engines and most have made great points. However, they failed to mention something that is more important then any factors they had listed. Keyword research will determine the direction your SEO campaign will go before you even create the website. What you might think is a great keyword or key phrase, the actual searches being done each month are a lot lower then you expected. Imaging this scenario is heartbreaking for a lot of people because I bet it has happened. You spend a lot of hours optimizing your website for your keywords, your site ranks well for those keywords and yet your traffic has hardly moved. All that hard work, patience and perseverance for your keywords has resulted in low traffic and not many sales. Now you sit back and think to yourself everything you did worked because your rankings show for it. You just cannot figure out where the traffic is now that you have that good ranking.

Before you start any SEO campaign, you need to not just make a keyword or keyphrase list, you need to research them. When you research what you are trying to optimize for, almost every time you will come up with new keywords to use in your SEO campaign. You will find things that are searched for quite a bit that maybe your competition isn’t using. That is the main goal when researching, what can I use that is getting a good amount of searches each month that the competition really isn’t using yet? This way you can determine what keywords to optimize your website for ahead of time. If you would have done this from the start of your SEO campaign then all the hard work you put into it would not have to be corrected. Now you have to change the content wording, title tags, meta tags, alt tags, heading tags, contact all the sites you have links on to change the anchor text. All of this could have been avoided if you had researched your keywords ahead of time. I know you want your website to make you a lot of money, we all do, that is the point of being in business. Just remember though a little research can go a long way and save you a great deal of time in the end.

Here is a small list of tools you can use to research your keywords. You will notice that I did not list the Overture Keyword Tool. I feel it is no longer accurate to use since it is no longer being updated and the results are from January 2007.

Word Tracker

SEO Book Keyword Tool

Keyword Discovery 

 

Years ago what you put in your meta tags would make or break or search engine ranking. Search engine marketers would emphasize heavily on what was said in the meta tags, because it played a big role on where the site ranked. You would find websites that had more text in there <head> tag then they did on the front page of the website. Imagine over 15 lines of meta tag’s being used on each page. Now a days though all of those meta tags are useless and a waste of space. There are a few meta tags that I still recommend everyone to use and I will go further into that in a bit. First let’s take a look at some meta tags that you will find by these “meta tag generators” that I would not bother using.

<META HTTP-EQUIV=”refresh” CONTENT=”10″>
This tag would refresh the page after 10 seconds. Never use the refresh meta tag. There is no reason why you should be refreshing the page unless you are looking to redirect the user to another part of your website or a different domain name. Even then this is not the recommended way of accomplishing that.

<META NAME=”Expires” CONTENT=”never”>
This tells the search engine spider/robot when the page will expire or be out of date.

<META NAME=”Classification” CONTENT=” “>
This meta tag would be used to classify your webpage for a directory or if the search engine breaks down a site to categorize it.

<META NAME=”Author” CONTENT=” “>
This meta tag specifies who the author is. To me this is just a waste of space and I have seen clients who have using keywords here that had no effect.

<META NAME=”Subject” CONTENT=” “>
This would be the subject of the webpage, and then again you have a title for the webpage I hope so just use that.

<META NAME=”Copyright” CONTENT=”© “>
Copyright notice would go here.

<META NAME=”rating” content=”general”>
This meta tag is used to give your website a rating for your audience. You could manipulate this tag by having an adult site or gambling site and still set it to general. Yea I can see how this will help you, use the backspace key and save yourself the time of even typing this one out.

<META NAME=”Revisit-After” CONTENT=”XX Days”>
On new clients websites I still come across this tag quite a bit. Why would you want to tell the search engine spider/robot to only come back after XX amount of days? Hell why would they even want to listen to you? If you set this number to say 45 days and each day you add new content the search engine wouldn’t come back until after the 45 days are up? You have got to be kidding me! Highlight the entire meta tag and use the delete key in the upper right hand corner, thank you.

Misc. Meta Tags

<META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOODP”>
This will make sure that your title or description from DMOZ will not be used on the SERP’s.

<META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOYDIR”>

<META NAME=”Slurp” CONTENT=”NOYDIR”>

This tag will make sure that your Yahoo directory title or description will not be used on the SERP’s.

<META NAME=”Robots” content=”all”>
You can use this meta tag if you are not comfortable or just do not want to create and use a robots.txt file. Here you can specify to the search engine spider/robot what pages or directories you do not want them to crawl and index.

So What Tags To Use?

<META NAME=”Description” CONTENT=” “>
Using the description tag is a must in my opinion. Google and other search engines sometimes use this tag when displaying your website on the SERP’s. The description tag should be different for each webpage you create, keeping the same description tag on every page is not an effective way for SEO on your website. Whatever keywords or keyword phrases you are going for on that specific page, you will want to word your description tag around them as well.

<META NAME=”Keywords” CONTENT=” “>
There are search engines out there that ignore this meta tag (Google being one). However there are smaller search engines that still use this tag to help index your website so why not take the extra minute to use this one. I am sure others will argue and say why not take the minute and use one listed above. Also it has been shown that not using this meta tag will not hurt your SERP’s with some of the major engines. This one is up in the air to use or not, I still use them on my client’s websites. You will want to have created different keyword meta tags for each page as well but do not spam your keywords or key phrases in this tag.

Those are really the only two tags you should use at all times. I know using the Keyword tag is not needed for certain search engines however since it is used for others I say use it, but do not abuse it. The end result is you are always looking for a slight advantage over your competition to boost your website on the SERP’s. Meta tags are not as important as they used to be, so if you come across a company that is offering there SEO services and focuses heavily on altering your meta tags and how important they are just walk away. Those companies have no clue what they are talking about and just want whatever money they can get from you and that is it. They are just like the companies who will submit your website to 1,000’s of search engines for a fee. I will talk about that however in another post.

You see it a lot on the internet weather on a blog or a forum post about, I get phone calls from potential clients and existing ones. There Alexa ranking and what needs to be done to increase it. In my opinion I do not focus that much on an Alexa ranking for any site, you put all your effort into that and you end up with crap content for your site. In a nutshell all the Alexa ranking does is takes the data from the Alexa toolbar that is installed on the viewers computer and sends the information back to Alexa. However if the viewer does not have the toolbar installed, then of course no data is sent back. The toolbar currently only works for Internet Explorer and only for Windows. I am a Firefox guy, and I would never install the toolbar anyhow.

 

So the rankings that Alexa show are from a very specific range of viewers. They all run Windows (As do A LOT of people), they all use Internet Explorer (A LOT of people again), and they have to have the Alexa toolbar installed. This is why I do not focus that much on the ranking reports that Alexa gives out. Your end result is you want the lowest number possible, however the system can be manipulated. It’s pretty straight forward, every time your website is viewed by the Alexa toolbar that counts towards your overall score.  This score will not help you with your results on the search engines, it is just a measure of how much traffic is coming to your website from viewers who have the toolbar installed.  Spend your time worrying about more important things besides your Alexa ranking.

 

There are services out there that will boost your score if you feel the need for it, price ranges between $300-$5,000 a month. I am sure an easy script could be written with whatever URL’s you are looking to boost your ranking. Load them in a script, set it to a random timer to open that URL in your browser window. With the random timer going it will visit a random page and random time intervals for you. I have yet to fully test this idea out, just a theory really but I will look more into it. What are your thoughts on the Alexa ranking system?

After a much needed 3 week vacation, (first one in 2.5 yrs.) I am now back to work and doing my best to get caught up. I let all my client know I would be away, however I did not mention here on my blog for it is so new and hell I don’t know how many of you even read it yet. I am confident though that in due time I will have readers here to share my opinion’s or dispute them. I say dispute because I speak my mind on any topic, I don’t sugar coat or kiss ass per say when people ask me for my opinion on a subject. So let the updates start rolling in as I have a lot to talk about now that I am back full time.