SEO Tips » General SEO

Why Google Ignores Your Meta Tags

admin — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 15:33:21 +0000

ODP Data

If you’re lucky enough to have your site listed in DMOZ (the open directory project) then you might find that Google will take your title and description and use them on SERPs. This can be annoying if your are trying to optimize them for CTR’s.

Lucky enough for you guys, you can add the following code into the part of your document to make Google ignore data from the ODP :

I often use the following :

This will block data from both the yahoo directory and DMOZ.

Snippet Searches

If you are searching for a snippet of content rather than a keyword then your meta description might be replace by the snippet you searched for with the included phrases in bold for example :

That is not my meta description but it is highlighting the search term. When your keywords are highlighted in bold like that it works wonders for your CTR! Check this read on SEOmoz on why Google doesn’t read your meta description .

Thankfully, if your that picky about your meta description, there is a solution to this, here it is :

This piece of code will stop Google from displaying relevant snippets of your page to longer tail search terms. I would probably advise against this as your CTRS may fall completely because these longer tail search terms may not bold any text in your meta description snippet on the SERP.

5 Top SEO Tips For 2011

admin — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 10:40:31 +0000

SEO changed massively throughout 2011. This has probably left a lot of webmasters confused to where there priorities should lie with their SEO. I thought it would be a good idea to give you my opinion on what are the top seo tips which will help improve your websites rankings.

Meta Tags

Let’s go back to old school SEO, not only will these little gems improve your CTR on the SERP page, but the title tag will help you rank better for your chosen keywords. It might be worth having a play with your meta description tag to find your optimum CTR rate.

Content Is Still King

Good content is still king in SEO, not only will it want your readers to read more and return to your site, but they if they find it useful enough, they may link to it from their own websites as a valuable resource.

Article Submissions

Again an old school SEO tactic, this works time and time again for me as a source of high quality targeted traffic and a easy way of building in content, one way quality backlinks. Websites such as ezinearticles have 1000’s of visitors every day, if your article appears on the home page and you have a link to your site, prepare to watch your traffic soar. I have noticed on these article sites, that the articles you write are often heavily linked to from other sub pages, not only do you get a link, but if you’re lucky then that link might have quite a lot of authority. Articles I have written before now have jumped up to a PR4.

Get The Social Media Bug

Since the introduction of Facebook and Twitter and other popular social media platforms, it has done the world of good for growing traffic to your website and SEO. Every post I write gets sent out to twitter and if I’m lucky, some of my nice followers will then re-tweet it to their followers. Imagine the traffic potential if you have 1000’s of followers!

Get Local.. If Your Lucky

You may have noticed that certain search phrases trigger a new type of search result. These results are called local results and normally rank above the organic results. If you’re lucky enough for your keywords to trigger these results, then I would definitely try and include your site in these. I have seen sites with no optimization at all outrank the big players. This in my opinion will grow dramatically in 2011. See my article on GPO.

Using A Blog To Drive Traffic To Your Website

admin — Mon, 24 Jan 2011 14:20:04 +0000

One piece of advice I would give to get more traffic to your website is to have a regularly updated blog. By updating it regularly it will attract focussed visitors who can leave comments and get involved with your website.

SEO Benefits Of Having A Blog

One of the main benefits of having a regularly updated blog is that Google loves websites that are updated regularly. So if you include snippets of a couple of your latest posts on your home page, it should also give you a boost in rankings.

If your content is good enough, you may also find that users link to your site as a reference. It also gives you a fantastic opportunity to link to lot’s of subpages on your website using the anchor text of your choice, helping Google crawl your site easier and more efficiently.

Keeping Your Readers Interested

If your good, you can get subscribers to your RSS feed. So every time you write a post on your blog they will be notified and they will probably come to your site to have a look what you have written. Imagine the marketing potential of this if you had 1000’s of subscribers to your RSS feed and you wanted to promote a new product / service. You could promote it pretty much instantly. However it is important not to abuse your blog by using it solely as a place to advertise your products, this will probably just annoy your readers and they won’t return to your site.

The Power Of Social Media

I am going to use twitter as my example here, set up a twitter profile for your company and then you can post shortlinks (such as bit.ly) to your blog posts. You can have a massive amount of exposure if you have lots of followers on twitter. If you post a link to a blog post on twitter and you have 1000 followers, say 50 of them re-tweet your article, then 5 of their followers then re-re-tweet it, those figures are a bit optimistic, but could you imagine the traffic potential if you used twitter as well as different social media platforms to market your website.

All these tactics go hand in hand and work well for you to grow traffic to your website through the use of a blog. Just remember your community of readers (big or small) will all be targeted and be interested in your product / service. Subscribe to my SEO blog !

4 SEO Techniques SEO’s Should Avoid During 2011

admin — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 11:55:43 +0000

During 2011 there are many SEO techniques that I would try and avoid using after seeing the SEO trends from 2010. Google is becoming more intelligent and as we are heading towards a more semantic web I would definitely advise you to stick within Google’s guidelines as much as you can.

Stuff to Avoid

Here is a list of techniques that I would advise you to avoid:

Hiding Text Using CSS

Towards the end of 2010 I have seen many websites just drop out of the rankings. They had been fine for over a year then all of a sudden a complete loss of rankings over night. On further inspection I noticed that a lot of these websites had hidden content when JavaScript was disabled.

I have also read somewhere (can’t remember where sorry guys) that Google now recognizes hidden content and flags it. Your site is then liable to get penalized if they feel it is not sticking to their guidelines. One of the many SEO tips I could give you for 2011 would be to avoid using this technique.

Don’t Concentrate Too Much On Keyword Density

As the internet is becoming more semantic, I believe the focus in search engines algorithms will be taken off keyword density. If your page is relevant to the subject, has at least one or two mentions of the keyword and is of good quality. I think you will see that page rank well no matter how much SEO you have performed on that page. If all your keywords are repeated 7 times this will not look natural and you could be penalized as a result of this.

Black Hat Linking Techniques

Google are becoming better and better at being able to detect paid links. I would avoid this at all costs. Contextual links and natural organic links are the way forward. To be honest I’m convinced that the importance of link building to your site is nowhere near as important as it was 2 years ago. Maybe Google is taking its focus off inbound links?

Use PageRank As A Measure Of Your Success

There hasn’t been a PageRank update since April 2010. I don’t believe that there is going to be one any time soon either. Since Google removed it from webmaster tools I believe they have completely removed it from there algorithm. I have seen so many PR0 sites outrank PR5 sites. This is also making it harder for webmasters to give an actual cash value of there site. The only thing they can go on now is traffic and the alexa traffic tool.

Leave your comments on what you think is going to happen in 2011.

The 304 Status Code

admin — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 13:07:41 +0000

When Google comes to cache your site, it can have several different status codes that it stores. One of these that got my attention was the 304 status code. Out of all the SEO tips I have read, I have never came across this before. After doing a bit of research, I realised that it was not a crawl error.

A 304 status code is what a search engine bot uses when it’s crawled your site before, comes to crawl it again and notices it has not changed at all. Does this mean that Google will not move your site up and down in the rankings? Does Google penalize you for consistently having a 304 status from your page.

This made me think.. everyone knows that Google supposedly loves fresh new updated content, but does it? Does it reward you for having fresh content or does it just not penalize you for your site having a 304 status code. I also read that Google could potentially punish you for making small changes to your site all the time. Is this because they think you are trying to avoid the 304 status code?

Not trying to start a theory here, but I can’t help but wonder if anyone has experienced any drop in rankings because they have not updated there content between Google Cache’s.

Please let me know your thoughts on this, as I have a mixed view and would like someone with a little more knowledge about this to point me in the right direction.

Basic SEO Tricks For Newbies

admin — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 19:48:10 +0000

Starting out in SEO can be difficult, you don’t know what works best and you can only learn that through experience. You need as many SEO tips and SEO tricks as you can get so you can experiment with different techniques to see what works best. Here are some of my favourite SEO techniques that work time and time again.

Sort Out Your Canonicalization

By either adding a 301 re-direct or a canonical tag to the page you are trying to optimize, this could give your rankings a major boost.. For example : both http://www.example.com and http://www.example.com/index.htm are indexed in the search engines. These two pages you think are exactly the same, Google see’s them as two separate pages. By adding a 301 re-direct or a canonical tag to the page, it tells the search engine your preferred entry point for that page. Combining the weight of both pages into your prefered one.

Keyword Density and Your Title Tag

Try and focus on your main keywords you are trying to optimize for your in title tag and then keep these keywords being repeated at a density of about 1.5%, still making it read natural. This can be the hardest part.. coming up with content that reads natural, is SEO friendly and actually useful.Your content has also got to be unique, any duplicate content and you could be liable to be penalized by Google.

Directory Submissions

Directory link submissions usually work well for starting off in SEO. You can either pay for people to submit your site too lot’s of directories, or choose to do it yourself (I always do it myself). Instead of submitting to as many as you can, try and submit to ones with a PageRank higher than 3. Also try mixing up your anchor text and site description as Google may see these links being more organic and natural, rather than payed for and generic. Theres nothing natural about 100 links from directories with the same anchor text and description.

Optimize Your PageSpeed

Try and keep your HTML as neat and tidy as possible, remove any javascript from the page and try and contain it within one javascript file. You can do the same for CSS. If you are using a CMS, you may consider using a seperate template for your home page and content pages. Just to reduce the load time for each individual page. Google announced that PageSpeed is part of it’s ranking algorithm about 6 months ago.

Google SEO Tips

admin — Sat, 09 Oct 2010 09:20:51 +0000

SEO Tips for Google! One of the most talked about subjects on the internet. With more and more businesses starting to trade online, everone is looking for SEO tips to help them get to the top of Google.

I’m nearly there! I’m currently third in Google UK as I am writing this post. So I’m not at number one yet, but im probably higher than most of you reading this.. otherwise you wouldn’t of found this article .Google has about a 65% market share of search engines, so here are some useful techniques that I used and that will help you get too the top of Google.

Optimize Title Tags

Without title tags, you will not be found for any keyword. If you are trying to be found for the term “SEO Tips”, but “Untitled Document” is the name of your web page, you are doing yourself no favours. A good convention I use, that seems to work for myself is “Keyword” | “Company Name”, this way if people search for your company they will find it, there is also a greater chance they will find you if they search for your keyword.

Provide Lots of Content and Useful Links

Forget about getting as many links to your site as you possibly can, this doesn’t always work. Concentrate on providing lot’s of good useful content that will make people glad that they found your site.

It is a good idea to know what websites are useful in your niche also. Do a search and note down websites that you find useful. Try and include them in your articles. Google will see you know your competitors and are writing properly for the web and will take this into account when they rank your website.

Get links from other related websites

Don’t spend all your time submitting your site to directories and using free link exchange sites. Browse sites in your niche and them contact them directly about maybe swapping links with each other. Try and write good blog comments on related blogs also, but don’t spam them; if you do your rankings may be affected severely.

SEO Myths

admin — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 09:26:23 +0000

I bet there’s not one of you out there today who has not tried something really weird that you wouldn’t normally do when designing a website to help you rank better in the search engines. In this article I hope to point out a few SEO myths and why they are not true.

Keyword Density

Ok so you’ve all probably heard that you need to repeat your keywords several times, or Google will never find you for it. This may be true for the first few months after getting indexed by Google, but once you have been indexed longer than 6 months; keyword density is not a big contributing factor in SEO. If you have your keyword in your title tag and the page is highly relevant to the keyword, then you should rank well for it, it may not be straight away, but with SEO you have to be patient. So if your looking for big rankings then repeating your keyword every 4 words is not the way to go.

Avoid Nofollow links

Webmasters are informed to avoid nofollow links at all cost. This is entirely untrue in my opinion. If you follow a blog which has a nofollow plugin installed on it’s comments then this should not let this stop you posting a link to your site, aslong as you have got something useful to say. You don’t necessarily have to use your keyword as your anchor text. If you write good comments, people will come to your site because you know what you are doing, people don’t click on spam comments. So even if you don’t get any improvements in Google, nofollow links may give you higher traffic from other high traffic blogs.

Spamming Keywords in Meta Descriptions and Meta Keywords

This should not be done. The Meta keyword tag is no longer used by any big search engines, but you should still include it for the smaller ones, just have about 3 of your main keywords, to give you the least possible chance of getting penalised for spamming. The Meta description tag is used by the search engines, but not for ranking purposes. All it does is give you the chance to write something interesting about your web pages, to influence people to click on your site. So if your site is top of the rankings and your meta description doesn’t sell your site, peoples sites in 3^rd and 4^th positions may get more traffic than your site in 1^st.

Simple SEO Tips

admin — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 14:59:18 +0000

I’m writing this article because there are no simple SEO tips that I know of and would like to explain SEO to you as clearly as I can.

SEO is not simple by any means. It is the most talked about subject on the internet, with so many conspiracies to what may get you “overnight top rankings”. In my experience as a webmaster, there is no such thing. You must link build and update your content regularly just to even stand a chance against other websites. People are all trying to SEO for the wrong reason, hence the millions of competitors you have for such simple search terms. If you want to blog for a living, in my opinion, you must drop everything and put nearly 100% of your time into it.

Here is what you should spend your time doing:

Content Writing – 45%
Link Building – 45%
On Site Optimization (Making sure your pages HTML validate) – 10%

Your content writing and link building merge together. When I say content writing it doesn’t just mean content for your site. It means that you can submit articles to other sites with your link included in the article. This is the easiest method I have found to gain fast links without spamming. Out of all the content you write, about 60% should be for your own site and 40% to article directories and to partner sites with the same topic.

When you are link building, you shouldn’t make your links to generic. For example I’m trying to optimize my site for the keywords “seo tips”, this means I shouldn’t have “seo tips” as the anchor text for every back link to my site, as it looks like spam and un-natural to Google.

Other ways I have found of link building are just contacting other related topic website owners and just asking them if they want to swap links. A good mixture of reciprocal and one way links is always healthy. You need to mix it up as much as you can so Google doesn’t see your link building as predictable. You need to keep shocking it with new links from different domains with different anchor text.

Not even all your links have to go to your home page. Deep links (links that point to individual pages in your site that may not be in the top level directory) are always good to have, as this gives off the impression that people are linking to your content because they find it useful. Google loves good content.