Perhaps, this seems self-evident. But the same could be said for the previous SEO tips (title tag and meta tags). But you have to ask yourself the question, why would anyone want to come to my web site? And why would they want to tell others about your web site?
The answer is usually content.
If you think of the web sites you personally visit frequently, what is it about them that keeps you coming back? Some of the common ones are:
- Continually updating content (articles, blogs, news, stock prices, job listings)
- Source of reference materials, or vast amount of information (wikipedia, imdb, google maps)
- Useful features (applications and tools, email hosting, calendar, portfolio tracking, to do lists)
- Community (forums, comments, friends)
So does your web site have ANY of these features? Some web sites do, and some don't. If you web site does not have content that ever changes, and does not provide any useful features or community, why would someone want to come back there a second time? Why would they want to send their friends there?
Not all content types are useful for all web sites. Trying to build a web site that incorporates all four of the above types into one site might cause a case of "jack of all trades, master of none". Specialization and niche are not bad things on the Internet.
So ask yourself, why would anyone want to come back to this site after the first time? Why would they ever want to publish the URL to their site and recommend people come here? Answer that question, work on improving your content along those lines. And that will be an important element of your SEO game plan.
HTML <meta> tags are used to provide supplemental information about the page, but not actually change the way the page is viewed in the browser. It is mainly used to denote keywords and description, but can also be used to list copyright year, author, which software was used to create it, et cetera.
Meta tags are easily abusable, so search engines don't rely on them to any great degree. There is certainly some debate about their effectiveness. But since meta tags are easy to add, and can only help and not hurt, they are generally regarded as a required element for SEO.
Keywords
Obviously, if a site could pick it's keywords so easily, every site would use every word in the dictionary and the whole thing would be useless pretty quick. Someone with a site about SEO consulting services could include "web site design, programming, advertising, marketing, free money, gold, britney spears, U.S. Election" and go on and on to areas that are totally not related to their site. So search engines do NOT generally trust a site to pick it's own keywords.
But, it can't hurt to have them. Don't put too many, and keep them closely related to the page content. For bonus points, each page should have slightly different keywords.
Description
The description given in the meta tags is actually used by Google to describe your site. It should be something written to entice a user to click on your site. Obviously, it's tempting to go to either extreme, either with a completely boring description ("A site with my thoughts on things") and one full of marketing sales junk ("I am the greatest programmer in the world, and let me share my secrets"). The best written descriptions probably entice the user to come to your site based on what you're likely actually going to provide them ("A site devoted to sharing concrete SEO tips I have learned over the years, that lead to measureable results.").
To the best of my knowledge, most search engines do not take the description into account when assigning a ranking to your web site, but it does help people get there.
Robots
A relatively new meta tag is the Robots tag. The purpose is to help search engine (and other automated web crawlers) know your site policy on indexing content. Do you even want crawlers viewing your site? If you don't, this is where you can tell them. And do you want them giving additional credibility to sites you link to (called Google Juice)? Both the indexing and link-following attributes can be set with this one tag.
In general, here are some tips for setting up meta tags:
- It's good to have them, even if their value is debatable
- Don't have too many keywords, 10 or 12 at the most
- The description is sometimes shown by search engines, so make it entice the user to click on the link
- Sites that may contain a lot of links to questionable areas of the internet (spam) should turn on the NOFOLLOW robot attribute
At first blush, this SEO tip seems pretty basic. The right title tag can make a big difference in your search ranking. Basic advice like that makes you kinda want to skip the rest of this entry, doesn't it?
Well the importance of <title> tags to SEO is obviously more than just "have one". Your choice of words is important, as it relates to your site, as it relates to the content of the page, and as it relates to other pages on your site.
Be Descriptive
The title tag should obviously be a reflection of the content of that particular page. If the page contains a list of your favorite movies, a relevant title tag would obviously be "My Favorite Movies" or "The Best Movies of All Time" or something along those lines. A bad title tag in that scenario would be "What I Saw Last Week".
Draw People In
The title tag is displayed to users in search results, and so it should be written in such a way that makes people want to click it - draws their attention and draws them in. So "Movies" may be a bit to cryptic, but if you used "Top 10 Movies You Won't Find on Anyone's Top 10 List" as your title, that makes people want to click it.
I see some sites where the URL is the title tag on every page, like if "--: mydemos.com :--" was the title tag on every page of my site. I generally think this is a bad idea. First, given how important title tags are, it seems a bit silly to waste it on repeating the URL. If they want to know the URL of your site, they can look at the address bar. You also lose the opportunity to draw people in, and lose the keyword matching opportunity as well.
Now, given that search engine will likely match the keywords search to a title tag, why wouldn't you just stuff all your keywords in the title? Well, at least two reasons why you shouldn't do that. There might be more. 1) It takes away from your title being relevant to the content of that specific page, and 2) search engines will notice that your title doesn't match your content and might penalize you for that.
Tips For Writing the Perfect Title
1) Each page of your site should have a different title
2) The title should be descriptive, to draw a searcher to click on your page
3) The title should contain some of your keywords, but not any irrelevant ones
4) Longer titles are sometimes better, up to 10 words
5) Optimizing your title tags might be the quickest and easiest way to improve your search engine rankings
6) Don't put your URL in the title, but do put the name of your site if it's different than the URL
I've been getting a few clients interested in improving the ranking of their site in search engines. Most of what I do at this stage is basic SEO. I actually like doing site reviews and SEO, and am able to send out pretty informative reports to my clients on ways they can improve their site - both overall and specifically for what search engines are looking for. I monitor statistics, I track trends month over month, and I am constantly thinking of ways to improve my clients' sites.
So does this make me an SEO? I think it does. Am I the greatest SEO who knows the secret formula to guarantee #1 rankings in Google? Not yet (keyword being yet). I have a way to go in terms of picking up knowledge for advanced SEO techniques. But every month I do this, I think I get a little better at it. Things just start becoming more intuitive, and I can often tell just by looking at a site what the likely problems are going to be with the layout and/or content in terms of getting top index rankings.
Let's be honest. The majority of web sites out there (more than 99.9% I'd guess) are not perfectly optimized for search. That means almost every link in the search results is beatable (almost). And somewhere north of 90% of web sites aren't optiimized at all, which means many of them are easily beatable with a little effort. Most sites were developed for primarily for content, and then for style, and the developer didn't give too much thought into how the search engines are going to rank their site.
Here are a few basic tips for improving a web page ranking. I call this SEO 101, it's really just the basic stuff:
1) Use <title> tags. The web page title should be descriptive of the page contents, and not just your web site URL repeated.
2) Use <meta> keyword and description tags. This is 1999 SEO, but it still applies. Make sure your keywords are relevant, and don't just stick the phrase "free money" in there, when your site has nothing to do with giving out money.
3) Use external CSS files, external JavaScript, and keep the HTML clean. If you do a View>Source on your site, is the first 4 pages unreadable garbage? It shouldn't be, your main content should start within the first 2 pages of source code.
4) Get rid of spam. If you run a blog, chances are someone trying to sell something has tried to infultrate your comments. Get in there and delete that stuff, because the quality of your outgoing links is important.
5) Fresh content. New content should appear on the site every week or two. Every month at a minimum. Sites that never change for years are not as relevant to search engines.
6) Relevant content that uses your key words. What is it that you or your company does? Do you offer Search Engine Optimization (SEO) services? Do you even say that the way it's commonly said, so that a search on the phrase (in quotation marks) would lead to your site? Do you say it 2 or 3 times? Do you say it a few different ways, because one person might say SEO but another might called it Google Optimization, and someone else call it Search Engine Optimisation. (Love to the brits, but you all need to use Z's more.) If each page only contains one paragraph of content, honestly not too many people (let alone search engines) are going to find it useful.
7) Post things people want to link to. Why would someone link to your site from theirs? Really think about that. Really focus on that... give people things to link to. Funny things. Smart things. Things lots of people would be interested in.
8) Avoid spammy techniques. Don't have hidden text that humans can't read (white text on white background). Don't overuse your keywords - by repeating them 100 times per page. Don't link to bad areas of the web. Don't add hundreds and hundreds of pages of useless content - ie: one page for each country, state and city that basically says the same thing. Don't rely too much on flash.
9) Use a program such as Google Analytics to track which pages of your site are the most popular. Add the Google Analytics tracker to your web pages, and then come back in a month or two. See what's popular, and do more of that. See what's not really working and do less. Repeat your successes and stop what's failing - a novel idea!
10) Define your goals. Measure where you are. Makes small improvements to your site. Give these changes a chance to set (at a minimum, when Google reindexes your site), and then measure again. Keep making improvements, and keep measuring. Slow and sure wins the race.
I don't know if you have noticed this, but the targeted ads on Facebook are getting ridiculous.
I am all for them making money, but it seems every ad on there lately is:
a) Stupid and useless to me (ie: not at all relevant or targeted)
b) Using the worst kind of scummy ad techniques
Listen, I am not against Facebook making money. I love Facebook, and they should make millions from that idea. But I also prefer the ads I see to be more subtle AND useful. The idea behind targeted ads is that advertisers know I am a male, late 30's, make a decent income, married, etc. etc. And so they show me golf club ads. Gadget ads. Car ads. You know, THINGS I ACTALLY MIGHT LIKE. Targeted advertising is great on paper.
Instead, Facebook delivers me this:
ARE YOU 35-39 YEARS OLD?
Really? Really? Come on, really? That's the STUPIDEST thing I've ever seen. And if the "tagline" wasn't the worst kind of targeted ad I can imagine, the product itself - free samples? So you want to trick me into giving over my name address and income data for no gain?
I am an adult male with disposable income. SELL ME SOMETHING. I want to buy it. I spend hundreds or thousands of dollars a year on stuff I really didn't need. And with all this demographic information you have on me, the best the computational algorythm can come up with is... free samples?
I'll just refresh the page here. Get a new ad...
What's the problem? Why won't they advertise good things to me? Why is it always dumb stuff?
An extremely interesting article from FreelanceSwitch, one of my new favourite blogs.
It just happens to be an infallible truth that people are more motivated by what they stand to lose (and who they stand to conquer) than by what they can gain. By leveraging the success of their competitor against their fear of losing business to someone else, you’ll easily persuade them to want to work with you and they’ll think it was their idea to ask you!
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