As an internet marketing company that specializes in offsite optimization, we are often confronted with clients that are struggling with their onsite SEO. Onsite SEO, meta tags in particular, have such an impact on what we do offsite, that we now offer website audits to our clients as part of our service offerings to help them with their onsite SEO. We also include the creation of meta tags for our content development service.
We keep hearing from the "experts" that meta tags are not important. Try telling that to our clients who temporarily lost their rankings because they were messing with their meta tags! We have seen time and time again where changes to just the title tag can change your rankings. We have seen dramatic rankings increase when we go in and optimize our clients’ pages. We’ve even written a few articles on optimizing web pages and what to look for so clients can troubleshoot their site themselves. It’s that important.
Title tags continue to be the most important meta tag to consider. Each page should have its own title tag. Include one complete instance of your keyword phrase in your title tag. Why? Well, two reasons. First, this is important to all three major search engines. Second, this is what normally shows up in the listings displayed on search engine results.
Even alt tags are important, yet often overlooked by those creating web pages. A good alt tag is very important and easy to include in your website. In this article in particular, a test revealed that an image link with an optimized anchor text is more valuable than a text link with an anchor text that is not optimized very well.
While there are programs out there that will help you generate meta tags for your sites, we feel its best you do this manually to make sure you are fully optimizing all components.
Remember, search engine optimization is about making small modifications to parts of your website. When viewed individually, these changes might seem like nominal improvements, but when combined with other onsite optimization tactics, they could have a notable impact on your site’s performance in organic search results. And doesn’t everyone want that?
As the end of 2008 is upon us, we tend to reflect back on the good and bad we have done over the year. No, not referring to your naught to nice ratio, but rather how have your website links performed over the past year? Has your link juice been good, and the latest Google Indexing served to reward you with increase in Page Rank and site visitors?
Link juice is the colloquial term given to the drawing power associated with web addresses. There are two methods web surfers use to get to your pages. Either typing in the web address in their address bar, or clicking on a link. Remembering a long address to one of your sales pages or an article at your site is remote. There is a much higher chance they will visit Google, Yahoo or MSN and enter a word or phrase in the search box. Search engines then present a Search Engine Results Page (SERP). Your goal is to show up close to the top of the SERP.
Links listed on a SERP all have a value associated with them known only to that search engine. Search Engine Optimizers have termed this value as a link’s juice. The higher the quality of the link’s juice, the higher it should show up on the SERP. Seem simple so far? In theory, it is. The complexity comes when the quality of that juice starts getting diluted; becomes weaker; resulting in your link moving down the list. Move to far, and no one sees or clicks your links.
What has happened to cause your page’s juice to lose some of its effectiveness? Did you do anything wrong? Could you have been victim of circumstances beyond your control? We will attempt to give you the overview you’ll need, as well as some resources to start a journey of self discovery and education that will ultimately leave you as knowledgeable as you’ll need to be to increase the quality of your link juice.
Search engines use proprietary computer programs, called algorithms to determine the ranking of links on those results page. Google uses something known as PageRank, which has been described as the “likelihood that your web page will get visited”. PageRank, or PR, is primarily determined by how many other web pages are linking to yours, what their PR is, how relevant their content is to yours and so on. There is a lot that goes into all of these machinations used to ultimately list out those results.
Remember back to January and February of 2008, what sort of changes have you made on your actual web page? Did you change the content considerably? Perhaps you changed the title on that page or keywords? Did the keywords some how get changed or removed from your META tags? Remember that any of these types of on-page changes can take months to be reflected in the SERPs. Forgotten actions easily cause PR reductions leaving you scratching your head later when updates occur.
As the year progressed, have the number of your inbound links decreased? What has happened to their PR? Make sure that most of them are of higher quality value. Google has repeatedly stated they will discount your PR if you are paying for inbound links or if you are selling your outbound links. This is seen as gaming the search engines solely for the purpose of manipulating your PR.
To help you determine how you page looks to search engines use the Website Grader. Input the web address you’d like to check, and some other information. You’ll be presented with a report that spells out what is happening with that page, and how to improve. Tools like Website Grader are a great way to check how your competition is working the elements on their pages. Use this tool to check out those ranking higher in the SERPs you’re looking to dominate.
Submit to web directories, but beware, however that not all directories are the same. If a directory charges for submission, be suspect if they are not using humans to review the submissions. Are 100% of sites accepted, does it categorize poorly, or is there no other content besides the links and brief descriptions? These all lead to lower quality links; the juice cocktail sites that have a lot of the goodness removed from their outgoing (your incoming) links . Steer clear.
For the past 12 months were you developing relationships with other professionals in your niche or industry? Quality connections evolve into quality links when you start referring back and forth. You’ll link to them for relevant information you write and publish. They are likely to return the favor in natural, organic ways. These links are high quality, sought after, coveted. Take them for granted at your own peril.
If during this last year, you failed to focus on creating quality content on your web pages, don’t expect to get anything more than coal! The more compelling your articles and posts, the more likely they will be referenced and linked to, naturally, over and over again. When writing and linking out from your content be aware as to whether you are using the 5 types of links properly. Using content from free article sites is acceptable now and then, however understand that thousands of sites may be using that exact content. The destination links which appear in the article benefit most, not your site. By writing your own quality content and submitting to the article directories, you may actually benefit more than using many articles on your own website.
Final thoughts on the overall effects on your links losing their juice? 2008 is nearly over and all you can do is focus on a better, nicer ‘09. One angle you might decide to focus on is that a number of sources online speculate that PR is overrated, and has, very little to do with the quality or quantity of traffic delivered to your page. An informative article from Search Engine Journal states that “…Google may regularly devalue PR to better control their search results…” Talk about printing more money when your broke! There are many SERPs that have top listings with PR=0 or 1.
The future success of your pages have more to do with quality of content, and less with link juice. You’ll never be wrong for serving up high quality, keyword focused and well structured web pages. People use search engines because they want answers. If you are not ranking the highest on those results pages for your targeted keyword phrases, hopefully those that are have links to your pages on their sites, and thus direct traffic from the search engines to you via their pages.
Happy New Year! And may 2009 bring you all of your online goals (oh, and world peace as well!)
Meta tags can help improve your placement in search engines and can increase quality traffic to your web site. Unfortunately, unless your website developer has a fundamental knowledge of search engine optimization, or you have an SEO professional review your site, many websites lack some of the fundamentals needed to enhance your site and increase traffic.
Even those who have a basic understanding of the importance of meta tags may not do everything required to optimize your site. Creating effective meta tags is a lot of work. However, the long term payoff is well worth it, especially in your link building efforts. Even with the most effective link building campaign, if your meta tags are not well-written for your specific web page, you can undermine your link building efforts. Search engine optimization success relies on these two factors to work together for ultimate effectiveness.
So what does your website meta tags need to have in order to garner the best results? Below are a few tips and guidelines for your website:
Title Tag. Each page should have its own title tag. Try to use 5 to 8 small to medium sized words and include one complete incidence of your keyword phrase. This is important to all three of the major search engines and is what normally shows up in the listings displayed on the search results. Title tags for all of your webpages are extremely important. Make sure each is unique to the page on which it appears.
Meta Description. Start this tag with an incidence of your keyword phrase and then produce a short 15 – 18 word sentence clearly describing your web page. Keep in mind that the description tag is often viewed as the description for any rankings you achieve so it is best to make it as alluring as possible to potential site visitors.
Meta Keyword. Keyword tags have long been considered ineffective and no longer have any importance on Google; however Yahoo does still consider the keyword tag so include it. The keyword tag should start with the main keyword phrase. The maximum size of a keyword tag should be 250 characters, using commas to separate each phrase. Only use keywords that appear on that web page. As with title tags, this is important!
Keywords in URL. Create keyword-based filenames that closely represent the content within the file. Search engines tend to reward keyword-based filenames a small amount – perhaps enough to push past your competition. It’s worth the extra effort.
Headings. Heading 1 and 2 tags should be applied on every page where appropriate to embolden the relevance of the page. In other words, use the page’s keyword phrase within a Heading 1 tag to further enhance the visibility of the keyword phrase on the page.
Alt text for images. Don’t forget to provide appropriate ALT text for each image on your website. Adding an incidence of the keyword phrase or a portion of the keyword phrase is totally appropriate which can add slightly more credibility to your page score when the search engines index the page.
While meta tags are no guarantee that your site will make it to the top of search engine results, they do serve as a way to offer the website owner the ability to control how pages are described on search engines. Quality link building is quite simply one of the most important activities you can undertake to get higher search engine rankings but with inferior meta tags, your website is working against itself to achieve these rankings.
[tags] meta tags, SEO, search engine optimization, link building [/tags]
As an internet marketing company that specializes in offsite optimization, we are often confronted with clients that are struggling with their onsite SEO. Onsite SEO, meta tags in particular, have such an impact on what we do offsite, that we now offer website audits to our clients as part of our service offerings to help them with their onsite SEO. We also include the creation of meta tags for our content development service.
Meta tags
