Have you seen that Simpson's episode where Jasper stands at the front of the class laying out the ground rules while nursing an old school butt paddle? If you've never seen this episode or can't recall it by memory then quite frankly friend, you deserve a paddling. Without further ado:
Originally posted August 30, 2006, and updated today. This article is a brief series on individual meta tags and their impact on SEO, today's feature, the meta keyword tag.
The year is 2004, smart SEOs noted the importance of keywords and also enjoyed the use (and for some abuse) of the keyword meta tag. For those of you unaware of what the keyword meta tag looks like here is an example below:
meta content="keyword 1, keyword2, etc." name="keywords"
The smart SEO in 2004 used 3-5 unique keyword phrases on each page, the leading search engines respected and used the tags as a contributor in their ranking system, and everyone was happy. But that was then and this is now, 3/4 through 2006, how then should we deal with the keyword meta tag in today's SEO world?
In January 2006 Google went widespread with the Nofollow tag designed to give the impression (to search engines that respect it), 'I do not vouch for this link'. All outgoing links now added the following to ensure they would not be penalised for chance of linking to a bad web site (that may hurt you rankings) or simply to be a blog snob.
EDIT: We've added some new information as of August 8th, 2007, so check it out.
Read the rest of this entry »
If you understand web marketing and SEO then you'll know there are some skills and strategies to rank web sites in local searches as well as global. Generally, if you're searching for local products or services Google will be happy to return relevant results and may even throw in some quick helps like contact details and maps to aid your search. But there is a fundamental issue with Google's attempt to better search for the user--it potentially harms overall sales for top ranked web sites.
Browsing through my logs the other day I checked out a random visitor who landed on our Distinct SEO Web Review page. Nothing to shabby, however, the keyword used to hit the page was interesting. Our visitor used the term 'SEO Website evaluation' where we rank #11. Read the rest of this entry »
High Rankings is reporting a number of new tools and updates on Google's approach to search.
Some interesting finds include:
Google's love of PageRank
Comments on Flash
Use of Sitemaps and Webmaster's console
and finally, a new meta tag called: unavailable_after. This tag is supposed to work best for time sensitive promotions--to tell Google, 'don't spider after this date.' No word on whether that means Google will be efficient in removing it from the index....
Google has released another metric in their Adwords console to help advertisers understand the overall size of particular keyword markets.
https://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=52760
A brief description here: Search Engine Journal.
This will have a positive impact on how you approach long tail markets, or in the least provide another metric to compare data.
Lately Google has done a good job reducing the value of incoming web links coming from less than stellar locations. This would include most ezine article web sites, web directories, and similar sites. Some SEO's still argue that 'high quality' or targeted directories are still a viable source to give link love. I on the other hand don't think that's the case, or in the very least, all directories are slowly becoming useless.
