Archive for the Category ◊ Website SEO ◊

More SEO Search Ranking Myths Revealed
Thursday, January 05th, 2012 | Author:
SEO Search Ranking Myths 150x150 More SEO Search Ranking Myths Revealed

SEO Search Ranking Myths

SEO Search Ranking Myths have become larger and more misleading every year. Some are based partially in reality, and others have spread because it’s often difficult to prove what particular SEO action caused a resulting search engine reaction.

SEO Search Ranking Myths

For example, you might make a change to something on a page of your site, and a few days later notice that your ranking in Google for a particular keyword phrase has changed. You might naturally assume that your page change is what caused the ranking change. But that’s not necessarily so. There are numerous reasons why your ranking may have changed, and in many cases they actually have nothing to do with anything that you did.

Mixing up cause and effect is one of the most common things new SEOs do. If it were affecting only their own work, it wouldn’t be so bad, but unfortunately, the clueless often spread their misinformation to other unsuspecting newbies on forums and blogs, which in turn creates new myths. It’s always interesting to see how people are so willing to believe anything they have read or heard without ever checking it out for themselves.

Common SEO Search Ranking Myths

Myth 1: You should submit your URLs to search engines. This may have helped once upon a time, but it’s been at least 5 or 6 years since that’s been necessary.

Myth 2: You need a Google Sitemap. If your site was built correctly, i.e., it’s crawler-friendly, you certainly don’t need a Google Sitemap. It won’t hurt you to have one, and you may be interested in Google’s other Webmaster Central Tools, but having a Google Sitemap isn’t going to get you ranked better.

Myth 3: You need to update your site frequently. Frequent updates to your pages may increase the search engine crawl rate, but it won’t increase your rankings. If your site doesn’t need to change, don’t change it just because you think the search engines will like it better. They won’t. In fact, some of the highest ranking sites in Google haven’t been touched in years.

Myth 4: PPC ads will help/hurt rankings. This one is funny to me because about half the people who think that running Google AdWords will affect their organic rankings believe that they will bring them down; the other half believe they will bring them up. That alone should tell you that neither is true!

Myth 5: Your site will be banned if you ignore Google’s guidelines. There’s nothing in Google’s webmaster guidelines that isn’t common sense. You can read them if you like, but it’s not mandatory in order to be an SEO. Just don’t do anything strictly for search engines that you wouldn’t do anyway, and you’ll be fine. That said, the Google guidelines are much better than they used to be, and may even provide you with a few good tidbits of advice.

Myth 6: Your site will be banned if you buy links. This one does have some roots in reality, as Google likes to scare people about this. They rightly don’t want to count paid links as votes for a page if they can figure out that they are paid, but they often can’t. Even if they do figure it out, they simply won’t count them. It would be foolish of them to ban entire sites because they buy advertising on other sites.

Myth 7: H1 (or any header tags) must be used for high rankings. There’s very little (if any) evidence to suggest that keywords in H tags actually affect rankings, yet this myth continues to proliferate. My own tests don’t seem to show them making a difference, although it’s difficult to know for sure. Use H tags if it works with your design or content management system, and don’t if it doesn’t. It’s doubtful you’ll find it makes a difference one way or the other.

Myth 8: Words in your meta keyword tag have to be used on the page. I used to spread this silly myth myself many years ago. The truth is that the Meta keyword tag was actually designed to be used for keywords that were NOT already on the page, not the opposite! Since this tag is ignored by Google and used only for uncommon words in Yahoo, it makes little difference at this point anyway.

Myth 9: SEO copy must be 250 words in length. This one is interesting to me because I am actually the one who made up the 250 number back in the late ’90s. However, I never said that 250 was the exact number of words you should use, nor did I say it was an optimal number. It’s simply a good number to be able to write a nice page of marketing copy that can be optimized for 3-5 keyword phrases. Shorter copy ranks just as well, as does longer copy. Use as many or as few words as you need to use to say what you need to say.

Myth 10: You need to optimize for the long tail. No, you don’t. By their very nature, long-tail keyword phrases are uncompetitive; meaning that not many pages are using those words, and not that many people are searching for them in the engines. Because of this, ranking for long-tail keywords is easy – simply include them somewhere in a blog post or an article, and you’ll rank for them. But that’s not optimization.

Contributing author is Tola Ajayi who is an expert at understanding SEO Search Ranking Myths.

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What’s Bad For SEO? Are you wasting your time?
Tuesday, April 12th, 2011 | Author:
Bad For SEO 300x229 Whats Bad For SEO? Are you wasting your time?

Bad For SEO

I was just reading this article about things that are bad for SEO and realized that I use most of these techniques. What’s really amazing is that according to this article the WordPress plugin (SEOPressor) I’m using is a complete waste of both my time and the money I spent on it.

I’m not sure I agree with what’s being said in some of these points because I do have articles ranking on the first page of Google following some of the points that are said to be a waste of time.

Here is what the author had to say,

In an effort to keep you from spending your precious time on supposed SEO tactics that will have absolutely no effect on your rankings, search engine visitors, conversions or sales, I present you with 16 SEO tactics that you can disregard from your personal knowledge base and or SEO toolbox as being in any way related to SEO:

1. Meta Keywords: Lord help us! I thought I was done discussing the ole meta keywords tag in 1999, but today in 2011 I encounter people with websites who still think this is an important SEO tactic. My guess is it’s easier to fill out a keyword meta tag than to do the SEO procedures that do matter. Suffice it to say, the meta keyword tag is completely and utterly useless for SEO purposes when it comes to all the major search engines – and it always will be.

I agree I haven’t yet seen any sites or pages ranking because of meta keywords. What you really should do if find keywords that are relevant and add them to you article. This can be done by using the free google keyword tool. Now this is a VERY different story when we talk about Meta in general.

2. XML Site Maps or Submitting to Search Engines: If your site architecture stinks and important optimized pages are buried too deeply to be easily spidered, an XML site map submitted via Webmaster Tools isn’t going to make them show up in the search results for their targeted keywords. At best it will make Google aware that those pages exist. But if they have no internal or external link popularity to speak of, their existence in the universe is about as important as the existence of the tooth fairy (and she won’t help your pages to rank better in Google either!).

Of course you need links to build page popularity but the reason your creating an XML site map and submitting is for one purpose only and that to tell search engine about the pages on your site. When you create a new page you should ALWAYS create and submit the site map because this also tell the search engine your site is growing which can help with rankings. I can prove this theory with a site I stopped creating and submitting site maps for. I did this specifically to test the theory and guess what you NEED an XML sitemap as my site has dropped right out of the rankings.

3. Link Title Attributes: Think that you can simply add descriptive text to your “click here” link’s title attribute? (For example: <a href=”page1.html” title=”Spammy KeywordsHere” >Click Here</a>.) Think again. Back in the 1990s I too thought these were the bee’s knees. Turns out they are completely ignored by all major search engines. If you use them to make your site more accessible, then that’s great, but just know that they have nothing to do with Google.

4. Header Tags Like H1 or H2: This is another area people spend lots of time on, as if these fields were created specifically for SEOs to put keywords into. They weren’t, and they aren’t. They’re simply one way to mark up your website code with headlines. While it’s always a good idea to have great headlines on a site that may or may not use a keyword phrase, whether it’s wrapped in H-whatever tags is of no consequence to your rankings.

With the new Google Preview I feel these become VERY important for the reader to easily see that your content is what they are looking for. Maybe it doesn’t help with the SEO of the page like the SEOPressor plug-in leads you to believe but they are still valuable.

5. Keyworded Alt Text on Non-clickable Images: Thought you were clever to stuff keywords into the alt tag of the image of your pet dog? Think again, Sparky! In most cases, non-clickable image alt tag text isn’t going to provide a boost to your rankings. And it’s especially not going to be helpful if that’s the only place you have those words. (Clickable images are a different story, and the alt text you use for them is in fact a very important way to describe the page that the image is pointing to.)

Always use Alt Tags on your pictures and always make your pictures link to something even it’s right back to the same page it’s on.

6. Keyword-stuffed Content: While it hasn’t ever been a smart SEO strategy, keyword-stuffed content is even stupider in today’s competitive marketplace. In the 21st century, less is often more when it comes to keywords in your content. In fact, if you’re having trouble ranking for certain phrases that you’ve used a ton of times on the page, rather than adding it just one more time, try removing some instances of it. You may be pleasantly surprised at the results.

My studies show that if you have the keyword in the Title of the page and in the first 50 words, the last 50 words of the article you will be just fine. Keeping in mind that I have articles that are created with a certain keyword in mind but yet it ranks better for keywords I wasn’t trying to optimize for.

7. Optimizing for General or Peripheral Keywords: You’re not gonna rank for a one-word keyword. You’re just not. You are likely not even going to rank for a 2-word keyword. So stop wasting your time optimizing for them, and find the phrases that answer the searcher’s question. For example, most people seeking legal help aren’t putting the one word “lawyer” into Google. They have a very specific need for a certain type of lawyer as well as a specific location in which they hope to find said lawyer. So rather than throwing the word “lawyer” all over your site, ask yourself this: There are people out there who want what you’re providing. What are they typing into Google? Now focus on those words instead. And don’t even get me started on people who put words on their pages that are barely related to what they do “just in case” someone who types that into Google might be interested in what they provide. You won’t rank for those phrases anyway, but even if you magically did, they won’t make you any sales.

8. Targeting the Same Keywords on Every Page: The keyword universe for any product or service is ginormous. (It really is.) Even if there are one or two phrases that bring you the most traffic, why the heck would you want to miss out on the gazillions of others as well? Stop focusing every page on the same handful of phrases and start targeting each page to its own specific set that most relate to what you’re offering there.

9. Focusing on Ads as Links: Banner ads, Google AdWords links and most other forms of online advertising do not create links that count toward your link popularity. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use this form of marketing – just don’t be deluded into thinking that it will have a direct effect on your organic search engine rankings and traffic.

10. Mad-lib Doorway Pages: While you may provide lots of products or services that are extremely similar to one another with just one minor change, it’s not a good idea to create separate pages for each of them and making only minor keyword changes to each of them. While this may be okay for paid search landing pages, it’s a duplicate content spammy nightmare for organic SEO purposes. (In fairness, do sometimes still see this technique work, but it’s still not advisable to do it.)

11. Linking to Google or Other Popular Websites: It’s the links pointing to your pages from other sites that help you with SEO, not the pages you’re linking out to. ‘Nuff said.

Hmmm… I bought an ebook for $47 that’s big secret to ranking success was this very technique. It said to link to other popular resources like CNN, Google and it would help my rankings. I don’t believe it has.

12. Redirecting a Keyworded Domain to Your Real One: So you have your business name as your domain (as you should), but you have noticed the unfortunate fact that Google seems to really like domains that have keywords in them. Buying one (or more) and redirecting it to your actual website can’t provide you with any advantage because a redirected website (and its domain name) isn’t ever seen by the search engines. And besides, even if there was something magical about doing this, again, you’re only talking about one keyword phrase.

I never use redirects anyways as I feel they are misleading.

13. Republishing Only Others’ Stuff: While it’s fine to republish an article that someone else published first, if that’s all your blog consists of, it’s not going to help your search engine rankings. Instead of republishing entire articles, discuss them in your posts and provide your thoughts and opinions on what’s good / bad / ugly about what the others are saying. It’s all about adding value.

You can republish but always focus on new content or at least add new content to the republished articles.

14. Making Minor Changes to Freshen Content: This is not going to help a thing. If any old articles or posts need to be updated, then update them. But just changing a date or a few words will not have any effect on your search engine rankings or traffic.

WOW again another traffic system I bought teaches this very thing. Another waste of money.

15. Nofollowing Internal Links: Perhaps you’re not looking for your privacy policy page to be followed by the search engines, so you add a nofollow attribute to it. That’s all well and good, but don’t fool yourself into thinking that this will somehow control your PageRank flow and get you better rankings. It won’t.

16. Main Navigation That Links to Every Page: If linking to pages in your main navigation gives them more internal link popularity and therefore more possible weighting with the search engines, then surely linking to every single page of the site in your main navigation should be a good idea, right? Wrong! It isn’t. All it does is spread your internal link popularity too thin and confuse the heck out of your site visitors. Don’t do it. Choose to link only to top-level categories and perhaps subcategories (if you have a reasonable number of them) in your main navigation. This allows users to drill down further when they’re in the category sections themselves.

Did I miss any? I’m quite sure I’ve just touched the surface on waste-of-time SEO tactics. How about you? Do you agree with the above? Disagree?

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Another Meta Tag Discussion
Friday, March 04th, 2011 | Author:
meta tag 300x200 Another Meta Tag Discussion

Meta Tags

I keep hearing about Meta being a thing of the past but is this really true??? NO IT”S NOT!!!

Clickable META tags are one of the most important aspects of your site. This is because people read your meta title and determine if your site is what they are looking for.

This is why I’m going to discuss Keyword rich meta. Also see why we still need meta tags.

Keyword Rich META Tags

META tags are very important in the marketing of your website and here is why:

* Meta Tags will improve search engine rankings of your site, media, and pages

* Meta Tags help users see your search result listing as relevant to their query

* Meta Tags will become the title for your site when bookmarked

* Meta Tags help classify the page on social networks and makes it easier to find

These benefits are just the tip of the iceberg and you can’t afford to not have keyword rich META tags on your site.

Loading them full of keywords, however, doesn’t generally inspire users to visit the page, never mind bookmarking or sharing the content. That being said, there’s no research that suggests users won’t click keyword loaded results either.

Clickable META Tags Will Attract Users

If your site doesn’t look appealing in the search results, users will be enticed to visit your competitors. It’s that simple, but there are plenty more reasons to make your META tags intriguing and attention-getting:

* Titles and tags can appear in RSS feeds and email inboxes. If the tags are loaded full of keywords, they’ll likely be disregarded as spam

* Keyword rich tags don’t tell the user what the content is actually about; it just gives them a general idea. Clickable META tells users exactly what to expect when they click through.

* Tags become the titles and descriptions when content is shared on social networks. They need to be clickable enough to convince others browsing on the site to click through to your content

* Attract more targeted users and prequalify them. You’ll get much higher conversion rates and cleaner data

* Well-written tags can presell the content. And, if users are already interested in buying from you or following your call to action before they get to the page, your site design and copy is more likely to be successful.

Whether you’re just running an information site, a company providing services, or an ecommerce store, you’re in the business of attracting consumers, not search engines. And I’m sure you’d prefer they were paying consumers (sign ups, sharing, and/or monetary transactions). If you’re not going to get any sort of return, it makes your hard work sort of pointless. At the same time, if people can’t find your content, there’s no point in worrying about the conversion.

The  META Tags of Choices

Awkward keywords can often generate great traffic, but they don’t make enough sense to use in a normal sentence. You can’t have both — you have to choose one or the other — so now what do you do?

You’re in a dilemma!

To decide which way to go, ask yourself some very important questions:

* Is the page functional or informative? Some pages are created specifically to serve a purpose while others offer some kind of value or interaction. Functional pages such as ‘contact us’ and ‘about’ are only visited when the user has a very specific need. These pages are rarely interesting enough to be bookmarked or shared. In this instance, keyword rich titles are often best. Informational/interactive pages such as blog posts should put interest and value ahead of keywords. So long as the page is on topic it will still support the major keywords as well as related keywords.

* Is the query space highly competitive? If your keyword is something with very low competition, and the rest of your on-page SEO is done properly, you can likely get away without forcing keywords into your title and will likely benefit more from the clickability. With competitive spaces, however, this isn’t going to be an option.

* Will visitors already be interested in clicking through? If my brand already has a strong presence in the space, clickability likely won’t be as much of an issue as getting a particular page found for the right terms.

* Where will my paying visitors come from and where will they land? If you’re offering a service that everyone needs, but doesn’t know about (they don’t search for it by name), chances are your main pages and keywords aren’t going to generate as many conversions as long tail phrases and topics. However, complementary industries and vendors (who are more likely to link to you) will be more likely to link back to main pages and be using major keywords. So, I’d be more inclined to use keyword heavy tags for main functional pages, and clickable titles for the rest.

What have you experienced when choosing between clickable and keyword rich titles? Do you have any tips to share?

Article Contributor: Site-reference.com.  They are an excellent source for SEO information. The topic and debate of Meta Tags is always on the table but I agree they are still needed.

Bottom Line we still need Meta Tags

 

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Properly Optimizing Your About Page
Monday, December 13th, 2010 | Author:
Properly Optimizing Your About Page 300x231 Properly Optimizing Your About Page

Properly Optimizing Your About Page

The most common forgotten about page when it comes to SEO is Properly Optimizing Your About Page. Your About page is one of the most important pages on your site and it often gets the least attention. Did you know that a Google study revealed that is was one of the most-visited pages on the site, excluding the landing page of course. Properly Optimizing Your About Page can be a great way to help stimulate page rank and inbound links when done right.

How To Properly Optimizing Your About Page

I have listed some great ways to Properly Optimizing Your About Page with information that should be included as well as examples to help you provide the correct content for your company’s About page.

When you understand how people use the online medium to gather information, you can see just how important your About page really is. Especially if you’re pursuing SEO as a major means of bringing traffic. Consider that people usually don’t know who you are when they land on your site and Properly Optimizing Your About Page can help.

The About page is a great place to get across the most important points you would want any prospect, customer, employee, investor or partner to know about your company. As part of optimizing a site, SEOs would do well to work with clients to rock this section of the site better.

1. With a descriptive tagline
2. 1-2 paragraphs at the top of the main About Us page that tell about the organization’s goal and main accomplishments.
3. A section following the summary that elaborates on its key points and other essential facts about the organization.
4. Subsidiary pages with more depth for people who want to learn more about the organization.

Details Needed For Optimizing Your About Page

A good place to start for content is answering the questions a web user might have about you. Use Who, What, Where, Why, and When to make sure you’ve covered everything relevant.

What

* What does the company do (or make)?
* What does it care about?
* What’s different about your company?
* What evidence is there that you are a trustworthy business (testimonials, memberships, awards, etc.)?
* What disclaimers or limitations should I be aware of?

Where

* Where is your head office?
* Where are your branch offices or facilities?
* Where do you do business?
* Where can your products be purchased?
* Where can I find your blog or other social pages?

Why

* Why was the company created?
* Why is it a good choice to buy from your business?
* Why would a talented employee want to work for you?
* Why are you a good partner?

Who

* Who is behind the company?
* Who does the company serve?
* Who do you partner with?
* Who are you looking to hire?

When

* When was the company founded?
* When is your business open?
* When were the major milestones reached?

How

* How does your business offer value?
* How do you serve your customers?
* How do you make your products?
* How can people at your company be reached?

After Properly Optimizing Your About Page

You need to build out pages by topic from you About Page. Some may feel they only need a few brief paragraphs to get the facts across. But I’m of the opinion that when doing business online, the more information you can provide about yourself and your business, the better. A new page for each major topic lets people find the information they want to see without overwhelming. In addition, these targeted pages are great for SEO.

Just follow these tips for Properly Optimizing Your About Page and you will get free traffic to your site.

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Avoid These SEO Services
Sunday, November 07th, 2010 | Author:

I we all agree that’s SEO is very complicated when you don’t know what you are doing. Even for those of us that do, we still have lots to learn because SEO s a continuous process of adjustments with literally hundreds of variables that can affect your rankings.

Caution SEO Serivces Avoid These SEO Services

Bad SEO Providers

Most people will outsource it and think they are choosing SEO service with experience but find out they really wound up with nothing. I feel most of this can be avoided if you take the time to learn a little bit about SEO so you know what you are talking about when dealing with any SEO service and selecting an SEO provider.

I’m not writing this because I am and SEO provider, I am not BUT I can save you money when you do decided to select one as I have chosen a few in my day and wasted my money time and time again and you don’t have to. I seen this list by a fellow named John Carroll an A.C.E. and who is SEMPO certified for almost 20 years in the marketing and design industry.Take a read it just must help you.

Selecting The Right SEO Service

The good news is with the right SEO provider, it can the most powerful marketing venue for your business. It can drive very targeted customers and gain online exposure that can’t be attained through any other marketing outlet.

The bad news is if you choose the wrong SEO provider and many do, it can cost you money, waste your time, effort, and marketing dollars. Your company can be misled for years while your competitors are incorporating an effective plan and converting customers you could have captured.

After dealing with SEO companies I can tell you that it is pretty easy to spot those you need to stay away from. My goal in this article is to help equip you to make the right decision for your SEO needs.

5 Tips To Avoid Bad SEO providers

1) Watch Out For Guaranteed Ranking: The reality is even the most seasoned SEO expert does not know what it will take to rank a website with Google, Yahoo, and Bing. The magic recipe is not public and is different with each search engine.

The Only assurance worthy of consideration is one that is performance based. For example, if a company states, “if you are not top page ranked within 6 months for a viable keyword phrase, they will continue working for free until you are ranked”, it’s a promise worth merit.

2) Bait And Switch: Did you know there are several places you can be listed on the top page of Google, Yahoo and Bing? There is the maps section, Sponsored Listing section (or PPC), and then organic positioning. Organic positioning is what most businesses think of when they want an SEO service (the area that fills up most of the screen on the left of a search results page).

Many SEO firms will confuse their services by saying things such as “top page placement”. This is a tactic very common in the SEO world. Make sure you clearly understand what an SEO firms means by “top page placement”. Organic placement is the most effective place to be listed with Google, Yahoo, and others.

3) Thirty Days Or Less: This tactic plays on the customer’s desire for instant gratification. Ranking a website organically takes time. If anyone is telling you they can rank your website in 30 days or less, he should be eliminated as a viable solution. The reality is organic SEO takes months of work and adjustments.

4) Poor Keyword Selections: This technique is almost impossible to detect. This involves an SEO provider choosing ineffective keyword phrases that sound good, but produce little-to-no traffic. They choose ineffective keywords because they are non-competitive and easy to rank.

About the only way to not fall prey to this tactic is to have multiple SEO providers perform a keyword research, then compare the data. Otherwise, you could be on the top page of Google for worthless keyword phrases. It will look good, but mean very little.

I can remember talking to a subcontractor about their SEO services. My contact rattled off 10-20 keywords they were ranked for on the top page of Google. After I got off the phone, I ran a quick analysis to find the keyword phrases they gave. Each produced little-to-no traffic, were not competitive and were easy to get ranked. They were marketing themselves as an SEO provider.

5) They Know Most Businesses Don’t Track Sales: It is critical to track lead sources and compare with any reports given by an SEO firm. Tracking reports are easy to embellish. Of course, this is more to assure that the keywords you’ve been ranked for are effective. But investigate your SEO campaign as much as possible.

Black Hat SEO

Unethical techniques also called “Black Hat SEO” can really hurt your business. Many people will tell you the entire industry is untrustworthy. I can’t blame them given how frustrated I have been trying to educate others through this blog.

It is worth the time for you to make sure you have the right SEO provider on your team.

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Meta Tags How
Wednesday, September 01st, 2010 | Author:

meta tag titles 300x242 Meta Tags HowMeta tags how should they be used? I was told they don’t matter anymore? At least for ranking in Google anyway but this doesn’t seem to be the case and here is why I say say that.

I have proof that some of my pages a ranking very well and it’s because of my proper use of meta tag seo. Everyone wants their web pages and blog post to rank well and it seems every SEO Company and their dog is promising expensive first page rankings.

Fact is I will explain how Meta Tags can help you get there for FREE.

Let’s jump right to it…First let me explain in the quickest few sentences know to man what meta tags do for your page.

What Are Meta Tags?

Meta Tags tell search engines and visitors what your page is about. Although this may not be the only way how you are found, learning basic meta tags how to’s can help. The proper HTML Meta Tags look like this,

meta tags how Meta Tags How

Meta Tags How

As an example, whatever text you place in the title tag (between the <TITLE> and </TITLE> portions as shown in the example) will appear at the very top of the web page browser. Creating very descriptive titles using key words will help the search engines find you.

Creative page titles Meta Tags How

Meta Title Tags At The Top Of Web Page

Now days you don’t have to write HTML like we did back in the early 90′s to create a website as there are a ton of software out there that can do it for you. Most web hosting plans come with website builders in them that walk you through the website creation process with drag a drop features or WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get). The main thing is you know that you do still need meta. Note if you do not create Meta yourself browsers such Internet explorer will create them for you based on the content of the page. It is always better to control what search engine and visitors see yourself.

Basic Met Tags How To’s

One of the most important factors in how a search engine may decide to rank your web page is the meta that you use. All major search engine spiders (crawlers) will use the text of your title tag as the text they use for the title of your page in your listings so you will want to follow these few tips on Meta Tags How to’s.

  • Make your title tags descriptive and relevant to your page content.
  • Title tags should not be longer than 6 words
  • Always use keywords in the meta title
  • Meta description should never be longer than 22 words or 160 characters
  • Meta keywords should only be around 8 keywords and try not to repeat the more than 3 times. As an example: Meta Tags How, Meta Tags How To, How to use Meta Tags. As you can see I have used the key word Meta Tags three time in a row.

As I mentioned earlier I have used meta on all my pages and some of these pages rank on the first page of Google for the key words I have selected. Here’s the proof,

I bought a domain name strictly for the fact I did not want anyone else taking it on me. I copied the exact same content for my web pages from my Affiliates web pages. The only thing I did different was that I optimized the Meta tags as listed above. This website has no backlinks at all and ranks higher than my affiliates main site that has been on the internet for years. My site has affiliate links to my affiliates main site and I now make around $4000 a month and I have not touched it since I created it. So when you read that meta is not required any longer I beg to differ.

One thing I would certainly recommend besides the meta tag how to’s is that you read how to use proper design seo to get better page rankings.

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Writing Creative Page Titles
Thursday, August 26th, 2010 | Author:

Creative page titles 300x258 Writing Creative Page Titles

Why Creative Page Titles?

Creative page titles are very important when trying to catch the prospective visitors attention. These have to be words that describe what your page is about so that visitors know they found what they were looking for. Also, It’s these creative page titles that search engines look at when they crawls your websites pages looking for the searched content.

Studies conducted by Google show that a most people who are searching will be tempted to either click or ignore based on how relevant the content of the webpage title is based on their search.

You will need a creative page title to catch their eye in the natural search section of the search engine results page to get web traffic.

Now that I have explained the impact of having a creative page titles for you webpage, lets talk about how to write an effective and powerful title.

Writing Creative Page Titles

Let’s start with some basics! The webpage title aka the Meta Title Tag is the synopsis of the content of the web page and you will want to make use creative page titles for all of your pages. So, as no two pages on your website are the same, hence why should their title tags be? Therefore, as a general rule, creative page title tags for each page on your website should be unique. This is an added bonus from an SEO perspective, because now you can target many more keywords and spread your reach across search engine indexes. Be sure to see our post on Meta Tags How.

It is important to remember that since the title tag is the synopsis of the content of the web page, you need to make sure that the title tag is relevant to the content of the page which is why we call it a creative page titles. For example, the title tag for an about us page is “How to create creative page titles“. Hence, the title tag does its job of informing what the page is about.

You will notice that “creative page titles” is one of the key phrases we want to target and so, we want to make sure we include it in the keyword phrase. This brings out an important point. You need to do a keyword analysis before we write an effective and powerful title tag.

Keyword selection is a very important part of writing compelling page titles and is a part of the Search Engine Optimization service that companies like “First One On” provides to their clients.

The next step after keyword analysis will be to write down title tags for each and every web page on your website.

Please be careful when writing creative page titles tags and don’t over stuff keywords in the title. Doing so will undermine the power of the title tag and defeat the purpose of better ranking in the search engines. The title tag is the title of your web page and so it must be relevant and meaningful. Remember, this is the title in your AD in the natural search listings of the search engine.

General Suggestions For Creative Page Titles

You should never promote all of your keywords in one page. Normally, you should promote 3 to 5 keyword phrases per page. The ‘Title tag’ should contain up to 3 important keywords that match to the body of the page content. If the keyword you are trying to promote is highly competitive, you can consider repeating the important keyword twice in the first 100 words of the page content. Also see design SEO for a better understanding.

Limit the length of the creative page titles keywords to 65 characters or less, including spaces. There’s no reason to have the engines cut off the last word and have it replaced with a “…” Note that some search engines are now accepting longer titles and Google, in particular, is now supporting up to 70 characters.

Use a divider when splitting up the keywords. We generally recommend the use of the “|” symbol aka the pipe bar. Others choose the arrow “>” or hyphen “-” and both work well.

Re-using the title tag of each page as the H1 heading tag can be valuable from both a SEO keyword targeting standpoint and a user experience improvement. As you can see in this post I have used the key word, creative page titles in my h1 and h2. Users who go to the page from the search result listing will have the expectation of finding the title they clicked on. Users will be more likely to stay on a page they’re reasonably certain fits their intended search query.

About The Author
I created this creative page titles post using information provided to me via email by Peter Bowen who is a seasoned marketing communications professional with an extensive web based marketing background, he won the 1994 Entrepreneur of the Year award for developing an online shopping mall when the internet was in its infancy. Passionate about internet search engine marketing and “converting clicks into customers” you should apply these recommendations for creative page titles and his other proven SEO strategies.

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