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How Important are Meta Information?

Published: March 8th, 2010

Best Practice SEO dictates that you need good meta information as it is essential for SEO. Two tags to focus on are title tags and meta descriptions. Make sure they are descriptive and most importantly, relevant to the content on the website.

If you do have duplicate meta descriptions on your website, you will most likely get a warning in Google Webmaster Tools. Take this as a gentle nudge towards getting into the good habit of having a unique description for each page. After all, this is the summary snippet underneath your link on the search engine results page. The rule of thumb is to keep these under 150 characters in order to have the full sentence visible on the SERP.

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Yahoo! Site Explorer Trick – Referring domains count vs total number of backlinks

Published: March 2nd, 2010

I had a chat a few days ago with a fellow SEO counterpart who let me know a quick trick when using Yahoo! Site Explorer. This method allows you to filter the number of referring domains from the total number of backlinks pointing to a web site.

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Where will SEO be in 10 years?

Published: October 23rd, 2009

This is a question I often ask myself. As far as I can see, the answer seems to depend upon two factors – the emergence of real time search and how SEO progresses within the marketing mix.

At present it is impossible to see beyond Google when looking into the future. However, the emergence of a viable competitor does not seem as far off as it did a year ago. The merger of the Bing and Yahoo could make an impact – as long as they stop trying to play catch-up and start looking beyond existing search conventions.

One avenue that looks like it could impact upon Google’s quality-weighted algorithm is real-time search. At the moment, real-time search doesn’t offer much in terms of value for businesses. This is because of its current prominence in the social media sector. The failure of businesses to convert social media into revenue means that the connection between real-time search and revenue has not really been made.

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Seven Simple Steps to Onsite Optimisation

Published: September 11th, 2009

These seven steps assume you’ve been given a fully finished site to optimise and you don’t have much time! Follow them and you can’t go far wrong.

1. Decide which pages will focus on which terms

This is crucial. Choose no more than a handful of terms per page. I am a believer that landing pages are for SEO as well as PPC (those who disagree can berate me in comment section below). Ensure this strategy does not become confused, with more than one page focusing on exactly the same key phrase – focusing on longer-tailed key phrases is fine though.

2. Alter page titles

Put priority terms at the front end of the title and make sure they are written with word proximity in mind. The closer together the words within the title, the better the effect on the ranking of the phrase combining those words. For example, the title ‘One two three’ is likely to have better rankings for the phrase ‘one two’ than the phrase ‘one three’. Also, phrases that are entered after the first 60-70 characters will be far less effective than those within the first 60-70 characters.

3. Write keyword rich content

Don’t over-do it on the key phrases but make sure there are a couple of each in there. At least 250-300 words on each landing page is best, though every little helps.

4. Ensure there is no duplicate content

Make sure there is only one version of each page – use .htaccess to redirect and robots.txt to exclude where necessary. Ensure identical content isn’t elsewhere on the web with use of Copyscape or simply by copying and pasting the text into Google. Make sure there is only one version of your homepage – Google views http://yoursite.com, http://www.yoursite.com, http://www.yoursite.com/index.html and http://yoursite.com/index.html as 4 different pages. Make sure it knows which one you prefer by using Google Webmaster Tools and the .htaccess file.

5. Insert relevant headings

Make sure there are headings on the page containing the key terms – but also ensure they do not exactly match the page titles.

6. Insert relevant meta tags

Write an interesting 120 character-long meta description mentioning relevant key terms. Ensure that the meta keywords tag does not mention anything that isn’t actually mentioned in the body of your content.

7. Upload sitemaps

Xml sitemap is vital to inform Google about your site structure and URLs. Html sitemap is useful.

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How to come up with a landing page strategy

Published: August 14th, 2009

The most difficult thing at the start of an SEO project can be to come up with a landing page strategy.

The difficulty is to try and avoid an overlap in strategy – the terms you’ve been asked to optimise may be associated with more than one page, and it can be very difficult to completely restructure the site once it’s been built, especially if you’ve been given a long list of keywords.

The effect of this can be confusion with search engines as to which page is the main focus for which term. However, a strategy I believe in is to focus the homepage upon the general, most searched for term and focus the deeper page on slightly different or longer tailed terms associated with the general term. The simple reason is: the homepage is more likely to get natural links.

This should be reflected in the page titles, which are the most important onsite optimisation factor – they are not only highly considered by the search engines but they also provide a clear insight into your strategy. Remember the 65 character restriction and your strategy should fall into place.

So for example, a marketing agency may focus the homepage on general terms such as ‘marketing’ ‘marketing company’, ‘design company’, ‘brand design company’, ‘brand design’. Then you can focus the pages that outline these services on longer tailed/less popular terms such as ‘internet marketing services leeds’, ‘logo design leeds’ etc. This would give you the following page titles, with most popular term at the front and word proximity also determined by popularity of term:

Homepage: Marketing Company & Brand Design Company

Marketing service page: Print, Online & Internet Marketing Services Leeds & Yorkshire

Brand design service page: Brand Logo Design Services & Branding Services Leeds & Yorkshire

The content on each page should then reflect these titles. For example homepage content should focus on what a great marketing and brand design company you are. The content on the marketing services pages will expand on the marketing service you provide with headings for online & internet marketing and print marketing, and how you provide these services throughout Leeds and Yorkshire. The brand design service page would follow suit.

Links gained to each page should use the appropriate anchor text.

Ok the example isn’t perfect but hopefully you’ve got the gist of what I mean!

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