From early days learning SEO, I went ahead and did all my meta descriptions with a bit of blurb about the page but my *Guru* has told me this is incorrect and I should include only the title of the page in the meta description, eg “Antique Dining Chairs” whereas I had put in “Antique Dining Chairs – over 500 chairs on display at the Glebe Antique Centre. Dining chairs to match your table, occasional chairs for that special place in your home”.

Any thoughts before I go and change everything yet again?

Christine

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Hi Christine

From where I’m sitting, your *guru* is wrong. Remember, your meta description tag is often used as the snippet on the search results pages to describe your site.

So apart from including keywords, it has to do the job of convincing people to click on it. A nonsensical list of keywords is not going to convince people to click so you have to balance it out with an appealing sentence, preferably including a call-to-action or reason to click.

Yes, it’s important to put your keywords at the start of the tag if you can, but you have up to 160 characters in that tag indexed by search engines, so you should use the space to your advantage. Having a short, unimaginative meta description or simply copying your title tag is not going to make any difference to your overall rankings and is more likely to turn your potential visitors off.

Google admitted that it no longer considers the meta description tag in their ranking algorithm anyway, so, other search engines aside, the main job of the tag in Google SERPs is to convince people to click on the link and visit your site.

Put it this way: if you were in the market for an antique chair and you saw the following two listings in Google, which one would you click on?

• Site1.com – “Antique Dining Chairs.”
  
• Site2.com – “Antique Dining Chairs – over 500 chairs on display at the Glebe Antique Centre. Dining chairs to match your table, occasional chairs for that special place in your home.“

I’m thinking Site2.com – am I right? And – oh look! The longer tag managed to include *dining chairs* twice and a whole bunch of other keyword phrases as well: *dining chairs Glebe*, *chairs Glebe*, *occasional chairs*, *Antique(s) Glebe*.

Case closed.

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I’m just reading over Rand Fishkin’s article Title Tag SEO Best Practices referenced in SEO 101 and I have a quick question regarding the bit below:

“Many SEO firms recommend using the brand name at the end of a title tag instead, and there are times when this can be a better approach. The differentiating factor is the strength and awareness of the brand in the target market. If it is a well known brand, and it can make a difference in click-through rates in search results, the brand name should be first. If this is not the case, the keyword should be first.”

Do you need to be consistent with the format you use on each page of the site? That is to say if one page would benefit from having the Brand Name first while other pages would have more strength using the Primary and Secondary Keywords first is that okay from a design/authoring point of view?

Thanks,

Tiffeny

Hi Tiffeny

Great question! Every SEO will probably have a different answer to this, but I’m a strong believer in optimizing on a page-by-page basis.

Using the reverse pyramid analogy, every page on your site is a potential doorway, with your home page at the very bottom of the pyramid.

You might assume visitors all come via the home page, but if your site is well optimized, they rarely do. They will arrive via the page that best matched their search query. So you need to optimize each page as though it alone can be found in the search engines.

So you should optimize your title and other tags accordingly, to match the content on each individual page and the keywords you are targeting. If that means putting the keywords at the start of the tag, so be it.

Hope this helps!
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In one of your previous posts, you said to include the META keywords tag to provide those search engines that DO support it with as much information as possible about site content so they can index it correctly.

My question is: Which search engines still support the META keywords tag? I know there is the experiment conducted by Danny Sullivan to refer to, but that was posted in 2007. Just want to know what is the latest on this.

Thanks

Stephanie

Hi Stephanie

Here’s a link to the What is SEO? Beginners Guide published by SEOmoz.

According to Chapter Nine of that document, Yahoo! is the only major search engine that still supports the Meta Keywords tag and they claim not to use the content for ranking, but merely for content discovery.

Hope this clarifies things!

Kalena

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As I work my way through your SEO101 class, I am using my husband’s business website as my guinea pig. However, he and I have been wondering what happens to ranking once the Title Element, Description tags, and Keywords are altered?

For example, my husband’s website ranks #5 on one search engine. But he’s been (over) paying some company to do his SEO. So if I make changes, with his permission, am I going to mess up what few results he has gotten from this other company’s efforts?

By looking at it, I’d say that my work is already better. I’m just worried about the other stuff “behind the scenes” that this other company has been doing that may be accounting for rank.

To provide a complete picture, I should say he has had no social marketing done on his behalf, no blogging, no updates to his website or keywords, no YouTube videos. I can’t tell WHAT they’ve been doing for the last year.

Any input would be greatly appreciated!

Paula

Hi Paula

First thing you should do is to take a record of the site’s existing title and meta tags, as well as making note of current rankings for target keywords. If you plan on making changes to the visible text on the site pages (recommended) for SEO purposes, you should also make a record of the existing pages prior to your SEO.

That way, if for some reason your SEO experiments don’t result in better rankings, you can revert back to the current versions. But if you are applying what the lessons are teaching you, I am guessing your SEO activity will pay off. No way to know for sure without jumping in and giving it a shot!

Regarding this other company your husband has hired – they should be providing you with a full report of the exact SEO activities they have been undertaking. If they can’t explain or choose not to fully reveal the methods they have been using, there is likely something dodgy going on. Unless their process is completely transparent, I would be very suspicious of any SEO company claiming *behind the scenes* activity.

Hope this helps!

Kalena

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Thanks,
Brendan

Hi Brendan

Yes, most search engines index PDFs. In fact, after HTML files, PDFs are the most popular file format on the web.

In terms of deep content – most search engines only dig down a certain number of folders when indexing a site for the first time. They generally come back to dig deeper, but may not index all the files on your site. For this reason, you should place all your most important content in the top 2 or 3 levels (e.g. not buried too many sub-folders deep).

Provided you have included all your pages and files in your XML sitemap and submitted that to Google and other engines, your most important content should get indexed regularly.

Regarding optimising PDFs, yes, I would recommend you do this. Here’s a terrific article from SEOmoz that should give you some tips for doing this.

Kalena

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This week, I wrote a piece about SEO after receiving several question submissions from webmasters who were struggling optimizing their sites. The common thread amongst these questions was:

“There is SO much conflicting information out there about SEO – what are the basics and where do I start?”.

I decided to write an article outlining 10 vital, yet simple steps that webmasters can implement themselves to improve the search engine visibility of their sites. But to make it less overwhelming, I wrote the steps as a series of weekly tasks over a 10 week time frame.

I know how time-poor  webmasters can be so — just like starting a new diet or exercise plan — the 10 Week SEO Diet introduces the concept of SEO into your routine slowly.

I hope you enjoy the 10 Week SEO Diet. You can also view the YouTube version.

Kalena,

I am a former student and I have a good question: Suppose I have a landing page for ‘pick a keyword’? Obviously I want the customer to land on this page but this page does not have any pagerank yet. The homepage however does have pagerank and the search results in showing the homepage. How do I get the landing page to out rank the homepage for the specific term?

Respectfully, Cliff

Hi Cliff,

This question really comes back to the fundamentals of SEO, so provides a good opportunity to review some of the basics.

Often a websites Home Page will outrank it’s other, more targeted pages, even though they have more content relevant to the search query, but why is this the case? The answer is usually quite simple, and it mostly comes down to backlinks.  More often than not a websites home page has significantly more links to it from external sites, than other pages on the site.  Search engines treat backlinks as “votes of confidence” and use anchor text associated with those links as a strong signal about what the site is about.

So, to answer you question – How do I get a landing page to out rank my homepage? – get back to the basics :

1. Ensure that the contents of the landing page is highly relevant to and includes plenty of mentions of your targeted keywords
2. Optimise Page Title, description, H tags for your keyword
3. Establish links to the landing page (not your sites home page), from related third party sites with you keyword phrases as anchor text.

Hope that helps…

Andy Henderson
WebConsulting SEO Consulting (Brisbane, Australia)

Hi Kalena,

This is Pratik from India. I am working here as an SEO and dealing with a lot of overseas clients from SEO perspective. Here, I have got a query while working on a website. I have found that my website is receiving traffic from different countries which is not the actual target to get the leads converted; my main target is United States only, so the additional traffic will be of no use. Therefore, I am wondering of blocking other countries visitors to visit my website and redirect them on a simple page. The question is what disadvantages you see on blocking the traffic from other countries? Will this effect on SEO in anyway? Will I be able to rank well on Google as I am doing today? I am more concerned on SEO results because my website is ranking well for more than 500 keywords in top 10. Could you please let me know comments on the same? Looking forward to your feedback!

Thanks,
Pratik

Hi Pratik,

Unless there is a VERY good reason, I would be very, very cautious about blocking any sort of access to your site.

Just because traffic may be coming from a source that is not your specific target market, does not necessarily mean that it will not result in a lead.  A US resident may be on holidays or working abroad (there may be a lot of potential leads in US Military personnel posted abroad for instance), or may have outsourced research to an overseas service (much like what you are apparently offering for SEO).

I’m sure I don’t need to tell you the importance of links…Although backlinks from websites local to your target market are likely to be of better value than those from other countries, it is probable that you could generate some very good, relevant links from other countries.  If they were unable to access the site, clearly you would be missing out on backlinks.

Perhaps the most important reason why you may not want to block other countries though is related to search crawlers. Search engines, won’t necessarily crawl your site from the country where your target market is located.  If you block access to other countries there is a very real chance that it will limit the ability of search engines to crawl (and therefore index and rank) your site.

Traffic, even if is not coming from your target market, is rarely a bad thing as you never know what might lead to sales, leads, enquiries or links, unless you have a specific need to keep your site hidden from specific users, you should not be limiting access.

Andy Henderson
WebConsulting (SEO Brisbane)

I’ve contacted you because I feel frustrated. Until last night my site was listed within the second page results in google with the key words “learn Spanish free”. Thanks to the SEO course at SEC and my work , I was proud to see results like this. However for some strange reason this morning (UK time) I am nowhere to be seen with this key words. I have checked other search engines (yahoo, bing) and I am listed there (3rd and 2nd pages). Would you be able to tell if I have done anything to upset google? And if I have what?

Furthermore, I have checked all key phrases that have brought me visits before and I am nowhere to be seen within google index. (I used to appear on the first page with these key phrases). The only time I am in google listing is when I search the words “Spanish aid” ( the name of my domain) or the full URL of my web pages. I am also appear in google listing with the  word “Spanish colours” under Images. I find this extremely weird as it seem that google has penalised me for something I don’t know of. As I said on my previous email I was progressing and I was happy that I was learning an seeing positive result, now it seems that I have taken a big step back. I hope you can give my an explanation as at the moment I am banging my head against the wall.
Thanks a lot for your help

Thank you
Luis

Hi Luis

Fluctuations in your Google rankings are completely normal. Sometimes, they’ll make a slight tweak to their ranking algorithm which can result in other sites ranking above yours and/or lowering your previous ranking for certain keywords. But this doesn’t mean you’re suffering a penalty.

See some previous blog posts about this, particularly:

Why is my CMS based website only ranking for the home page

Why does my website not rank high on search engines?

Your site is still in the Google index and you rank #1 for your brand name so you haven’t been penalized. I could see nothing wrong with your content that would trigger any alarm bells with Google.

However, the big problem with your site is the low Google Toolbar PageRank score (1/10) reflecting the very low number of incoming links pointing to your site. Has your PR score always been 1/10? If it has recently dropped from a 2 or something, that might partially explain the ranking drop. While a higher PageRank score is not a pre-requisite to high rankings, it can be a key indicator of your site’s link popularity, which in turn has a strong influence on your ultimate keyword positions in Google.

The more links you have pointing to your site from related sites and using relevant keywords in the anchor text of the link the better you should rank for those keywords. The best thing you can do for your site right now is to build links pointing to it and to add new content. That will gradually improve your PageRank score and your link popularity – then the rankings will follow.

If you’re still worried, you can take the steps outlined in these posts:

How do I fix ranking penalties?

Why doesn’t Google index my entire site?

Kalena

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I would like to practice integrating SEO techniques. In your SEO101 lessons, you recommend using a web based site editing software. Please recommend one I can use for this purpose?

Thanks
Darlene

Hi Darlene

Probably the best option for you to practice on is to create a site using Google Sites.

Another good option is to create a free hosted web site using WordPress.com. It is traditionally used to create blogs, but because of it’s functionality and search engine compatibility, many companies use it to build their web sites these days (including Search Engine College!).

Just keep in mind that this creates a hosted site on wordpress.com (e.g. http://yoursite.wordpress.com) rather than your own domain. To achieve the best results using SEO, you need to use a hosted domain with your own domain name e.g. http://www.yoursite.com. If you have your own domain and want to use WordPress to build a site on it, go to WordPress.org and follow the instructions for installing WordPress on your domain.

WordPress offers a range of SEO plug-ins that pretty much automate the SEO coding process (e.g. All in One SEO Pack).  But for educational purposes, you should really work on integrating your SEO tags into the raw HTML code rather than taking these short cuts at first.

Kalena

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