Hello Kalena
I’m a new Search Engine College student and I have 3 questions about SEO:
1) I’ve listed key phrases in a bulleted list. One of the items listed is not a keyphrase, but does it matter to the search engines where the key phrases are, as far as their order in the list?
2) I noticed something called “itemprop” in the meta description tag when I look at the source code of my website. I know this is something to do with “All in One SEO” coding. If itemprop is in the meta description, will that affect my SERPs?
3) Itemprop seems to be an issue with W3C, and the W3C Code Validator found more than 30 errors with my WordPress theme’s coding. Could this also affect my SERPs?
4) I wrote more than 300 words for my site, and I’ve been changing words to try and improve the site’s performance over several months. However, when I type in a key phrase I can’t locate it in Google. Also, it seems the only way I can find it (on page 5) is when I type in the city with the key phrase.
Any suggestions would be appreciated.
Kind Regards
Ben
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Hi Ben
I don’t usually answer more than one question per post, but I’m feeling generous today ?
To answer your questions:
1) All other things being equal, keywords/phrases at the start of your tag are given slightly more relevancy weight than keywords/phrases towards the end of the tag.
2) I use the All in One SEO Pack plugin for WordPress as well and I’ve never noticed this *itemprop* you speak of. However, it appears to be attribute for embedded items in your code. It shouldn’t have any impact on things as the content of the meta description tag rarely has any influence on your page ranking in the SERPs.
3) Yes, HTML validation can have an impact on how search engines index your code, which can in turn have an impact on how well you rank. If you have used W3C to validate your code and it has found errors, I suggest you try to correct the errors as best you can.
4) SEO is a fluid exercise. You need to constantly tweak and refine your page code and content (and link profile) until your page starts to rank well. As long as you follow the advice in our Search Engine College lessons and on this blog, you should find an improvement over time.
Hope this helps.
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