Posts Tagged ‘keywords’

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I recently received an email from someone looking for some advice and a variety of topics. I thought our readers here would benefit from my response. This is the first post of a series of questions and answers touching on keywords, links, architecture and more.

We’ll start off with the questions and thoughts regarding keywords and how they should be used on the page vs. how the search engines interpret them. For many outside the SEO industry keyword usage can still be somewhat of a mystery. Hopefully this information will provide some new insights or reconfirm old suspicions.

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We’ve previously looked at Paid Search Advertising Roadmap, Paid Search Rules and Alphabet Soup and PPC. Now let’s start looking at keyword matching. How well do you understand match types?

Each of the three major PPC platforms follow a similar approach, with Google AdWords and MSN adCenter using essentially identical match types and Yahoo! Search Marketing being a little more confusing. If you can get your head around the different terminology in the three platforms then you’re going to be just fine.

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When providing SEO advice on the topic of website design, we often warn against placing important content into images. This is because search engines can’t read images like a person can. To them, an image with text is just an image. They really have no idea what the image is or if, in fact, it says anything at all. So when optimizing sites, anytime we are dealing with keyword optimized content, we want to make sure it’s standard HTML text. This includes headers, benefit lits, and even normal body copy.

While the search engines can’t read actual images, they can read what we say about the image. This information can be gleaned a few different ways:

• Image file name (image1234.jpg vs. mustang-gt.jpg)
• Text immediately surrounding the image
• The overall content of the page the image is on
• Image ALT attribute in the image tag

When trying to optimize images for image search, all of these can provide important indicators the search engines use to produce the best set of image results. In terms of traditional optimization and website usability, the ALT attribute plays an important role.

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Yesterday I posted some thoughts on When, Why and How to Construct a Meta Description Tag. While it’s relevance in terms of rankings is rather limited, there is still some intrinsic value to implementing a good description that will appear in the search results.

Today I’m going to tell you everything you need to know about the Meta Keywords tag. You ready?
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I work in website marketing … it is our job here at Pole Position Marketing to market our client websites. Having become something of a workaholic, putting in 6+ days a week of work, I can never completely put the work behind me. This truth has been evident for over a year, but the event I’m about to tell you brings a new level of realization.

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Continuing my Q&A series on Website Architecture, these questions were presented to me before and during my webinar of the same topic. We have some more good questions and answers today that I’m sure you’ll find valuable. Click here to Keep reading

This is one of those Basic SEO posts, that i feel silly writing about because “everybody knows” this information already. But then I look at websites of prospects and I realize that not everybody really does know. Or maybe they do and they just forget. In any case, this will be a quick reminder / refresher.

Most duplicate content issues have to do with on-page content. Mass page/content duplication can often have a negative effect on how the search engines spider and index your site. While I believe the title tag is the single most important piece of real estate on your site, duplication here is likely to have the least effect on the search engine crawlers. It will, however, have an effect on rankings, but that’s another discussion. Even still, it’s a duplicate issue that absolutely must be addressed for tactical SEO performance.

Duplicate titles is something we often see on newly developed websites or content management systems that don’t allow proper control of individual pages. While I get how when developing new websites the title tag can get overlooked, I’m amazed that people develop web software that still doesn’t take title tag customization into account.

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I am a day behind on getting this out for the day 2 of Small Business Marketing: Unleashed, but better late than never.

Day 2: Workshops

The day was kicked off with a presentation by one of the sponsors ideablob.com, and then we were released to go to workshops. (Sage Lewis, of SageRock.com tends to refer to each session / workshop as a class, which truly describes what the conference was like.) There were three time blocks with four workshops running in each block – Each block running an hour and a half. With that amount of time, we really were given in depth lessons on each topic. The hot topics were repeated, so you didn’t miss out on anything.

My schedule:
Keywords and Content presented by Heather Lloyd-Martin of SuccessWorks Search Marketing
Building a Community presented by Sage Lewis of Sage Rock
Link Building presented by Debra O’Neil-Mastaler of Alliance Link

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Day 1: Sessions

WOW. What a great day. The day gave us four sessions / two tracks of indepth introductions to all aspects of Search Marketing for small businesses. Each speaker had a full hour to go into more depth on their subject than any conference you’ve ever attended.

Rather than have a keynote speaker, Unleashed opened with a general overview of what Online Search Marketing is all about. Jennifer Laycock introduced three incredible presenters,
Matt McGee of Marchex and Small Business SEM (who happens to hate Twitter I do not like green eggs and ham, I do not like them Sam I am.), Wendy Piersall of sparkplugging.com and Matt Bailey of SiteLogic.com.

After the Common Sense introduction, we split out into the sessions. These are the ones I got to attend: Click here to keep learning

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been reviewing optimization work performed by my team as well as many of our client’s competitors. I’ve been studying the quality of the optimization work performed, both as a measure of comparison, and to simply get a feel for what other people are doing that perhaps we are not. What I found was pretty eye opening.

In many cases, as I peruse through the text and code, I can hardly tell where any “optimization” has occurred. It’s like knowing that surgery was performed but not being able to see the scar. Yet in some instances the on-page optimization looked like surgery performed by Leatherface of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. This is what I call “SEO Bloat”.

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