Tag Archive for: search engine optimization

For those of you who don’t know who Danny Sullivan is – one, if you’re an SEO, shame on you.  Two, if you want to learn about SEO, learn who he is.

At any rate, Danny Sullivan is one of the most respected SEOs on the planet.  He knows his stuff.  He works diligently to learn about search engines (in particular, Google) and how they operate.

SEO is something that is becoming more and more well-known, as people and businesses realize this is how sites are to be found online.  Because of this, there are a lot of gimmicky SEO plugs (“Pay only $200/month and 1st page listings in 90 days!” types of stuff) going around.  They really annoy me.

Apparently Best Buy is getting in on this.  And they’re including social media in their “be found online” mix.  It’s through a company called “CloudProfile”.  And it’s FREE.

The best part?  They pitched to (of all people) Danny Sullivan.  And he’s taking them up on their offer.  See his word on it here.

I love this story, mainly because it touches on the element that so many SEOs (and marketers) miss – connecting with people.  It’s actually a tabloid that has attracted attention for making sure their focus is more on people than on search engines.

It’s great as a reminder – marketing should always be about thinking of connecting with people, not just crunching numbers.  If you only think of figures (traffic numbers, PPC costs, number of unique visitors) then you’ll likely lose a lot.  If you keep your focus on the people who visit your site, chances are you’ll gain many more fans (and revenue).

More info available also from The Guardian.

Keyword density is the number of times your keyword or keyword phrase appears inside content on a web page, compared to the total amount of content.  This is considered by SEOs to be part of the on-page SEO for targeting a specific keyword for a site.

So how important is it, really?  As the search engines progress and develop further, their algorithms change to fit one desired outcome: judging web sites and pages in the same way humans do.  In this way, the highest quality web pages should show up at the top of the search engine results.

Considering this, making sure you have a keyword density of 3-5% is not something that most humans take into account when they visit a page.  I don’t know about you, but I personally don’t do a search for a keyword, land on the page, and then count the number of times that keyword appears, do the math, and then dismiss the page if that percentage is outside the magic range.  I read the page, see if the content is good and high quality, and make my judgements based on that.  And if it’s really good, I might even link to it from one of my own pages.

Too many SEOs worry about fitting keywords X number of times into content, to a degree that often makes the content feel more unnatural.  This only hurts their connection with the human visitors to their site.

As it is now, the search engines will look for keywords in content, but having a specific density percentage is not in the top of their search-quality priority list.  If the page is specifically on a certain topic, the keywords will naturally appear within the content.  Forcing it will generally not help for the search engines, and certainly will not help with your human visitors.

My recommendation is to simply write the content to stay on topic and don’t worry about embedding keywords.  If you keep your keywords in the proper core SEO locations, the search engines will know very well what your page is about without having to do any sort of deep content keyword analyzation.

Nowadays the web is getting more and more attention.  People are realizing that businesses are made by being found online.  The methods of doing that are through creating good web pages, having an online presence through blogs, social media, online advertising.  And tied into almost all of this is search engine optimization.

If a business uses any of the other means (social media, blogging, site design), then it all comes down to wanting to be found online, to gain a presence.  And this ties into SEO.  Whether or not you realize it, if you have a Facebook account, you’re helping one site or another with search engine optimization.  Every link you post makes a difference.  On Twitter, any link posted can have an impact on visitors and the search engine listings.

Anything online will make a difference in SEO.  The key to doing good search engine optimization on purpose (as opposed to on accident, as a surprising number of sites have done) is to continue learning what changes impact the search engines.  As it is now, social media is starting to have an effect.  But that doesn’t mean you just need to put one post and you’ll shoot up three pages.  The trick is learning how it all ties together.

A good SEO stays educated on many aspects of the internet.  Just because you learn the basics doesn’t mean you’ll still be an expert SEO four years later (or even one year later).  The internet is a changing beast, and knowing these changes can make a big difference in your placement online.

And if you choose to hire someone else to do the search engine optimization for you, make sure that you’re happy with how educated they are on these changes.  Learning the basics of SEO is easy – but mastering it is more than just a few steps above that.

Do you get phone calls for your business from people who say that’ll put you on page one for your keywords with their SEO services?  It can be difficult to determine which SEO companies can actually do the work they claim (and some of them make full-time SEOs like me just look bad).

Find out what their skills are before agreeing to anything.  If you can determine that a company really knows what they’re doing, it can be worth the price.  Good SEO is not cheap, but the revenue you get from solid listings on your primary keywords will more than make up for it.

I’ll say now from my own experience – anyone that guarantees position 1 (or even page one) listings in a set time period (or at all, really) is in all likelihood full of it.  SEO is part of an industry that is constantly changing.  To do it right, you have to keep track of how the search engines operate and adjust where necessary.  Bad SEO may work temporarily, but in all likelihood will eventually make your listings drop lower than ever (or even get you blacklisted).

Shannon Rogers with Web Advantage put together a good list of questions to ask SEOs who cold-call you.  If you can find SEOs who can answer these well, they may very well be worth the marketing investment.

Pay for link building?  What?  Yes, the different ways people do their link building vary from totally free to exorbitantly expensive, but one method a lot of people have not really considered is actually sending traffic that will build links to pages that deserve them.

There are different ways to use PPC to target your landing pages, but if you have good enough content you can use the traffic you attract to help create more links.  The cost will vary based on the keyword you choose, but in some cases this can be very beneficial for your SEO.

Julie Joyce at Search Engine Land has 8 tips to help you fine-tune this approach.

It appears Google and YouTube are starting to put in something new – automated captioning.  This will help a lot for people who are unable to receive the audio for either physical or mechanical reasons.  It’s going to start with English only, but they will be using voice recognition software to turn the audio into legible captions.

There is word that this update may affect SEO, but I have my curiosities about this.  It can only truly affect SEO if the captions are somehow written into the page code.  We can only see if this is the case once this new development in YouTube goes live.  We’ll see how it turns out.

Yes, even the BBC is starting to adjust to the new wave of internet marketing.  It appears that they’re starting to consider SEO when writing their news posts online.  And keep in mind for the BBC, SEO stands for search engine optimisation, not the silly search engine optimization we talk about.

Enough of their traffic comes from the web and search engines, so they are making changes.  It’s true!  I read it on the Guardian.

Canonicalization is a major part of SEO, but at the same time one that still gets missed by many web designers.  Check out my guest post at Daily SEO Tip.  I get into more detail on what it is and how to fix canonicalization there.

I still hear from a lot of SEOs that are convinced the keywords meta tag actually makes a difference.  Well, I thought I’d run a full test to see how much attention the search engines pay to it.

The test was as follows: I put a random string of letters and numbers together and slapped it into my keywords meta tag.

Keywords Meta Tag Test

Keywords Meta Tag Test

So there it is.  And I let the engines go out and gobble up my site.  After the robots had all crawled it, I did a check to see what each search engine found.  And this might surprise you, but here you go:

Google Keywords Meta Tag Test Results

Google Keywords Meta Tag Test Results

Yahoo Keywords Meta Tag Test Results

Yahoo Keywords Meta Tag Test Results

Bing Keywords Meta Tag Test Results

Bing Keywords Meta Tag Test Results

Ask.com Keywords Meta Tag Test Results

Ask.com Keywords Meta Tag Test Results

And as you can see for yourself – only Yahoo and Ask seem to pay any attention to the keywords meta tag.  Not only that, but it was very recently revealed that Yahoo will no longer use the keywords meta tag.

So, as I’ve said before – the keywords meta tag is only used by people who have not done the research to realize that it doesn’t do anything.  For SEO, keep your optimizing solid – use the primary elements, the title tag, the description tag, header tags where valid.  But remember to target humans, not just the search engines.  If you keep that in mind, you’ll likely find yourself in better positions on the search engine results pages.