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Meta Description Tags are bits of HTML code placed in the “Head” section of a website page, usually before the Meta keywords tag but after the Title tag. These tags do not influence a page’s search engine rankings but they are worth doing since words may ultimately appear in Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs), given how unpreditable SERPs can be. Conducting tests on Google and Yahoo for keywords will confirm the validity of doing these tags properly.

Meta description tags are bits of HTML code that are placed in the “Head” section of a site page, usually before the Meta keywords tag but after the Title tag. They were long assumed to influence a page’s search engine rankings in two ways – by helping the page rank highly for words contained within the tag, and by providing a description in the search engine results pages (SERPs). The reality, however, is that the information placed in both Meta keyword and description tags is not accorded any importance or “weight” in Google’s ranking algorithms and very little in Yahoo’s. Including keyword phrases, then, really does little or nothing to improve your site’s position in the SERPs for words relevant to your online business.

SEO people are now debating whether or not it is worth all the effort needed to properly include Meta keywords and description tags. The reality, however, is that you cannot really predict what the engines will show in the SERPs, because results will also vary with the words that the searcher types into the engine. It might be prudent, then, to adjust your Meta tags to include certain keywords and/or phrases that you think might be used in searches, particularly if those words do not appear anywhere on the page other than in the Title tag.

Running test searches on Google and Yahoo for relevant keywords in your description tag confirm that an adequate tag is at least worth the effort with the latter engine, since those words may appear in the SERPS. Even running test searches on the two engines for irrelevant keywords in your tag, unrelated to your site and appearing nowhere else on the page, may generate something. Test pages for irrelevant words may be only partially displayed by these engines, or part of the description tag may only be shown, but at least they are engine results.

Tests on other search engines seem to also confirm the validity of including proper Meta description tags. MSN search seems to function much like Yahoo, but like Google offers only incomplete and/or partial results. Teoma actually finds the page where the words are located but does not necessarily show them.

You should not fret too much over Meta description tags, but it is probable worth the little effort and time needed to do these one and two sentence blurbs well. Description tags with relevant keywords complement strong keyword phrases already included on your Web pages, and will at least generate incomplete and/or partial engine results. When you also consider the way engines are always changing their search parameters, it also helps to cover all your bases.

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Determining timelines for SEO projects and/or work is an essential component of your company’s SEO campaign. Two important considerations here are when to actually start investing in SEO, as well as how long before the client starts to see results from a successful SEO campaign. Time-sensitive offers and campaigns and seasonal offers probably should not involve SEO, where branding awareness should. Be prepared to wait several months before seeing concrete SEO results.

Determining timelines for SEO projects and work is an essential component of your company’s SEO campaign. There are several factors which help determine when to actually start investing in SEO; here are some of them:

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If you have a highly time-sensitive offer, such as “save 10% in the next three days”, plug that into your paid search campaign rather than make it a focus of your SEO work
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If you have a seasonal offer to promote over a period of a couple of weeks, or if you have new product launches that you want noticed quickly, investing in paid inclusion is likely your best bet. This can guarantee that your URL will be seen by some search engines, although it doesn’t guarantee it will get listed. (Remember, Google and many other search engines do not accept paid inclusions.)
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If you have time-sensitive news, such as a big product launch, consider optimizing the press release you post on your site and submit it to the wire services so it is picked up and posted under the most appropriate terms by Google News and others. This can happen in a matter of minutes if you have access to an SEO PR expert and your PR people are used to working with that expert. Press release optimization is one of the faster growing segments of SEO
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If you are trying to let the world know about your brand marketing, your standard offers and your very existence, focus on classic search engine optimization. This can take anywhere from one month to three months or longer to get a highly visible rank in major search engines. Another timeline to consider involves determining how long a successful SEO campaign will take and when the client will start seeing concrete results. There is no quick fix to SEO. Paid search campaigns show up online almost instantly and only require that you have a place to link to. Optimization campaigns, on the other hand, can take much longer, and usually last at least several weeks, if not months.

Here are some of the factors which affect that timeline:

* The competitiveness of the search terms you’re targeting and your site’s true relevance to them
* Whether your site is built using programming that’s “search-engine friendly” and if the SEO firm involved has to reprogram much of it
* How prepared and able you are to work in cooperation with the SEO firm you use. The fact is, client-side delays in selecting final search terms and posting new pages are the most frequent causes of slow rank movement
* Whether your linking relationships will all have to be built from scratch or whether you have relationships with peers, news sites and related sites that could turn into linking partnerships quickly
* The number of pages on your site and how many of them need to be optimized
* Whether you employ questionable practices such as cloaking or duplication (nearly-identical pages posted on the Web), which can drop or delay your search engine ranking
* The timing of a site revamp or new launch. Too many marketers spend most of their energy focusing on the new site and only once it’s over do they think, “OK, now it’s time to get my traffic-driving tactics together.” Clearly, the problem with that approach is that optimization requires tinkering with your site itself, up to and including the actual copy on the page. Plus, great optimization campaigns are built on hours of research. Your SEO firm needs to research search terms and potential link partners before it can start. And, if you have a “living” site that changes frequently with different products, new press releases, etc., you’ll need to have your internal copywriting and technical staff thoroughly trained ahead of time by the optimization firm. This means that you need to pick an optimization firm as one of the initial parts of your site launch or redesign plans, not at the very end

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White Hat Practices are ethical SEO methods used to optimize a website’s pages and realize long-term higher search engine rankings. Black Hat refers to unethical and deceptive SEO techniques employed

by short-sighted companies looking to “trick” the search engines into realizing higher engine rankings.

These practices are not acceptable in any form to the engines and industry. Black hat techniques include

cloaking, doorway pages, hidden text, hidden links, and duplication.

I thought it might be a really good time to about White Hats and Black Hats, so let’s start off with some old-fashioned definitions:

White Hat Practices: Ethical SEO practices. White Hat refers to honest, above-the-board SEO techniques used by well-meaning industry experts to help optimize a website and its pages and to realize higher search engine rankings and drive more qualified traffic to that site. These practices are wholeheartedly approved by Search Engines and the SEO industry at large.

Black Hat Practices: Unethical SEO practices. Black Hat refers to deceptive SEO techniques employed by companies looking to “trick” the search engines into realizing higher engine rankings. These practices are not acceptable in any form to the engines and industry.

Black hat techniques are often employed by companies looking for a “quick fix” and aiming to temporarily spike search engine rankings for a given site. These practitioners are fully aware that their success will only be fleeting, because that site will be blacklisted or banished altogether from the major search engines once their unsavory methods are uncovered. Companies caught using black hat techniques will immediately suffer a sharp drop in engine rankings, and long-term damage to their brand and reputation. Companies seeking SEO support need to better appreciate how damaging black hat techniques can be to the reputation of their company, their brand and/or their website. They are advised to steer clear of companies practicing these methods.

There are many black hat techniques, so let’s identify some of them. This list is by no means exhaustive, but at least it will encompass some of the more well-known methods:

* Cloaking – also referred to as “sneaky redirects”, this technique features to programs that send search engine spiders to website pages never viewed by users
* Doorway pages – also known as “crawler only” pages, these pages are created just for search engine eyes. They try to artificially achieve high search engine rankings for a certain search term by repeatedly incorporating the same keywords and phrases in the body of text. This technique is related to keyword stuffing
* Hidden Text – this method involves the placing of keywords on a page which match the background color of the actual site, thereby rendering this text completely invisible to the human site visitor. May also be referred to as “keyword stuffing”
* Hidden Links – similar to hidden text techniques, this method involves placing links that are specifically designed to be spidered but cannot be viewed by the user
* Duplication – the creation of multiple pages, domains or subdomains which essentially contain duplicate content. Creating multiple copies of the same page under different URLs is an example of this. Many sites provide text-only or printer-friendly versions of pages which feature the exact same content as the corresponding graphic-rich pages. If you do have duplicate pages, you are advised by the engines to employ a robots.txt file to at least block duplicates from being spidered. Duplicate content is usually unintentional (such as a standard web page or print friendly page), but sometimes it is by design, such as when a site recycles content to artificially increase its traffic.

There is no doubt that black hat methods, often used in excess, can lead to short-term gains but invariably at the expense of long-term pain. These underhanded techniques pose such a serious and pervasive problem for the SEO industry that search engines such as Google and Yahoo dedicate large parts of their Webmaster Guidelines to discussing them. If these engines somehow catch you practicing black hat stuff, you might be kissing your online reputation goodbye. You might be blacklisted and/or banned altogether, and it could be years, if ever, before you could once again gain engine respect.

A final word on black hats: the industry does not talk about these practices that much, which for some only lends to their mystique appeal. Sometimes the temptation to wear black hats is too great for SEO practitioners, and has actually led to the development of grey hat methods. As you might expect, this compromising approach is not as honest as white hat but not as dishonest as black hat. Let’s use an example from duplication to illustrate. An ethical white hat SEO expert would be inclined to establish just a single site, whereas an unethical black hat SEO expert would devise hundreds of mirror sites to link to the main site, thereby artificially exaggerating that site’s importance to users and tricking the engines. A grey hat SEO person might establish secondary sites that are not duplicates of the original one, have some unique content and don’t lure users into visiting an irrelevant place. This practice might actually add some content value and optimize the original site without raising the ire of the search engines. As in life, there is always a middle ground in the SEO world.

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August 28th, 2007

This article is provided by Yesup SEO, an established SEO services.

Strong internal linking structures are important to your website and your SEO campaign, and is enhanced by adding a sitelink map to your text link navigation menu. These maps should comply with both Google and Yahoo. You can now go to Google Webmasters Console and Yahoo Site Explorer to learn if these engines are indexing your site pages, how well your internal links are working, and which external web sirtes are actually linked to your own pages.

website pages indexedWe have already discussed why strong internal link structures are so essential to your SEO strategy for the company website, and we looked at how to better promote strong internal linking. Adding a sitelink map to your text link navigation menu was mentioned as one major way to ensure better internal links, and we also talked about how these maps should comply with both Google and Yahoo. It would be a worthwhile exercise to login into both these search engines and confirm that they are both indexing each of your site pages. Making sure that those pages are engine-indexed does not guarantee higher engine keyword rankings but it certainly does not hurt. At the very least, you will obtain relevant and valuable data on how well those internal links are functioning as well as which external website pages are actually linked to your internal pages.

Webmasters and SEO guys have not always been able to go to Google and Yahoo and find out if site pages are engine-indexed. These two engines use to steadfastly keep secret which external pages are linked to your internal ones. The SEO world has changed, however, and now Google and Yahoo recognize the importance of helping Webmasters and SEOs find out which pages are linked. So now they offer up the tools to help you.

After designing your site and engine optimizing it, and making sure that you have created an engine-friendly sitemap, you should immediately set up accounts in Google Webmasters Console and Yahoo Site Explorer. With your sitemap established, you can employ tools from the two search engines to find out if your pages are indexed.

Google Webmasters Console (www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/)

After setting up an account in Console, you can actually add one site or several sites and have multiple ones all registered on a single interface. There are several tools empowering you to obtain valuable information on your site pages:

* Diagnostics Tab: find out in detail if Google spiders are having problems accessing pages (i.e. URLS not found, timed out or restricted by robots.txt, http errors)
* Links Tab: click on External Links to view all external links pointing to each of your internal pages. Click on Internal Links to discover which internal pages are linked to a specific external page. In both areas you can select Numeric Link to access a list of website pages currently Google-indexed that point to each of your own pages. Links Tab probably provides you with the most valuable information you will obtain in Console
* Pages Analysis: access a Google Analysis of your site and/or page content
* Sitemap Tab: create the sitemap for each of your domains, and feature all pages you want crawled
* Statistics Tab: learn about how Google PageRank is distributed on your site, and which page ranks the highest each month

Yahoo Site Explorer (www.siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com)

After setting up an account in Explorer, you can also add one site or several sites but you have to authenticate each of your unique domain names. Tools allowing you to collect details on your pages include:

* Explore: located on the administrative interface, this tool lets you view all site pages which are engine-indexed
* Inlinks: allows you to see how many pages are linked to the page you are “exploring”. By selecting Except From This Domain on the Show Inlinks dropdown menu you can view just the external links pointing to your site

You are advised to visit both Console and Explorer frequently to find out which pages were recently indexed and which pages have external links pointed to them. The great news for both Webmasters and SEO people is that Google and Yahoo are finally allowing them to obtain detailed and valuable information on their website links. If you are a Webmaster or SEO person, you would do well to take advantage of such support, as it can only help you formulate a more comprehensive and effective SEO campaign!

If you have any questions about this article, or wish to offer suggestions, please contact us at Yesup SEO, an established Toronto SEO services.

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Freqeuent, ongoing keywords management enables you to identify keywords generating clicks but not leads and/or sales. It also involves creating dynamic landing pages and testing. Continual testing, more importantly later on, will also identify those words which may be leading to lots of clicks but not converting into lots of leads and/or sales.

As you continue to search engine optimize your website, remember that you need to go beyond developing a comprehensive list of relevant, targeted and up-to-date keywords and phrases. Broad-based keywords are more expensive, meaning that the cost-per-lead (CPL) and cost-per-click (CPC) will be higher and the Return On Investment (ROI) lower.

Finding appropriate, narrow-based keywords will lower your costs and increase your investment return, but this takes a lot of effort and is a very time-consuming practice. It involves finding out how to increase your site’s reach and increase the size of your target audience. Building a much larger keywords base, then, is an important part of search engine marketing, since it enables you to bring your average costs in line with your ROI objectives.

Once you have built a really big keywords base, you need to manage it effectively, across many major search engines. This may be harder than it seems, because all you need are a few keywords getting lots of clicks but not converting to make the whole process unprofitable. Monitoring and managing your keywords closely and frequently will help you improve on keyword conversion rates.

Effective keywords management involves ensuring that the landing pages on your website are properly targeted or linked to the keywords you are paying for. Since these keywords may be changing, then employing dynamic landing pages works better, in terms of better converting clicks into eventual leads and, then, sales.

Strong keywords management also features continual testing; run tests early and frequently so that you can weed out those keywords and phrases which are not really leading to clicks or visitor interest. Continual testing, more importantly later on, will also identify those words which may be leading to lots of clicks but not converting into lots of leads and/or sales.

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