Do meta key words help or hurt SEO
I Came accross a blog post by Chris Smith:
Around a year ago, Danny Sullivan did some great research on the Meta Keywords tag to determine which search engines are using it. He found indication that Google and Microsoft Live Search ignore it for keyword ranking (retrieval) purposes, while Yahoo! and Ask are apparently using it. With Google having the bulk of the search marketshare, and Yahoo possibly only using the tag to a limited degree, it would seem rather extraneous to continue using it for search optimization.
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I always thought that having as many keywords in your meta tag as possible is best. But it might not actually be.
I know that you need to have the right keyword density to have the Propper SEO done. Don’t over load your page with the same words over and over. Don’t let it look like spam. Make it sound as ligit as possible. If your website is about emails and email marketing, use those words in your content. But don’t use it too much. Don’t make your keywords the only thing people see when they read your content. Make it as informative as possible.
How important is Google Pagerank?
Is Google’s Pagerank still important? Does it really mean anything if you have a high pagerank? well, maybe…
Many of the current regulars believe PageRank (PR) is no longer important to Google SERPs. Google started it’s search engine based on PageRank, but over the years they have had to alter their search algorithm to combat those who try to gain higher rankings through understanding how the algorithm works and adapting a websites code etc… to meet those requirements.
For example a couple of years back you could create a new site with 1,000 optimized pages (and optimizing a page isn’t rocket science), give it enough links (from any source almost) to get the home page to PR5 and within a few months you were practically guaranteed a fair chunk of targeted traffic. Now it takes at least 9 months and more likely 12 months to see any significant traffic. It’s been called the Sandbox Effect and has really made organic SEO much harder.
Some Websites have a very low pagerank, but still get allot of traffic. In those cases, pagerank is of no real importance.
This change does not mean Google no longer uses PR/links as part of it’s ranking process, just it’s changed how it’s does things to make an SEOs task much harder.
My take on this is Google used to take the value of a link and basically immediately pass that link benefit in full to the recipient page. Now (2005 onwards) there’s a significant delay between adding a link and seeing it’s benefit fully. So when a page gains a new link it won’t see it’s full effect for maybe 6 months or more (I estimate it’s between 9 and 12 months).
Since a lot of people have little patience and expect what they do today to show rewards quickly this has led them to believe PR is no longer important, since the PR of the page goes up within 3-4 months, but rankings doesn’t move for 6+ months (12+ months in some cases).
As a webmaster this means you must obtain long term links no short term links like you see with the blackhat technique of link spamming where a comment spammed link from a blog has a relatively short life on a high PR page.
To the webmaster building a real, substantial business around Google traffic expect a minimum year delay, it will be slow going with a lot of work, but you’ll get there eventually and when you do you will most likely stay there for years to come.
This is what businesses should want (long term stability) and what Google wants (sites that have earned their traffic), no fly by night web sites that rank well for a couple of months, get banned and so are deleted only to be replaced with a similar site that’s banned a few months later.
PR is also important for other reasons, which I’ll explain another time.
So Google pagerank does matter, it just depends on what you are looking for when it comes to pagerank.
Dominate Google Rankings
You can be on top of Google ranking for any search term! You can Dominate the Internet withing 24 hours, you can make hundreds of dollars a day… all you need to do is sign up here:
Sound familiar? Well, the truth is all you need to know and do is a few simple steps and you can be on top. You don’t need to sign up to anything, you just need some knowledge, and here it is. Free, simple and easy to do.
Domain Names
Age: Make sure your domain name is at least six months old.
If it’s more than a year old, that’s even better. Google
often (but not always) likes domains to be at least six
months old before indexing the site. How do they know? They
use a “whois” database like the one at:
http://www.AllWhoIs.com.
Go there and enter your domain if you want to see what
Google (and anyone else in the world) can instantly know
about your site.
TLD Type: TLD stands for Top Level Domain, which is to say
the letters after the dot. The best ones to have are “.com,
.net. .org and .edu.” These get the most play in Google’s
top 3 rankings for just about every keyword you can
imagine, with “.com” and “.edu” being the best.
Embedded Keywords: If you have your main keyword (and ONLY
your main keyword) as a dotcom domain name with even just
halfway decent page text and some good inbound links you
can usually nail number one on Google for that keyword.
I’ve done it dozens of times. It’s a no brainer.
Dashes: Having a dash in your domain name might be bad for
branding, but it can open whole new doors of opportunity for
your search engine optimization efforts. You see Google
treats a dash as a null value (almost like a space) and can
take them or leave them with equal indifference. So, if your
main keyword phrase is a few words long, you can place a
dash between each word. If that’s taken, just try one dash
separating the first and second words but leave the second
and third word grouped together. You get the idea. Just
keep trying combinations until you have one that works and
scoop up the domain. Even if you sit on it for six months,
you’ll have it when you want it.
Now on to the next big item; keywords. The best keyword
embedded domain name in the world will mean little if
nobody is searching for that keyword. That said; let’s find
the best keywords possible for your site. Here’s how…
Keywords:
Keywords in Demand: Let’s snoop into Google’s keyword
database and find some winners. Go to
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal and
enter any keyword or phrase you think your target audience
is looking for. Now click on the top header link to sort by
desired search volume to see which words get the most
searches.
Go Long: And don’t be afraid to use longer keywords as long
as they get plenty of searches. Not only will this narrow
the tasks of your workload for actual optimization but it
will open all kinds of new options for finding great (dash
laden) domain names and even help cut back on your
competition.
Narrow Your Field: Now take the top ten or so relevant
keywords and phrases and list them in order of “Approximate
Monthly Searches Performed.” You might want to paste the
keyword into one column of a spreadsheet and the number of
searches into the next column. This next part takes a bit
of math so we might as well let Excel do it.
Competition:
Competition; Less is Better: “Less is better.” Well that’s
the understatement of the year. But how do you know how
much competition you will be up against? It’s easy. Simple
division does the trick nicely. Here’s how…
Google It: Go to Google and paste in your first keyword
phrase. Look in the upper right area of the page and see
how many pages you will be competing against if you try to
optimize for that keyword (Results 1 - 10 of about
123,000,000 for “keyword”.) Now record that number in the
cell to the right of “searches performed.” You can go ahead
and do the same for each keyword. When you have all the
info you need have Excel divide the number of “competing
pages” by the number of “searches performed.” The lower the
resulting ratio; the better your chances. Your best bet is
to take the lowest ratio number with the highest number of
“searches performed.” This is your optimal target.
Even More: But we’re not done yet! Now find the next best
two runnerup keywords and write them down in order of
importance. We’ll need them soon.
Content:
The King Lives!: You’re probably sick of hearing it but
content really is king. Developing search engine friendly,
well optimized content (for REAL people) is key to your
success. Google can read a Web page just like a person
thanks to its natural text algorithm. So keyword spamming
and robotic writing do not work with Google. But here’s
what DOES work…
Keep it Real: Call a close friend and tell him or her
exactly what you want to tell your web visitors. Then as
quick as you can write it down, as close to “word for word”
as you can remember. Just let the words flow. You can fix
spelling and grammar later.
Fitting In: Now, with your list of three keywords, go back
through your text and fit your most important keyword as
close to the beginning of the first sentence as possible.
Now go ahead and place your number two keyword someplace
else toward the beginning of your first paragraph. Your
third keyword should go into the beginning of the second
paragraph if possible.
Now use only one of your keywords for each of the next
three paragraphs. Try to make them fit naturally toward the
beginning sentence or two of each paragraph.
Throw in a Curve: Now use a reverse order for the very last
paragraph. Put your least important keyword (number 3 pick)
at the beginning of the paragraph and your best keyword at
the end. This shows consistency (at least as far as Google
is concerned.)
Last but not least, do not repeat any keyword more than
three or four times on a page. I stick with a 3 x 3 method
and it works great (3 keywords each mentioned 3 times over
the course of about 9 paragraphs.)
Getting Links and Monitoring Your Site:
Inbound Links: Having high quality inbound links can
account for more than 75% of your search engine ranking
success. Getting these links is the crucial step that will
get you over the top. At the same time you need to monitor
your progress and your site’s status (how search engines
REALLY see it). This will tell you not just where you are -
but where you are likely to be. In the old days, we had to
do all of the link work and monitoring by hand. And believe
me, it took a long time (I averaged about 16 hours per
week; per site!). My advice is to find a good SEO tool and
let it do the tough and repetitive work for you. If you get
hold of the right product, it’s the best money you’ll ever
spend.
There you go, that is all you need to dominate Google Rankings. Simple hey?
Do you have any tips on Search engine optimization?
share them
Paying for Traffic?
Your blog/website is up, you have your tracking set up and you get about 5 to 10 visitors a day. You have links to your site, but you still can’t get your visitor count up?
One of the first things to remember is: are you writing good articles? you need to think to yourself “what would I want from this article?” If you have good articles and your traffic goes up a bit more, but still not enough. what then?
You can actually pay for visitors. There are multiple ways in witch you can do this. You can have an adwords campaign going. You can sign up with affiliate sites. You can also trade links on a credit basis. You can even offer some websites/bloggers money for a link to your site and a good review. (the latter is mostly frowned upon.)
I’ve decided to give it a test run, to see what the outcome is of it and if it is really worth the while. I’ve signed up with NewGenTraffic, and the way they work is quite interesting.
When you sign up, you get either a basic account, or you can pay for an account. When you pay for an account, you get alot more out of the deal. For me, I’ve signed up with the free account. The way my account works:
I get a code, that I can place on my website. Similar to Google adsense advertising. Ads get displayed everytime a page is loaded. When someone clicks on one of those ads, I get credit points witch I can use to promote my own website/blog. The person who’s ad gets displayed and was clicked on, uses one of his credits for that click. with New Gen Traffic you can also Buy credits. The more credits you have the more ads you can run on other sites and the more traffic you eventually get.
So you can either wait for some visitors to come to your website and click on those ads, or you can jump the gun and buy credits. With Google adwords it works the same. You sign up with adwords and decide to display ads and how much you want to pay per click. When people visit other sites that have google adsense displayed, and your ad is clicked. You get charged with a certain amount. (you can specify how much.)
In that way, you payed for that person to come to your website.
There are many other way’s in witch you can get traffic by using this system. I will let you know what results I get after a week or so.
Robert
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How search engines work, google, yahoo ect.
Google has a bunch of servers in Data centre’s. Data centers are basically a cluster of computers/servers in a single location on a network.
Google sends out what they call Spiders. They go out on the internet and “crawls” the internet. Goes from one website to another following links and indexes the webpages. The spiders read the page and index them on the google server. Store’s some information about the url, what the website is about ect. Google can then determine what the website is about after a number of words or phrases are repeated. So a blog about the internet will have the word Internet repeated quite alot of times. Therefore, google “sees” that about and automatically gets told that its about the internet. Then your website has been Indexed. The same goes for any other page.
When you then type in “the internet” in google, it will quickly have a look at the logs on their server and find all the data that matches your search. Then, display it in a list in your browser. The websites aren’t actually stored on the google servers, but a database to what everything is about and where it can be found.
As you can expect, its quite a large database/list.
When it comes to being “found” on google there are multiple things you are going to have to do. Think of it as a race. If you have your new website up, and nobody really knows about it, google probably will also not know. It takes a couple of days maybe even weeks for your website to be indexed in Google. That is where Search engine optimization comes in. using the correct amount of keywords and writing your content in the right way.
It takes quite a while for you to get the right balance of keywords and content. Writing in a non-spam like way. Stay away from repeating the same keywords more than about 3 times in a sentence.
There is alot more to Search engine optimization than just using the right words.
More on that later. 
I hope that that makes sense to you.
