The keywords meta-tag  was created when the web was young to help site designers let engines know what a Web site was all about, and it worked well.  Too well.  Early SEOs started abusing the system by stuffing them with popular search terms that were not at all related to the current page to drive up rankings and page views.  The search engineers figured this out pretty quickly and either decreased the importance of the tag, or ignored it completely.

So why the debate then?  Because two of the major engines, Google and Yahoo seem to have different opinions of the tag.  Yahoo tells us to use it to improve the ranking of our sites.  Though they give no indication of it’s importance.  On the other hand, Google says nothing about the keyword meta tag.  They don’t say to use it, but neither do they say they ignore it, as they do with other tags.

I recently conducted a survey of SEOs, Web Designers and E-Marketers to see who uses the keywords meta-tag.  45% of respondents said they do not use the keywords meta-tag.

In September, 2007 Danny Sullivan from searchengineland.com proclaimed his hatred of the keyword meta-tag and attempted to kill it once and for all.  His article was well researched, articulate and convincing…to some.  Scrolling to the bottom you’ll see the same debate again with some agreeing with Danny, others disagreeing.

So what’s the average Joe to do when the experts can’t even agree?  That’s a decision you’ll have to make on your own.  However, I will tell you that I use them.

Why do I use them?  First because it’s easy to do.  Second, if I don’t stuff them and the engine(s) use them, I get a boost (however minor it may be) in the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs).  If the engine(s) don’t use them; well, I’m only out a minute of my time.

Yahoo tells us they use it, so that’s a no-brainer as far as I’m concerned – why waste a little help?

Google, well that’s a bit more tricky.  Their silence on its use makes me suspect that it is used by the algorithm in some minor way.  Perhaps as a part of an overall keyword checklist;  I think they read all the places a keyword might appear (page title, URL, description, keywords, content, alt tags, headings, etc.) and compute a score.  Of course no one but the engineers know for sure.  So again, if they do use it, great.  If not, well I’m not out anything but a minute of my time.

If you decide to use them, use only about 15-20 words that relate to the content of the site – DO NOT STUFF THEM WITH SPAM.

So what will YOU do?  I’d like to hear your thoughts.

Post from: Austin, Texas SEO - Jack Leblond

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If you are even remotely involved in marketing, communication or PR, you have no doubt heard of Ragan Communications.  The good folks at Ragan have been providing expert advice for years.  Ragan, like many others in their field, have been getting more involved in Social Media, e-marketing and even Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

One of Ragan’s staff writers recently posted an “aticle” (UPDATE: Original article now resides in member’s only area.  Here is a Google cached version) (UPDATE: Now the Google cache is dead too…sorry) on how to land on the first page of Google.   In the story, author Michael Sebastion summarizes for us a presentation made by John Spagnuolo at a recent Ragan conferance (which generally are quite good – you should go to one).

Michael’s summary was well-written and John’s suggestions, aside from implying Web teams are slow and difficult to work with, were accurate.

How many SEO rules can one article break?

The page this article is on breaks many of the rules talked about by John, and a few other  important rules of SEO.

Code bloat

Most SEOs advise that in order for Google to be convinced your page is relevant, you need to use a lot of good content and as little code as possible.  Of the roughly 1,500 lines of source code in this document, only 30 of those are the article.  I’m baffled by the insane amount of JavaScript and embedded CSS.  The site layout mixes Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and static layout from multiple tables, nested within each other.  Even in the days before CSS, nesting tables four deep was a bad idea.

There are no hard and fast rules on code-to-content ratios, but having a page with less than 10% content (like this one) is certainly not a good idea.  The article tells us “content is king” and I agree.  It’s too bad that on this page code is king and content is … well, the king’s 3rd cousin on his mother’s side.

Keywords

Michael and John tell us to start our optimization by finding and using the correct keywords.  I’m sure what they meant was content keywords, but the keywords must also be included in the Meta tags.  Meta tags are less important now than they used to be, but they can not be ignored.  Let’s take a look at this page’s keywords meta tag.

<meta name="keywords" content="Articles, aticle, title, story, ragan select, related stories, related products">

It seems that Ragan wants us to find this SEO article by searching for “aticle” and not something SEO related.  The description tag is even more puzzling – it’s empty.

Alt tags on images

John & Michael remind us to always include alt tags for our images – that’s good advice.  This page has very few images, one of them though is the company logo.  Too bad the only image I could locate an alt tag for is the icon for the RSS feed.

Page titles

The title for this page is not horrible, though I don’t know why they felt the need to tack “Article | Homepage Articles” to the end of it.  This page title is better than the rest of the site though, many of the other pages on Ragan.com use the same title over an over again.

Page URLs

Michael does call out Ragan for it’s reliance on long, dynamic URLs.  Google has said that it can follow simple dynamic URLs with a few parameters.  This page passes eight url parameters and none of them are something a human can understand.  Google may be able to find this page, but I’m not holding my breath.

Credibility

I’ll end my article where Ragan started theirs, with credibility.  John and Michael discussed a few ways your site can lose credibility.  I think they actually showed us a better way.

Post from: Austin, Texas SEO - Jack Leblond

How NOT to get your SEO article on the first page of Google

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