Years ago webmasters of questionable sites learned about keyword stuffing and meta tag manipulation. If you were online back then, you could type just about anything into a search engine and innocently click on results that ended up taking you to sites that were offensive and had nothing to do with your search query. That was the result of SEO dirty tricks!
Perhaps understanding that, you can now relate to why some search engines ignore meta tags and penalize sites that employ keyword stuffing.
After all, if your targeted visitor is a person searching for information about a particular subject, you want to provide them with relevant results... right? Absolutely!
Meta tags, like keyword density, are easily abused and misused.
However, you should not ignore them on your web pages. Meta tags are supposed to describe what the page is about and you should use them to briefly describe each page. Some search engines will still use your meta description in search results. And keep in mind that any heavy optimization of these tags may trip the spam filters in search engines. Use them, but lightly, and don't depend on them. They have limited use.
Write a short description of your website in the meta description tag, and put your most important keywords in the meta keywords tag. Assign each of your pages with an appropriate title, preferrably using the most important keyword(s), but absolutely within reason.
Keep your SEO clean and relevant. Keep your content fresh and interesting. Then do everything legitimate that you can to promote your site, and you will experience the success you crave.
MyInternetBusinessStrategy.com
Search engines don't pay much attention to keyword density anymore. You should focus on writing content that people will want to read and/or link to from their site.
Those that concentrate on keyword density write page content specifically to increase it, rather than for the visitors that try to read the content. Keyword density has been abused since before Google came out with their PageRank algorithm in 1998. Keeping that in mind, search engines do not pay much attention to pure keyword density. What they do pay attention to is
relevant on-page factors such as page structure, navigation, title tags and advanced topics such as term weight and c-indices.
As important as the above mentioned strategies, all pale in comparison to the off-page factors such as your linking strategy, especially in Google. Yahoo seems to give more weight than Google to on-page factors, but even then keyword density is not very high on their list.
Seth Godin says that's the number one question of most of the people he meets.
He points out that the problem is in the "get."
He recommends that you ask, "how can I
earn more traffic?" or "How can I rethink the core of what I'm offering so that it
organically attracts people who want to see it?"
Seth compares earning traffic to dating. I have heard this analogy from many Internet gurus but generally the others were talking about traffic conversion... as in turning visitors into buyers. One of my mentors often talked about this strategy. Like Seth, Alex said that the process of dating or "courting" your visitors is getting a series of "small yeses". Permission marketing is the key... and Seth is King of this strategy!
Seth is the original "Turning visitors into friends and friends into customers" strategist.
These are all excellent ideas. The question is, are you willing to listen and implement them to earn more traffic?
Happy Valentines Day!
Remember... dark chocolate is the one that's good for you... within reason, that is.
Hope you get some and Enjoy!
Nielsen//NetRating's latest data indicates that the number of searches continues to grow at a more than healthy pace, totaling about 5.1 billion in December 2005, an increase of 55% from the almost 3.3 billion searches made in December 2004. Meanwhile, the number of Internet users rose just 3%, clearly showing that searching is becoming an ever more significant online activity.
Google remained the top search engine, and even increased its dominance, accounting for nearly 49% of all searches. Most of this gain came at the expense of MSN, which saw its search share decline from 14% to under 11%. Yahoo! essentially held steady. The three top sites handled over 81% of all searches.
Google's growth was strong enough that its competitors' market share declined.
Are we about to have a major "SearchQuake"? Stand by for the BigDaddy SearchQuake sometime this month or next.
It's a measure of where you might expect to be when Google moves to that new algorithm for all data centers in February or March.
This upcoming change in algorithm and the interestingly named server "Big Daddy" were publicly posted on Matt Cutts blog for beta testing by SEO's (and other Google Watchers) who read him regularly. (For those who don't know, Cutts is a software engineer at Google & shares SEO tips on his blog)
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/
PageRank is a combination of link popularity (number of inbound links) and link weight (the linking power carried by a particular page) and several other factors.
However, your search engine rankings are not determined exclusively by PageRank. Hundreds of other factors, including relevancy of links, anchor text and other off-page and on-page factors also help to determine that.
PageRank is one of the current measures used by Search Engines, but its value seems to be declining, according to Google.
The SeaMonkey Council is proud to announce SeaMonkey 1.0, the first end-user release of their internet suite. This open source application, available as a
free download from its mozilla.org-hosted website, features a state-of-the-art web browser and powerful email client, as well as a WYSIWYG web page composer and a feature-rich IRC chat client. For web developers, mozilla.org's DOM inspector and JavaScript debugger tools are included as well. SeaMonkey 1.0 is one of the most complete, powerful, and secure internet software packages available today.
For those of you interested in an integrated WYSIWYG web page composer that is free, you may want to check it out.
Otherwise, I do suggest that we all keep up with technology!
“Don’t Eat the Marshmallow Yet!” by Joachim de Posada
The premise of the Marshmallow book is based on a landmark Stanford University study of children who were left alone in a room with a single marshmallow on a plate. They were told that if they didn’t eat the first marshmallow they would be given another one in fifteen minutes.
The study traced these kids for ten years after the initial period and it found that kids who were able to resist eating the initial marshmallow were significantly more successful than the group who ate the marshmallow.
Delayed gratification seems to play a significant part in success.
Stay focused and don't give up! Your
Internet Success could be right around the corner!
Both AOL and Yahoo have announced they'll be charging email senders $2.5-$10 per thousand emails sent to guarantee delivery.
Last week's announcement by AOL may bite into everyone's budgets. The proposed charges would roughly double most mailers' send costs. (You'll hear about fractions of a cent per name; but, when you do the math, it adds up fast.)
As late as last Wednesday all sources said Yahoo would never join the pay-me-to-deliver-email Goodmail program, and that AOL whitelisting would be "phased out." Now both these positions appear to be reversed.
Companies such as AOL and Yahoo that process email for their customers can stand to make A LOT of money by charging senders. Yes, we're all in business to make money!
If this trend sticks, other email clients, from MSN's Hotmail to Gmail, as well as corporate email servers, will start charging too.
So... isn't it time you started looking more towards RSS?
Guess what?
Microsoft has released IE7 Beta 2 Preview for download by developers.
If you have anything to do with the design and layout of a web site, you need to download this and get started on correcting any obvious compatibility issues.
Hopefully you are aware that web sites can and often do look totally different in different browsers and of course, different resolutions (screen "sizes").
If you're not aware of this... go download
Firefox and check out your websites.
You may or may not want to download a beta (IE7) but if you're brave, you'll have a jump on most other webmasters!
Deb
