Ethical search engine optimization is when you present relevant and high quality information for your visitors in a way that is easily accessible and understood by the Search Engines but meets strict search engine guidelines.

How Do I Know If What I Am Doing Is Unethical?

If you find you need to question how ethical your search engine optimization methods are then perhaps there is a reason you should take a closer look.

If you are purposely trying to deceive or trick the search engines in order to gain a top search engine listing then most likely what you are doing is unethical.

Using any effort to deceive the search engines means you are walking on thin ice. Most industry experts will give the same advice: don’t risk your rankings with unethical SEO. Most also agree that any results obtained from unethical search engine optimization are usually very short-lived.

If your rankings have dropped or your website has been completely removed from the Search Engines’ databases then it could be that you have committed what the search engines’ deem to be an ‘unethical’ offence.

In the last few years in particular, the Search Engines are becoming much more sophisticated and are able to identify spammers and websites that intentionally try to be deceptive.

It’s not worth it and if you are using deceptive SEO practices it is just a matter of time before your site becomes penalized.

What Are Some Examples Of “Unethical SEO”?

Even the best at black hat SEO admit that it is becoming harder and harder to outsmart the Search Engines using deceptive practices. Search engine algorithms have become quite intuitive and can catch most of the commonly used deceptive and unethical practices include:

• Creating one set of content for your visitors and another set of content for the Search Engines
• Sending visitors to a set of content for a specific URL other than the content that is indexed by the Search Engines for that page
• Placing multiple pages with identical or near identical content as a way to manipulate the Search Engines
• Automatically generating new pages that have little or no value
• Deceptive link farming with unrelated topics for the purpose of boosting rankings

What is Ethical Search Engine Optimization?

At 1^st on the List we follow the Bruce Clay SEO Code of Ethics and practice “safe SEO” that takes a long term approach to obtaining sustainable ranking performance results. The key components of this SEO Code of Ethics include:

• Being truthful and never misleading or offending a consumer
• Obeying all copyright, trademark and other laws
• Authoring 100% unique content that represents your own work
• Being honest and upfront about your abilities, training, standards of performance and experience
• Providing fair service to all clients while avoiding conflict of interests without prior notice
• Creating reasonable customer expectations
• Protecting client confidentiality and anonymity

By following these ethical search engine optimization guidelines we work to the best of our ability to increase and retain the rankings of our clients’ websites.

To learn more about our ethical SEO practices visit our Code of Ethics & Conduct page or:

Call Toll Free: 1-888-262-6687

Email: SEO Consultants

Complete our Form:     SEO Request for Proposal

Does your website have 100% original content that is relevant and useful for your visitors?

Is any of your website content duplicate content? If so, do you know how to find duplicate content, fix the problem and avoid duplicate content issues in the future?

Google is becoming ever more stringent towards indexing and ranking sites with duplicate content on the same domain or across domains; it doesn’t matter, chances are Google is already penalizing your rankings if you have duplicate content on your website.

Why Is Duplicate Content Bad and Exactly What Is It?

Google defines duplicate content as:

“Any sizable amount of essential website content
that matches exactly or is noticeably similar to content found
within the same domain or on web pages from other sites”.

Google does recognize that a lot of times, in some websites, duplicate content may have resulted from unintentional and “non-malicious” efforts.

Duplicate content is not plagiarism, for instance, when you make an honest attempt to make your website more user friendly by adding “printer friendly” versions of your web pages or having items in your online store with the same product description because they are available in different sizes or colors.

In this instance, Google does not penalize for duplicate content but simply filters and indexes only one of these pages to show in their search results.

However, Google algorithms are also smart enough to recognize that some website owners tend to make slight changes to their content and repost it on a different web page in order to manipulate SE rankings and get more traffic.

Google warns that you risk a duplicate content penalty if they feel you are manipulating the content in a malicious way. They will not only penalize and adjust the rankings for the page with duplicate content but also your website’s entire rankings.

Refer to Google’s Duplicate Content Webmaster Tools page to read their full stance and get tips for how to avoid duplicate content issues in the future.

Here are some of the more common duplicate content problems we have come across when working on our clients’ websites.

Duplicate Content on Multilingual Websites

It is common for websites marketing to multiple customer groups to have a multilingual website with content in more than just one language. For example, as a US based business you may have content in both English and Spanish or as a global company you may have content in English, German, Japanese and Portuguese.

Google Webmaster Tools provides several insights to optimizing your multilingual website and how to avoid duplicate content:

• Make the page language very obvious – stick with one language on each page and avoid side-by-side translation designs.
• Block automatic translation pages from being crawled – use robots.txt to keep automated translations from being indexed by the Search Engines. Automatic translators are not perfect, and while useful for your users, the text often reads like spam for the Search Engines.
• Make each language easy to find – keep each translation of content on separate URLs and cross-link the language versions of each page so they are within a single click for your visitors.
• Design URLs to describe the page content – despite the Search Engines relying on the content of the page to determine the language you should still provide clues in the URL for your users.

Duplicate Content on Multi-Regional Websites or Regional Pages

National and Global companies may want to target the content on their website based on the location of their customers. For example the content displayed for Canadian visitors may be different than the content displayed for German visitors.

Google prefers to know which country or region you are targeting because this knowledge helps to improve its search results for users in different parts of the world.

Duplicate content can be further complicated by a website being both multilingual and multi-regional. Google highly suggests that websites like this carefully test the original site and its infrastructure to make sure it can handle these tasks.

For more support in optimizing your website for multiple regions visit Google Webmaster Tool’s Multi-Regional and Multilingual Sites help page.

Preferred URL for Multi Domain Ownership

Canonicalization is the technical term for specifying to the Search Engines the preferred URL when your site has more than one page with mostly identical content.

Some deceptive website owners will do this on purpose to manipulate the Search Engines but it can also occur accidentally, such as having a printer friendly version of your pages.

Most of the time Google will simply choose which page to index but if it feels that the duplicate content is malicious they will “make appropriate adjustments in the indexing and ranking” of your website.

Google Webmaster Tools provides several tips to Avoid Duplicate Content issues on your own site:

• Use 301 Redirects which are similar to registering a change of address at your post office. This will permanently redirect visitors to your preferred URL.
• Keep a consistent approach to URL naming
• Use Webmaster Tools to specify your preferred URL
• If other websites display your content, have them include a link back to your site to indicate you are the owner of the original content. Better yet, ask other site owners to use the “no index meta tag” so their version is not competing with yours.

How to Avoid Duplicate Content with Manufacturer Product Descriptions

One tempting way to quickly create product descriptions on an e-commerce site is to pull the content straight from the manufacturers’ descriptions. If you do this chances are most of your competitors are taking the same content and placing it on their site as well.

Now you not only have to deal with duplicate content between your own website pages but also between your website and your competitors’ websites.

Google will only ever credit one source for the unique content (whichever site they deem to be the original author). This means that even though the duplicate content you provide may be useful for visitors who are already on your site, it has little other value, especially to the search engines.

Though tedious, writing your own product descriptions is much more effective and beneficial. If you have 1000’s of products, pick your most profitable lines and start there. If your product descriptions come from a database there are methods to help the database auto generate unique descriptions.

For tips on a new strategy for developing unique product pages check out our Writing Powerful Product Descriptions That Sell article.

For additional advice on how to avoid duplicate content issues specific to your website, please contact one of our Search Engine Optimization consultants:

Call Toll Free: 1-888-262-6687

Email: SEO Consultants

Complete our Form: SEO Request for Proposal

You sit down for a nice family dinner and the phone rings. How many times has this happened to you?

When you answer (if you answer) a telemarketer starts trying to upgrade your cable, sell you a vacation package or run a survey about your household. In fact, most of the time this outbound marketing phone call is unrelated to anything currently going on in your life. Maybe you hang up or politely say you are not interested; either way you are always eager to get off the phone and on with your meal.

Why Outbound Marketing Doesn’t Work

From a consumer’s point of view, “outbound marketing” is any advertising activity that interrupts your normal activities. A lot of the time outbound marketing speaks at you rather than with you; engaging in a conversation is nearly impossible.

The unsolicited interruption common to “outbound marketing” is ineffective because the consumer has not identified that they even need or want the product or service. At some point outbound marketers need to admit it: consumers who are actively seeking specific products or services will be much more receptive to hearing what one has to say than those that are not actively seeking.

Consumers are living in the era of “information overload” where they are presented with over 2,000 outbound marketing messages each day (on average). Eventually, they begin to tune you out – meaning that one’s entire hard spent marketing budget can quickly be wasted on ineffective outbound marketing.

The Big Shift from Outbound to Inbound Marketing

From newspapers, magazines and posters to modern technology including the phone, television and email (think spam mail) outbound marketing slowly evolved up until the mid-1990′s when marketing took a drastic change in direction.

In 1995 Yahoo! and Alta Vista launched the very first Search Engines which allowed consumers to find the information about products and services they actually wanted and needed. In just two years, the number of people using the Internet to search for what they wanted and needed nearly quadrupled from 16 million to 70 million people!

There probably wasn’t a light bulb moment where a single marketer realized, “Why not promote our business to an online consumer searching for our type of products or services?” Surely there had to be a way to promote a website when a consumer expressed a need for a specific product or service. By 1997, the first generation of Search Engine Optimizers starting offering their services and the Search Engine Optimization industry was born.

Over the ensuing years inbound marketing companies have evolved to include a number of marketing activities such as:

• Search Engine Optimization (our specialty)
• Social Networking
• Email Marketing (using pre-qualified email lists)
• Online Videos
• And Blogging

The focus of Inbound Marketing firms is on engaging interested customers, building customer retention, offering responsive customer service and generating leads

Benefits of an Inbound Marketing Strategy & SEO

Because inbound marketing services is more about getting found by consumers already shopping in your industry there are several benefits to this approach:

Long Term Strategy

Inbound marketing strategies offer a much more sustainable long term solution. Whereas with outbound marketing you have to keep paying for ads to run in magazines or hire people to cold call, with inbound marketing, the focus is on naturally drawing searching customers to your company. With proper execution, inbound marketing lead generation naturally attracts new customers without you having to actively search for them.

Right Timing

The inbound marketing process focuses on getting your customers attention when they are actually thinking of you, when the need or desire for your products and services are strongest giving you a great opportunity to fill that need.

Budget Wise

Inbound marketing leads are much more cost effective to attain. In fact, Hubspot reports that inbound marketing tactics costs companies 62% less than outbound marketing with a cost-per-lead that is 60% lower.

For instance, after running expensive door flier campaigns in his city, one of our customers decided to invest in our Search Engine Optimization services. His door fliers had an extremely poor response rate with a cost per lead of $684. The cost per lead through his website, which is inbound marketing online is now a respectable $22. Because inbound marketing leads are more qualified they also have a higher conversion rate (3.3% compared to 0.03%).

Consumer Response

There is a high level of control and monitoring with inbound marketing online. Thanks to Google Analytics and other data tracking services, marketers can collect deep insights into how their customers interact with their website. Conversion optimization (making improvements to generate better customer responses) is one direct activity made possible through inbound marketing for ecommerce.

Customer Connection

Rather than printing the same magazine advertisement for thousands of readers, inbound marketing online is highly customizable – it is possible to serve a modified web page specific to a particular visitor based on a number of factors. This allows marketers to connect with a user on a much more personal level.

In an era where consumers use the Internet prior to making many of their buying decisions, connecting with customers online gives marketers the opportunity to provide the most relevant information the consumer is searching for. By having all the information easily accessible on your website you are automatically catering to all the information they are seeking.

Whether you are a local or national company, a strategic inbound marketing online strategy that includes search engine optimization can greatly improve your lead generation and conversions, making each dollar spent more efficient and effective.

For more information about inbound marketing for ecommerce and other online marketing strategies or to enhance your existing inbound marketing strategy with search engine optimization, please:

Imagine that you are at home on a Friday night and trying to decide where to go for dinner. At one time you might have dusted off your phone book and flipped through the menu section … but if you are like most consumers today, you will go online (using a computer or your smartphone) and search for something like “restaurants+[your city]” or if you are having a particular craving “Mexican+restaurants+[your city]”. That was easy – now you have a whole list of restaurants to choose from!

All potential restaurants (whether they appear in the listings or not) fall into one of three categories as perceived by the consumer. Unfortunately perception (accurate or not) is reality and can directly affect any business.

The three categories of perception when someone searches for something online include:

1. Unknown Perception  – Who Are They? I’ve Never Heard of Them

These are the local restaurants in your area; potential gems that may not show up in the top search engine listings. These restaurants are not even on your radar to consider.  That great little Italian place three blocks away? It gets blocked out by all the other restaurants with top search engine rankings.

2. Negative Perception  – Don’t Eat Here!

These restaurants sometimes do show up in the top search results but when you go to their website there are some major flaws that immediately turn you off from eating there.  Maybe the website is out-dated (will their dining room be straight from the 90′s too?); their menu doesn’t load properly (what if I don’t like their selection or their prices are unreasonable?); or their phone number isn’t easily accessible (how will you make a reservation?). Any negative aspect of a website could turn a qualified customer away.

3. Positive Perception  – Now What Will I Order?

These are the restaurants that show up in the top search engine rankings for most of your searches AND have a great website to back their top listing. You will likely view it as a very viable option for the night’s meal. If Google puts it first, it must be one of the best restaurants in town…at least that’s the perception.

Are you beginning to see a trend here?

I know that this is a hypothetical situation (maybe it’s not so hypothetical – I admit to doing the Friday night restaurant search from time to time) and that it may seem trivial since it’s just a meal for one night.

But what if you are a large contracting company, a business consultant, a heavy duty equipment manufacturer or a global retailer? What happens when you are consistently not found first on the search engine results page?

Consumers increasingly rely on Google as a signal as to who the “best in the industry” really is. Consumers can be very skeptical of companies who do not rank for some of their most popular products – or worse yet – their own name!

The key point I want to make is this: the perception of a first page listing in Google is crucial to making a great first impression and winning new business – whether you are a restaurant selling $7.99 buffet dinners or a software developer selling million dollar services.

What do you think? How do you perceive companies who “miss the mark” and don’t rank well in the search engines for their products? How have Google listings influenced your decision making process as a consumer?

The analogy in the article is worded:

SEO is like a car. You can’t just ask “how much does SEO cost?”

Let’s expand on the analogy here.

You would never walk up to a car salesman and simply ask, “How much does a car cost?”

We all know that there are many factors that determine the final cost of the vehicle such as size, brand, speed, power, gas mileage, make and model, performance reviews and so on. Furthermore, there are other ‘hidden’ or future costs of cars such as annual insurance, maintenance, replacement parts and resale value.

The price you are willing to pay likely depends on some combination of these factors – perhaps you want a European model made in the early 2000’s that goes from 0 to 60 in less than 5 seconds. Or perhaps you are looking for a vehicle that simply gets you from point A to point B.

Search engine optimization is much the same:

• Some SEO companies or SEO services will simply get your website from point A to point B.
• Some SEO services focus on short term performance rather than long term value.

The price you pay and what you get are highly correlated. We encourage you to understand exactly what you are getting from any SEO service for the price that you pay. Make sure you compare apples to apples and not apples to oranges when you gather SEO quotes and decide on your provider.

For a free initial Search Engine Optimization consultation that involves the discussion of our SEO Process:

You have probably come across countless SEO companies offering three or four SEO bundles much like a cell phone company offers. These companies assume that you will find what you need within one of their packages or more likely, force you to settle for the package that best suits your needs.

We believe that these companies have been somewhat successful in attracting new customers because there is a general misunderstanding as to what exactly SEO is, as if it’s a mysterious black box.

By making it a tangible product – packaging it into a ‘Local Business SEO Package’ with a set list of features – customers are more open to making the purchase.

However we would like to challenge you to think of SEO for what it is – a service. Like any other service you should expect to see a very broad range of service offerings.

For example, you would never expect to receive the same level of service at the drive-thru window of a fast food restaurant as you would from a five star restaurant. At a drive-thru window you would pick either a hamburger or cheeseburger from the menu whereas at a five star restaurant a waiter would describe each of the evening specials and offer additional items that may compliment your meal.

Challenge to Go Above and Beyond

Our culture has instilled the desire to “think outside the box,” to be creative, and to go above and beyond what everyone else is doing. There is no doubt that you try to do this in your business every day.

Often the low-cost SEO packages you see online apply the same approach to each client. They work their way through a checklist of tasks and performance metrics that may or may not necessarily apply to your unique site.

Our ability to go above and beyond other SEO companies involves taking a step back and evaluating the website, your business, your industry and your target market and then creating a unique approach to help achieve the client’s specific online goals. The majority of the time this translates into your marketing campaign going above and beyond all of your competitors.

We offer custom SEO solutions because we believe that:

• Every website is different
• Every target market is different
• Every business is different
• Every industry is different

The Added Benefits of a Customized SEO Strategy

What will a custom SEO solution get you that a ‘boxed’ solution will not?

• Support from experienced SEO staff
• Interaction – our SEO Consultants are available to explain their work and explore various strategies
• Get you the RIGHT kind of traffic – for your top performing products, categories and target markets
• Optimization – gradually improving performance, traffic and conversions as we learn from what works and what doesn’t work
• Ability to respond to data and make necessary changes – with a fast response time
• Long-term solutions – shifting the focus from immediate rankings to  substantial growth month after month

Custom SEO on a Budget

Often customers seeking SEO shy away from a custom SEO solution because they have a small budget. However our creative out-of-the-box consultants are able to generate unique ways to maximize your budget and get the most bang for your buck.

If you are interested in a custom SEO solution that adheres to ‘thinking outside the box’, contact us for a no obligation initial consultation by calling Toll Free 1-888-262-6687 or by Emailing Our SEO Team.

Messages such as “Page Not Found” or “Requested URL not Found” can be extremely frustrating in your quest for a particular piece of information.

Rather than frustrate your own website visitors you can design a custom 404 Error Page that is useful in getting them back on the right path.

What is a 404 Error?

A 404 error is presented to visitors when the page they are trying to reach is non-existent on your website. This could be because they clicked on a broken hyperlink or the web page no longer exists or that they mistyped the URL.

These ‘404 Pages’ get their names because webservers send an HTTP status code of 404 when a user requests to see a page that is missing. Most webservers have standard 404 page errors to return when a missing page is requested. Unfortunately, these standard 404 pages provide little information to the user other than that the page they want is not there.

As a result, most users just click away and leave your site in search of another site that does offer the information they are looking for. Rather than just let your visitors leave you can turn your 404 page into a helpful page that directs your traffic and helps them find what they are looking for on your site.

How to Design a Custom 404 Page

Here are seven tips for designing a useful custom 404 error page:

1. Tell visitors clearly that the page they are looking for can’t be found.
2. Use language that is friendly, inviting and in line with the tone of the rest of your web page content and consistent with your branding image.
3. Make sure the 404 page has the same look and feel – including all main navigation – as the rest of your website. This makes the visitor feel as if they are still on your website and makes them more likely to stick around.
4. Add helpful links to your most popular pages, articles or posts as well as a link back to your home page to guide the visitor where to go next and to reduce the likelihood of the leaving.
5. Insert an Enhanced 404 widget to embed a search box on the page to allow visitors to search for the information they need in case they do not see what they are looking for in your list of helpful links and navigation.
6. Provide visitors with a way of reporting a broken link to help keep your 404 pages to a minimum. This also empowers the user to give feedback and to feel as if their problem of not being able to access a page is being addressed.
7. Exclude your 404 page from Google search results regardless of how nice it looks.

Dealing with 404 Pages in the Search Engines

As mentioned, you will want to keep your 404 pages from being indexed by Google and all other search engines. To do this, set your webserver to return an actual 404 HTTP status code when a visitor tries to reach a missing or broken page.

There are free programs such as WebBug.exe that are useful for showing you your HTTP referrers.

404 Pages for SEO

We recommend to all of our search engine optimization clients that they install a customized 404 page for the benefit of their user. Once this is complete we also recommend performing a HTTP/1.1 referrer check to ensure it has the proper HTTP status code of 404.

For help installing a 404 Error Page that will reduce the chances of your users not visiting your website pages at all, please contact 1st on the List Promotion:

Studies show people scan the pages using an “F” pattern or “F Behavior”:

Visitors will not read your web page word-for-word (especially in their initial stages of research). This means that you need to write your page so it is easy to scan . Use headings to signal what the text is about. Subheadings, lists and bullets are a great way to break up the text and make it even easier to scan, as long as it is done within reason and not overdone.

Place important words at the start of subheadings, paragraphs or bullet points so that they form the stem of the “F” down the left side of the page; these words will be easy for the reader to spot and find what they are looking for in the text.

If you want your pages to rank well you will also have to design the pages to cater to the Search Engines as well. Be sure to include a Page Header (“H1” tag) as well as sub headings (H2, H3, etc.). These show the Search Engines the importance of information as it is presented.

Finding a balance between pleasing the Search Engines and your reader can be quite tricky and often takes time to develop but is well worth the effort.

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For more information about Search Engine Optimization or any of our other services at 1st on the List Promotion, please:

Call us toll free 1-888-262-6687

Email our SEO Consultants

Complete our Form SEO Request for Proposal

So how do we measure up to his seven habits?

Practice Makes Perfect -
We Practice SEO

Patel admits that it isn’t hard to become an SEO expert – read some books, forums and white papers and you’re set to go. However he says that being able to speak the lingo and point out short fallings on websites doesn’t mean you are good at SEO.

We have been practicing SEO for over 14 years. We have worked on hundreds of clients sites and are constantly improving our own website and sister sites.

As Patel admits, only practice and experience gives you a “better understanding of how you need to adjust your approach to rank higher.”

You Never Know Until You Try -
We Take Calculated Risks

Patel says that in order to be effective you must take risks and be aggressive with your website. We agree with this habit to a certain extent but would like to add that these risks should be logical, calculated and not extreme.

Effective risk taking is not buying hundreds of links and hoping you won’t be penalized. Taking risks is being aggressive with your websites and applying what you learn to push onward to the next level.

The Customer is Number One -
We Build Relationships

Patel refers to building relationships in the context of networking with other SEOs and people within the industry.

This is an important aspect of SEO and we work hard at networking but we feel that building relationships with our clients is much more important.

There are far too many SEO companies that get hired that don’t really care about their clients or take the time to truly get to know their clients. We view our relationships with our clients as strategic relationships. Only by working very closely with the client can we achieve great SEO success.

Think Outside the Box -
We Are Creative

Often SEO companies offer cookie cutter solutions with only three SEO packages to choose from. We are creative from the very beginning in designing custom tailored packages designed to meet the specific goals of the individual client.

Sometimes this involves getting creative. Hard questions get asked, such as:

“Will this package really help the client meet their goals?”

“How can we stretch their online budget to meet their goals?”

“What are the most effective SEO activities that will maximize the efficiency of their budget?”

A recent example of this is a client who sells jewelry online. Her main products and business description is ‘custom jewelry’ but her small budget couldn’t afford chasing after this highly competitive market. Instead of attempting to do so we designed a strategy to target another product line – one that had a lot of searches with relatively low competition and provided a much better and much more effective way to allocate her tight budget. The long term plan is to increase revenues in this product line and apply future returns towards pursuing the more competitive and expensive ‘custom jewelry’ market.

Think It Through -
We Are Analytical

An analytical mind is required throughout the entire SEO process. From choosing effective keywords that will attract prospective buyers, to conversion analysis all the way to site and server set up, our SEO is focused on Patel’s one main point: increasing revenue.

A recent example of applying analytical thinking was a new client who had performed SEO in house for a number of years. Upon decision to outsource this area they wanted to continue using their list of existing targeted phrases. Upon looking at the list and doing some research it was decided that some of the phrases were too generic and the company didn’t really offer the service that was implied by the phrase. With some tweaks to the list the client is now optimizing their site with more targeted phrases that will bring better qualified visitor traffic.

Don’t Put All Your Eggs in One Basket -
We Use Multiple Tactics

I think what Patel is trying to say is that good SEO’s don’t depend on just one successful activity. He says that SEO is a “constant game of cat and mouse” where you never know what the single most effective tactic is or what the most effective tactic will be tomorrow, next week or five months down the road.

The Search Engines use over 200 factors to determine how well a website will rank and often make more changes to their algorithms in one year than there are days in a year.

We focus on covering as many of the 200 factors Search Engines consider as well as the future changes that the industry predicts to see. Rather than only building links or only writing content our team is able to address a significantly higher number of ranking factors by applying a wide range of SEO activities. With this approach it is far more likely to maintain more stable rankings in the long term.

Always Have a Backup Plan -
We Rely on SEO Supporting Activities

Patel believes that SEO needs to be supported by pay-per-click ads, email marketing and other forms of online promotion that will help diversify channels. We offer many of our clients’ complimentary activities to help support their SEO efforts.

The best example of this is using PPC to help gain traffic website during the early stages of SEO and for brand new websites.

If you are interested in becoming one of our SEO clients please visit our Search Engine Optimization page or contact 1st on the List Promotion:

The original purpose of a keyword tag was to help Search Engines understand the content of the page by listing the most important words within the text. Over time people began to take advantage of boosting their listings by placing popular keyword phrases within the keyword tag even if the corresponding page did not support these words. Today the major Search Engines are much smarter and able to read the content on their own in order to determine the main keyword phrases relevant to the text.

For this reason most people believe that the user submitted Meta Keyword Tags have very little value as they have little influence on major Search Engines rankings.

However, some smaller search engines still take the meta keyword tag into account when determining their rankings so it can be beneficial to still include the Keyword Tags.

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For more information about Search Engine Optimization or any of our other services at 1st on the List Promotion, please:

Call us toll free 1-888-262-6687

Email our SEO Consultants

Complete our Form SEO Request for Proposal