Here are just a few examples:

• Just yesterday Rand criticized horrible information in the Kansas City Star’s Steps to Build Web Traffic, including “You need to have key words or meta tags on every page of the site. Meta tags are the key phrases that search engines look for.”
• Tony at Xeal Inc. says that the META Description “can actually be a detriment for the user.”
• Heck, even I’m on record calling a search marketer “borderline criminal” who claimed in a proposal, among other things, that META tags are key to ranking well.

However, I have now built a steady stream of evidence to the contrary — namely that the META Description can be vital to ranking well.

Hear me out.

What I’ve seen specifically is that Google leans heavily on the Description tag to determine if a page is unique or not. If you have a site where the vast majority of pages all have the same Description, or no Description at all, you might encounter a couple of problems:

1. The pages may not get indexed at all.
2. The pages may get indexed, but only in the Supplemental index.

My evidence for this?

WFG’s, The Company of Women: This site has seven pages. Every page had the exact same Description and Keywords, and every page (except for the homepage) was in the Supplemental index. We changed both METAs, and the pages came out of Supplemental within days.

CreditorWeb.com: Same situation here, but with vastly more pages, and virtually all of them were Supplemental. When we changed the duplicate Descriptions to be unique to each page, however, the pages came right out.

Nursing Homes.com: Similar situation here, but with a twist. We launched thousands of new pages back in September and just like clockwork, Google began to crawl them all and add them to the index. Flash forward a few months, however, and the crawling had stopped almost entirely and nothing but the homepage was indexed. Turns out, only the homepage had a Description. Adding a unique Description for every page has had the unique effect (so far) of restoring to the Supplemental index pages that Google crawled back in September. Although it’s crawling thousands of pages a day, it’s still showing the old pages in Supplemental. Waiting to see if all the pages now have Descriptions maybe?

So if you’re having problems getting into the full index, or if you just want to avoid problems in the future, be sure that all your pages have a unique Description. It can be short, but just make sure it’s applicable and unique.

A big congratulations to Kim, whose blog, Emergiblog, was just named in FOXNews.com’s list of 10 Best Health Blogs.

Emergiblog is the world’s number one nursing blog and has been honored a number of times. Although we help Kim manage it, the honors go 100% to her outstanding writing and wit.

Congratulations, Kim!

Not necessarily.

That’s usually your goal, but there are some instances where you actually don’t mind a low clickthrough rate (CTR). Let’s take Nursing Jobs.org for example.

They have a section of their site dedicated to nursing jobs with signing bonuses, and they have some PPC advertising driving traffic to that page. Currently, they only have a few jobs there, so the percentage of the general nursing population who would be interested in any of them is very small.

So, they could have a PPC ad that looks like this:

Nursing Jobs with Bonuses
Find nursing jobs with signing bonuses
at the web’s #1 site for nursing jobs!

That one will definitely get a good CTR, but the vast majority of the clicks will be from nurses who won’t find anything they’re looking for — money down the drain.

Consider this alternative:

OR and ER RNs Needed
$1,000 Signing Bonuses for RNs in
Hartford, CT. Apply Online Today!

The CTR for that one will really stink, but the ad tells those nurses exactly what to expect when they click through. As a result, you’re going to get very few clicking through who won’t find a job applicable to them — you get way less clicks, but each click is way more valuable because you’ve prequalified them.

Having your visitors filter themselves before they every click on the ad is a great strategy because it not only saves you money, it also allows you to bid much higher per click. Keep that in mind the next time you’re writing your creative.

The program is in restricted beta right now, but they are accepting requests for invitations.

Rand’s SEOmoz blog is hands-down the best search engine marketing blog that I’ve found. No one else comes close. I say that because he constantly details an absolutely unbelievable amount of behind-the-scenes details on how his company does what they do. Many people wouldn’t dream of ever giving away even half of what he does. Is it any wonder that SEOmoz has skyrocketed in popularity like it has? Good karma at work again.

Strategies for loosening their grip abound, but I’ve never seen one better than this one. I instantly wanted to see they said some of my domains were worth, so I didn’t hesitate to enter them. On the next page, though, they prompted me for my name and email address so that they could email the report. That would seem perfectly legitimate to most people, and so I bet their conversion percentage is well over 50%.

And that’s the key: users will give up their contact information if they feel compelled enough. You can do that by offering something of exceptional value, as most people advocate, but this way seems much more effective. Just get creative as to how you can make it a reasonable step in the process.

He’s right. And not only does karma work great for getting better rankings, it also leads to more business. Be wary of any company who promises to increase your rankings or improve your site without telling you exactly what they’re doing. Best case, they’re likely not somebody you want to be working with. Worst case, they’re doing something underhanded that will cause your site to lose its rankings altogether.

Well back in July we switched over to a new hosting service called Mosso (an innovative “hosting system” from the guys at Rackspace), and we would definitely recommend them. As with any new service they have definitely had their bumps in the road, but for us the good definitely outweighs the bad.

The downside is that they only have a single product: $100/month for 80 GB of dsik space and 2,000 GB of bandwidth. If you need that much, or you’re looking to be a reseller, then this a great deal. Otherwise you might have to team up with someone.

The really cool thing for us is that we can run ASPs on a true Linux system. As longtime Windows guys, that has made the switch to a Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP setup very, very easy for us.

1. Faster ad approvals: Ads will go live within minutes instead of the old 3-5 day turnaround. In fact, we’ve already noticed faster ad approvals even without being migrated to the new system. Multiple A/B ad testing will also now be available to determine best performance.
2. Geo-Targeting: Previously advertisers had to use either local search or geo-specific search terms. Under the new system advertisers will be able to do this in one account. The new geo-targeting will allow distribution down to specific cities. They now provide a map of the area which then shows a highlighted radius of coverage based on advertiser’s choices.
3. Ad Groups: Keywords in Ad groups can now use multiple ads where as before a keyword had to be linked to just one ad and advertisers had to wait up to 5 days to change.
4. Keyword Insertion feature: Keywords will be able to be automatically inserted into titles and descriptions improving focus of ads and click through rates, and will also save advertisers time having to write specific ads including each keyword. Though that doesn’t mean you can slack off on writing good ad copy.
5. Quality Index: Similar to the old Google quality index made up of click through rate, keywords related to ad copy, display URL, landing page and other factors.

Can you spot the one that Google didn’t have in 2003?

If you said #2, you’re right. It’s only been out since the beginning of 2005.