Huh?

Let me clarify. Google does not use the keyword meta tag, or meta description to influence their search results of a said website over another. They will, however, in certain situations use the meta description tag for a snippet in a search result. (if it is good we are told)

This was a response in numerous legal cases where it was argued that a defendant was using the plaintiff’s name, trademarked keyword or phrase in their meta tags to rank, or have relevance for them in a search result. Many have tried to cite Google saying that these tags played an effect in the ranking of a website over another. Not true, at least in regards to Google.

Google uses over two hundred signals in their web search rankings, but the keywords meta tag is not currently one of them, and they don’t believe it will be.

In regards to using a competitor’s name or trademarked / copyright in your meta tags? I’d stay far away from that as possible. We have consulted attorney’s over the past few years in regards to infringement cases. They are never cheap and it’s easy to see where the infringement happens online.

If you need help with your website optimization, or consulting involving an online trademark or copyright infringement feel free to contact us.

Why is this important to you? This means that getting on social sites like Facebook and Twitter can increase your online traffic. People now expect to see advertisements on social networking sites. Consumers thrive on connecting and communicating and this is what makes the process such a success.

Businesses are seeing drastic results because of social sites like Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter. According to Neilsen, a site specially created for ranking, the time spent on social networking and blogging sites accounted for 17 percent of all time spent on the Internet in August 2009.

People are always on the internet and that 17 percent of time spent on social networking sites can help your business grow. Just one click can increase traffic to your business site because of a Twit pic or a Facebook status.

In January, people in the age demographic of 25-50 spent about 31/2 hours on Facebook. It’s no wonder why advertisers choose to advertise on the internet.

“In the past, advertisers had significant concerns with social media advertising,” said Vice President, Media and Agency Insights Jon Gibs. “The considerable increases we’ve seen in ad spending over the past year suggest that many of these concerns have subsided or been addressed.”

Since more and more businesses are investing in social media advertising, the concerns about participating with these sites should decrease over time and more companies will want to get involved. If your company is not involved in social media yet, do not hesitate to ask TM how you can start.

I will briefly go through a real-time search checklist of what you need to do in order for searchers to actually find you online. Most of these points may seem pretty obvious; however most people are not implementing these simple tasks to really take advantage of Twitter and other real-time search channels.

1. Keywords
It is critical to use keywords in real-time search. This might seem like a pretty obvious statement, but the same methods you apply to websites to improve their search engine listing should be applied to real-time search. Keywords will help followers find you online and will improve your chances of being crawled faster and sooner. Be careful not to overdue it on the keywords, because it may turn some followers away.

2. Timely Events
It is important for you to share your thoughts or opinions about a popular topic to help increase your chance of listing higher and faster than others. If you are discussing an event from last week, then people are not going to be interested in hearing what you have to say. However, if you can share some new information regarding the topic or develop a different angle to the story, then people will most likely notice you more. It is important to keep up with your current events and trends in order to not fall behind.

3. Followers
To create the greatest impact with real-time search, it is important to have a large number of followers. You not only want a lot of followers, but you want to build quality relationships to increase the chance of  searchers finding you online. If you do not have a lot of followers yet, then you to expand your network further before you invest too much time into real-time search, which leads us to our next point.

4. Promote Conversation
Spark up some conversations. The more conversations you are involved in, the more followers you will obtain which will in turn create a greater opportunity for you to be found by searchers.

5. Calls to Engagement
Tweetmeme and Digg have buttons that you can place on your articles to show the amount of retweets or diggs it has. These buttons help indicate how many people are engaged with your article and may persuade others to do the same. The buttons also provide a type of “call to action” for people to share the conversation with others.

One important fact to remember when experimenting with real-time search is that its’ main purpose is to create visibility. This means you have to create the “buzz” about you or your company in order to get people talking, which is critical, which is critical if you want to benefit from using real-time search.

According to the Yahoo Search Blog, “Our search assistance features are still the most sophisticated query assistance technologies on the web”. But the fact remains that Google has long offered personalized results that outdistance Yahoo.

Everyone is wondering how this will affect the Microsoft-Yahoo deal. According to Yahoo, they will innovate on the front end and on how the information is displayed to users and personalize based on the data Yahoo has. Bing will be responsible for the backend gathering of web pages.

Yahoo’s ultimate goal with all of these changes is to help users get things done quickly on the Web and is an example of how Yahoo will differentiate its search once it starts using Bing results.

There are available services that allow you to share information on both networks, however, this new integration feature is different because it allows users to decide what information to share and what type of update to use . Since most people use both Facebook and Twitter this should make it even easier and quicker to deliver information to their followers. It has not been announced when this feature will be available.

The integration of Facebook and Twitter shows how social media outlets are starting to rely on each other to implement new strategies. It will be interesting to see the development of social media in the future.

Microsoft recently released it’s new search engine, Bing.  Bing is being touted as the new generation of search engine, that they are calling a “decision engine”.  To be honest, I haven’t used Bing a whole lot because I’m generally unimpressed with Microsoft’s products.  I have heard some feedback that it’s hard to find what you’re looking for sometimes, but maybe these are glitches that Microsoft will work out over time.

With the Yahoo and Microsoft deal, it has been announced that Yahoo will begin to use Microsoft’s Bing engine for it’s internet search.  In return, Yahoo is going to be able to keep 88% of all paid advertising revenue for the first five years of the deal (it’s a 10 year deal) and Yahoo will also have the rights to advertise on some of Microsoft’s websites.

So now it appears that we only have two major search engine algorithms to worry about.  Google which has always been in the forefront and Bing which will be running Bing.com and Yahoo Search.

Is this going to hurt your online presence?  If you’re one of our clients, probably not.  If anything it should make our job a little easier and help us rank you a little bit better.  But from what I understand about Bing, this reinforces the need for you to have good relevant content on your website and continue to build up your authority with a good linking strategy.

Yahoo search has been going down hill for years and MSN Search was garbage.  But together, they may have found a winner with Bing.  Will they beat Google?  Probably not.  But they may change the game just enough to get us to pay attention to Microsoft for once.

The main reason companies invest in social media is to gain competitive advantage through relationship building. Companies that take the time to invest in social media have a big advantage over companies that simply try a variety of different social media outlets, but never invest enough time to make it worthwhile.

There are a variety of benefits for using social media such as to 1. build thought leadership, 2. improve customer relations, 3. improve recruiting, 4. lower customer service costs, 5. improve search engine ranking, 6. increase media coverage and 8. influence sales.

For most companies social media is new territory and they tend to become lost with all the information that is out there. This is mostly the case with younger companies or with an uneducated or inexperienced staff. However, if companies make the investment to learn more about this industry, it can be very useful for them. Most early adopters of social media focus on blogging, social networking, microblogging and video in industries such as Retail Consumer Goods/Services, High Tech, Media/Entertainment, Automotive and Financial.

Understanding how combining SEO best practices with social media content creation/promotion can actually extend social reach via search as well as compliment an existing SEO program is where there is opportunity between SEO and social media. It is important to optimize certain social media content with keywords to help build this relationship. Examples of areas to include keywords are title tags, file names, description, anchor text and annotations.

A crucial point to remember when leveraging social media for link building is to create content worthy of linking to in the first place. The catch with generating notable content is that no one will know you have created that content unless you tell them. Not only is promotion critical in determining who will see or take notice of your content, but developing channels to distribute your content is also another important aspect. RSS feeds work as well as building networks on social media sites such as Facebook, StumpleUpon and YouTube.

The companies who actually make the effort and investment to figure out what social media and search engine optimization strategies will benefit them will have a big advantage over companies that wait. You do not want to be the company that misses such a great opportunity and realizes it when it is almost too late.

If you would like more information on this topic or to view this article then please click here.

SEOmoz states that “301 redirects are the best way to redirect webpages, but warn that they do have disadvantages.” Their research suggests that 301 “redirects deplete between 1%-10% of link juice,” but feel that this is acceptable if it is critical to allow one URL lead to another. It is also better than the alternatives (javascript and 302 redirects) which pass very little juice, if any at all.

The Meta Robots tag (noindex, follow) is usually a better option than robots.txt because “robots.txt do stop search engine crawlers from visiting a web page, but they do not keep them from being indexed.” They also create a black hole for link juice. Meta robots tags with noindex and follow parameters keep pages out of the search engine indices and allow link juice to be passed.

It is not recommended to spend any time on search wiki because it has very little impact, if any, on rankings. There has yet to be any evidence of global results. It could be helpful for spammy queries, but it is suggested that it may just be “another data source Google uses to separate it from its competition.”
“Link neighborhoods are a real thing, but the affect of links from bad neighborhoods on good neighborhoods is minimal if the links are not reciprocal.” Legitimate sites frequently receive spammy links, but this should not have a negative influence on your site, unless the bad links make up a “large percentage of the inbound links.”

The importance of traffic on rankings is another area that is analyzed. It is stated that “the metric visitors to a given site are not used to help determine ranking. While traffic and rankings correlate neither cause the other.” The more popular sites receives more links and the more links you have, will result in a higher ranking. It is also believed that the metric of “unique visitors” should not be counted on “nearly as much as raw visitors for comparing the traffic sent to a site from various sources or comparing the traffic growth from month to month.”

This concludes information on SEO Best Practices. If you would like to learn more about these practices, or read more detailed descriptions, please check out SEOmoz.

SEO Best Practices Part 1

SEO Best Practices Part 2

SEOmoz recommends including alt text for all images on all publicly accessible pages. It is also suggests adding images with good alt text to pages targeting competitive rankings. There are 2 reasons for this. One reason is that everyone (even people with limitations) should be able to use the internet. The second reason is that alt tags have proven to have a larger impact on rankings, than once thought. While, there is not specific information supporting this as an exact cause, it is recommended to use good alt text for pages ranking for competitive searches.

The use of the Meta Keywords tag can be useful in page rank. Previously SEOmoz did not recommend using Meta Keywords tags because they were abused in the beginning of the internet and just a way “for competitors to automate the process of competitive analysis.” After conducting some tests it seems that Meta Tags play a minor role in Yahoo! page ranking. It is believed that Google & Bing ignore this tag, and that it does not play a significant role. For now it has not shown to have a large enough impact on page ranking, so it is not an area that anyone should be too concerned about.

Another SEO Best Practice suggestion is to only use Parameter Driven URLs (www.example.com/product?param=1&param=2) if they are necessary for your site. It is recommended only to use 2 parameters. The search engines have stated how it is much more difficult to crawl parameter driven URLs and how this frequently leads to duplicate content issues. There is correlation data to back this up. The data also shows that pages with static URLS tend to rank higher.

It is also recommended to use footer links sparingly. No more than 25 relevant internal navigational links. There have been examples of Google penalties linked to abusive footer links, which are easily detected and have automated penalties.

It is not recommended to use Javascript or Flash for any navigation important to search engines. It is much more beneficial to use HTML code than to use Javascript or Flash, because they are more difficult for crawlers to read and could lead to a lower page ranking.

This concludes the part 2 of SEO Best Practices. Stay tuned for the 3rd part later this week!

SEO Best Practices Part 1

SEO Best Practices Part 3

The Title Tag format is a very critical area for search engines. If you want to beat out your competition it is essential for you to put your most important keyword(s) in the beginning of the tag. This is important because it is the first thing the search engine will read. If you are competing for a less competitive term, it may be more beneficial for you to put your brand name first.

Research has shown that H1 tags are not as critical in determining your rank status as most internet savvy experts once thought. It is still a good idea to include it in your HTML to help determine the most important information, etc, but it has not been proven to have a significant impact on SEO.

It is recommended to use the rel=nofollow tag to block out spammers and create an incentive for active users. SEOmoz does not recommend using nofollow for PageRank sculpting anymore since the announcement from Matt Cutts. The nofollow tag is still useful in preventing spam, which was the original intent, but no longer useful in determining information architecture.

The Canonical Tag is a fairly new tag, and has not proven to have a dramatic effect on duplicate content thus far. When anything new like the Canonical Tag is introduced it takes some time to measure the actual effects. SEOmoz suggests that the search engines are probably still working out the problems. The Canocial Tag is meant to deplete juice like 301 redirects, but it is still too early to know how important it is for SEO.

This concludes the first part of SEO Best Practices.

SEO Best Practices Part 2

SEO Best Practices Part 3