Dmoz Meta Description Tag
August 18, 2008 | SEO
We looked at the meta description tag as a powerful tool to getting the right description of your site in Google’s listing. We also looked at the keyword tag and in the previous post looked at other meta tags. As mentioned in the post there is an often overlooked power in the hands of any SEO.
However getting just the description you want can be difficult at times. Google generates a description via three sources:
- The meta description tag
- The content on your site.
- Your listing in the Open Directory.
In the third case this can cause problems. Often our clients have a listing in the open directory (dmoz.org), often a listing was created before Google started using it this way and it can often be totally inappropriate for describing a site effectively. It’s a popular method for Google to use, as the description was edited by a Human, Something very rare in the world of SEO.
You can stop Google from doing this by adding this meta tag:
<meta name=”robots” content=”noodp”>
Yahoo will also use its own directory, to stop Yahoo from using this to describe your listing you use this meta tag:
<meta name=”robots” content=”noydir”>
Both will stop all engines from displaying the appropriate listing if you want to target a particular engine change “robots” to the relevant engine eg. <meta name=”msnbot” content=”noodp”>
HTML Meta Tags
August 15, 2008 | SEO
We looked previously at the keywords meta tag and the description meta tag. To sumarise what we learn’t the keywords meta tag is pretty much useless and the description meta tag is the opposite and is actually extremely underused.
The power of the description is in controlling how Google describes a site in it’s listings. This is actually easier said than done, when Google works out how best to describe a listing it sometimes throws a spanner in the works so in a future post will look at how you can really enhance your listing.
Here we are going to look at other meta tags. Well the simple answer is in the main these are pretty useless as well.
There are two main problems with meta tags. ultimately they are just labels. Some labels provide useful information for certain things, for example if you sign up to Google Webmasters you have to upload a file to your server or put a meta tag in your site to authenticate that you are the owner or webmaster. Ultimately visitors aren’t going to click on your source code to be viewing your meta data because it’s of no interest to them unless they’re a web designer and they’re looking to borrow some code.
For Ranking purposes all meta data is pretty useless, in fact if you have too much unnecessary clutter in your code you lower your ratio of content to code and this will have a negative effect on your rankings.
Lets look at a few of the more common meta tags.
Author meta tag
I read recently that a site can fail one of the many different coding tests if this meta tag is not in a site. I don’t remember what it was for exactly or even if this is actually true but ultimately who cares? If you have a web site your main concern is that it is friendly and attractive to your visitors. What interests me about this tag as someone who started designing web sites over 10 years ago is this tag will often tell someone that looks if the site is designed using a cms or a wysiwyg. You can often spot these a mile of by the standard of the design. What makes me chuckle is the number of web designers who actually leave the author tag in there pages which explain they’ve used something like Dreamweaver to design their sites.
Robots tag
We’ve already covered the Robots Meta Tag in some detail. Having a follow, index is pretty useless Google’s going to index your site unless you specificially ask it not to which is what this tag is for. The real power is in having a page indexed but not followed or vice versa.
Robots Revisit
Is this important? It’s a similar story. Picture the scenario. You are Google and it’s your job to firstly index the whole web effectively. Do you think all those sites that have a Robots Revisit tag that stipulates something like 7 days are going to get Google to do exactly what they have requested when Googlebot knows you’ve not changed your page for 6 months or a year? Utterly pointless.
There is however one powerful meta tag, which is a variation of the robots tag, which if you have a listing in the open directory or Yahoo’s own directory stops Search Engines using it to describe a site in it’s listing which we will deal with in a future post.
Google announce next step in developing Search
Google recently announced, in its blog, the next step in developing its Search Alogrithm. Search results will become more Geo Targeted towards the searcher, this is done by three important elements:
Location, which can always be found with a high degree of accuracy from a computers IP address.
Search History, again this is pretty much fool proof even if a user switches their cookies off.
Web History, which you have to be signed in and have personally enabled according to Google but which it can generally achieve accurately enough using the same principles used to generate data for the above two points.
It’s no surprise Google have taken this step. Ultimately if you do a search to find a local curry house you don’t want to see results from the other side of the world or even the next city an hour down the road. Google’s goal, like Adam Lasnik says, is to provide more relevant results. First ‘relevant to the query’ but also relevant to the user.
Google’s key next step is to plug in the abudance of information that social networks provide and do a similar result but on a much grander scale.
Meta Description Tag, Meta useful
July 31, 2008 | SEO
SEO should really be about more than getting to the top rankings in Google. Firstly SEO touches many other important areas and we understand that our work as well as having a positive effect, should not just stop with getting the rankings, what’s the point in getting visitors who you barely make any money out of? What you want is attract visitors who already have their credit card out. We also realise that SEO can also have a negative impact when not performed corretly
That’s why we’ve recently changed our packages to not only provide our clients with a cutting edge service but that also provide more than your bog standard SEO Company, our goal is simply deliver results. We don’t yet have a nifty catchphrase, I’m not sure this should be it, but if our clients don’t realise we’re ‘more than just a SEO Company’ then we’re simply not doing a good enough job.
We looked at the Meta Keywords Tag yesterday and I said the thing that really annoys me about SEO is the pointless stuff that gets overstated, well with the Meta Description Tag it’s the opposite it’s always grossly understated. This is simply because in terms of it generating rankings it’s barely more useful than the Meta Keywords Tag, however it’s power is in generating leads, targeting markets and qualifying prospective buying customers.
The odd thing is people who run PPC are used to doing this for their PPC campaigns yet seem totalltoblivious to it at times when it comes to organic rankings. Let’s be honest and say that actually most listings for site’s in Google aren’t that attractive, in fact sometimes it’s a choice between the least ugly listing not the most attractive.
Tips for a more targetted Meta Description Tag:
Make it short and sweet but not too short and sweet, you don’t want Google to cut of your description mid sentence but you also want you used your allotted space.
Like the Meta Keywords Tag make sure you have unique Descriptions for each page. Some general blarb is not going to attract prospective buyers.
You can start to generate the right sort of leads by mentioning the keywords you are targetting or have rankings for. Remember the user has already qualified themself by telling Google what they want, let them know you have it. The more elements of your listing in bold the better.
Don’t spam, simply everyone hates spam.
Don’t lie either, in fact be dead straight with your customer if you only sell a certain type or colour of widgets let them know. There is little point them visiting your site only to be disapointed.
Ultimately it’s much better to target niche groups who are prospective buyers than get lots of click through’s but hardly any sales. Remember the main goal is what you take home at the end of the day in your back pocket.
Keyword Meta Tag, Meta useless
July 30, 2008 | SEO, Uncategorized
One thing I really hate in SEO is the minor things that get made into big majors. Page Rank is one thing that springs to mind, the less said about that the better. The ultimate criminal has to be the Keywords Meta Tag. In fact it is so pointless it won’t make a blind bit of difference to Google whether it’s there or not. Annoyingly it’s something which just seems to have ‘hung around’ from the dark days of spammy SEO.
What’s the Keywords Meta Tag for?
Back in the early 90’s when Search Engines emerged on the scene to catalog and put some order on the growing number of web pages popping up, meta tags were used as useful way for a web site to tell the engine what it was about. Due to the popularity of Search Engines this system was readily abused and most web sites started having meta tags about popular subjects they had nothing to do with like “Britney Spears”.
That’s the simple history of the Keywords Meta Tag. In the mid 90’s some of the Search Technology which we see today started and one of the key changes was that the Search Engine Spider popped up, this is an automated program (bot) that would index pages.
In some cases your Keyword Meta Tag can actually damage your rankings so if you insist on using it here is a few pointers:
Don’t Spam - make sure all keywords are mentioned at least once in your main content.
Don’t use overkill - limit the number of keywords you use to no more than a dozen. ie don’t have an endless list, the less really the better.
Don’t be repetative - say if your site is about Dog Food don’t have Dog Food this, Dog Food that, Dog Food more, Dog Food even more.
Instead each keyword should be unique - Dog Food, this, that, more, even.
If, in the case of the above example, Dog is not always connected to Food have a comma between.
Don’t use overly specific keywords, if your targeting particular phrases you should include some general markets too
Make each page unique - variety is the spice of life, Google certainly think so.
Meta Description Tag
We should mention the meta description tag at this point, this is far more important (more on that in another post), so make sure your major keywords are mentioned here.
