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I hear this too much now:  “SEO is Dead”.

What a bunch of BS!  I do believe that social marketing is a big turning point in both traffic and conversion on the internet, but search engines will never die and free organic traffic on page one of Google is still (and will be) very profitable.

The great thing about SEO is that ANYONE can do it.  Personally, I do not hire a company to do my SEO nor do I pay for services who “guarentee page 1 listings on Google”.  The process is very cut and dry.  The funny thing is that so many people spend time *trying* to rank high in Google but they are doing it all wrong.

In this video, I begin a ten part series, called SEO Exciter, aimed at showing you the simple fundamentals that can transform any traffic stagnant site into an organic traffic machine.

cheers…matt

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Here’s part 2 of the SEO Exciter Series (you can watch all 10 right now at SEO Exciter), and this one is more of me showing off some killer SEO results.

The interesting thing to note here is that my money site (in this example) ranks near the top of the google rankings, but below that is a whole slew of social marketing sites (including this blog!) ranking for the same term.

The reason?  Social media and social marketing.  You CAN use Social Marketing for SEO!

More importantly, standard SEO and social marketing work hand-in-hand.  One reason for my top money site listing is due to the social media backlinks.  As an artifact of these backlinks, you will find the social media sites themselves ranking highly in the search engine, too.

This is why we social bookmark, and make videos, and create hubpages and write blogs!

Get traffic AND build SEO with your social marketing efforts.  Sure, it is not required to get your site ranked high in Google, but wouldn’t you rather have FIVE links on page one of Google or just one?

Check out the video above.  I talk about this more in details.

cheers…matt

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Meta tags are perhaps the biggest misconception for people just starting out online.   A very common question about websites goes as follows:

“I just created my website and I chose my keyword meta-tags.  I also paid a few hundred dollars to get listed in the search engines.  Why is my website not showing up in Google?”

Well, probably because keyword meta-tags and search engine submissions have almost NOTHING to do with getting ranked highly in Google, Yahoo or MSN (the three top search engines in the world).

The point of this week’s SEO Exciter Series video is to explain the what meta tags ARE and ways to use them to your advantage (and believe it or not, meta tags have very little to do with Search Engine Optimization!).

Let’s break some of the meta-tags down a little bit:

<title> Tag - This is actually is a pseudo-meta-tag and it is perhaps the only important one there is.  This tag is crucial in SEO.  Make sure you have a title tag on your website, for one!  This is the text that appears at the top border of your browser.  Major search engines provide a lot of emphasis on what the title of your web page is.  It is important!  And make sure you have some of your best keywords in your title.  Use a pipe (|) to potentially separate out keywords.  Just keep it under 70 Characters.

Why?  Because that is the maximum number of characters Google will display on a search engine results page (75 for MSN, 118 for Yahoo).  Remember that your title IS the heading of your search engine listing.

<meta name=”keywords” content=”some keywords”> - Meta keywords mean virtually nothing.  In the old days, meta keywords were used to identify relevancy of keywords to websites. Not anymore.  There are too many websites.  And frankly, search engines don’t WANT to give the websites the options to choose there own keywords (though, SEO is our way around this!).

Some old search engines do still use these keyword meta-tags (called Meta Search Engines), but who cares!  We want the big boys (and still, competition makes using these keywords redundant, even for the meta search engines).

In fact, placing your “good, money” keywords in your meta tags is a way to advertise to your competition what is making money for you.  If you use keyword meta-tags, keep them generic and for God’s sake, don’t place any of your secret keywords here! (unless it is in one of my niches…where I WILL find it and use it!)

<meta name=”description” content=”some description”> The description meta tag IS important, but not too much to SEO.  This (in most cases) is what Google and the other search engines display as the result description.  The words used in the description aren’t used too much for SEO, but the effectiveness of getting the user to click your link is crucial!  This is your ad-copy to your Google listing!  The more people that click on your link the better. This is about conversion!

(And keep this under 150 characters…that is Google’s max!  Else, it will dot-dot-dot (…) the rest!)

<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex”> -This is the true ANTI-SEO tag!  This is telling the search engines NOT to index this webpage.  This does have its use if you are creating private pages or pages that you wish NOT to get ranked (like your terms and conditions, your help desk, your contact details, your shopping cart, etc.).

This is different from the robots.txt file.  I won’t get into this here, but this is a file that instructs search engines HOW to spider your website.  Cool stuff, but it doesn’t have much to do with meta-tags.

And there are many other meta-tags out there, too.  Most won’t help or hurt you in any way.  These four, above, do have an impact on your website (SEO or not) and you should be aware of them all.

cheers…matt

P.S. Sorry about the sound quality.  I fix this is part 4…which you can watch right now…

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I kind of find part 4 of the SEO Exciter series very relevant, especially after watching Leslie Rhode’s new video on how UN-important LSI really is. And for those of you don’t know, I learned a lot of my SEO directly from Leslie, so to hear him first poop all over LSI is one thing…and then to figure out how I am going to change my current SEO strategy is another.

Luckily, after watching the video, I think I am OK!  First, Leslie kind of define LSI (or Latent Semantic Indexing) a little bit different that what I am talking about here.

Here is the point I am trying to make here (and luckily, it really does not contradict what Leslie says in the video!):

A little bit of history, first…

With search engines of the past, they relied heavily on keywords.  Basically, the more you had of one keyword on a page, the more likely you would be indexed and ranked for those keywords.

Of course, internet marketers became very wise to this concept and essentially started to “keyword stuff” their pages.  (And if you get into the “Dark Side”…aka, Black Hat…they took keyword stuffing to whole new levels!).

This, of course, caused some quality problems with the search results.  A page with a keyword splattered all over it was not very relevant nor was it good to read (Adsense people loved it!  They didn’t care…they just wanted the search engines to find the pages).

So then “keyword density” became important.  Tests where showing that search engines favored sites that had a certain percentage of the terms to be a target keyword.  I think the target density was somewhere between 7% and 15%.  This was better, but still catered towards SEO’ers who artificially created (garbage) content just to appease these rules.

So the search engines have gotten a little bit smarter.  We are not there yet…meaning Search Engines cannot read and comprehend our content, BUT it is smart enough to correlate relevant words.  This is what I am referring to LSI or Latent Semantic Indexing.

Let’s say I want to start ranking for the term “Tesla Car”.  In the old days, I would focus on getting those terms written either as much as I can throughout the page or at least at a specific density.  It probably would not make for a great read, but search engines are (let’s be frank), still not that smart.

With new algorithms, though, search engines pretend to be smarter by not only observing the density, but also observe the text that accompanies it.  So in this case, I would use keywords like “electric car”, “environmentally safe car”, even “Elon Musk” (who is the creator of this car).  They are all highly correlated terms and the quality of the “read” of such an article inherently goes up.

(Plus, it reaffirms the relationship of the term “Telsa” here to car, not Nikoli Tesla the engineering genius of the late 1800s).

This all gets back to the fact that keeping things “Natural” in the way that you write is a great course of action.  Be sure to use keywords when possible, but as time continues to move forward, the search engines are only going to keep getting smarter.  Quality content is the key here.  And if you have a keyword you want to rank for, first say it with a title or header tag, then sell it with your body content.

That is where LSI is most important!

cheers…matt

P.S. If you get a chance, be sure to check out Leslie Rhode’s Is LSI REAL?

(You can get his 7 other common SEO Mistakes here, too.)

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And today, I want to talk a bit about “misconceptions” of SEO, and mainly, the “other meta tags”.  One of the biggest points I want to make about meta tags is that really they don’t have much to do with SEO, at least directly or in a positive manner.

We’ve talked about the keyword meta-tag and why it is essentially useless in the major search engines of today.

We’ve also talked about the importance of the Title tag, which IS a meta tag, but then again it is not.

What about the “other tags”?

One that is fairly important is the description meta-tag.  It looks something like this:

<meta name="description" content="A description of your page" />

We’ve talked about this a bit in our post Do Meta-Tags Help Top Search Engine Ranking. We also discuss in that post the effectiveness of robots meta-tags, how they can PREVENT spiders and why they are really not needed.

But let’s get a bit deeper here.  What about things like re-freshes?

<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="5;url=http://example.com/" />

Where the 5 (in red) is the time to refresh in seconds and the URL (in blue) is where to redirect the page.

Personally, I am not a fan of these, and this is because it has a lot of “black hat” applications to it, which can cause major search engines to think twice about your intentions.  Does this work?  Absolutely.  But their are some security holes (like origin or new resource information, or lack) which can cause viewers and spiders very suspicious on your intent.

If you want to use redirects, I suggest you read up on htaccess files, 301 redirects and 302 redirects.  There is a good wiki about it here).

What about things like zipcode meta-tags, city meta-tags, and country meta-tags?  Do they help in the “local results”?

Not really!  In fact, NONE of the listings shown above has any location meta-tags to speak of.  (Check out the Google Local Business Center for more information about this listings!)

What do we have left?

• Copywrite
• Author
• Publisher
• MS tags (from Microsoft tools)

Those don’t do squat.

Lastly, there are a few “old fashioned” ones like:

• Expires
• Cache
• No-Cache
• Distribution
• Revisit-after

All of these CAN play a role in how your site in ranked, but not for the positive (and in some cases, they are ignored like the other ones as well).

My moral is quite simple:  Most meta-tags don’t do anything!  Make sure you have a title tag.  Make sure you have a description.  Beyond that, I wouldn’t be wasting too much time with meta-tags.  The were created at the infancy of the internet and now they are just outdated text that is wasting valuable bandwidth and provides your competitors with more information about your website than they need to know.

cheers…matt

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Today I want to focus on perhaps the simplest SEO strategies to increase your presence in the organic search listings.

These are some of the “Unseen On-Page SEO Factors”.  Lately, though, we have focused on topics like the structure of the site, the meta tags and the content.  Those are all really important factors, but there are a few cardinal sins and heavenly blessings associated with things YOU might not see, but the search engine spiders, like the Google-Bot WILL see.

The Image Link

YIKES!  I admit it, I used to do this!  It looked cool, too.  You know what I am talking about (I hope!).  If I put a cool image link like:

Looks GREAT, but where is the anchor text???  This is the inherent problem with banner ads (and why some people are willing to pay MORE for a text link rather than banner space).  Sure, there is a time and place for banner ads and images, but one place it should NOT be is in ANY menu bar or internal link on your website.

Javascript and Javascript Links

Much like the image problem above, but worse!  At least with the image, you are still sending some type of backlink to yourself.  Realize that Search Engine bots cannot read Javascript.  Therefore, if your website is using javascript to do linking, you are essentially giving the search engines nowhere to go.  This was more common in early website design, but most website platforms do not use javascript for linking.  Using “Flash” links is still debatable, but I would still avoid it.

Make sure that your “Page Source” (”View” -> “Page Source” in most browsers) shows all of your text links surrounded by the anchor tag:

<a href=”SITE”>Anchor Text</a>

If your links are surrounded by:

<script></script>i

Everything within t is being ignored by the search engines!

Note, though, that javascript CAN be embedded within an anchor tag, which is OK. It looks like this:

<a href=”SITE” onclick=”javascript:someaction();”>Anchor Text</a>

Alternative Text for Images

Speaking of images, we just said that images contain no text by default.  That is partially true.  In fact, there is an image parameter called ALT which you can define text if the image cannot be found.  This text is fairly weak in the whole content scheme of things, but it is text that the search engines can read and will attribute to content.  It would look like this:

<img src=”YOUR IMAGE” alt=”PUT GOOD TEXT HERE“>

Again, I would still avoid using images for links, but for the images that are found elsewhere, you might as well put a few good keywords in the ALT text.  Also remember that Google has an image search engine, which would correlate this image with the text!

Training the Spiders

This really has nothing to do with images, text and backlinks.  This is the simple concept of writing more content and updating your website and blog regularly.  Remember that the search engines have limited resources in what it will “spider” every day.  It cannot spider all websites equally (most websites never change, in fact).  So the spiders are smart enough to know which websites change regularly and when they change.

Powerhouses like YouTube and Digg would be changing always (and the spiders visit big websites like this about just as much!…that is why content put on YouTube or Digg can be found in the search engines results pages so quickly!).  But for us, we don’t change it that often.  BUT, if we get into a routine of making changes once per week, it will start coming once per week.  If we made changes once per day, it will visit once per day.  Get what I am saying?

Continuously grow your website and blog and be consistant about it, too!  (That is one reason blogs are so well loved by Google! )

cheers…matt

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So far, we have focused a lot on the things that you can directly do to your website to get it indexed in Google (or the other search engines for that matter!).  Now we need to focus on the other side of SEO, which we call Off-Page SEO.

Remember the old proverb:

“If a tree falls in the woods and no one is there to hear it, does it really make a sound?”

This is similar to what we are talking about now.  If we built the greatest and most SEO optimized website on the internet and Google does not find it, will we get ranked?

The answer is no.

So we have two tasks as website developers:

1)  We first need to tell Google (and the other search engines) that we exist!

2)  We need to convince these search engines that we are both important and relevant.  (we are going to talk about this more in the next three parts!)

So how do we tell Google that we exist?  (The proper term for this is “getting indexed” in the search engine.)

Now I know many of you consider the idea of “submitting to search engines”, but personally, I think that is a waste of money.  These “search engine submissions” are more suggestions rather than indexes.  Yeah, I am sure they tell the search engines you exist, but it really gives you no credibility or popularity…and getting indexed really does not require this.

All you need to do is get a website that is already being indexed by a search engine to link back to your website.  We are going to talk more about getting backlinks (these are links from external websites pointing back to your website) in Part 9 of the SEO Exciter series, but just a quick preview…

• Write articles and Submit to Article Directories
• Submit to Directories (this is different than Search Engines!)
• Ping your Website or Page (Try Google’s Ping Service)
• Create a Social Profile (We’ll talk about this in Part 10)
• Create Forum Posts or Blog Comments

The point here is to get Google to find you naturally.  It will give you credibility, authority and relevance.

And just like we started this conversion…

“Just because Google indexes you, doesn’t mean you will rank for anything!”

THAT is what we talk about in the final three parts of the SEO Exciter Series!

cheers…matt

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