What is the deal with Meta Tags?

Search Engine Optimizers often have two different views when it comes to meta tags. One this is unanimous meta tags have definitely been devalued for use in most major search engines but you will find they are still being used as the description often times when your site is listed in the search results.

Meta tags were started back in the early 90's when the Internet was just getting its brand new legs and they were used to help the search engines organize the growing number of web pages. This was an easy way to get your site indexed and listed high.

Soon after unethical webmasters started to abuse the meta tag by either spamming the page full of keywords or sometimes even made different websites appear in the results for a completely different keyword. Gambling sites would stuff their meta tags with more commonly used phrases in order to bring their sites to the first page and trick the search engine and moreover the user.

Now obviously, most search engines have discontinued the use of meta tags for organizing their search results. Algorithms have become much more technologically advanced and they use a number of other methods for indexing and sorting. The big question is if they are no longer viewed as a helpful tag, why do some SEO's still use them?

Meta tags come in a multitude of different names and uses, so which ones do you use? There are four that I often find myself using when I am optimizing a site. They are as follows:

• Meta Robots:This tag is still widely supported and it simply tells the search bots to either follow the URL through or you can ask them not to index certain parts of your site for aspects that may not be relevant to your actual site.
• Meta Description:My favorite tag. This is your first impression, if you don't have this tag search engines will just tag clips of your index page including the keyword that was being searched for by the surfer. First impressions often is the difference between a sale or no sale.
• Meta Keywords:A controversial meta tag, some use it, some don't. I still thinks it holds a bit of value if you keep it simple. Don't add more than 20 or so keywords, as I think it does increase your on-page keyword density.
• Meta Content Type:This is recommended because you may find that if you do not have this tag it could cause display problems.

Now, most search engines don't use the meta tags as they did in the early nineties, but as I explained you can still use them for a variety of other reasons. There is of course a number of opinions on this matter: Some SEO firms are strong believers in the meta tag and other firms are strongly against it.

In conclusion, my opinion is that meta tags can be used for a number of alternative reasons and still offer you a great place to sell your stuff.

I always will recommend the use of at least a small number of Meta Tags, and if used correctly they will greatly improve your chances of more sales and higher rankings.

About the Author: Carrie Haggerty has been working in SEO and Internet marketing for the past 3 years. She has started her own SEO Firm and also her own SEO article website.

Optimizing Your Site for Both Google and Yahoo!

Search engine optimization techniques for Google and Yahoo are quite different. Many websites rank well in one search engine but not the other. This is the direct result of each search engine having its own unique ranking algorithm. For example, the Google algorithm predominantly values the anchor text of in-bound links. Yahoo places more emphasis on keyword density and meta tags.

The primary reason for the difference in ranking algorithms is that Google owns the patent on Page Rank (PR), named after Google's founder Larry Page. As a result of owning this patent, other search engines need to place more emphasis on different optimization factors including website URL, keyword density and so on.

What are the greatest differences in search engine algorithms?

Google places a significant amount of emphasis on inbound links to your website. The value of these inbound links are measured based on their Google PR. The more links you receive from high Google PR web pages, the better your search result placements will be for a given keyword or search term.

Yahoo places emphasis on website URLs, meta tags, and keyword density. These factors can be analyzed on any website with a limited amount of effort, allowing Yahoo to quickly and easily rank websites properly.

How you can optimize your website for both Google and Yahoo!?

The challenge all website owners face is making the most of their optimization efforts. When thinking about search engine optimization, you need to cover all the bases. To do so, pay particular attention to the following guidelines.

Keyword Targeted URL
If your website URL doesn't contain your keywords, consider purchasing a new one or creating a new page off of your root directory (ex: marketingscoop.com/internetmarketing.htm). Having your keywords in the URL helps improve both your Yahoo and Google search results. Yahoo weighs the website address as an important ranking factor. Google values a keyword rich URL when third party websites place a link to your site using nothing but a web address.

Meta Tags
Although not as important as they once were, Yahoo still uses meta tags to help align search engine rankings and appropriate website pages. Make sure that your meta tags are complete and include your keyword phrases in the title, description, and keyword tags.

Keyword Density Between 6 - 8%. Although much has been written about the importance of keyword density remaining between 2 - 3%, Yahoo looks for sites with keyword densities as high as 8%. Don't be afraid to include your keywords throughout your webpage content. Make sure however, that your keyword density is not more than 8%.

Link Building
This is the most important factor for increasing Google search result placements. Develop a link building campaign and give other sites a reason to link to your site. This may include free downloads, tools, or other valuable resources.

Site Map. Publish a sitemap. This makes it easy for search engines to spider your website and access all of your most important web pages. Site maps should be accessible from your home page and kept up-to-date.

Following basic seo principles and working to develop incoming links can help you reach the top of the largest search engines. Apply these techniques regularly to see the greatest results.

About the Author: Michael Fleischner is a marketing expert with more than 12 years of Internet marketing experience. Learn how to improve search engine rankings with his latest ebook, The Webmasters Book of Secrets at http://www.webmastersbookofsecrets.com.

Mistakes Of Pay Per Click Advertising: The Terrible 10

Vigilance, micromanaging and attention to detail can help you avoid some common and costly mistakes of PPC advertising. What are those mistakes?

Here are the terrible 10 that are typical to most pay per click campaigns.

Too Many Keywords Per Ad Group
It's important to target your ad to be as relevant as possible. Don't group all your keywords into one or two ad groups. Break them out. Keep them tight. This gives you more control over ad variables so that you can be as relevant as possible.

Not Using Negative Keywords
Negative keywords reduce unwanted impressions, and more importantly, unwanted click throughs. However, with increasing priority given to "quality scores" and click through rates in the PPC engines, it's key to trim the fat from your keyword campaigns. If your company sells "widget management software" then be sure that you have keywords like "-serial" or "-free" assigned as negative keywords (unless, of course, you offer it for free in some manner). You can find good negative keywords in your log files or when you build your lists.

Weak Testing

Split-testing your ads is critical. Even the smallest of changes can boost results. In addition to testing your ad copy's "call to action" or value statements, every ad has multiple variables to test. The titles, the two lines of copy, and display url all can be optimized. If you don't have time for hands-on testing, a good professional pay per click management company can run daily split testing for you. You'd be surprised how well this can pay off.

Poor or Non-Existent Tracking

Of course, testing your ads and fine tuning your keyword lists only works well if you are tracking results. The search engines will tell you what your click-through rates are ... but you need bottom-line results. You need to know your return on investment or what your cost per action is. It's not enough to know that you spend $5,000 and get back $10,000. You might be able to spend only $3,000 and get that same $10,000.

Not Getting Keyword-Level Tracking

Proper and exact analytics or using an experienced pay per click management company is essential to get the data you need. If you have keywords that are not performing and leaking your account on a daily basis, you are throwing money away. Getting results to the keyword level allows you to adjust bids for maximum effect. If you have one keyword with a $1.34 earnings per click and another at 37 cents, this is key information that allows you to maximize profits. Lower one bid if you are above your "EPC" and raise another to eek out more profits from that sweet-spot keyword. Don't waste money on a daily basis.

Not Specific Enough Keywords
Some broad and generic keywords can certainly push a ton of traffic to your site. They may even be very successful. Often, however, they can also do just the opposite -- drain your funds with poor results. A user searching on one of these generic phrases is often doing research in an early part of the buying process. Knowing your keyword-level results and filtering out bad variations with negative keywords can help you get a true read on these generic keywords.

Not Going After Long-Tail Keywords

This follows the above item on generic keywords. Building a list and individual ads for the long-tail keywords can be a major time-sucker. It can also be profitable if the task is performed correctly. Those earnings per click will likely vary widely from a generic keyword like "mp3 player", "sony mp3 player" and "sony 2GB S610 walkman video mp3 player". One consumer is doing research, the other knows what they want and is most likely looking to purchase.

Not Separating Content and Search Networks

An easy way to get scorched on poor performing traffic or even click fraud is to not separate your search network ads from your content network ads. Chances are that if you don't know what the difference is, then they are likely not separated in your account -- and bad keywords are leaking your funds daily. You are better off to build different campaigns for your keywords on the content and search networks.

Not Attracting Local Clients Through Geo Targeting

If you draw most of your business from a local area, the big three PPC engines allow you to geo-target your keywords to that area. This will bring the local market to your doorstep on non-local keyword phrases. This can be hugely profitable.

Not Frequently Monitoring Your Accounts

Not everyone has time to run split testing on a daily basis or frequently checking your EPCs (even though you should...because it's costing you). That said, there are still a high amount of advertisers who seem to ignore their accounts for days ... or even weeks ... or (don't tell me you're doing this!) months. The big PPC search engines are increasingly cracking down on poor performing keywords, smacking advertisers with that "Inactive for Search" status for individual keywords. When this happens, you lose traffic, you lose profits. If you are investing heavily in PPC, you can't just turn your back on your account for days at a time.

The Terrible 10 of Pay Per Click Advertising is a lot to consider, but it's vital for healthy pay per click campaigns. Whether you can actively manage your PPC accounts at this level or you need to hire a pay per click management company to do it, vigilance and precision can make a huge impact on your bottom line.

About the Author: Josh Prizer is a Senior Account Executive and PPC expert for Zero Company Performance Marketing, a pay per click management company.

Best Practices in Web Design

Good web design is something that can be achieved relatively easily by sticking to a small set of guiding principles and avoiding some very common mistakes.

Truly excellent web design skills are born out of years of experience, dedication and plenty of hard-learned mistakes. Fortunately, being truly excellent at web design is not a pre-requisite for building a fantastic website and the lessons learned from those mistakes can be passed on without the hardship.

1. Keep Everything Obvious - Don't Make Me Think

The book entitled Don't Make Me Think!: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability by Steve Krug is one of the best selling books on the subject of web design and usability. Personally, I think thinking is a good thing but at the same time I don't want to be struggling to figure out how to submit a web form!

Visitors to a website expect certain conventions, breaking these is a great way of losing visitors. People expect to find the navigation at the top of a page or on the left hand side. Logos are mostly found on the top left. Much research has been conducted into how people view and use web pages. The good news is that you do not to know all of this; instead look at how larger companies such as eBay, Amazon, Google, Microsoft structure their pages and the language they use, then emulate them.

2. Limit Colors

A website using too many colors at a time can be overwhelming to many users and can make a website look cheap and tacky. Any users with color blindness or contrast perception difficulties may even be unable to use the site.

Limiting a palette to 2 or 3 colors will nearly always lead to a slicker looking design and has the added bonus of simplifying your design choices, reducing design time.

Software like Color Wheel Pro can greatly simplify the creation of a pallet by showing which colors sit well together. If you really do not have the eye for design then software like this provides the perfect way of escaping monotone or badly combined color schemes.

If your site uses blue and yellow together or red and green then it may present problems to anyone suffering with color blindness. Vischeck.com provides free software that can simulate different types of color blindness.

3. Be Careful With Fonts

The set of fonts available to all visitors of a website is relatively limited. Add to that the possibility of a user having a visual impairment then the options become even smaller. It is advisable to stick to fonts such as Arial, Verdana, Courier, Times, Geneva and Georgia. They may not be very interesting but your content should be more interesting than your font and if it can't be read, what is the point of having a site?

Black text on a white background is far easier for the majority of people to read than white text on a black background. If you have large amounts of text then a white or pale background is far more user friendly. Always ensure that there is a good contrast between any text and its background. Blue text on a blue background is okay as long as the difference in shade is significant.

Verdana is often cited as being the easiest to read on the screen. Trebuchet, Georgia is probably the best option for a serif font.

4. Plan for Change

If you fix the height of your page to 600 pixels will you still be able to add additional menu items without completely redesigning your page?

The ability to add or remove content from a website is fundamental to the ongoing success of it. Having to rewrite the entire web page or website each time you want to make a small change is sure fire way to kill your interest in your own site and will negatively impact your overall design and usability.

Getting a good idea of how your website is likely to grow will clarify how best to structure your layout. For example, a horizontal navigation is often more restrictive than a side navigation unless you use drop down menus; if your navigation is likely to grow and you hate drop down menus then your design choice has been 99% made for you!

Understanding how to use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), avoiding unconventional layouts and complicated backgrounds will all help enormously.

5. Be Consistent

Again, don't make your visitors think! About how to use your site at least. If your navigation is at the top on your homepage, it should be at the top on all other pages too. If your links are coloured red ensure the the same convention is used on all sections.

By using CSS correctly you can make most of this happen automatically leaving you free to concentrate on the content.

6. Keep it Relevant

A picture is better than a thousand words but if the picture you took on holiday is not relevant to your Used Car Sales website then you should really replace it with something which reflects the content or mood of the page; a photo of a car perhaps!

If you can take something off of your web page without it adversely affecting the message, appearance or legality of your website you should do it without hesitation.

Avoid the need to add images, Flash animations or adverts just because you have space. This wastes bandwidth and obscures the intentions of your website. If you absolutely must fill the space, then exercise your imagination to find something as relevant as possible.
Keeping your content focused will ultimately help your search-engine rankings.

7. Become a CSS Expert

Cascading Style Sheets should be any web designer's best friend. CSS makes it is possible to separate the appearance and layout of your page from the content. This has huge benefits when it comes to updating and maintaining your site, making your site accessible and making your site easy for search engines to read.

CSS at a first glance is very straightforward but is definitely worth investing in one or more books. Two great books are: CSS the Missing Manual by David McFarland and Bulletproof Web Design by Dan Cederholm.

8. Avoid Complexity

Using standard layouts for your web page will save you development time and make your site easier to use. Pushing the boundaries nearly always leads to quirky behaviour, cross-browser problems, confused site visitors and maintenance headaches. Unless you really do like a challenge then avoid complexity wherever possible.

Many standard layouts are freely available online with much of the boring, repetitive work already done for you.

The principles above all border on common sense and are well known to most people, yet so many sites continue to deviate away from them and suffer as a consequence. Following these principles will help you keep away from trouble, although it still doesn't guarantee it!