Meta Tags for E-tail Sites

March 7, 2008 at 12:21 pm · Filed under Code, SEO Best Practices

I recently conducted a competitive analysis for one of my etail clients and to my astomishment, I found that out of the 13 competitors I tracked, none utilised the meta description tag on their site.  This prompted me to write a post on this discussing meta tags and best practices for using them on your site …

Firstly…What is meta data?  In a nutshell, meta data is the information that is placed in the <head></head> part of your HTML (code) and primarily used to tell the search engines what your site’s pages are about as well as providing other useful data and information.   An example of meta data tags can be seen below:

 <head><title>Title goes here…</title>
<meta name=”description” content=”Description goes here..”/>
<meta name=”keywords” content=”Up to 5 keywords go here…”/>
</head>

This post will focus onthe three meta elements; Title Tag, Description Meta Tag and Meta Keywords tag, so lets go ahead and define each of these meta data elements:   

  • Title Tag: 

The title tag is the title of your page and shows up as the title of your page in the search engine results pages (serps) and also appears on the top of a user’s browser.  It is by far the most important meta element and its presence is absolutely mandatory.  The code for the title tag is as follows:

<title>your page’s title goes here</title>

  • Meta Description Tag:

The Meta Description tag is the focus of this post.  Basically, the meta description is not a mandatory tag but SEO best practice says you have to have it.  The code for the meta description is as follows:

<meta name=”description” content=”Description goes here..”/>

Here is why…

The meta description tag appears in the search results pages as the description snippet belwoe the title tag.  If no description tag is implemented on the site, the search engines will still find a content from the page for the description but in most cases that content will look shabby as it would contain content from various parts of the page including you breadcrumb, image alt tag or anywhere else the engine decides to get that content from.  This also leads to the description being cut off with a (…)  Very shabby!

Having a meta description tag allows you to havee control over the image of your company and more crucially it allows you to include call to action words such as buy now, or sign up today, etc…

  • Meta Keywords Tag

The meta keywords tag is no longer necessary or important but again, seo best practices states that you have to have it. In the past when search engines were new and unable to read the content of the page, they relied on this tag to rank pages.  Some search engines probably still do!   The code for the meta keywords is as follows:

<meta name=”keywords” content=”Up to 5 keywords go here…”/>

To sum up, my view on metas is that you have to have them. mainly for having a sharp looking listing which includes the appropriate call to action for your site.

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Researching Your Competitor’s SEO Strategy

February 29, 2008 at 9:57 am · Filed under SEO Tips & Tricks, SEO Research, Competitor Analysis

Do you research your competitor’s seo strategy and activities?  If you don’t then you should, this is the only way to beat them at their own SEO game.

Firstly lets define a competitor. Comptetitors are not necessarily your traditional bricks and mortar competitors.  Your online competitors are the websites with the number one to five positions in the search engine results pages (SERPS) for the keywords you’re targeting.

Now that you’ve discovered your true competitors, its time to start researching their seo strategy in order to discover why they are ranking on top of the serps.

There are a few things you can do immediately to get an overview of their seo strategy:

  1. Perform a site colon search for their url on Google.  This will show you all the pages in their site listed in Google.  So for example if you’re trying to research my site, you would typed in the Google search box site:omarkattan.com. Analysing the results of the site colon test you can quickly find out if their doing seo or not and if they are, you can find out what keywords their trying to target in their meta tags.   

  2. Next, go to Yahoo! and perform a link colon for their url.  This will take you to Yahoo’s site explorer where you can start researching your competitor’s link popularity.   Make sure to select the drop down options of “Except from this Domain” and “Entire Site”  This will exclude any internal links and will show links pointing to the entire site, not just the homepage.

  3. Go to Technorati and type in the domain name into the search box.  This will show you how popular your competitor is in the blogosphere

  4. Go to Google image search and type the domain name in the search box.  his will show you if their images are optimised to show up in the search results (an increasingly important factor) as Universal Search is becoming the norm.

  5. Go to YouTube and type in their URL, this will show you if their optimising for video search, again a universal search biggy.

The above are but a few factors you can measure, there are many more, but if you start with the above, you’ll be in a better position to implement a winning seo strategy.

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Keyword Research and Optimisation

February 24, 2008 at 10:44 am · Filed under Keyword Research

Keyword research is the foundation of any SEO activity, be it site optimisation or even link building, without the right keywords, your optimisation efforts will be fruitless without knowing the right keywords to target.

So how do you go about conducting proper keyword research?  Follow the following 8 keyword research and optimisation steps.

Understanding the current keyword structure of your site 

Before you can begin your keyword research and optimisation efforts, you need to have a strong understanding of your site’s current structure (hierarchy).  The best way to do this is to create a hierarchy of your site using boxes.  

Obviously, the top box would be your site’s home page.  Underneath that would be your sit’s category level pages and underneath that would be your internal pages.

If you’ve done your site structure correctly you should start to see your keyword categories unfold.  If at this stage you feel confused then maybe you need to take another look at the existing structure of your site and think about reorganising into logical categories so that it makes sense.  

Brainstorm keyword idea - the seed list

At this stage, you’re ready to start brainstorming keyword ideas. There are a few things you can do here to help you gather a wide array of good keyword ideas.  But before you start this stage, its a good idea to understand what your KPIs are (key performance indicators)  Basically what you’re looking to achieve out of your site’s visitors.  The following are ideas to kickstart your keyword brainstorming sessions.

  • Analyse the competitors

  • Send out surveys

  • Ask friends and family 

Keyword Discovery: Expanding the Seed List

Now that you have your seek keyword list, you’re ready to start expanding it.  This is where an investment in good keyword research tools will very much come in handy. 

The idea behind the keyword discovery stage of keyword research is to find not necessaruily the keywords with the highest traffic but more importantly the keyword phrases with the highest propensity (possibility) to convert into business.  

There are a number of free keyword research tools available out there but some of the keyword research tools worth an investment include:

My personal preference is for Wordtracker as its cheaper and has recently added the “keyword researcher” which has combined many of the tedeous keyword research jobs into one and allows you to research keywords in the UK. 

Quantify the keyword choices (traffic and competition)

The above tools give you an idea of estimated searches per day/month/year depending on which tool you use as well as the competition levels for the various keywords.  By measuring traffic levels against competiton levels for the desired keywords you’ll be in a better position to judge which keywords are worth going after and which keywords are not. 

Map keywords to your website pages

Now that you’ve gathered your ideal keyword list, you’re ready to start mapping it against your existing (or restructured) site.   I find that using an excel sheet is perfect for this exercise.

Optimise pages for selected mapped keywords

Now that the mapping stage is done, you’re ready to start optimising your site for the desired keywords.  There are many blog entries on this site about optimising your site for desired keywords, I would start by looking at the following categories:

Analyse and Tweak

Finally, once you’ve optimised your site you will need to measure the results of your keyword research and optimisation efforts.  You do that by studying your site side analytics tools such as Google analytics. 

Hopefully you’ll begin to see improvements and if you’ve followed the abov steps that will be the case, but if you feels the improvements are not as desired or that the traffic you’re getting is not converting as it should then this would be the time to revisit your keyword selection to try and discover keywords that maybe have less traffic but a higher propensity to convert.

Good luck with your keyword research and optimisation efforts! 

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Managing your link juice with “NoFollow”

February 12, 2008 at 6:28 am · Filed under Link Building, SEO Tips & Tricks

“Link Juice” is the cumulative effect of the link popularity that your site gains over time as more and more sites link to yours.  If not managed properly, this link juice can be diluted unnecessarily within your site’s internal pages.

So how do you go about managing your internal link “link Juice”?   Easy..Use the Nofollow link attribute wisely within your sites internal linking structure.

First of all, lets define the Nofollow attribute.  The Wikipedia defines the Nofollow as:

“a non-standard HTML attribute value used to instruct search engines that a hyperlink should not influence the link target’s ranking in the search engine’s index.”

Basically, the Nofollow is telling search engines not to attribute any “link juice” to the “nofollowed” link on the page.  Here is what a nofollow link looks like:

<a rel=”nofollow” href=”yoursite.com” mce_href=”yoursite.com”>this is a nofollowed link</a>

The Nofollow tag can also be implemented on a per page basis thereby instructing the search engines not to attribute any link juice to any of the links on the page.  The Meta Nofollow Tag is placed in the <head> section of the page and looks like this:

<META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOFOLLOW”>

Why would you want to use the nofollow on some of your internal links?  Well in a nutshell, because some of your site’s pages do not require as much internal link popularity as your other strategic pages.

Some of the links that should have a nofollow link attribute include:

  • Links in your breadcrumb leading to the copyright statement, the contact us page, etc…

  • Links to external sites such as the designers, coders, etc…

  • Duplicate links on the same page

By properly managing you site’s internal link juice, you’ll be well on your way to getting your important pages ranking better in the search engine results pages (SERPS).

Good luck!

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Barbarians at Yahoo’s “Gates”

February 4, 2008 at 1:42 pm · Filed under Search News

Unless your head’s been in the sand for the past week, you’ve probably heard by now Microsoft Yahoo Style Logothat Microsoft has made an unsolicited offer to buy out Yahoo for $45 Billion.  You’ve also probably heard that Google has proposed an unholy alliance with Yahoo to save it from being swallowed.

It all started just over 7 months ago when Jerry Yang decided to get back at the helm and run the company he founded in the mid nineties, needless to say, things didn’t go as anticipated.

Steps in Google…

Google has masterfully capitalised on this hidden opportunity by lobbying against MSN’s offer and claiming potential anti trust issues. 

To add salt to injury, Google has also proposed an alliance with Yahoo that could keep it independent and out of the hands of MicroSoft.  The deal broadly presents Yahoo with an opportunity to add 25% more cash to its income statement by handing over its advertising platform to Google in return for a very “lucrative fee”.

No matter how things pan out, the next 12 to 18 months will be very interesting indeed!  Stay tuned…

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