SEO & Marketing Tools

SEO or search engine optimization is a mythology in a web search engine friendly, so that search engines can index a page and give rank among the first in the search engine results. Effective promotion seo services can give higher search engine rankings results, supplemented brand visibility and bring higher return on investment (ROI) or go on www.keyword-swipe.com. Your potential customers must be able to find your site and find it in the first 3 pages as likely that the search is then substantially reduced. SEO has been an important tool to promote your online business.

SEO is a gradual approach involving on page optimization (title, description, key phrases, ALT tags, optimized content) and off page optimization (the quality and no. From left to one side). Please note that your’s is not the only place the craving for the attention of your potential customers. There are many other ways that you are competing for the same products or services.To your site before them is easier said than done.

Why do you need SEO services?

To services in the Internet business and stay one step ahead of your competitors, it is imperative to aim for top placing in the major search engines such as Google, MSN and Yahoo. These are the search engines, where more people likeky to find your site. Because, according to survey 85% of Internet traffic is through search engines. Placement of your site in the top of search engines means visibility and the visibility of translation in sales.

After a great site with Flash Blend end effects and beautiful pictures is not enough, because they receive little or no traffïc without search engine optimization. It is like an advertising board in the Sahara desert or visit www.seo-prediction.com. If nobody could search for your site, all your efforts in designing and developing it will be wasted. And without proper optimization, search engines can not be found either. That’s where professional SEO services comes into your life and can make great business.

Our website optimization and website submission services are mentioned below that everyone can believe. All seo services are for both ethical seo result and natural traffics. A site properly optimized list higher in the search results page and bring targeted visitors to your site. We speak of “targeted Traffic ‘not’ Traffic ‘will lead to higher sales for your company. Website Promotion is something you can not afford to miss!

To achieve this, you need the services of a professional SEO company. Companies in India will help you at every step in maximizing your online presence. Our web site optimization and submission services are designed so that your site in achieving excellent placement in search engines, which targeted traffic and increased sales.

Our range of SEO services includes the following:

1. Detailed Keyword analysis of your site.

2. Creating Optimized Title and Meta tags.

3. SEO Evaluation of site

4. Search Engine Optimization services

5. Search Engine Submission services

6. Link Popularity Campaign

7. Directory Submission services

8. Creation of a search engine friendly site map (if not already present) for

better crawling of your site

9. Tracking of website in search engines for optimized keyphrases by sending monthly Ranking reports.

10. Submission of site to Google Sitemap

11. SEO Copywriting

12. Article Submission

13. Submission of Your Blog to 10 Blog Directories www.search-engine-premiere.com www.sitemap-makers.com

By Kalena Jordan

One of the most important aspects of a search engine optimization project is also one of the most overlooked – preparation! There are some important steps to take in advance of optimizing your site that will make sure your SEO is successful.

Before You Start

Before you start any search engine optimization campaign, whether it’s for your own site or that belonging to a client, you need to answer the following questions:

1) What is the overall motivation for optimizing this site? What do I/they hope to achieve? e.g. more sales, more subscribers, more traffic, more publicity etc.

2) What is the time-frame for this project?

3) What is the budget for this project?

4) Who will be responsible for this project? Will it be a joint or solo effort? Will it be run entirely in-house or outsourced?

Answering these questions will help you to build a framework for your SEO project and establish limitations for the size and scope of the campaign.

Get Ready: How Search Engine-Compatible is the Site Currently?

Something I find very useful before quoting on any SEO project is to produce what I call a Search Engine Compatibility Review. This is where I carry out a detailed overview and analysis of a site’s search engine compatibility in terms of HTML design, page extensions, link popularity, title and META tags, body text, target keywords, ALT IMG tags, page load time and other design elements that can impact search engine indexing.

I then provide a detailed report to potential clients with recommendations based on my findings. It just helps sort out in my mind what design elements need tweaking to make the site as search engine-friendly as possible. It also helps marketing staff prove to an often stubborn programming department (or vice versa!) that SEO is necessary. You might consider preparing something similar for your own site or clients.

Get Set: Requirements Gathering

Next, you need to establish the project requirements, so you can tailor the SEO campaign to you or your client’s exact needs. For those of you servicing clients, this information is often required before you are able to quote accurately.

To determine your project requirements, you need to have the following questions answered:

1) What technology was used to build the site? (i.e. Flash, PHP, frames, Cold Fusion, JavaScript, Flat HTML etc)

2) What are the file extensions of the pages? (i.e. .htm, .php, .cfm etc)

3) Does the site contain database driven content? If so, will the URLs contain query strings? e.g. www.site.com/longpagename?source=123444fgge3212, (containing “?” symbols), or does the site use parameter workarounds to remove the query strings? (the latter is more search engine friendly).

4) Are there at least 250 words of text on the home page and other pages to be optimized?

5) How does the navigation work? Does it use text links or graphical links or JavaScript drop-down menus?

6) Approximately how many pages does the site contain? How many of these will be optimized?

7) Does the site have a site map or will it require one? Does the site have an XML sitemap submitted to Google Sitemaps?

What is the current link popularity of the site?

9) What is the approximate Google PageRank of the site? Would it benefit from link building?

10) Do I have the ability to edit the source code directly? Or will I need to hand-over the optimized code to programmers for integration?

11) Do I have permission to alter the visible content of the site?

12) What are the products/services that the site promotes? (e.g. widgets, mobile phones, hire cars etc.)

13) What are the site’s geographical target markets? Are they global? Country specific? State specific? Town specific?

14) What are the site’s demographic target markets? (e.g. young urban females, working mothers, single parents etc.)

15) What are 20 search keywords or phrases that I think my/my client’s target markets will use to find the site in the search engines?

16) Who are my/my client’s major competitors online? What are their URLs? What keywords are they targeting?

17) Who are the stake-holders of this site? How will I report to them?

18) Do I have access to site traffic logs or statistics to enable me to track visitor activity during the campaign? Specifically, what visitor activity will I be tracking?

19) How do I plan on tracking my or my client’s conversion trends and increased rankings in the search engines?

20) What are my/my client’s expectations for the optimization project? Are they realistic?

Answers to the first 10 questions above will determine the complexity of optimization required. For example, if the site pages currently have little text on them, you know you’ll need to integrate more text to make the site compatible with search engines and include adequate target keywords. If the site currently uses frames, you will need to rebuild the pages without frames or create special No-Frames tags to make sure the site can be indexed, and so on.

This initial analysis will help you to scope the time and costs involved in advance. For those of you optimizing client sites, obtaining accurate answers to these questions BEFORE quoting is absolutely crucial. Otherwise you can find yourself in the middle of a project that you have severely under-quoted for.

The remainder of questions are to establish in advance the who, what, where, when, why and how of the optimization project. This will help you determine the most logical keywords and phrases to target, as well as which search engines to submit the site to.

For those of you optimizing web sites for a living, you might consider developing a questionnaire that you can give clients to complete to ensure you tailor the web site optimization to their exact needs.

Go!

So now you are clear about your motivations for optimizing the site, you know more about the target markets, you know how compatible the existing site is with search engines and how much work is involved in the search engine optimization process. You’re ready to tackle the job!

By Kalena Jordan

Here’s an analogy for you. Yesterday, I was working my butt off in the gym on the cardio machines, panting wildly with sweat dripping off me and my face as red as a beet. Not the most attractive sight, but I figure, you’re at the gym to work out right? I might as well “go hard” or “go home”, as they say.

As I looked around me, I could see all these people simply going through the motions. There they were, minus perspiration in their shiny new lycra and expensive gym shoes, casually walking on the treadmill or lazily turning the wheels on a bike while reading a book or glued to the TV screens in front of them. Only a few seemed to be there for the actual purpose of working out. The rest seemed to be there to check out the talent or to simply keep up the appearance of fitness, while doing the bare minimum.

Huh? I don’t get it. Why have these gym bimbos paid so much money for a gym membership and all the related gear if they aren’t going to take full advantage of their investment?

Then it struck me - these gymbos were just like those companies who spend thousands of dollars on a shiny new website with all the bells and whistles like graphic design, blogs, shopping carts, web analytics, the lot and then fail to take advantage of it. I see it so often, regardless of company size. Web sites that could easily be bringing in loads of traffic and revenue simply wasting away because nobody can be bothered tracking visitor activity, analyzing trends or checking for search engine compatibility and usability.

These companies are simply keeping up appearances, investing heavily in Internet technology because their competitors are doing the same. But no thought has gone into the search engine compatibility of the site, how usable it is for visitors or whether it meets accessibility guidelines. They don’t look at their site statistics, they don’t check for broken links and they sure as heck don’t investigate why their sites aren’t converting traffic into customers. What a waste!

Is your web site working hard enough for you? Run it through the following 20 point fitness assessment to find out:

* Is your site fully search engine compatible? Are all your pages being indexed by the major search engines?

* Do you track your visitor statistics on a regular basis? Do you use the information provided by your visitor statistics to improve your site?

* Is your web site accessible to visually-impaired visitors? Does it meet the international standards set down by the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI)?

* Do you know which sites and search engines provide you with the most traffic? Do you use this information to increase your traffic further?

* Do you track the source of all reported errors in your site statistics and fix them promptly?

* Do you know which keywords your site was found for in the search engines? Have you conducted keyword research to determine what search terms your target markets are looking for so you can optimize for them?

* Does your web site HTML code validate to W3 standards? Do you check for validation regularly?

* Does your site contain zero broken links? Do you check for and fix broken links regularly?

* Has your site been fully search engine optimized to integrate your target search terms into your Page Titles, META Tags and visible page text?

* Have you created and submitted an XML sitemap to Google Sitemaps?

* Have you created and submitted a sitemap to Yahoo Site Explorer?

* Have you checked to see if your site meets Google’s Webmaster Guidelines?

* Do you measure your visitor sign-ups and conversions on a regular basis? Do you tweak your landing page copy to increase the conversion rates?

* Is your site navigation intuitive and are your visitors following the navigation paths you intended?

* Do you encourage feedback from your site visitors and provide an obvious way for them to provide such feedback?

* Are there at least 250 words of text on your home page to satisfy search engines?

* Does your site contain a visible, text-based site map to aid user navigation?

* Do you have an ongoing link building campaign running to secure more incoming links to your site and improve your site’s link popularity score?

* Does your site have a high percentage of repeat visitors? Are the majority of your visitors staying on your site for more than a minute?

* Do your search engine referrals and site traffic figures grow each month?

Unless you can answer yes to all the questions in the above checklist, your web site is not working hard enough for you and needs a workout. Get to it!

By Kalena Jordan

When you write web site content and design your pages, do you truly act with your target audience in mind? Or do you think global and act local?

I am amazed at the number of web sites I see that claim to target a global market, yet design and write their content for a regionally-specific audience. Not sure what I mean? Take the site I saw yesterday, for example. I won’t embarrass the site owners by pointing to the specific domain, but let’s just say the site is based in the U.S. and sells high quality gold chains throughout North America, Europe and Australia.

Now the owner of this site was complaining loudly in a webmaster forum that his pay-per-click campaign was having no luck converting sales from overseas visitors, particularly in the UK and Australia. He had spent a long time developing and tweaking a landing page for the campaign and he couldn’t work out why hardly anyone outside the U.S. was buying. I took a look at his landing page and could see the problems straight away:

1) He used the American English spelling “jewelry” throughout the page without considering that persons who use British English spell it “jewellery”.

2) He provided a toll-free phone number for persons in the U.S. to call, but did not provide any contact phone number for persons located outside the U.S.

3) He used the word “national” throughout the page, immediately isolating anyone outside the U.S.

4) He promoted “free shipping throughout the U.S.” but did not specify shipping costs for persons outside the U.S.

The owner of this site had not even considered that persons outside the U.S. might search for keywords in anything other than American English. It didn’t even occur to him that there may be an alternative spelling of his main keyword and he didn’t think about the logistics for purchasers outside his country. No wonder the page wasn’t converting outside the U.S.! He had made the classic mistake of isolating a large chunk of his audience by sending everyone to a one-size-fits-some page.

What he should have done was to create a separate landing page using British English spelling and shipping/contact information applicable to persons overseas. He could then have set up a unique PPC campaign targeting only UK/Australian searchers with regional keywords and ads leading to the British English landing page.

I see similar problems occur quite often in the online travel industry where you not only have to deal with regional spelling options, but also regional jargon. Think about the word “accommodation”. Apart from the fact the word is commonly misspelled, it is used most often in the UK, Australia and New Zealand to describe places to stay while traveling. In the U.S., the words “accommodations” and “lodging” are more commonly used. Same goes for “holiday” and “vacation”, with the latter being more common in the U.S. The word “traveling” itself is spelled “travelling” in British English! So you can imagine the minefield of problems webmasters must face promoting their travel sites online to a worldwide audience.

I don’t mean to single out a particular country, but Americans seem to find it especially difficult to step outside their regional mindset. I am always receiving emails from the U.S. with helpful suggestions for fixing my “spelling mistakes”.

The funniest email exchange I ever had in relation to this was from an American web designer. She had seen our Australian-based web site (with a .com.au domain) and emailed me to tell me it was “full of errors” and that if I wanted to present a professional business to site visitors, I should correct them. So condescending! I asked her to elaborate and she pointed me to these words she felt were spelled incorrectly:

optimisation
counselling
organised
enrolment
colour
catalogue
favourite
centre

Resisting the urge to use a few offensive words I’m sure she would recognize, I tactfully explained that our site was only targeting the Australian market and that we use British English spelling in Australia. Her response? Perhaps if we wanted to be taken seriously by an international audience, we should consider using the “more proper” American English. Flabbergasted, I pointed out the fact that American English was a derivative of British English and was not widely used outside her own country. Wikipedia has more about the differences between the two here. And let’s not forget that although it is the most common language used on the web, English is used by less than 30 percent of the world’s total Internet users.

The point of this story is that you absolutely have to think outside your market if you are going to advertise on the web. As ignorant as she was, my email friend did make me realize that many of her compatriots might also think our site was full of errors. American English is more common on the web and I’ve since learned to cater to that trend. I try to remember that in all writing I do for the web now, whether it’s in my daily blog, the syndicated articles I write regularly or web page content.

Whenever you design or write for a web site that has an international audience, make sure you address each market. It pays to undertake detailed keyword research into your markets you are targeting so you can capture the correct regional jargon and spelling that people are searching for. Remember it’s not enough to think global, you’ve got to act global too.

by Anna Tulchinsky

If you are responsible for lead generation campaigns at a B2B company, white papers and case studies would always be your best SEO tools.

Assuming that you have already done your keyword analysis, here are some of the things you need to do in order to achieve good SEO results with your white papers and case studies:

1. Try to get your site to contain as many static pages as possible (indexable URLs)
2. Arrange all files in as many directories as you can, do not place them all in the root.
3. Name your directories and your files using your most desired keywords (separate words with underscores)
4. Include your keywords in all Page Titles
5. Include your company name in all Page Titles

6. Do not worry about META tags if you don’t know how to add them, your Page Title is your most important tag
7. Include your keywords in H1s, H2, and H3s. Make sure you use these tags!
8. Create a style format where each title of a PDF document is accompanied by a short abstract, as opposed to being a simple link, and use keywords
9. Add both an ‘abstract’ and a ’summary’ component to your white paper template, this will allow you to use your keywords multiple times without annoying your readers
10.Add a ‘table of contents’ component to your white paper template, this is a great way to repeat your keywords again

11. Add a ‘company name’ component in the footer of your white paper template and provide your website URL
12. Interlink your site’s internal pages as often as you can (e.g. use margins and place “Related Info” boxes with links to other pages on your site)
13. Your links should have your keyword embedded within, do not use “click here”
14. Try to ensure that each page (i.e. each URL) has approximately 500 words on it with your most important keywords repeated 10-12 times per page
15. Make sure all your press releases contain your most important keywords and are published in full on your website

16. Give out your white papers to your partners and customers and try to get them to post it on their websites
17. Add an RSS component to your website and place each white paper there
18. Register your RSS feed in as many RSS directories as possible
19. Convince your management to allow you to distribute your RSS content via PRweb.com or PR.com. Do this in addition to using your company’s official PR firm.
20. Use PayPerPost and similar services to earn back links on the cheap (bloggers will publish comments about your company and a link to your website on their blogs; make sure to request permanent links)
About the Author
Anna Tulchinsky is an Internet Marketing and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) expert, specializing in web-based lead generation and sales strategies since 2001. She is the president of annatulchinsky.com, an SEO Ottawa firm.

By Kalena Jordan

With the increasing uptake of social media sites such as Digg, Technorati, Slashdot, YouTube and MySpace, together with community bookmarking sites like Del.icio.us, Reddit and Ma.gnolia, companies the world over can reach their target markets via a whole new channel.

Social networking is like viral marketing on steroids. Companies can release a new product in the morning and have it talked about by millions of users on thousands of sites by the afternoon.

The good news is that social media is user driven. The bad news is that social media is user driven. Yes, there’s the rub. Users are fickle creatures - they can love a product one minute and then drop it like a lead balloon the next, depending on their experience with the product, a rumor, or whether they have had their morning coffee yet. And if their experience is bad, the noise is generally louder. To protect their reputations it’s not just journalists that companies have to impress these days. It’s anyone with a computer and an Internet connection. Love it or hate it, the user community now has enormous power over the online reputation of a company or brand.

Not surprisingly, businesses and individuals alike clamor for the attention and mostly enjoy the limelight that social media can bring. Others hate the intense scrutiny that often accompanies the popularity. An example is usability blogger Kim Krause Berg’s unpleasant first experience of Digg - I Don’t Digg Being Dugg.

Online communities can even bring a site to its knees. Marketers are calling it the “Digg Effect” or the “Slashdot Effect”. Buzz for a site can cause more than good or bad publicity. As Kim found out, the effect can cause traffic overload sometimes resulting in site downtime and lost business.

Social media can also kill the reputation of a brand instantly. Take the Microsoft Windows Vista Laptop Scandal for instance. No stranger to the benefits of social media, Microsoft had allegedly tried to exploit the power of the blogosphere at the end of last year, by sending a number of A-list bloggers a free Acer Ferrari laptop loaded with the yet-to-be-released Windows Vista and Office 2007.

The pitch was a request for the bloggers to “review” the new Windows software in their influential blogs. Many bloggers did write a review, but some did not disclose their free gift. When this fact was discovered later, the bloggers were hammered by large portions of the blogosphere for what they saw as a clear conflict of interest. Microsoft were tagged both literally and figuratively as bribers and Windows Vista was widely panned with parody tag lines such as “Vista: So Bad We Had to Give it Away”. Not a great start to an online product release.

Another example of the damage that social networking can do to a company’s online reputation is the National Pork Board of America’s recent battle with breastfeeding advocate and well-known blogger Jennifer Laycock. Jennifer was sent a harshly worded letter from the Pork Board’s representing counsel, threatening her with legal action for allegedly stealing their pro-pork slogan “Pork: The Other White Meat” in a pro-breastfeeding t-shirt she had designed that read “The Other White Milk”.

The letter suggested that their case for trademark infringement was probably solid. Unfortunately for the Pork Board, the poorly-worded letter also suggested that they were insensitive to breastfeeding mothers and the plight of starving infants. The Pork Board didn’t count on Jennifer’s influence in the blogosphere and the power of social networking to carry her defiant response to the world. The Pork Board ended up receiving bags of hate mail and thousands of flame emails via their online contact form, forcing them to issue a public apology to Jennifer from the Board’s CEO and a generous donation to the Mother’s Milk Bank of Ohio in order to save face.

To their credit, the Pork Board did the right thing. They also made sure that all persons who complained about their approach to Jennifer received a polite, measured email response from the CEO. As a former PR consultant myself, I tip my hat at them. Having the apology come from the very top is smart. It demonstrates how seriously they took the complaints. The wording of the complainant response is polite and restrained. Addressing each and every complainer personally is impressive. It would’ve been tempting to ignore all the flames and issue some stock standard release.

Their choice of legal team may have been questionable, but the Pork Board’s public relations team mobilized quickly, upgraded to full damage control mode and did a great job of mopping up the PR mess before it spread too far. Social media might have damaged them, but the Pork Board’s reputation was ultimately salvaged by quick thinking and a swift online response.

Such situations underscore the growing importance of online reputation management (ORM) in our Web 2.0, social media-driven world. Companies should be tracking their online reputation on a daily basis to check for negative commentary via social media in order to avert potential PR disasters. Major search marketing players such as Andy Beal recognized the potential growth in ORM a long time ago. But I wonder how many PR/Search Marketing agencies currently offer this service?

With brand reputation increasingly at risk, you can be sure the smart agencies will be adding ORM to their service offerings faster than you can say “Can you Digg it?”

By Kalena Jordan

Is your web site search engine compatible? Despite all the misinformation out there, it’s very easy to design a web site that search engines will love. All you need to do is follow 3 simple steps:

1) Obey the Search Engine Guidelines

Nearly all search engines publish their own guidelines regarding the submission of sites, the type of sites they will accept and recommendations for optimized content. Google recently updated their Webmaster Guidelines which cover the most common forms of deceptive or manipulative search engine behavior that they consider to be ’spam’. They also published SEO Guidelines – advice for webmasters to heed when choosing an SEO. Google was the first search engine to publicly acknowledge search engine optimizers in this fashion.

It’s not just Google publishing anti-spam guidelines. You’ll find them at the following search engine sites as well:

* Yahoo terms of service
* Yahoo guidelines on search engine spam (covering AltaVista and AllTheWeb as well)
* Yahoo definitions of search engine spam (covering AltaVista and AllTheWeb as well)
* Yahoo content guidelines
* MSN Search webmaster guidelines
* AltaVista terms of use (AltaVista is a Yahoo-owned company)
* Ask.com terms of service and spam policy
* Ask.com editorial guidelines

2) Don’t Use Spammy Search Engine Tactics

Often, webmasters will use search engine spam techniques without even being aware that they are doing so. Or worse, web designers can - advertently or inadvertently - integrate techniques that could cause a site to be penalized in the site’s rankings in one or more engines, without the site owner’s knowledge of such penalties. The key to avoiding spamming the engines is research.
Keep track of the various search engine guidelines via the links above. Watch for any changes they make to these guidelines and tweak your site accordingly. Trawl the various webmaster and search engine forums regularly to ensure your site doesn’t use any of the latest optimization methods that appear to be penalized. If you suspect your site has been penalized, remove the offending content, contact the engine concerned and ask to be reinstated.

Google actually encourage you to file a re-inclusion request via their Help Center and this post by Google staffer Matt Cutts outlines what should be included.

Alternatively, here is a sample email template you can use instead:

——————————————–
Sample Re-inclusion Request Email

Dear [search engine name],

I am the owner of [your site URL].

I did not realize that participation in [spammy method] and
[spammy SEO name] programs could cause problems for my website. I was
assured that these techniques were search-engine-friendly by [your source for using spammy method].

I now understand that the practices used are not acceptable. I apologize for having allowed them to be placed on my website. I’ve removed the questionable pages and links from the site. I promise not to repeat such mistakes.

I am asking you to please consider reinstating my website,
[your site URL] into the [search engine name] Index.

Sincerely,

[Your Name]
——————————————

To assist them to provide a high quality service, search engines encourage people to report search results they are dissatisfied with. If you spot some content spam or techniques that are clearly in breach of the search engine’s public guidelines, you can report it using these links:

* Google spam report or via search-quality@google.com
* AllTheWeb relevancy problem report (AllTheWeb is a Yahoo-owned company)
* AltaVista search results manipulation report (or via Yahoo’s spam report)
* Yahoo spam report
* Ask.com spam report or via information@ask.com

3) Build Sites for Visitors Rather than Search Engines

The methodologies may have changed over the years, but the same principles have always applied to “good” or “white hat” SEO. Build sites for humans, not search engines. Make the site as user friendly as possible, avoid the bells and whistles and include high quality, relevant content.

Wherever possible, include text-based content and navigation menus with simple, descriptive, well-written copy designed to convert your visitors into customers. Include keywords and phrases your audience would logically type in to search engines to find sites like yours. Only link to sites that are relevant to your target audience and spend some time on usability, making sure all your forms and shopping carts work.

Remember that what pleases a visitor is almost always what pleases a search engine too.

By Kalena Jordan

In this article, I’m going to show you step-by-step how to create search engine optimized Titles and META Tags. This is a two part article. This part discusses the Title Element, also known as the Title Element. (Click here to read Part Two).

The TITLE Element

TITLE elements, (commonly called TITLE Tags), are one of the most important factors that search engines “look” at when it comes to determining the relevancy of a web page against a search query. In their ranking algorithms, nearly all the major search engines attribute a high relevancy weight to the content of the TITLE tag.

In the HTML code of a web site, TITLE tags look like this one for a fictional florist:

[TITLE]Miami Florists - beautiful floral creations made to order.[/TITLE]

(Please note that square brackets [ ] have been used in place of open and closing tags < > to prevent this page code from breaking. You’ll need to replace all square brackets with open and closing tags.)

To view the HTML code of any site, choose “View, Source” from your browser toolbar or right click anywhere on the page and choose “view source code”.

The META Description Tag

META Description Tags are designed to describe the content of web pages. Search engine robots will gather up this information when indexing web sites and often use it when referencing web pages in the search listings.

While not all search engines continue to utilize the META Description Tag, a majority of search engines rely on the content of this tag (together with a site’s visible content) to provide information about a site that they can match with search queries. It is therefore important for webmasters to include keywords and phrases in the META description that they would expect searchers to use to find their site content.

In the HTML code of a web site, a sample META Description Tag looks like this:

[META name=”description” content=”Miami Florists create beautiful floral bouquets, arrangements, tributes and displays for all occasions, including weddings, Valentines Day, parties and corporate events. Deliveries throughout Florida.”]

You can view the META Description Tag of a site by viewing the source code.

The META Keywords Tag

While only indexed by a small handful of search engines these days, the META Keywords Tag is still worth including within a site’s HTML code, if only to provide those search engines with as much information as possible about site content.

In the HTML code of a web site, a sample META Keywords Tag looks like this:

[META name=”keywords” content=”flowers, roses, weddings bouquets, florists, floral arrangements, flower deliveries, Valentines Day gifts, Christmas decorations, Mother’s Day, tributes, wreaths, clutches, sprays, in sympathy, funerals, corporate functions, parties, floral displays, Miami, Florida”]

The current lack of support for the META Keywords Tag by so many search engines can be attributed to increasing spam abuse by ignorant webmasters. These webmasters thought the keyword tag was a good place to stuff hundreds of keywords in the hope of achieving a higher search ranking, thereby “spamming” the search engines with useless, non-relevant data. This prompted many search engines to filter out the META Keywords Tag or lower its importance within the ranking algorithm.

You can view the META Keywords Tag of a site by viewing the source code.

Create Your Own Optimized Tags

Now, it’s time to create optimized TITLE and META Tags for your own site. Let’s start with the TITLE Tag for your Home Page.

Create Your TITLE Tag

Take the list of target keywords and phrases that you want your web site to be found for in search engines. You should have already allocated them to the appropriate pages of your site to be optimized. I use a spreadsheet for this purpose but you should use whatever works for you.

Now, open a text file in Notepad or something similar. If you like, you can use an existing sample TITLE Tag as your template. Let’s say our existing Title is:

[TITLE]Miami Florists - beautiful floral creations made to order.[/TITLE]

Now take your list of keywords for the home page and put them in order of importance, with the ones you want to rank highest for at the top. For our fictional florist these are:

- florists Miami
- florists Florida
- wedding bouquets

Now you are simply going to combine these keywords into a sentence or short blurb so they make the best use of the keyword real estate available. Always try to use as few words as possible in your Title Tags, because each additional keyword dilutes the ranking relevancy of all the others.

In this case, I would initially combine the keywords as follows:

Florists in Miami Florida specializing in wedding bouquets.

Notice how I’ve got the keywords in the correct order for the search queries? I’ve tried to include the most important keywords towards the start of the tag. There was no need for me to repeat the keyword “Florists” more than once because the sentence I’ve used covers both “Florists Miami” and “Florists Florida”. Most search engines will ignore “in” as a stop word, so it shouldn’t matter that we’ve included it.

Although it’s tempting to put a comma between Miami and Florida, on some search engines commas act as a keyword separator, so we don’t want to use one here because we don’t want “Florists” and “Florida” to be separated.

Now, there is just one problem with this draft Title. Our 3rd keyword phrase “wedding bouquets” is right at the end of the sentence, meaning it may lose some relevancy weight (search engines consider keywords closer to the start of the tag as the most important). How do we fix this? Let’s try this:

Florists in Miami Florida - wedding bouquets a specialty.

We don’t want to use a period after “Florida” for the same reason that we don’t use a comma. But a hyphen should not make a difference to search engines yet still allow the sentence to read logically to a searcher. So now we have our three target keyword phrases covered in a very short space.

In fact, the above sentence now covers the following keyword combinations:

- florists Miami
- florists Florida
- florists in Miami
- florists in Florida
- florists in Miami Florida
- wedding bouquets
- Miami wedding bouquets
- Florida wedding bouquets

When integrating your keywords, remember that their order is important. If you want your site to have the best possible chance of being found for the search query “Miami florists”, you need to put the keywords in that exact order and not “florists Miami”, because the spider searches the keywords in exact order. Unless they are stop words, also try to avoid using extra words between your keywords.

If you wanted to, you could integrate your company name into the Title tag, but (unless your company name is super short or includes a keyword), don’t sacrifice a keyword to do so. Instead, try placing the company name at the end of the tag so you can be sure that all your important keywords will be indexed first.

In the case of our florist, let’s imagine their name was Funky Florists. We could easily accommodate the name into the beginning of our optimized Title as follows:

[TITLE]Funky Florists in Miami Florida - wedding bouquets a specialty.[/TITLE]

It may reduce the keyword relevancy impact very slightly, but including your company name enables you to brand your page, which may be more important to you.

The content of the Title Tag is also what gets saved in a person’s Favorite’s list when they bookmark your site, so having your company name included is worth considering from a branding perspective.

In Part 2 of this article, I will show you how to create your optimized META Description and META Keywords Tags.

By Kalena Jordan

In Part 1 of this article, I defined Title Elements and META Tags and took you step-by-step through how to create an optimized Title Element. Now it’s time to create your optimized META Description and META Keywords Tags.

Create Your META Description Tag

Now it’s time to create your optimized META Description Tag.

Take your list of target keywords and phrases and open another text file. Again, you can use an existing sample META Description Tag as your template. Let’s say our existing description is:

[META name=”description” content=”Miami Florists create beautiful floral bouquets, arrangements, tributes and displays for all occasions, including weddings, Valentines Day, parties and corporate events. Deliveries throughout Florida.”]

You can make your META Description Tag as long as you like, but only a certain portion of it will get indexed and displayed by search engines. According to Danny Sullivan in his article How to Use HTML Meta Tags, 200 to 250 characters of the META Description gets indexed but less than that gets displayed, depending on the search engine. So you want to make sure all your important keywords are listed towards the start of the tag.

Now take your list of keywords for the home page in order of importance. For our fictional florist these were:

- florists Miami
- florists Florida
- wedding bouquets

Now you need to create a readable sentence or two describing your web site and incorporating these keywords so they make the best use of the keyword real estate available.

Because search engines often display the contents of the META Description Tag in the search results, it is very important that your sentences make grammatical sense and are enticing enough to encourage readers to click on your link. Let’s start with:

If you’re seeking a florist in Miami Florida, Funky Florists create unforgettable wedding bouquets, floral arrangements, tributes and displays for all occasions.

Ok, so that’s around 150 characters long and gets our three important keyword phrases included. But it’s a bit bland. We need to add something to entice the searcher to click on it. How about:

Order online for a 10 percent discount!

So now we have the following completed META Description Tag:

[META name=”description” content=”If you’re seeking a florist in Miami Florida, Funky Florists create unforgettable wedding bouquets, floral arrangements, tributes and displays for all occasions. Order online for a 10 percent discount!”]

Our new tag is optimized for our keyword phrases, it’s around 200 characters in length, it describes our site accurately, it speaks to the reader and it (hopefully) entices them to click on the link and view the site.

Create Your META Keywords Tag

We’re almost there. Now it’s time to create your optimized META Keywords Tag. Let me stress here that this Tag is quite unimportant in the grand scheme of things. Not many of the search crawlers even support it any more. You can see which ones do on this page. If you have the time and you really want to create META Keywords tags for your pages, then go ahead, but if not, then leave them out of your code altogether. This tag will have very little impact on your overall SEO campaign.

Assuming you do want to create a Keywords tag, take your list of target keywords and phrases and open another text file. Again, you can use an existing sample META Keywords Tag as your template. Let’s say our existing Keywords Tag is:

[META name=”keywords” content=”flowers, roses, weddings bouquets, florists, floral arrangements, flower deliveries, Valentines Day gifts, Christmas decorations, Mother’s Day, tributes, wreaths, clutches, sprays, in sympathy, funerals, corporate functions, parties, floral displays, Miami, Florida”]

You are just including a list of related keywords to include in this tag. Now take your list of keywords for the home page in order of importance. For our fictional florist these were:

- florists Miami
- florists Florida
- wedding bouquets

Because you have a lot more room in this tag, a good rule of thumb for creating a META Keywords Tag is to include the keywords and phrases your are targeting with your site content, as well as some terms that you don’t necessarily want to use in your site copy but are still relevant to the site content. For example, the site copy, TITLE and META description tags would include the most important search keywords, but the META Keywords Tag could be used for keyword variations and combinations that don’t appear in the visible site text, but that people may also search for. Examples include plurals, contractions, slang, variations, misspellings, cultural nuances and industry jargon.

For our fictional florist, these may include things like:

- wedding flowers
- roses
- wedding roses
- Valentine’s Day roses
- sympathy gifts
- Mother’s Day gifts
- funeral wreaths
- flower deliveries
- floral arrangements
- birthday gifts
- flowers
- flowers for wedding
- wedding decorations

So now we have the following draft META Keywords Tag:

[META name=”keywords” content=”florists Miami, florists Florida, wedding bouquets, wedding flowers, roses, wedding roses, Valentine’s Day roses, sympathy gifts, Mother’s Day gifts, funeral wreaths, flower deliveries, floral arrangements, birthday gifts, flowers, flowers for wedding, wedding decorations”]

However, when creating your Keywords Tag, you should not repeat any particular keywords within your META Keywords Tag more than five times and exclude commas so that all your keywords can be indexed in combination with each other.

So we need to fix the draft tag to remove the excess repetition of the words “flowers” and “weddings”. This is easy to do because some of the keyword phrases already incorporate these single generic keywords.

For starters, we can lose the single “flowers” as it is already covered by some of the other phrases like “wedding flowers”. Next, we can drop “roses” for the same reason. Then we can combine some keyword phrases together to save space, e.g. “flowers for wedding” and “wedding decorations” can be integrated to become “flowers for wedding decorations” so we can lose the extra instance of “wedding”.

So now we have the following completed META Keywords Tag:

[META name=”keywords” content=”florists Miami florists Florida wedding bouquets wedding flowers wedding roses Valentine’s Day roses sympathy gifts Mother’s Day gifts funeral wreaths flower deliveries floral arrangements birthday gifts flowers for wedding decorations”]

Tailored TITLE and META Tags

While some webmasters remember to include a META Description and a META Keywords Tag in their home page HTML code, many forget to include them on every page of the site that they want indexed. Or worse, they duplicate the homepage TITLE and META Tags on all other pages. To give a web site the best ranking ability possible, it is highly recommended that each page of the site include a unique TITLE tag and unique META tags, individually tailored to the content of that specific page.

For example, our fictional Miami florist may have a page devoted to wedding bouquets and another devoted to funeral wreaths. The TITLE and META tags for the first page should include keywords relating to weddings and the page about wreaths should utilize keywords relating to funerals and sympathy.

The use of tailored TITLE and META Tags on each page creates multiple entry points to a web site and enables relevant content to be found in search engines no matter where it resides on a site. For example, instead of relying on visitors to arrive via the Home Page, the optimization of individual site pages makes each page more visible in the search engines, providing additional gateways to the site’s content. The more pages optimized, the wider the range of keywords and phrases that can be targeted and the more entry points are created to a site.

By Kalena Jordan

Search engines read text and not much else. Because they can’t generally index graphics, search engines rely on the text in web sites to provide information about the site content, which they can compare with search queries.

Webmasters therefore need to use body text on any pages on the site that they want indexed by the search engines and ranked highly for matching search queries. Not graphical text that was created in design software, but actual, visible body text. Not sure if your site uses graphical or body text? A good rule of thumb that I learnt from search engine guru Danny Sullivan is to try and highlight the text with your mouse. If you can drag your mouse over individual words in the text when viewing it in a browser, chances are this is body text and the search engines can read it.

Figure 1

Figure 2

The most important page on which to use body text is the home page. Above is an example of a home page that uses graphical text instead of body text. Figure 1 shows what content the site visitors see, while Figure 2 shows the content a search engine sees and indexes.

How much information about a site’s content does a page like the one above provide a search engine? That’s right, very little. With next to no text to be found, the search engine would have to rely on the page’s Title and META Tags to tell it what the page is about. With such little information to go on, it is unlikely that a search engine would consider this page a relevant match for search queries relating to its content. To remedy this, it is widely recommended that each web page you want listed in search engines should contain at least 250 words of visible body text.

Keyword-Rich Text

While it’s a good idea to use plenty of body text on web pages, if that text doesn’t contain relevant keywords and phrases that people type in to the search engines, there’s not much point, because a site isn’t going to be found for logical search queries anyway. Many web sites make the mistake of including text on their site that is either unrelated to their products and services, or full of marketing-speak like “Internet solutions” or “superior services”. The Internet is plagued with web sites selling particular items without once making reference to those items in their site text. Weird huh?

For a search engine to find a site relevant for a particular search query, it MUST find that search query somewhere in that site. The easiest way to ensure this is to include logical keywords and phrases within the visible text on web pages, as well as in the Title and META tags. The best way for webmasters to find keywords that searchers are actually using is by conducting keyword research of their target market on a site such as Keyword Discovery or WordTracker.

Once it is determined what search terms perspective visitors are commonly typing in to search engines, they can then be compared to the goods and services offered on the site and the body text can be adjusted accordingly. Sites lacking any keyword research tend to use very generic, unfocused body copy, or sales-oriented “hype”. Neither style contributes to high search engine rankings.

Target keywords and search phrases placed strategically throughout your body copy give your pages a much higher ranking potential on search engines for related searches. But it’s not as easy as throwing the keywords into your site text willy-nilly. You must ensure that the keywords are integrated seamlessly so their repetition is unobvious and so that the text flows smoothly for the reader.

Don’t compromise the readability of your copy to achieve this - hire an expert copywriter to strike the right balance if need be.

SEO Copywriting

Before writing your web site copy, you should research potential keywords and phrases that your target audience may use in search engines and then narrow the list down to your priority terms for each page, sorted in order of importance. You should then use those target search terms as a basis for the creation of optimized Title and META tags for each page on your site. Once you’ve done that, it’s time to integrate those same target search terms into your visible web page copy. We call this SEO copywriting. But exactly how do we do it?

Speak to Your Audience

Don’t lose site of the reader when writing your body copy. Integrating your keywords is important, but not if you are sacrificing the readability of your site and losing the attention of your audience. Put yourself in their shoes like you did when researching your keywords. What are they looking for? What do they need? How will your product/service help them? Does it represent value for money?

Be emotive when describing your products and services. Describe how your product/service will make them feel or look, how it will improve their lives, give them more time etc. Use trigger words that people respond to such as “free”, “success”, “you”, “cash” etc. Not sure what these are? Check out Words That Sell reports. These reports are perfect if you are targeting a specific industry or profession because they define what keywords people in over 38 industries respond to and what they expect when making a buying decision.

Not sure who your audience is or what they’re looking for? Why not ask them? Use a free survey service such as Survey Monkey to learn more about them so you can write “to” them and not “at” them. You could even draft various styles of body copy and obtain feedback from your site visitors to determine what copywriting style works better for them.

Use Easy to Understand Language

The Internet is no place for verbosity. People are in a hurry - they want to find what they seek quickly and easily with the least hassle possible. You can help them in this quest by ensuring your site pages use simple language and easy to grasp concepts throughout. For example instead of “brand-building web information architects”, use “website designers specializing in brand promotion”. Keep the large chunks of text on each page to a minimum, using bullet points, white space, graphics, lists and sub-headings to break it up and make it easier to read. This rule of thumb is especially important when creating landing pages for pay per click and other advertising campaigns.

Use examples to get your main points across or to demonstrate your product benefits. Use the old WIIFM (What’s In It For Me?) adage when composing your body copy to keep the user’s interests at top of mind. Remember your international visitors by incorporating regional word usage (such as organize versus organize or jewelry versus jewellery) and avoid technical jargon that could alienate. Want your visitor to take a particular action? Spell it out for them in plain English, for example Click here to Buy Now, Subscribe to our free newsletter, Bookmark this page now etc. These references are called “Calls to Action”.

Build Your Copy Around Your Keywords

You should always build your page copy around your keywords and not the other way around. If your existing page copy doesn’t contain any of your target search keywords, you’re going to have to rewrite it! Start from scratch if you have to. The secret is to focus. Search engines aren’t going to rank your web site about socks highly if your body copy talks about foot sizes. You need to get specific. It sounds really obvious, but if you sell socks, make sure your site copy has plenty of references to the word socks! If you sell green wool socks, target the phrase “green wool socks” and not “foot apparel in lovely shades of emerald”! Who’s going to search for socks using that phrase?

At the risk of sounding like Dr Seuss, if you want to be found for, big socks, small socks, cotton socks and wool socks, then mention them all. Better still, sort your copy into categories based on your various products and services. If you sell wool socks AND cotton socks, then have a page dedicated to each kind. This allows you to target niche keywords within your copy and meet the search engine’s relevancy guidelines for related search queries.

Keyword Integration

So imagine you’ve added plenty of text to your pages and the copy flows well for the reader. You’ve researched your keywords and phrases and now you’re faced with the dilemma of integrating the keywords into your copy. So how do you satisfy the search engine’s craving for keywords without interrupting the copy flow for the reader? The answer is: very carefully.

Let’s take a look at a practical example. We have a client that specializes in luxury adventure travel. Before I optimized their site, part of the home page copy read like this:

“We specialize in providing vacations for people who want a personal service. We bring to our efforts a fanatical obsession with quality and exclusivity. We also bring a freshness, an outward-going passion for discovery which justifies our growing reputation as one of the world’s top travel providers. We can put together packages that include all adventure activities, accommodation, transport and food”.

Extensive Keyword Discovery keyword research for the client had determined that the site should target the following key phrases:

• adventure travel
• best adventure vacations
• tailored travel
• overseas adventure travel
• luxury travel packages

So taking our original home page text, the challenge was to integrate these keywords carefully and naturally so as not to disturb the logical flow of the copy and lose the interest of the visitor. Here’s how I did it:

“We specialize in providing the best adventure vacations for people who want a personal and tailored travel service. We bring to our efforts a fanatical obsession with quality and exclusivity. We also bring a freshness, an outward-going passion for discovery which justifies our growing reputation as one of the world’s top overseas adventure travel providers. We can put together luxury travel packages that include all adventure activities, accommodation, transport and food”.

Note that the key phrase “overseas adventure travel” accommodates the phrase “adventure travel” too. Voila! The search engines are happy because the site contains text content relevant to related search queries, the client is happy because we were able to integrate the keywords without distracting the visitor and I’m happy because I know the site is going to rank highly for the client’s target search terms.

Now it’s your turn – go tackle your web site copy!

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About the Author:

Article by Kalena Jordan, one of the first search engine optimization experts in Australia, who is well known and respected in the industry, particularly in the U.S. As well as running a daily Search Engine Advice Column, Kalena manages Search Engine College - an online training institution offering instructor-led short courses and downloadable self-study courses in Search Engine Optimization and other Search Engine Marketing subjects.
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