Do It Yourself SEO

[Nicolet]

Nice tips. I'll start on that as soon as I finish my site. Or would you like to do it for me? Kidding

[draligus]

nice tips, thanks

[Brazzell Marketing]

I'll share one tip and then ask a question.

Where Yahoo and MSN are concerned, the keywords in your title tag are super-important, but you should only put one to three words. This will give you dominance when people type short search phrases that match your title. With Yahoo, the index page has the most important title tag. Check out the title tags on my website below and run the searches in Yahoo and MSN to see what I mean. This only applies to Yahoo and MSN.

Question: Are you saying that Google has a hard time finding pages in a folder containing an underline as part of the folder name? I find this interesting and perhaps annoying considering my Microsoft WYSIWYG editor automatically puts pages in a folder labeled "index_files."

[John Scott]

Question: Are you saying that Google has a hard time finding pages in a folder containing an underline as part of the folder name? I find this interesting and perhaps annoying considering my Microsoft WYSIWYG editor automatically puts pages in a folder labeled "index_files."

http://www.internet-marketing-blog.c...words-in-urls/

Google doesn't parse keywords in URL's when they are run together, or when they are seperated by an underscore.

[Brazzell Marketing]

Got it. Thanks.

[THE X FILES]

<meta name="ROBOTS" content="index,follow">
<META NAME="RESOURCE-TYPE" CONTENT="DOCUMENT">
<META NAME="DISTRIBUTION" CONTENT="GLOBAL">
<META NAME="REVISIT-AFTER" CONTENT="1 DAYS">

I saw you didn`t metion this,so is it not important?

[costa blanca]

i always use the code: For me i think its very important if written correctly.

[THE X FILES]

Originally Posted by costa blanca

i always use the code: For me i think its very important if written correctly.

ummm,is the code above not correct?

[bdunndchi]

Great tips everyone. I appreciate all of them.

[Sadu]

Can't say I usually bother with all those additional meta tags.

Meta description is an absolute must. It often becomes your snippet in a search result so use text that will draw people in - and include your desired search phrase of course.

Meta keywords are much less important, though I sometimes use them anyway. My opinion is that you shouldn't bother with meta keywords until you are satisfied that all other on-page factors are 100%. Time is much better spend on titles or body content than on meta keywords.

"Index,follow" is the default anyway, and Googlebot is in charge of when it revisits your website. Just because you say you want to be visited daily, doesn't make it so.

I'd rather leave the 200 or so characters of extra meta tags off my HTML file, and have my page load a teeny bit faster.

[John Scott]

Originally Posted by THE X FILES

<meta name="ROBOTS" content="index,follow">
<META NAME="RESOURCE-TYPE" CONTENT="DOCUMENT">
<META NAME="DISTRIBUTION" CONTENT="GLOBAL">
<META NAME="REVISIT-AFTER" CONTENT="1 DAYS">

I saw you didn`t metion this,so is it not important?

No, those are not important.

[Vern]

hi Sadu,

though you got only 1 post. I'd say it's pretty helpful to
clarify the thread a little more.

Hey John,

Do you agree with that post and if you have any of
your helpful insights to add on there ?

[Forsh]

I didn't realize the meta description was so important, I actually spend more time on the keywords! Time to go back through everything.

[John Scott]

The Meta description isn't so important for SE rankings, except perhaps on Yahoo. But it can be very effective for increasing click through's from the search results pages.

[Marcus_Westberg]

For some sites it can actually be better without the M-description since Google then fetches the keywords automaticly from your cached text.

[Sadu]

Hi Vern, I'm new here, but have spent a lot of time experimenting with meta descriptions.

One of the more interesting things I found on my travels was a site with a keyword packed meta description, which was then the same on every page (not my site).

The site's SEO company then linked to the site from their own quite powerful links page. They included a clickable link with good anchor text, and by the link was a block of descriptive text about the link (as is the standard fashion). The descriptive text on this links page was the meta description copy-pasted.

I found that if you googled for any phrase within that meta desc, the SEO company's website would show top 20, and the actual site would not show at all. He was blocking his client's site via duplicate content without realising it.

This would not happen if...
1. A different meta desc had been used on every page, or no meta description used at all.
2. He had not copy-pasted the meta desc when he added the link.

After removing the link on the SEO company's site and waiting for the cache to update, the client's site appeared top 20 for all phrases concerned.

I learned a very important lesson here...

1. Never use sitewide meta descriptions. Write them properly or leave them blank. If you do use sitewide meta descriptions, you are setting yourself up to be burned by your black hat competetion.
2. Never link to your own site using text found on your site. When you are doing directory submissions, that sentence of description text needs to be fairly unique.

So I stand by my statement above - meta description is very important. Not because Google gives it lots of weight, but because (as John's link says) it usually becomes your result snippet, and you can tailor it to look good to a person. Marcus is also correct - Google does an ok job of making a snippet out of body text. So don't write a meta description if you can't do a better job than Google's default snippet. Personally, having "..." in the middle of my snippet really annoys me so I like to write proper meta descriptions to avoid this.

I also stand by the statement that titles, page content, nice URLs and everything else is more important than meta keywords. Personally, I use a script to make up a meta keyword tag out of the page content. Once again, I think uniqueness across the site is desirable, but I have no proof of this.

[Bluecircle]

Originally Posted by Sadu

Hi Vern, I'm new here, but have spent a lot of time experimenting with meta descriptions.

One of the more interesting things I found on my travels was a site with a keyword packed meta description, which was then the same on every page (not my site).

The site's SEO company then linked to the site from their own quite powerful links page. They included a clickable link with good anchor text, and by the link was a block of descriptive text about the link (as is the standard fashion). The descriptive text on this links page was the meta description copy-pasted.

I found that if you googled for any phrase within that meta desc, the SEO company's website would show top 20, and the actual site would not show at all. He was blocking his client's site via duplicate content without realising it.

This would not happen if...
1. A different meta desc had been used on every page, or no meta description used at all.
2. He had not copy-pasted the meta desc when he added the link.

After removing the link on the SEO company's site and waiting for the cache to update, the client's site appeared top 20 for all phrases concerned.

I learned a very important lesson here...

1. Never use sitewide meta descriptions. Write them properly or leave them blank. If you do use sitewide meta descriptions, you are setting yourself up to be burned by your black hat competetion.
2. Never link to your own site using text found on your site. When you are doing directory submissions, that sentence of description text needs to be fairly unique.

So I stand by my statement above - meta description is very important. Not because Google gives it lots of weight, but because (as John's link says) it usually becomes your result snippet, and you can tailor it to look good to a person. Marcus is also correct - Google does an ok job of making a snippet out of body text. So don't write a meta description if you can't do a better job than Google's default snippet. Personally, having "..." in the middle of my snippet really annoys me so I like to write proper meta descriptions to avoid this.

I also stand by the statement that titles, page content, nice URLs and everything else is more important than meta keywords. Personally, I use a script to make up a meta keyword tag out of the page content. Once again, I think uniqueness across the site is desirable, but I have no proof of this.

Very helpful, thanks!

[THE X FILES]

Originally Posted by John Scott

The Meta description isn't so important for SE rankings, except perhaps on Yahoo. But it can be very effective for increasing click through's from the search results pages.

Yes I used all meta codes I know to test it and get very good position in yahoo, actually it up me to 2# in some keywords just when the page indexed!

But google is the real problem, it display it in the first page 10# for just two keywords I think ....
May be when the page rank of the page up will give good posion to it ...

[THE X FILES]

And happey Birthday John

[CJ Jefferson]

Originally Posted by Sadu

2. Never link to your own site using text found on your site. When you are doing directory submissions, that sentence of description text needs to be fairly unique.

Hey Sadu, great post. I think this would be the case if you have a relatively new site and you are getting links from an older/trusted directory. If you're an older/trusted site it will matter less, because you should outrank the directory anyway.