Social SEO
There has been a lot of talk about social media and social book marking as taking over the tradition SEO industry. While it is true that some of the major social media sites are taking over the top listings in Google.
These days it isn’t unheard of to see multiple listings for the same content that has been linked to from the various sites like Digg and Boxxet. Sure these sites will help you get your content spread all over the search engines but is it the same as getting your page to rank high in the search engines? The short answer is no.
You see the reality is this; your content will rise to the top of the engines quite quickly but not for your site, it will be for the social sites that are hosting the snippets of content from your site. Good for the social site and if anybody actually visits those links, it could be good for your site as well.
Another way that this is different is in the amount of time that your content stays at the top of the search engines. At the time of this writing these social sites usually were ranking for about 2 weeks before they disappeared from any meaningful rankings. This is not too bad for content that has a short shelf life but what about content that has a longer shelf life… not so good.
Also, how long do you really think it will be before Google steps in to the fray to deal with what in essence is nothing more than duplicate content diluting their so called “quality results”? Does anybody truly need 20 or 30 listings to the same story spread over just as many social domains? I think not. Do I take advantage of it? I sure do!
Now what about SEO – is that going to disappear as a marketing tool? The quick answer is hell no. If you were given a choice on getting your site/pages to rank at the top of Google for years or weeks I am pretty sure which of way you would go.
Back in 2004 I obtained top 3 rankings for some fairly competitive gambling related terms in Google and those sites have had almost no updating or link building since then and yet they remain at the top of Google. You are not going to get that kind of sustained ranking with social book marking.
At this time the best thing one can do is to use the social book marking while it still works, to help your sites gain some ground in the search engines by combining it with solid SEO tactics.
Social Media is the buzz right now but it can’t last as it is way too easy to exploit just like some of the other techniques of old – can you say keyword stuffing? Use it while it lasts but trust me – it ain’t going to replace solid SEO tactics. That will come later when there is a breakthrough in artificial intelligence brought on by semantic search but that is for another rant.
Dynamic Sites and Navigation
All the effort needed to optimise every page is only useful if the pages can be crawled successfully but a robot spider. Dynamic sites producing "id=?" with large query strings are generally not easily penetrated. In situations like this you may need to consider URL rewriting.
At best this means that the migration of PageRank (Google's measure of a pages importance) is poor.
Text navigation is preferred by most engines. A search engine spider can understand a link that is text. Image links are generally not so well understood although alttags are helpful.
The use of java navigation, flash or other more adventurous navigation systems are often completely invisible to spiders.
Flash, Frames and JavaScript
To humans they look great but to Search engines Macromedia Flash, frames and JavaScript are meaningless. In fact, some of the robots and spiders stop completely when they encounter script on a page. But look at the source of the majority of Web pages and where do you find the JavaScript? If you construct your header to impart the maximum of information then spider will have found enough useful material ahead of the script to give you a meaningful entry.
Keyword Density
So you now have your header, but still if your body text does not reinforce your header it is very likely that your page may still be ignored.
One way the spiders can tell how closely your page matches the needs of the searcher is to examine how many times your page contains the keyword or keyword phrase entered by the searcher. Great, so we just put in lots of repetition and the job's finished isn't it? No, but your search engine listings may be.
Spiders love to find lots of text, so give them plenty of reading material. the key to a good keyword listing is how many times the page contains the phrase in relation to the total number of words on the page. keyword packing is most definitely not the answer as having too high a keyword density can be as damaging as too low, and each search engine works differently.
The biggest problem is that getting keyword density often makes a page unattractive to humans, so there's a delicate balance to be achived.
Writing A Good Header
Take a look at the tags at the top of this page:
Add symbols <> before and after each tag:
html
head
meta name="description" content="advice on search engine positioning, being positioned on the wrong keywords is a bad as being not positioned at all."
meta name="keywords" content="search engine positioning, site optimizing, web site optimising, site optimizing"
meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"
/head
Remember that most search engines give more weight to words found in the TITLE, especially if those words are also found in the body of the text. The TITLE is much more informative and likely to generate more solid keywords in the search engines, especially if the keywords appear in the body of the page.
However, we know that some search engines do not read META.
Now the search engines know what to say about the site, but we still want to tell them what keywords we would like to be found under. Only use relevant keywords, do not put keywords in here just to get traffic. Think what you're hoping to achive from your site, be it sales, enquiries or whatever. Measure your success by those results, not by head counting the visitors you con into arriving here.
Meta Tags
You'll hear conflicting opinions on the importance of Meta tags - contained in the heading of an HTML page. While meta tags aren't the answer to why your site isn't being listed, they are an essential part of a well-designed web site promotion programme. Remember that search engine operators are trying to offer relevant hits. It's easy to insert hidden text in Meta tags that has no relevance to the actual page content, and thus attempt to fool the search engine. But how does the spider know what's important on the page? One significant clue would be to read the Meta Tags and then look for corresponding visible text on the page; if the same words occur in both then there's a very good chance that the tag is for real and worthy of a high relevancy score.
The key is to use a carefully judged mix of the Meta tags and title.
Most searh engines give additional weight to words found in the Title tag if those words are also found in the body text. In many cases, the Meta description is the text that is presented by the search engine following the site's listing. It describes your site to the people reading the search results. It's your opportunity to persuade them that the search is relevant and that they should click on your site - not the one above or below.
The Header Tag
The "Header Tag" is situated at the top of the source code in a webpage. The header tag is usually made up of three components the "Title tag", the "Description tag" and the "Meta tag(s)".
Modern browsers are very tolerant of your internal page layout, so if you miss out tags like ,
and , along with their associated cloding tags, you're unlikely to see a problem with the layout of your page.So why bother putting them the header tags in? Different spiders read different parts of the Header tags, currently we know that Google give a high priority to the "Title" and "Description" tags. Whilst Yahoo also gives additionsl consideration to the "Meta" tags.