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SiteProNews Blogs

• Editor's Corner
• Darren Dunner
• Jerry Bader
• John Sylvester
• Kalena Jordan
• Mel Strocen
• Titus Hoskins

Reader Rescue : Should My Meta Description Tags Just Duplicate My Title Tags?

By Kalena Jordan in Featured

Hi Everyone

From early days learning SEO, I went ahead and did all my meta descriptions with a bit of blurb about the page but my *Guru* has told me this is incorrect and I should include only the title of the page in the meta description, eg “Antique Dining Chairs” whereas I had put in “Antique Dining Chairs – over 500 chairs on display at the Glebe Antique Centre.  Dining chairs to match your table, occasional chairs for that special place in your home”.

Any thoughts before I go and change everything yet again?

Christine

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Hi Christine

From where I’m sitting, your *guru* is wrong. Remember, your meta description tag is often used as the snippet on the search results pages to describe your site.

So apart from including keywords, it has to do the job of convincing people to click on it. A nonsensical list of keywords is not going to convince people to click so you have to balance it out with an appealing sentence, preferably including a call-to-action or reason to click.

Yes, it’s important to put your keywords at the start of the tag if you can, but you have up to 160 characters in that tag indexed by search engines, so you should use the space to your advantage. Having a short, unimaginative meta description or simply copying your title tag is not going to make any difference to your overall rankings and is more likely to turn your potential visitors off.

Google admitted that it no longer considers the meta description tag in their ranking algorithm anyway, so, other search engines aside, the main job of the tag in Google SERPs is to convince people to click on the link and visit your site.

Put it this way: if you were in the market for an antique chair and you saw the following two listings in Google, which one would you click on?

• Site1.com – “Antique Dining Chairs.”
  
• Site2.com – “Antique Dining Chairs – over 500 chairs on display at the Glebe Antique Centre. Dining chairs to match your table, occasional chairs for that special place in your home.“

I’m thinking Site2.com – am I right? And – oh look! The longer tag managed to include *dining chairs* twice and a whole bunch of other keyword phrases as well: *dining chairs Glebe*, *chairs Glebe*, *occasional chairs*, *Antique(s) Glebe*.

Case closed.

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Got a Reader Rescue question of your own? Post it in the comments and you might see it featured here on the blog.

Reader Rescue: Does Ask.com Accept XML Sitemaps?

By Kalena Jordan in Featured

Hi Kalena

I have uploaded my XML sitemap to Google, Yahoo and more recently Bing, thanks to your blog post about the Bing Webmaster Center.

However, I’m wondering if Ask.com accept XML sitemaps and if so, how do I upload mine to Ask?

thanks
Georgia

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Hello Georgia

Yes, Ask.com DO support XML Sitemap submissions. Here’s a blurb about it from their Webmaster Help area:

“Yes, Ask.com supports the open-format Sitemaps protocol. Once you have prepared a sitemap for your site, add the sitemap auto-discovery directive to robots.txt, or submit the sitemap file directly to us via the ping URL”

The ping URL is as follows:

http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http%3A//www.yoursite.com/sitemap.xml

To add your sitemap to your robots.txt file, simply include this line:

Sitemap: http://www.yoursite.com/sitemap.xml

Actually it’s not just Ask that supports the addition of sitemaps in robots.txt. Did you know that both Google and Yahoo also support that method of sitemap delivery?

You can either submit your sitemap via the search engine’s appropriate submission interface (e.g. Google Webmaster Tools, Yahoo Site Explorer, Bing Webmaster Center) or specify your sitemap location in your robots.txt file as per the above instructions.

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Got a Reader Rescue question of your own? Send it to kjordan [ at ] sitepronews [ dot ] com and you might see it featured here.

Reader Rescue: How Do I Target Specific Suburbs Using SEO and PPC?

By Kalena Jordan in Featured

Hi Kalena

My husband runs his own business. He is an electrician working in the Eastern Suburbs of Sydney, Australia, doing mostly domestic electrical work.

We employ a pay per click agency as well as a web page optimiser until such time as I am confident to do it my self. We monitor each very carefully to try and find out what works for us.

I am running key word research and incorporating suitable keywords into my husband’s site. And now that I am actually going through the motions of putting this into practice, I am having trouble justifying these words, as I know his clients don’t use these words to find our service.

Both the optimiser and the PPC agency have come up with the same keywords I have, and when I typed these words into Google to see whom or what popped up, the results were mostly irrelevant to our products. Although I could see these words used in our sub pages e.g. “Install ceiling fan”, “down lights”, “switch board upgrade” etc, I don’t feel these keyword phrases are strong enough for our home page. We are not competing for these keywords, we are competing for the local area and the electrician service within our local area.

Our business is usually found by people typing in the word “electrician”, then the suburb or CBD, inner city etc. These are the words I would like to target. So my question is, how do you target specific suburbs in your city?

Thanks
Kim

————————————–

Hi Kim

Regarding the search terms such as “install ceiling fan”, “down lights”, “switch board upgrade”, these are excellent choices to target with SEO because they are likely to be less competitive and provided you optimize your pages carefully enough, you should be able to rank well for them, provided they are relevant to the service your husband offers. If they aren’t, there’s no point targeting them.

Regarding targeting terms such as “electrician [suburb]“ – it’s going to be difficult to rank highly for such generic terms using SEO alone, so you might need PPC to win that war. Thankfully, Google AdWords enables you to set up location based advertising.

You can choose a particular geographic area, a range of suburbs, a particular city etc. You can even have your ads shown only to persons located in a specific number of city blocks – via customized (latitude and longitude) targeting! You can specify this when you create a new AdWords account. With location-based targeting, the suburb name appears below your ad to make it more relevant.

Another great way to target a specific market is to use dynamic keyword insertion, where a particular keyword is inserted into your ads automatically based on a search query or searcher location.

So you could have your AdGroup target individual suburbs such as “electrician North Sydney”, or the city as a whole such as “electrician Sydney” etc. Your ad could say something like:

Electrician {Keyword: Suburb}
Emergency electrician available
24 hours / 7 days a week.

Then if a searcher enters “electrician North Ryde” or “electrician Strathfield”, your ad will come up and show the relevant suburb in the headline. Powerful stuff!

I recommend you read up on dynamic keyword insertion and give it a whirl in your AdWords account.

Kalena

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Got a Reader Rescue question of your own? Send it to kjordan [ at ] sitepronews [ dot ] com and you might see it featured here.

Reader Rescue: How do I choose what keywords to target?

By Kalena Jordan in Featured

Hi Kalena

I have two questions.

1) How do I know if a keyword merits my time and energy? For example, when I use Google’s Keyword tool, it says “debt settlement facts” has “not enough data” in the local search volume , when I input in “debt settlement texas,” I get 1,600 searches. Is this tool accurate to estimate the potential traffic to keywords ?

2) How do I know which keywords my competitors are using ? What I did was check each competitors site maps and looked at individual pages to see what they were targeting.

William

————————————–

Hi William

1) It sounds like you’re using Google’s PPC Keyword Tool, which is helpful for choosing which keywords to target using pay per click advertising, but I’ve found it not so helpful for SEO campaigns. I would use other KW research tools such as Keyword Discovery, Word Tracker and iSpionage to get a better idea what people are typing in as search queries. All KW tools should be used with a grain of salt in terms of search data anyway – they can give you a general idea based on traffic figures, but trial and error is really your best bet when targeting keywords for your site.

2) Yes, looking at your competitor’s pages to see what keywords they are targeting is a very good idea. You can also view the source code for their pages to see what keywords their Title, META Description and META Keyword tags contain.

Kalena

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Got a Reader Rescue question of your own? Send it to kjordan [ at ] sitepronews [ dot ] com and you might see it featured here.

Reader Rescue: Do I have to disable Google personalization settings to check client rankings?

By Kalena Jordan in Featured

Hi Kalena

In the past, I made sure I was not logged in to Google when I checked my Client website standings in search. But, now are we going to have to clear *Web History* and Disable customizations every time we want to check our client’s rankings manually?

This article claims that Google’s new ‘cookie’ extends Personalized Results to All Users. Here’s a quote: “Google has begun using a cookie placed on users’ machines to track their search behavior and offer personalized recommendations, even when they are not logged into a Google account.”

Regards

Mitch
————————————–
Hi Mitch

It’s true that Google have extended Personalized Search to all users, whether they’re signed in or signed out of a Google account. But you can turn history-based customization off – both temporarily and permanently. The method of turning it off differs depending on whether you’re logged in or out of Google, but in both cases the instructions are very simple.

Probably the easiest thing is to run your searches as normal and check to see if the SERPs you’re seeing have been customized based on personalization. As per Google’s official blog post:

“You’ll know when we customize results because a “View customizations” link will appear on the top right of the search results page. Clicking the link will let you see how we’ve customized your results and also let you turn off this type of customization.”

You can then choose to view the same SERPs without customization to ensure you know how the results look to persons who have opted out of personalized SERPs. But keep in mind that personalization has been in place since 2005 and SERPs all look slightly different to everybody.

There’s really no such thing as a consistent SERP in Google so traditional *rankings* are somewhat meaningless today. I know that’s sometimes a difficult thing to explain to a client, but it’s true!

For more on how Google Personalization does or doesn’t impact SEO, you might like to read my SPN article: Can SEO Exist Beyond Google Personalization?

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Got a Reader Rescue question of your own? Send it to kjordan [ at ] sitepronews [ dot ] com and you might see it featured here.

Reader Rescue: Is it possible to SEO a WordPress site?

By Kalena Jordan in Featured

Hi Kalena

I had a big discussion last night with my husband and my son-in-law who has done some work on my husband’s web site.

Jason (my son-in-law) has used WordPress for the site. There are currently about 79 pages on the site. In our conversation I was pretty adamant that I wanted to be able to SEO all the pages. I don’t want to rely on WordPress and it’s blog meta tags to get ranked.

Shouldn’t we be better served by a web building program than a blog program like WordPress? I understand that WordPress has an all singing all dancing SEO plug in but is that really the best option?

I know that you use WordPress for your blog. And it seems the right thing to do. But do you also use it for your main site? Any advice you may give me would be most appreciated.

Thanks so much.

Vicki
———————————————————–
Hi Vicki

Actually, sites built with WordPress are perfect for SEO purposes. We are actually thinking of switching our Search Engine College site over to WordPress because of the SEO benefits including deep indexing, cross linking, tagging, filenaming and various SEO plugins that pretty much make other CMS packages obsolete.

You and your son in law should have no trouble optimizing your husband’s WordPress site and hopefully achieving some good ranks and traffic as a result. There are a number of fantastic SEO plugins for WordPress and people are raving about how SEO friendly the WordPress Thesis theme is so you might want to check it out.

You might also want to my review my favorite WordPress plugins. Add to that list the SEO Smart Links plugin and you should be set.

cheers
Kalena

Got a Reader Rescue question of your own? Send it to kjordan [ at ] sitepronews [ dot ] com and you might see it featured here.

Reader Rescue: How do I remove my old pages from search engines?

By Kalena Jordan in Featured

Hi Kalena

I have been updating content and meta tags etc on my website, which was created in dreamweaver and have been checking my listings / ratings through, google, yahoo etc, but am noticing that there are links still to my old website, (of the same domain name) which I removed and replaced earlier this year.  How do I completely remove this content and update my listings?

Any help you can offer will be gratefully received!

many thanks,
Heather

———————————————————————-

Hi Heather

You don’t mention it, but I am assuming that your old website pages were completely removed from your server and that your current pages have different filenames to your old pages?

If the search engines had indexed your old page URls, they will still show up in search results. So how do you get around this? By redirecting all your old page URLs to your new ones. This can be achieved using 301 redirects. Using 301s also happens to be the method recommended by Google if you’re moving domains or page filenames.

While you’re at it, you should also do two other things:

1) Create an updated XML Sitemap and upload it via your Google Webmaster Tools account.

2) Create a custom 404 Error page (you can even make it funny!) to ensure that any searchers clicking on links to your old pages get taken to your new site and are not shown an ugly 404 Not Found Error Page generated from your server.

Hope this helps

Kalena

Reader Rescue: Can the title tag make such a difference to ranking?

By Kalena Jordan in Featured

Today’s question is from Andy, who writes:

Hi Kalena,

I have a very important question. I have a blog that has been getting steady 40-50 visitors from Google everyday. About 4 days back, I changed the homepage title. From the very next day, my traffic fell to 30 and to 20 and to 14 and yesterday I have had only 7 visitors. I havent built any new backlinks. The site has been growing naturally. The blog is 3 months old.

Can a change in title tag really cause such a disaster?

Thanks
Andy

Hi Andy

Yes, it certainly can. The content of the Title tag is one of the most important factors that search engines take into account when ranking sites for search relevancy. It’s SEO101!

Cheers
Kalena