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As i go about my day performing search engine optimisation on peoples websites i have contact with a lot of people including third party people who may be involved with a website we work on. Now today i was told by a 3rd party that optimising meta tags is “old Hat” and that Google places no relevance on what is found here.

I thought id write about this as some people obviously have this train of thought. To put it simply Yes, meta tags are still used by search engines and DO still hold relevance. When i speak of meta tags i talk off the title, keywords and description tags. If you have optimised meta tags then do a search for your domain in Google; what do you see? you will see the title of the web page as the title of the search result and the description on the web page as the snipped in the search results. Good optimised sites always have their keywords in these areas and when you search for the keyword Google makes the keyword bold in the results. I don’t know about you but if i see the keyword in the title and description in the search results i click that link!

Secondly as all good SEO’s know for Google to return your page as a search result there has to be relevance on the page to the search query. One of the first things Google reads when it looks at the page is the title, keywords and description.

I will agree with one thing though, Google does not place to much relevance on the keywords. This is because in the past? people have tried to take advantage of this and stuff keywords into the keywords tag. The other tags however have a physical limit on how many characters will be recognised so cant be stuffed. You could still try and cram as many keywords as possible in these tags but Google is clever enough to see if you are doing this and if you are they simple take the title and snipped from elsewhere. Simply put your meta tags tell Google what your page is about.

Gary
NSEO Programmer

You can bring a lot of traffic on your website with the help of digg.com, stumbleupon.com etc. Although it might seem difficult to get to the front page of these websites, in fact it is easier than you might think. Below are a few steps to help you get to the front page of social bookmarking websites:

• The first and most important point is that your headline should be catchy. Many great articles go unnoticed just because their headlines are not catchy. Remember the headline is first and in some cases the only thing seen by users. So if you do not have a catchy headline you will have little chance of getting to the front page.
• The second thing which comes after the headline is a short but meaningful description. Once you have got the reader’s attention with the help of your headline you now need to keep it – and a meaningful description is vital for this. Many users do not bother to read anything over 100 -150 characters, and so one needs to think how to describe the article as briefly and interestingly as possible.
• As I mentioned above, to keep the users’ attention you need to make everything catchy and interesting and the third factor in this attention catching game is the first paragraph of your article.
• It’s only the first paragraph of your article which helps you to get your users’ attention. The next factor is content. If you write something trash there is no point in bookmarking it. You might get banned from social bookmarking sites if you continually post rubbish.

I will discuss more on this topic in my next post.
Nadeem Hussain
SEO Programmer