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The Meta Description Dilemma

Meta descriptions are behind-the-scenes page elements that cause a lot of conflict. There are two extreme SEO positions related to the meta description that are often debated and lead to more confusion among people who are webmasters and not professional SEOs.

The first extreme position is the meta descriptions aren’t necessary. The second extreme position is that they are always necessary and should conform to a specific keyword-based format, length, etc.

The “not necessary” position is based on the premise that Google does not always use the meta description. That’s a true statement. Sometimes Google takes content from the page itself to use for the search snippet and ignores the meta description altogether. However, sometimes it uses the meta description and that’s why this position is so destructive.

The second position is equally destructive simply because any page of content can rank for several hundred search queries, some of which are beyond predictability by the person writing the page. Google will most definitely not use your meta description for every one of those search queries.

So what should you do about your meta description?

First, you need to understand that it won’t be used for every possible search query. Still, that doesn’t mean you can’t write a meta description that targets a particular keyword (preferably the primary keyword of your web page) and give it a good call to action.

The primary purpose for the search snippet, which your meta description has the potential to become, is to get the searcher to click on the search result and visit your page. Optimize your meta descriptions for search, but give them a good call to action.

In Defense Of The Iphone

Here’s a statistic to put in your cap: 74% of smartphone users actually like geo-location services.

Understand of course that geo-location services are different than location check-in services. With the latter, you log into your account at a location check-in service and let your friends know where you are. Then, anyone can find you – including that stalker you’re trying to avoid.

Location-based services that users like are those iPhone apps that ask you where you’re located so they can show you how to get from point A to point B. For instance, you want to find Happy K Supermarket and you’re at First and Third. The geo-locator on your phone will pinpoint your current location and show you how to get to where you want to go per your request.

So why is this distinction important?

Well, if you own a local business and you want people to find you on their smartphones, then you can include a geo-location feature in your app to help them when they want to find you.

Let’s say you own a flower shop in Ayrshire. If someone wants to buy flowers for their Mum on Mother’s Day and they don’t quite know where you are, then all they have to do is log into your app, search for the flowers they want to buy, then ask for your location. The geo-location feature will ask for permission to pinpoint their location. When they agree, they will get directions from their location to yours. You will make a quicker sale.

Without the geo-location feature in your iPhone app, it’s possible that the customer might get frustrated if you are hard to find and give up. In that case, one of your competitors will get the business.

On-Page SEO Getting More Difficult

If you haven’t noticed, on-page SEO is getting more difficult all the time. There are several reasons for this.

No. 1, Google tweaks its search algorithm multiple times a day. On a low-tide day they could update their algorithms 50 times in one day. They’ve been known to make such tweaks a couple of hundred times in a single day. That’s way too many updates for anyone to keep up with. You can’t track them all.

Another thing, the on-page factors themselves keep growing. It used to be that all you had to do was write a page of keyword-based content, give it some meta tags, and build a few links. Today, you need to do a lot more than that. In fact, if you do today what you did in 1998, then you are likely not to get your pages ranked because you are likely spamming the search engines and they don’t like that.

To top it off, there are new data pieces that not all webmasters use but that Google sometimes uses to give certain pages a boost in rankings. These include schemas and structured data.

Whilst these are not necessary for on-page SEO, they can be helpful. However, simply using them isn’t going to guarantee that your pages rank better. There are still more than 200 ranking factors that Google looks at to rank its pages for any particular search query.

SEO is an ever-changing game. The best that you can do is experiment, test, and measure everything you do. If you get stuck, try consulting with a professional SEO.

Are You A Link Spammer?

Surprisingly, after all that has been written about link spam (on this blog and all over the web), there are still a lot of people who will spend time and money creating links that won’t benefit them in the least. In fact, many of them could hurt their business.

Here are 5 common link spam tactics that can hurt you. Avoid them at all costs.

1. Blog comments – This one is the most obvious. How many times have you seen a comment on your own blog that had nothing to do with the content of your post? And it included a perfectly constructed anchor text link in the middle of it? Don’t do this. It doesn’t work.
2. Forum comments – Many people still think you can join a forum and immediately start spamming the boards. If the forum administrator doesn’t discipline you for doing it, it’s not a good forum. Don’t spam the forums. Add value instead.
3. Articles – Articles are a good way to boost your reputation and present yourself as an expert. They can also provide great inbound links to your website. But low quality articles sent to article directories just to get a link are old hat SEO that no longer works. Save your money.
4. Social bookmarking – Social bookmarking has value if done correctly, but all those social bookmarking sites that were started just to provide webmasters with inbound links are now no longer useful. You’re wasting your time.
5. Web directories – Like article marketing, at one time Web directories provided high value links. Today, very few directories are good link building opportunities. The ones that are probably are specialty niche directories and/or provide paid listings.

Not all link building techniques are link spam. Find the good opportunities and leave the bad ones alone.

Tablets Are Good For Web Traffic

There’s a war brewing that few people know about. It’s the war between smartphones and tablets. Tablets may be winning.

While smartphones are good for a few things, bear in mind that most web sites today still are not optimized for mobile traffic. It’s a sad truth. Nevertheless, iPhone apps are good and can deliver great traffic if handled the right way.

On the other hand, tablets don’t require special browsers. Most tablets come with browsers that are more adaptable to regular Web use. Therefore, fewer people have difficulty accessing the web sites they want to access on their tablets. And I think that could be a major factor in who gets the traffic in the future.

According to WebProNews, traffic from tablets grew 10 times faster than traffic from smartphones this past year. How that will play out in the long run is anyone’s guess, but it looks pretty good in the short term.

Two other interesting tidbits we’ve gleaned from the WebProNews article are:

• 80% of the traffic is coming from iPad devices (go Apple!)
• and, the share of web traffic coming from tablets is expected to be 10% of total web traffic by next year, which will shoot it up over the traffic expected for smartphones

So here’s the big question for web site developers and brand marketers, Should you start focusing on obtaining tablet traffic? My position is absolutely! Not that you should give up on your iPhone app development, but be cognizant of this new development in web traffic – the tablet.

What Is Content ‘Quality’?

Content. Everyone thinks they know what it means. And when you add the word “quality” to it, then you are changing the very nature of the content. Everyone still thinks they know what it means.

So what is meant by “quality content?”

In the old days of search engine optimisation, many webmasters figured out that you could rank higher in the search engines if you counted your keywords. Keyword density became a buzzword and webmasters used it as a measure of quality. But it didn’t really produce quality. It simply produced rankings.

Later, link building became a common practice. SEOs and webmasters learned that you could focus on building lots of links. Then you had to make sure you got the right links from the right websites. And you had to make sure your anchor text was just right. Over time, the search engines have forced webmasters to change how they sought search engine rankings. All of the changes in search engine policy have been geared toward one end: Quality.

So what is quality then?

In a word, quality as it pertains to content is how you write about your topic with your reader in mind. Quality content is content that reaches your audience with a message they are interested in reading. If they like it, it’s quality. And it doesn’t matter how many keywords or links you have pointing to it.

The SEOs job is to ensure that your content is quality content that seeks out the best opportunities to rank for key terms you want to rank for. The practices have changed. The nature has not.

How To Encourage Geolocation Marketing

More and more people these days are buying and using smartphones. You can use that to your advantage if you own a business in Scotland. Simply encourage those smartphone users to share your location with their friends.

It’s called geolocation and it exists in a number of ways.

Some social media services like Foursquare allow users to share their geolocation with their friends. Facebook also allows users to disclose their location with their friends when they make a post. Some iPhone apps do the same thing.

Mobile marketing has come a long way. If you own a bookstore in Scotland, or any other type of business, you can encourage your customers to give away your location using an iPhone geolocation app. Simply place QR codes around your store in visible locations and encourage your smartphone-using customers to share their geolocation with their friends. Then watch as new customers walk in your door every day.

Another way to encourage geolocation marketing by involving your customers is to hold an event. Make it a social event. Provide punch and cookies at the event. Then, display your QR code in prominent locations around the social area of your store and encourage your customers to share their geolocation using their favorite service.

A version of the above scenario includes developing your own iPhone app where customers can automatically notify their friends when they arrive at your store location. This would be an ideal way to promote all of your locations through one app. Hold an event like the social event suggested above and near the beginning of that event have everyone take out their iPhones and your app and share your geolocation at the same time. Call it a geolocation party.

Are You An Authority?

Authority is a difficult thing to measure, but search engines are getting better at it. Bill Slawski examines a Microsoft patent on author ranking in social media. One thing I find interesting in his discussion is this:

Instead, one signal of authority can be based on a propensity to provide early links to Web sites or Web content that becomes popular with other users.

In other words, when it comes to social media authority, the early bird really does get the worm.

That’s an interesting measure because if the links you share go on to become popular links or go viral, then that’s a boost to your social media authority. If you are a Johnny-come-lately and tend to share links after they’ve become popular, then you can’t get any feathers in your cap for being a discoverer. You’re simply a sharer. And chances are, you’re sharing with people who’ve already seen the information.

Real authoritative leaders are the first to share true news. On the other hand, your authority will only extend to those areas that you share information about regularly.

This is an important distinction. You might share one link on a topic that is off-topic for you and even if it goes viral it won’t make you an authority. But share a link about a topic that you do post about regularly and that link goes viral, there’s your authority boost. Do it a lot and you’ll become a recognized authority.

Like I said early on, authority is hard to measure. But don’t think the search engines and social media sites aren’t trying.

What If Facebook Had A Search Engine?

A new study shows that Facebook might have 22% of the search market if it were to launch a search engine today. I’m not so sure about that.

The numbers are predicated upon a survey of respondents and include an aggregate of the responses from three categories:

• Definitely
• Probably
• Don’t know

I don’t think you can count “don’t know” as a positive. I’d discount those numbers and just use the first two categories of responses. That would only put the Facebook search engine at 17% of the market, still enough to be the second most used search engine online.

Interestingly, 27% of the respondents with no search engine loyalty said maybe they’d use the Facebook search engine, “but only if it was better than Google and Bing.” Duh.

I think the reality is that no one would use it unless they receive search results at least as good as Google and/or Bing.

Nevertheless, taking these survey results at face value, what would happen to search engine optimisation if Facebook did have a search engine? Obviously, they’d have to make their website crawlable so that it could be indexed by the search engine. Would that mean all the walls would fall down? Would Google then be allowed to crawl Facebook or would Google’s bot be blocked? How would searchers feel about that?

This study actually brings up a lot more questions for me. It’s not easy to build a successful search engine. Just ask Yahoo! and Ask. Heck, just look at how long it took Bing to come up with something that was halfway competitive with Google.

So what do you think would happen if Facebook had a search engine?

Are Words On The Page Optimization?

What do SEOs mean by “on-page optimisation?” Does that refer to the words, the images, the links, or what?

In a sense, it refers to all of the above. But how much optimisation do you think each of those elements contributes to the page overall? As an experiment, try building a page from scratch without using words on the page at all. Start with a sidebar full of widgets. Then add a few links. Next, add a video and an image or two. Between each new element that you add, wait a couple of weeks to see how adding that element affects your rankings.

My bet is that each element might help a little bit, but when it comes to adding actual words on your page, that will help a lot. The best on-page optimisation in the world is about your word content. Everything else is ancillary.

My point here is that you can’t build a web page without words and expect it to rank very well. Sure, you might get an image to rank in the Image vertical at Google – but I doubt it. The search engines look at surrounding text to see what an image is about. Alt tags are hardly enough.

In terms of on-page optimisation, words are the bread and butter. They tell the story. They inform the search engines as to what your page is about. And the words are what earn your income for you.

When you start optimising your web pages, think very carefully about what words you want to use. Use only the best words.