Scotland SEO Blog

To put it simply yes, meta tags are still important to SEO as the search engines do still use them when indexing sites. By meta tags I am referring to the title, keywords and description tags.

If you have optimised your meta tags using good SEO strategies then when you do a search for your domain in Google you will see the contents of the title meta tag as the title of the search result and the contents of the description meta tag as the snipped in the search results.

Well optimised sites always have keywords relevant to that particular page. The keyword meta tag is not as important when it comes to SEO, however there is no harm in including this tag.

All good SEO’s know that for Google to return your page in the search results there has to be relevance on the page to the search query. One of the first things Google reads when it looks at a page is the title and description. The other search engines operate in a similar fashion.

Whilst Google will not place to much relevance on the keywords, the same is not necessarily true of the other search engines. In the past the keyword meta tag was abused, however the other tags have a physical limit on how many characters will be recognised so they cannot be keyword stuffed.

Good SEO strategies will ensure that each page has its own unique title and description. This ensures that each page is read and indexed accurately and will ensure you get more targeted results in the search results.

Sending an e-mail may land you in court if you are not careful with the content. The website out.law.com reports on changes to laws in Scotland:

Scots face up to 10 years in jail for sending text messages or emails with sexual content. Scotland’s just-published Sexual Offences Bill contains stiff penalties for any sexual messages whose intent is to humiliate the recipient.

You may argue that is directed to sexual offences which is the obvious intent of the bill. However it should be noted that proving ‘intent to humiliate’ is quite difficult so any material of a doubtful nature could come under scrutiny.

Those sending emails, texts messages or newsletter offering ‘organ enlargement therapies’ could be accused of trying to humiliate individuals.

“We wanted to make sure all forms of communication were covered by a single law. Sending offensive e-mails in the workplace has become more common, as have text messages,” he said.

Around 90% of all emails or electronic communications would probably be considered fine. However that 10% could be at risk if someone decides to report them. All the more reason to watch what your staff are sending and how you put together your e-mail campaigns.

Whilst this legislation is targeted at certain undesirable activities, it only takes one or two complaints to see the courts widen the coverage. The strange thing is, the individuals who are being targeted by this legislation will probably be the ones to ignore it.

Google has finally capitulated and broken SEO rule number 6, or was it 5 - I cannot remember. Whichever rule number it was, it went something like:

Avoid using flash in your web design as the search engines cannot read their content.

Not anymore apparently. If you use Adobe flash files in your web design then Google will soon start reading these files as well. The last bastion of sensible web design is about to go out the door.

According to Google Webmaster Central Blog:

In addition to finding and indexing the textual content in Flash files, we’re also discovering URLs that appear in Flash files, and feeding them into our crawling pipeline—just like we do with URLs that appear in non-Flash webpages. For example, if your Flash application contains links to pages inside your website, Google may now be better able to discover and crawl more of your website.

If anyone has been hiding any blackhat activities inside flash files then look out, all will soon be revealed. There are sites that are comprised almost completely by flash files and I am sure these webmasters will be cheering this latest news.

Google is not able to index images inside flash files and the following limitations still apply:

There are three main limitations at present, and we are already working on resolving them:

1. Googlebot does not execute some types of JavaScript. So if your web page loads a Flash file via JavaScript, Google may not be aware of that Flash file, in which case it will not be indexed.
2. We currently do not attach content from external resources that are loaded by your Flash files. If your Flash file loads an HTML file, an XML file, another SWF file, etc., Google will separately index that resource, but it will not yet be considered to be part of the content in your Flash file.
3. While we are able to index Flash in almost all of the languages found on the web, currently there are difficulties with Flash content written in bidirectional languages. Until this is fixed, we will be unable to index Hebrew language or Arabic language content from Flash files.

It’s time to go and rewrite all the ‘how to design SEO compliant web page’ tips now.

Web design and SEO don’t normally go hand in hand and yet they should! If you are about to have your web site designed then you should have an SEO expert on hand to ensure that the basic requirements for search placements are included in the design.

These requirements include:

• Ensuring that the finished design is W3C compliant.

• Keeping flash and other non-SEO effective effects to a minimum.

• Making page titles and URL’s SEO friendly

• Creating individual META Tags for each page

• Having user friendly navigation areas that can be read and followed by spiders

Good web design ensure that visitors to your site can easily find what they are looking for. Search engine spiders can easily crawl your content and follow your links. Finally, with a well designed web site that is popular with visitors and contains good content you will attract inbound links.

These all go together to help gain a good rank in the search results. This helps to increase your traffic. A win win situation for you as a website owner.

The world is full of fads and the internet is no exception. Fads are not just what people are eating, wearing or doing. There are also fads in the types of advertising that works. There were banners, audio and these days videos. The art of internet advertising involves picking the right fads and using it to best promote your business.

Traditional advertising was based on time. You paid for 30 seconds on tv, or a 10 second radio spot, or perhaps a week on page 10 of the local newspaper. Even billboard advertising operated on a time basis. This does not really work when it comes to online advertising.

The internet has become an interactive jungle. Young people want interaction; older users want answers. Online advertising needs to sit somewhere between the two - and I am not talking about pay-per-click as the interaction.

The difficult component of online advertising is trying to pick which method will best deliver your message to users. Google Adwords is a tried and tested general purpose advertising medium. To deliver effective online advertising using other methods requires the services of online marketing experts. Trying to pick the trends yourself can fraught with danger - get it wrong and it could cost you big dollars.

Newsletters seem to go through phases where they will be popular and then decline, possibly due to the amount of spam mail that often follows subscriptions, then rises up again in popularity. We seem to be going through a increase in popularity phase again at present so if you do send out newsletters, you need to ensure they look good.

These tips may help to focus on the important design aspects of a newsletter. I will assume the content is top class already.

Make sure your newsletter is scannable.
Most people just scan a newsletter so use short paragraphs and bullets or numbering to help them out a little.

Put the newsletter title in the email subject line.
Almost all email recipients access the importance of the email based on the subject line. Sell your email there with a great title.

Include a table of contents.
Most newsletters are made up with short paragraphs from featured articles. Include a clickable table of contents in newsletter.

Make sure all links are working.
There is nothing worse than seeing something interesting in a newsletter only to have that link inoperable.

Spell check - spell check - spell check
Make sure you use a good spell checker and whenever possible, have another person proof read the copy before sending.

These are simple and straightforward newsletter design issues, you would be surprised how many people forget them. When it comes to internet marketing, your newsletter represents you.

Good SEO strategies can have your site listing at the top of the search engines for most of your keywords and phrases. As result you will see a steady stream of organic traffic flowing to your site. The question is - how long are they staying? If they arrive on your site and leave just as quickly without accessing other pages, you will have what is known as a high bounce rate. That means no readers and few if any sales.

If your bounce rate is high you will need to closely examine why. They are obviously finding you in the search engines so why are they not staying?

The first place to look is your landing page. Does it sell your site or your business? If it does then perhaps it is overselling and scaring the users away. Your landing page needs to welcome the visitor whilst providing them with what they have come to look at.

Many website owners make a mistake in optimizing a wide set of keywords but not having relevant landing pages to those keywords. If you optimize for cat food, I don’t want to land on a page promoting dog food. At worst, you should have a page that promotes pet food with clear navigation links to cat, dog food etc.

One of the other issues is the optimizing of generic terms rather than using more specific terms. Using the above example, you may optimize pet food when all you sell is dog food. I click on the pet food link only to find it is for dogs only.

There are two alternatives to this problem. First you can simply concentrate on the terms relevant to your site or you can optimize the meta tags so that the search engine listing clearly states dog food only. The later will ensure you get listed for ‘pet food’ queries. Users generally read the descriptions so the traffic you do receive will be focused - in this case, on dog food.

These steps will reduce your bounce rate and see your sales conversion rates rise. A win for you and a win for users who are not winding up on your site by accident.

Images are becoming an important part of any website so it important that you get the most SEO value from them. Google in particular loves images so optimizing them can be very important.

What many webmaster forget are the users as well. There are many users who for a variety of reasons have images turned off in their browsers. Rather than seeing a blank space, you need to at the very least provide some text replacements for the images. This is done through the ALT tag - and it is this tag that search engines read so use it to strengthen your SEO.

Using the ALT tag is straight forward. Within the img src tag you need to add the alt=”XX”. Good SEO would suggest that you make this tag relevant and use a keyword that is highly relevant to the text around the image.

The second tag is not quite so important, however by using it you may strengthen your SEO for any included keywords.

This tag is the ‘title’ tag and is used in a similar method to the alt tag - enter title=”XXX” where x represent the title of the image - again, use a keyword if possible within the title.

Getting these tags right with your images helps both the search engines and your users and can provide some decent SEO strength to your pages.

Reputation Management is one of those areas that can be extremely difficult to handle. The following tips may help prevent negative pages from appearing at the top of the SERP’s. I do however feel that other areas of your business are more important in the short term.

Negative comments about your business will generally only surface if individuals, normally customers, have had a poor experience. Prevent that poor experience using great customer service skills and you will find that your business may actually grow. Reputation management by name assumes you are going to receive negative publicity - while you cannot prevent all negatives - you should be working towards it.

Some times customers are simply unhappy no matter what you do. These steps will not erase the bad publicity but if performed successfully, may help to prevent any of it reaching the front pages.

Subscribe to Google Alerts. This will send you an email whenever your keyword or phrase is found by Google. Use your business name, your brand and your website name if it is slightly different. You may get an email every day - this is a great tool not only for reputation management, but for general gossip as well.

Create a blog and optimize it fully. Ensure there is good quality content on it and update it regularly. Blogs rank well and it can often be quite easy to get to the top of the SERP’s with a blog.

Get social. Promote your brand, business or web site on as many social sites as possible. Learn to listen to what is being said around you. These sites can often be where bad publicity often starts. If you are then you may be able to nip in the bud before it gets out of hand.

Accurate content. Write useful and accurate content. If bad publicity starts you can always refer people to any of the relevant pages. If the content is not accurate, it will only reinforce the negatives.

Reputation management starts with customer service. If things get out of hand you need to be able to respond immediately to rectify any problems - perceived or actual. Being at the top of the SERP’s will at least help to keep the negatives from appearing there.

One of the great things about Web 2.0 and the social communities that have developed is the increase in interaction. When it comes to SEO, we all crave inbound links and social interaction has certainly helped on that score.

Social bookmarking is on the increase with individuals either submitting their own content or bookmarking content they find on other sites, either for future reference or to share with friends. This provides for greater exposure of your content with an increase in links.

Social optimization strategies can make use of these links. If a site links back to your content, and the content which includes the link is of good quality, then by bookmarking that page you are helping to promote it. I am sure the webmaster on the site would be quite appreciative.

The aim however is not so much to deliver more traffic to their site, but deliver traffic to your own site. If you can deliver an extra 100 visitors to another site that links to yours, and just 10% of that traffic trickles across to you - that is another 10 visitors.

You may say it is only 10 - however there are several important facts to remember. First, you are not promoting your own site. When others look at your bookmarks, they don’t see your site, they see many others - always a good image. Other webmasters will see that you do promote sites that link to you so they will most likely find ways to link back to you.

Your content is the key to getting inbound links. Use those inbound links to increase your traffic whilst improving your social reputation.