Search Engine Optimisation Overkill

By Peter Bowen, Director, First One On

Struggling to get to the top of search engines' results knows no limits that some SEO - search engine optimisation firms will go to and yet only too often we hear about websites that have been temporarily or permanently removed from Google’s index because of erroneous SEO practices or the use of ‘black hat’ or dishonest SEO optimisation techniques. Search engines will not tolerate tricks and cheats that some so called SEO practitioners include in their arsenal. And even if search engines do not discover these underhanded attempts right away, your competitors might report you.

Keyword Density or Keyword Stuffing?

Sometimes SEO practitioners go too far in their desire to push their clients' websites to top positions and resort to irrational practices, like keyword stuffing – placing too many keywords into the content text on a webpage. Keyword stuffing is considered as a questionable practice because you are diluting the value and quality of the keyword. Bearing in mind that the recommended keyword density is from 2 to 5% of the content on the page, that is repeating the keyword twice in the first 100 words, anything more than this, say 10% density will begin to look very much like keyword stuffing and it is very likely that it will get noticed by search engines and could face penalties.

"Generally, keyword density in the meta title of the page, the main H1 headings, and the first few paragraphs really has more value", says Peter Bowen, SEO Expert at First One On. Needless to say, that you should be especially careful not to stuff these areas. Generally words that are in bold and/or italic are considered important by search engines but if any occurrence of the target keywords is in bold and italic, this also looks unnatural and in the best case it will not push your page up the rankings.

Doorway Pages and Hidden Text

Another common keyword trick is the use of doorway pages. Before Google introduced the PageRank algorithm, doorways were a common practice and there were times when they were not considered an illegal optimisation. A doorway page is a page that is made especially for the search engines and that has no meaning for humans but is used to get high positions in search engines and to trick users to come to the website.

Very similar to doorway pages was a scam called hidden text. This is text, which is invisible to humans (e.g. the text colour is the same as the page background) but is included in the HTML source of the page, trying to fool search engines that the particular page is keyword-rich. Needless to say, both doorway pages and hidden text can hardly be qualified as optimisation techniques.

Search Engine Optimisation expert Peter Bowen at First One On is considered by many to be a master craftsman when it comes to SEO techniques, and his expertise is sought after far and wide throughout Europe and North America.

Meta Title Tags are Gold

How to write compelling page titles

From an SEO perspective, the title of the webpage is very important, these are the words that describe what your page is about and it is the first words that a search engine sees when it crawls your webpage looking for content to add to its index.

The page title is also what the searcher sees in a search result -so the page title is very important in describing what the page is about and if the title meets the searchers criteria, then it is more likely to be clicked on and your page will open.

It is safe to assume that the majority of searchers these days will be tempted to either click or ignore based on the content of the title. This is like your ad in the natural search section of the search engine results page.

Now that the impact of the title of the webpage is obvious, let us explain how to write an effective and powerful title.

First the basics! The webpage title aka the title tag is the synopsis of the content of the web page. So, as no two pages on your website are the same, hence why should their title tags be? Therefore, as a general rule, title tags for each page on your website should be unique. This is an added bonus from an SEO perspective, because now you can target many more keywords and hence spread your reach across search engine indexes.

The second thing to consider is whether you want to add your company name in the title tag? The answer is that it depends on your branding strategy. If your company name is a known brand, or if you want to promote your firm name as a brand or if your company name consists of keyword(s) that you want to target such as ABC Family Solicitors targeting the keyword "Family Solicitors", then by all means add your company name in the title tag. If not, then use the limited but valuable space to add your targeted keywords. If you do decide to add your company name, make sure that it is at the end of the title. This is because you want search engines and your visitors to first read the targeted keyword(s) for that page and then the company name.

It is important to remember that as the title tag is the synopsis of the content of the web page, we need to make sure that the title tag is relevant. For example, the title tag for an about us page is "About Website Design Company - ECommerce Partners". Hence, the title tag does its job of informing what the page is about. Now, you might have noticed that instead of "About Us - ECommerce Partners", we added "About Website Design Company - ECommerce Partners".

The reason is because "Website Design Company" is one of the key phrases we want to target and so, we replaced "About Us" with "About Website Design Company". This brings out an important point. We need to do a keyword analysis before we write an effective and powerful title tag.

Keyword mining and analysis is a very important part of writing compelling page titles and is a part of the Search Engine Optimization service that First One On provides to our clients.

The next step after keyword analysis will be to write down title tags for each and every web page on your website.

Please be careful when writing title tags and never, never over stuff keywords in the title. Doing so will undermine the power of title tag and defeat the purpose of better ranking in the search engines. The title tag is the title of your web page and so it must be relevant and meaningful. Remember, this is the title in your AD in the natural search listings of the search engine.

General Suggestion: you cannot promote all of the keywords in one page, normally, you should promote 3 to 5 keyword phrases per page. The 'Title tag' should contain up to 3 important keywords that match to the body of the page contents. If the keyword you are trying to promote is highly competitive, you can consider repeating the important keyword twice in the first 100 words of the page content.

Limit the length of the title keywords to 65 characters including spaces or less. There's no reason to cut off the last word and have it replaced with a "..." Note that the search engines have fluctuated recently and Google, in particular, is now supporting up to 70 characters.

Use a divider when splitting up the keywords, we generally recommend the use the "|" symbol aka the pipe bar. Others choose the arrow ">" or hyphen "-" and both work well.

Re-using the title tag of each page as the H1 heading tag can be valuable from both a SEO keyword targeting standpoint and a user experience improvement. Users who go to the page from the search result listing will have the expectation of finding the title they clicked on. Users will be more likely to stay on a page they're reasonably certain fits their intended search query.

Please let us know if you found this article on Meta Title Tags of interest by contacting First One On

Do You Need More Website Visitors?

I want more website visitors who will buy from me

OK so you have a website and you have spent good money on making it look attractive and it has good design features and funky stuff...! but you don't seem to be getting any visitors knocking your door down to get your products or services - what is wrong?

You now have to think about how search engines work - they index your website content into a huge data base of information and when someone types in a search term the results that are displayed are relevant to the search term, so if you are selling yellow tennis balls then you would expect to see your website pages listed in a search result - but only if you have followed a few simple rules that define how pages get listed at all.

If you do not follow these simple steps then your page will not get listed and no one will ever be able to find your pages - OK so here's what you need to do:

1) Find keywords
Pick a list of words relevant to your business. Sort the list down to the most likely word or phrase that a visitor might use to find what you want them to find. Then pick one word or phrase to use on one page of your site. Contact First One On for more detailed information on keyword mining.

2) Put keywords in Page Title
The Page Title at the very top of the screen is one of the most important things that Google and other search engines look at to determine what is on a web page. Contact First One On for more detailed how to information.

3) Put keywords in Page URL
Google and other search engines also look at the text of the URL page name, the name of the folder or directory holding the page to determine the content of the web page. Contact First One On for more detailed how to information.

4) Put page keywords in Meta Data
The page meta data (the code behind the page) is very important in describing the page content to a search engine. Don't forget, search engines cannot see graphics, they only read text data. Put a short list of 3 or 4 primary keywords in the meta data keywords. Contact First One On for more detailed how to information.

5) Put description in Meta data
The description of what the page is about should be readable by a person and make sense and include the keyword. Contact First One On for more detailed SEO Strategy information.

6) Put keywords in the H1 text
The H1 heading tag in the code of the page usually contains the title of an article at the top of your content description. Google and other search engines can see this and they put extra importance on the words in the H1 text. Make sure your keyword or phrase is included in the H1 heading tag. Contact First One On for more detailed how to information on optimising pages on your website.

7) Use keywords in the page content
Putting the keyword in the page content also tells the search engines that the page is actually about the keyword. In general the keyword should appear at least once in the first 50 words and two or three times in the next 100 words on the page. Contact First One On for more detailed page optimisation information.

8) Measure your search ranking
After changes have been made and pages uploaded it is important to measure your search ranking. Tweaking and fine tuning pages may be necessary. Contact First One On for more detailed how to information on website analytics.

Please let us know if you found this article on search marketing of interest by contacting First One On