Scotland SEO Blog

The description meta tag is, on its own, a rather unimportant addition to any web page. It does nothing to your pages search engine optimization strategies, in fact it is pretty much ignored by search engines, until your site ranks.

One your site is appearing in the search results, the description meta tag becomes important. When your page comes up in the search results, the snippet of information about your site is taken from your description meta tag. If there is no tag, the search engines find an appropriate piece of text of their own.

Where you can get into difficulties is if you try to over optimize your description meta tag. If you do, Google for example, will ignore it and create its own description. This could look pretty poor if you could see it for yourself. In the long run, a good description meta tag is part of your search marketing. It helps to sell your site to the searchers. They see the snippet, yes thats what I want, and click through to your site.

A poor tag means they will skip past your entry in the search results. Enough searchers do that and you will start to slide down the search results rankings. The moral - treat your description meta tag as a mini piece of advertising copy.

With the advances to web design and the scripts that can be included on web pages, if you don’t have a means of interacting with customers or visitors, then perhaps it’s time you did.

There is one big advantage in having a blog, the comments. Your visitors can leave comments, you can respond to them, you are creating a social environment. Other visitors can see the interaction and join in if they choose.

Websites that don’t have a facility for interaction are often at a disadvantage. They don’t have to be. There are a lot of scripts available that enable comments. If you have doubts about comments, you can incorporate a guest book - it’s a little old fashioned these days, but people still use them.

If you are a little adventurous, you can incorporate a small forum. This can be a little time consuming, however once established with regular participants, you can often ring them in as moderators.

Web 2.0 is all about interaction. Web sites now need social optimization to ensure they can participate in the social dialogue that is occurring all around them.

Web analytics provide a wealth of information. One of the most important pieces of information is the stat that shows your most popular pages. More importantly, which pages are receiving traffic from the search engines.

Knowing these stats is one thing, doing something about it is another. Obviously, if you are receiving a fair amount of traffic from the search engines for those particular pages, their search optimization must be working.

What are you doing with the traffic when it arrives? Does your page load quickly? Are smacked with ads as soon as they land? Does the content match the keywords used to find you? This last is very important. You may have optimized for a certain set of keywords but the searchers are finding you with a different set - often long tail. Does your content satisfy that search term?

The analytics stat that is important is your bounce rate. If you are getting a good flow of traffic to a page, but it is bouncing away again, it’s pretty obvious you need to do something about that page. Perhaps make the content more appropriate.

Having determined your popular pages, or landing pages, you need to be sure they load fast and look attractive enough to hold the visitors interest and encourage them to move through the site.

Analytics provides the statistical information. It is what you do with it that counts. Don’t waste the landing pages that are receiving visitors.

Search engines, particularly Google, can now read and rank Flash sites, at least some of them. However, if your site is built around Flash and is not ranking, then perhaps installing a blog and spending some time blogging could help to give your site a ranking.

Be sure you blog is installed as a sub folder to your main site. Create as much content as possible and undertake all the SEO requirements to get a blog ranked. This includes directory submission, social bookmarking, perhaps social interaction through forums and link building.

As your blog starts to climb up the search engine rankings, the rankings will flow on to your flash pages as well. Judicious use of links from your blog pages back to your main site will also help.

Flash sites have been popular and often look good. Over the years their biggest problem has been in trying to get them to appear in the search results. Blogging can be good for all websites if done cleverly, they can be very beneficial to sites built using flash.

Video is one of the huge growth areas under web 2.0. It has however had one downside. Search engines have had a lot of trouble delivering results relevant to the search terms used. Even Youtube, the online home of videos, has had trouble delivering relevant search results.

Many of the problems can be associated with the ALT text used to describe a video. A video could be described in the ALT tags as SEO related yet be a piece of pornography - one of the downsides to web 2.0 technology.

The situation may be about to change thanks to a new search technology. VideoSurf is said to be able to view a video frame by frame to try and determine its context. More importantly, when delivering the results, it delivers them with a thumb nail of the relevant videos found.

The search technology is only in closed beta at present (you can request an invitation). When released it may well revolutionize the way we search for videos.

If it is successful, you can guarantee the big three search engines will be lining up to acquire the technology and add it to their search functions. Yahoo! would certainly see it as a way to stay in the search engine race. Google would see it as a final nail in other two coffins. MSN would see this type of acquisition as a means of overtaking Yahoo! to be number two. Web 2.0 will certainly take the next step in development.

Publishing articles that comment on or report news could prove to be a big plus to blog publishers. First Google and now proposed by Yahoo!, blogs that report on news stories will appear on Yahoo! News pages - at least a link to the list of blog stories with Google.

For blog owners this should come as welcome news. Google have had the feature for a while now. When undertaking a news search, check out the side bar; Google displays a ‘views articles from’ box. This provides a link to blogs that have commented on or written articles relating to the search term.

Yahoo now propose to include a similar feature. The biggest difference is that the feature appears on the news pages, not the search results. For each topic in the news menu bar, there will be a ‘most blogged’. It is believed the posts that appear there will be linked to Yahoo!’s Buzz Tracker.

For bloggers this could be good news. If your post appears in the news section it is almost guaranteed a steady stream of traffic. The concept has not gone live yet, however you can see an example on this news page.

Rumour has it we are running out of domain names. While I can accept that most of the short word domain names may have gone, there are still plenty of good long phrase domain names left. What is needed is to become smarter with your domain name.

If your a florist, for example, having a domain name such as flowers.co.uk or florist.co.uk may sound great and I am sure they get plenty of traffic. Searchers today are becoming fairly smart. They don’t just search for ‘flowers’ now. They may search for ‘flowers for mother’s day’ or ‘wedding flowers’.

If you are a florist, registering a domain name like johndoeflowers.co.uk wont cut it in today’s world. Few people will search for john doe flowers. If you could register ‘weddingflowers.co.uk’ or ‘flowersforalloccasions.co.uk’, then you may find that receiving organic traffic from the search engines much easier.

Much has been said about using keywords in your domain name for SEO purposes. It may or may not help your rankings. However, if your domain name is a regularly searched term then you may find yourself at the top of the rankings for that term.

Domain names need to be clever, they need to be memorable, and ideally, they should relate to search terms.

Online advertising takes many forms. Pay per click, pay per view or impression and banners are some of those popular forms of advertising.

If you are after sales then pay per click can be your options. Pay per impression and affiliate advertising are other options. Affiliate advertising is one of the most cost effective since it only pays on the completion of an action - in this case a sale.

However, advertising does not always have to have sales as a primary aim, at least, not in the short term. Advertising can be an effective way to build brand awareness. One of the best forms of advertising for brand awareness can be the banner ads.

Banner ads can be promoted on a pay per view, pay per click, affiliate or time based basis. Time based can often be the cheapest in the long run - it is also the easiest to budget for since it has a fixed cost.

Time based banner ads can be published on a contractual basis. You are effectively buying space, space that on the page that has been agreed upon, for an agreed upon fee. This is similar to buy ad space in a newspaper or magazine. The banner is run for the agreed time in the agreed place.

Promoting your web site through banner advertising can be an effective way to build brand awareness.

Whether you use, like or even approve of Google’s new browser, Chrome, many others will. In fact there are predictions that Chrome may rival Firefox by the end of the end year when it comes to the number of users.

With that in mind, it may be a good time to test your websites to see how well they cope with this new browser. There have already been reports that some sites that rely on CSS have difficulty rendering on Chrome. This comes as a surprise given Google’s preference for CSS for web page formatting.

It is always a good idea to give your sites a periodical run through the various browsers to check for any compatibility issues. IE6 often runs in difficulties and many sites need tweaking to ensure they render correctly on that browser.

Google are heavily promoting their browser with many claims such as speed being pushed. If you have trouble with your web design under Chrome, I suggest you refer to your web designer to see if they have a fix suggestion.

Blogs are also reported to be having trouble with the CSS and Chrome’s ability to render some pages. Check your sites and tidy them up, before Chrome takes over.

Too many website owners try to engage in search engine marketing using narrow single keywords. Searches are becoming more sophisticated now and using phrases, often questions, when seeking information. The best way to tackle this is by using keyword phrases instead of single keywords.

A keyword phrase is simply two or more words that make up a phrase. A search query these days is more likely to use three or more words. Lets say you sold ‘junior leather footballs’. Your primary keyword may be ‘footballs’. However, chances are there is going to be a lot of competition for that word.

You could use ‘leather footballs’ at your keyword phrase, however this is likely to either have a poor search factor, or be heavily in use. ‘Junior footballs’ is a more accurate description of what you are selling, however it may nor be accurate enough.

‘Junior leather footballs’ describes exactly what you are selling. The question becomes, how often is it used? A little research can help find the answer to that question. If it appear often enough as a search query, than you may find the perfect search engine marketing set of keyword phrases.

When considering keywords, look outside the traditional circle of single keywords. Analyze your traffic and select keyword phrases that readers are likely to want relate to.