Are Meta Tags still useful in SEO?

Many years ago, meta tags are used as the primary tool to rank better in search engines. However, the advancement of search engine algorithms have made meta data of less importance in SEO. Before we get into it further, let us discuss what are meta tags all about.

Photo from businesseconomy.com

What are Meta Tags?
Meta tags are the summarized information of a page for search engine crawlers. It tells the search engines what your site is all about. The most important elements of meta tags are meta keywords and meta descriptions.

Here is an example of meta tags. Here is what you will get if you search for my blog in Google.

You may noticed that the only visible element is the meta description. Meta keywords are not directly seen. This is the same for other elements.

The Death of Meta Tags
Google announced later in September 2009 that they no longer use "meta keywords tag" to rank websites in web results. Yahoo announced a month later after Google that they will no longer support the use of meta keywords tag (http://selnd.com/12yZNF). And according to Duane Forrester, a Senior Product Manager for Bing,they are still using meta tags as a signal to find spammers.

Google, Yahoo and Bing are the three giants of search engines. With the status of meta tags on their algorithm, is it still safe to use them? And if it's still safe, what is the proper format to follow? Is there any?

Conclusion
The three giants didn't ever mentioned that our site will get banned if we will use meta tags. So meta tags are still safe to use. In fact, this blog has meta tags (meta description only) on it. How about you? Are you still going to use meta tags? If yes, stay tune for my next post. It's all about how to create meta tags with different meta descriptions on Blogger blogs.

Links - Another Important Item in SEO

If choosing the right keywords is the most important item is SEO, what's next? It's quality backlinks. Having links is a part of the algorithm of the search engines. Even if you have perfectly chose your keywords, without quality and quantity of links, your site will not be discovered and spidered by search engines.

Photo taken from Scotts Lateff

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Two types of Links in SEO - Inbound and Outbound

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Outbound links are links coming from your site and leading to other site while inbound links; sometimes called backlinks, are links coming from external websites leading to your site. Backlinks are important because it is how the search engines measure the popularity of your site especially Google.Of course there are good and bad links.Good links are links coming from authority and legit sites. Bad links are links that came from link farms and other suspicious places. You can acquire backlinks by buying them but consider free methods of acquiring backlinks unless you aimed to rank on top of search engines.

Anchor Text

This is the most important item in backlink. Anchor text are the exact text where the link starts from. Example: Make Money Online. These are the keywords that you click and then it points to another site.

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Bad Practices to be avoided in Building Backlinks

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Here are practices you should avoid in building backlinks to your website. Keep in mid that these bad practices will destroy your sites reputation on SEs and will get your site sandbox!

• Do not purchase too many links - you can get your website sandbox if you purchase a thousand links in a day.
• Avoid outbound links to bad sites. It will destroy your reputation on Search Engines because these sites are disliked by the SEs.
• Do not participate in exchanging links.There are three reasons why you should not do this. First is you are not sure how long will your link appear on other sites. Second, the context the link appears may have been changed by the site owner. It is suspicious if most of the links from your site are from link exchanges.
• Always balance the ratio of inbound and outbound links.

Keywords - The most important item in SEO

Keywords are actually the strings you type when you make a search on search engine. So if your site is optimized with that keyword. Most likely, your site will appear on the search results. So it is really important that you optimize your site with keywords. Seems easy huh? But it is not.

Choosing the Right Keywords

The search engines are so much populated with millions of  websites. Maybe you can rank your site with one-word keywords but you cannot maintain your ranking because a large number of websites will replace your site. So using two-word or three-word keywords will be of much help. Here are the tips that I could share  in choosing right keywords.

• choose keywords that are related to the contents of your site
• include also keywords that most people use on your site 
• use synonym keywords, often users use keywords as such but mean the same thing
• expand your main keyword by using keyword tools

You can use Google's keyword tool or the Website Keyword Suggestion Tool to look for keyword suggestions for your topic. There are two things you should remember in choosing keywords. The relevancy to your site and the number of searches a month. You may also want to take advantage of narrow searches.

Keyword Density

After choosing keywords, you must make your site keyword rich without keyword stuffing. The idea of the keyword density is that it is the measure of relevancy of your site. The recommended relevancy for 2-3 keywords is 3-7%  and 1-2% for minor keywords. You can check your keyword density using Keyword Density Checker.

Where to Put Keywords

• URL and File names
• Page Titles
• Headings

Keywords in the URL, File names, Page Titles and Headings are more important than keywords inside the page. Your site may have same keyword density inside pages compared to your competitor but having the keywords in these sections is of large difference.

Understanding Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the most technical thing for every webmaster. This is so true because SEO helps in the promotion of websites and requires fair knowledge on basic HTML etc.Generally, we can describe SEO as activities that make a website search engine friendly, thus making the website rank in higher position on the search results of the search engine.

I am not an SEO expert. The reason why I wrote this blog post is to learn and understand SEO. Upon reading some articles and ebooks about SEO, here are the basics that I've learn about it.

• Even if you do all the activities in SEO it does not automatically guarantee  you a high search engine ranking.
• Setting realistic goals like being the top 50 on a popular keyword is more satisfying than aiming for a ranking on the first page of the search engine.
• SEO can be a 30 minute job or can be a permanent activity. If you rank first on a keyword with low competition then I can say that SEO is only a 30 minute job. 

There's a lot more but I won't be posting them all. We will tackle that on later posts. What we are going to do now is to know how Search Engine works and the difference of the Search Engines. These are the fact about how the search engine work.

• Search Engine crawl websites using a software called a "crawler" or Google-bot as in the case of Google. 
• The spider follow all the links and index whatever they found on the way.
• Spiders cannot spider every website everyday. Sometimes it will take a month so your SEO efforts won't be notice immediately. 
• Crawlers are not humans so they cannot see movies, flash, etc. They see only text based. You should use a spider simulator to check your website. 
• After crawling such pages, it will be indexed and will be stored on a database.
• Last step of the job of the search engine is to display the content on the browser from the most relevant to relevant websites and it is endless.

Although most of the Search Engine's operation are the same, there are minor differences about them like:

• Yahoo tells the importance of websites by the on-page keyword factors.
• Google tells the importance of your website by links.
• Google loves older websites than newer ones while on Yahoo it is not a big deal.

These facts may or may not change as time goes.Doing SEO is difficult these days than on way back 2003 and that what most webmaster says. It is easy to rank on the first page way back 2003  compared at present.

The Many Faces of A Blog Commenter

These are the types of personalities of a blog commenter that I noticed on the web. I regularly visit 100+ blogs everyday so I've come up with this post.

Types of Blog Commenters

#1. Legitimate commenters. This type of commenter always have something useful and related thoughts to share.  They always comment in a respectful manner even if they disagree to the points made by the author. They make friends with the author and other commenters and build a good community along the way. I do not fit into this type. How about you?

#2. The Skimmers. Came from the root word "skim" - meaning to move or pass swiftly and lightly over the text you have written. Sometimes they don't actually read your post. They base their comments on the title of the post. Often they leave comments with false conclusions.

#3. Your number 1 fan commenter. They always visit your blog and agree to anything that you say. You will often read " I definitely agree", " I love the post ", " Great read, your post is worth the bookmark". Sounds familiar huh? We've been there (me too) for once in a while. Sometimes we are afraid to voice out our true feelings so we just have to agree for the sake our comments will stick :P This is what we call making connection with the popular blogger haha!

#4. Troll Warlord. I'm not talking about Jarakal of Defense of The Ancients (DoTA). I'm talking about the tackless trolls. They will criticize anything and everything they can. They make valid points but the way they present their opinions often results to a bad impression.

#5. The Link Spammers. They will do anything to leave comments with their links; links in the url box or in the comment box hoping for some link juice. They often leave short and irrelevant comments like " Great posts! " etc. Most of them are generated by bots from some comment blast service or some SEO company using software to build backlinks. And guess what? They are even more smarter nowadays! I hope the commenters from this blog doesn't fall for this category (they do :P).

#6. The Curious. This type of commenter always ask a question at the end of his comment. Why? For you to approve it! Really? Yes of course! You will answer that question for sure. And you will not notice that they already spam their links on your blog haha.

What other types of commenters do you know of? What categories do you fall into?