Hot answers tagged keywords
87
Yes, putting important keywords closer to the beginning of a title does help SEO. SEOmoz's ranking factors survey agrees, as do other sources.
Keyword Use Anywhere in the Title Tag
66% very high importance
Keyword Use as the First Word(s) of the Title Tag
63% high importance
Keyword Use in the Root Domain Name
60% high importance
...
11
Google doesn't put much (if any) ranking weight directly on the keywords that are in the URL right now. Any effects on SEO with or without them are caused indirectly through user interaction and usability.
From a better usability standpoint:
Keywords in URLs can increase the clickthrough rate (CTR) from the SERPs. Check out these two search results for ...
7
Google's Keyword Suggestion tool is designed for AdWords research. It can be used for SEO as many of the same keyword stats are relevant to both, but there are some differences. In particular, the competitiveness level for a particular keyword in GKST is simply a measurement of how many advertisers are bidding on each keyword. This might correlate with how ...
7
Since meta tags have no influence on your page's rankings, but can be used in a page's listing in the search results, I would make sure the description tag is written like a sales piece. It can be the deciding factor for users when deciding which search result to click on.
The keywords tag is obsolete so I wouldn't worry about the order of the keywords in ...
7
Meta keywords have never been removed and probably never will be (they are still included in the HTML5 specification) because they're too useful. Just because they're no longer used by search engines for ranking websites (because contextual keywords are more reliable for that purpose) doesn't mean they don't exist or have been removed.
Meta data is used by ...
6
Hint: The answer won't be in a 3x3 table because it's not that cut and dry :)
The more words in an external link the less targeted that link is for for each word individually. So having a link that just says "widget" will help you rank better "widget" then an external link that contains the phrase "best blue widget". But both will help you as they both ...
6
If they are different views for the same product they should have a custom alt attribute that describes what the image shows. After all, that is the purpose of the alt attribute. So one showing the back of the product could say, "Rear view of the Blaster 3000". A close up of a part of it could say, "Big red shiny button on the side of the Blaster 3000". ...
6
I use manual - simply because I want to be in control, especially when it's my clients money. When manual, it makes more sense to control what times, or if the advert appears over a whole day or until the money runs out. If money is not an option, go with automatic.
We (web users) click impulsively and so sometimes being position 1 is not best but why would ...
5
If you speak about meta keywords: 0
Google does not use the keywords meta tag in web ranking
Take much care about the content of your <title> tag, all the words you use in the headings tags (<h1>, <h2>, ...), and the quality of the content of your page.
You can also have a lot of precious guidance here:
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
...
5
Google will crawl pages that have high PR and frequently change their content with much greater frequency then typical pages. StackOverflow pages seems to be crawled almost constantly as questions appear in Google's search very quickly after being asked.
So, to ensure you get spotted first, you will need to have a well established site that has accumulated ...
5
Keyword stuffing is when you intentionally, and unnaturally, placing keywords in your content for the purpose of manipulating the search engine rankings. If "hp toner" naturally appears often on your pages then that's fine. If you're cramming it in everywhere you can, including places where it obviously doesn't belong, then that's keyword stuffing.
As an ...
5
For PPC, I would rank terms in the following order:
Most specific
Highest traffic
Lowest competition
This should leave you with the terms which are most likely to convert and get the greatest number of qualified searches without excessive cost.
If you are using the Adwords bid tool and organizing your exported terms on a spreadsheet, it may be easiest ...
5
Try not to think of it in terms of search engines. Instead consider it from a usability perspective. (Keep in mind search engines do take into account the bounce rate)
The goal should be that the url should portray what the destination will be about. If there are multiple posters then you should go with posters.php
Granted, the page title, description ...
5
Search engines are very good at handling acronyms, especially Google. But if you want to help them along you can do two things:
Use the <abbr> or <acronym> tags to indicate an acronym is being used and what it means. <acronym> is being phased out in HTML5 with <abbr> handling both abbreviations and acronyms. So <abbr> is the ...
5
The practice of truncating terms to a root (not necessarily singular or plural) for search indexing is known as "stemming" and is employed by most advanced search engines.
In the context of the word "download" (which may be either a noun or a verb) there is a possibility that the heuristic will treat the term differently depending upon its context, however, ...
5
It is the process of reducing each word to its stem. E.g. "searched", "searches", "searching" all become just the root word (or stem) "search" in a search index.
In terms of websites, this is frequently used for search functionality. I.e. enabling any form of the search term to find all variations of the supplied keyword. It can significantly improve the ...
5
If you look on google trends, you will see that your new keywords receive a lot less interest than your old keywords:
This is probably because, in general, users are lazy and don't like to get too specific in their search queries unless they have a real need to. Also, different users get more specific in different ways, so while one user might search for ...
4
While it may be a good idea to write for humans or for search engines, it's a great idea to consider writing for both. The first rule of great writing is this:
Don't write to be understood; write so that you cannot be misunderstood.
Always assume that a sentence will be taken out of context or be used by itself to represent the whole of paragraph. If you ...
4
Write the article so it makes sense to human beings. If you start writing content so it reads like what you think the search engines are looking for you're going to end up with bad content. Bad content makes getting links much more difficult to do. It also makes people leave your website which is also against your goals.
Anyway, search engines are smart ...
4
I find that the competition value is useful as a means for seeing how important other advertisers consider the term to be, however, it is not as important as specificity (how closely the term aligns with whatever you happen to be marketing) and search volume (how many people are searching on the term).
Note that many, many PPC advertisers take the "shotgun ...
4
1) Depends on the what the content is. That's how you determine what the title should be. , #3 is best assuming it is about Sandra's healthy tomato soup recipes, and not the recipes themselves. Those recipes should have titles like:
website.org/en/recipes/healthy-chicken-broth
website.org/en/recipes/tomato-soup
website.org/en/nutrition/tomato-soup
2) ...
4
Google will notice the change eventually. However you can request reconsideration:
If your site isn't appearing in Google
search results, or it's performing
more poorly than it once did (and you
believe that it does not violate our
Webmaster Guidelines), you can ask
Google to reconsider your site.
Request reconsideration of your site.
...
4
This is keyword stuffing. Don't do it.
If you can find an honest way to get some of those terms into the page itself, like a sidebar blurb explaining what your site is for, instructional text, etc. then you're generally fine.
4
Google can't read your PHP code. It can only read the output of your web server. So your server must be spitting out PHP code somewhere.
If your site is functioning normally, then the most likely place for this to happen is on an error page, or 404 page. What happens if you type in a non-existent URL? Do you see an error page that includes some of the ...
4
Once you remove one word and swap it out for another then you'll stop ranking better for the original word and start ranking better for the swapped out word. That is counter-productive. Just pick the word that is most appropriate and go with that. If all of the words are appropriate (really one should fit better then the rest) then choose the one that gets ...
4
It doesn't matter since meta keywords have no effect on a page's rankings.
So, use whichever one you think describes something properly. "Ferrari car" doesn't do that as Ferrari is a brand name and can stand alone. "Blue widget" and "green widget" should obviously not be broken down into "widget, blue, green" as that wouldn't make any real sense.
4
You're not going to get an exact answer as no one knows exactly how much weight those keywords carry except Google. We do know that they currently carry lot of value but we also know that Google is working on reducing it.
4
To add to what John Conde said...
It used to be a ticket to the top but over the past 18 months or so it's been blunted a good bit when it comes to many generic keywords. Google wanted to prevent quick buck artists from buying something like greentennisshoes.com, stuffing it with affiliate ads and rocketing to the top of search results nearly automatically. ...
4
For many pages you can't, not without making the title either undescriptive or really awkward and spammy at least. Frontloading is a really unnatural way to write.
If you have general topics, like Wikipedia pages, then it's easy to do something like:
Labradors
Labrador training
A/C repair
But most blog articles, news posts, etc. out there aren't generic ...
4
I just did a quick test and $30 returns different results to 30, but £30 does not (even in the UK). So it seems Google does not understand the pound symbol but does understand the dollar.
You can add hidden mark-up to content that adds semantic meaning to it, such as mark-up that states "this is a price and it's in GBP". schema.org is a good place to start ...
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