I know what you’re thinking—“It’s 2011 and this guy is writing about meta descriptions?” You better believe I am. Yes, I’m fully aware that Google doesn’t use meta description as a ranking factor, but that doesn’t mean that it’s totally unimportant.

Remember, searchers still see the description meta tag whenever they’re looking for your products and services. So it’s important that your descriptions catch their attention and draw them in.

Here are 5 tips for writing better meta descriptions.

1. Think of it as ad copy—Your search listing is competing against about 14 other listings (including PPC ads) for a click. It’s your job to stand out from the crowd and earn that click. That’s why you need to think of your meta description as a mini-ad. You have to give people a reason to click your link. Don’t just have some boring, generic description. Focus on a benefit and get them to take action.
2. Include a call to action—Speaking of taking action, I’ve started experimenting with using calls to action in my meta descriptions. Here’s a basic example of what I mean “Personal injury lawyer John Doe has helped thousands of clients get big settlements. Call (800) 123-4567 today for a free consultation.” By including the phone number, people don’t even have to click through to your website to take action. That’s especially important these days because many mobile phones as well as computers with Skype automatically make phone numbers clickable for instant dialing.
3. Use keywords to draw attention—No, including keywords in your meta description isn’t going to help you rank better, but it can be useful for grabbing the attention of searchers. That’s because the search engines usually bold the keywords in your description that the searcher entered. This makes your description stand out.
4. Keep it at the right length—Try to keep your meta descriptions around 150 characters with spaces. Any longer than that, and you risk having your message cut off. If you Tweet, this shouldn’t be a problem for you.
5. Use unique descriptions on each page—Don’t use a single generic description for all of your pages. Make sure each page has its own unique, compelling description that speaks directly to the searcher’s needs.

What tips would you add for writing better meta descriptions? Leave a comment below.

A lot of the mystery about SEO can be solved simply by getting the information straight from the horse’s mouth. Yes, that’s right! One of the best SEO resources comes direct from Google. Specifically Matt Cutts. For a few years he has been uploading very helpful videos on the GoogleWebmasterHelp channel on YouTube. There are over 300 in fact. If you haven’t subscribed to the channel, I recommend doing so. It’s personally one of my favorite resources and something I place the a lot value in.

The channel has a variety of different videos, but the ones that I like the most are the QNA videos done by Matt Cutts. In these videos Matt answers questions that people have sent in. Matt has an excellent way of explaining things. He often breaks things down in ways that everyone can understand. You can quickly tell that it’s important to him that his message is understood well. The videos are recorded in a very relaxed and casual setting which really allow you to concentrate and absorb the information being shared. Here are a few examples.

In the world of SEO, often you hear about link building. It’s an important aspect of SEO. It’s so important that there are a slew of products, services, and tactics that claim to help people with building backlinks. Some of these products may work, but it’s a safe guess that many do not. Most of the services are very expensive, and I suspect that most fail to deliver what is expected. Lastly, it seems that there are only a few tactics that are truly effective. That said, have you ever considered learning more about different ways to build links yourself? Matt Cutts has recorded an 8 minute video that talks about just that. Here is the video below:

What about keyword spam? Specifically using multiple versions of the same phrase and rewording it multiple times in your content? (i.e. SEO Hosting, Hosting SEO, Search Engine Optimized Hosting, Optimized Hosting For Search Engines, etc.) In other words, does Google consider it keyword spam when you target multiple variants of the same keyword phrase? The reason why people do this is because in most cases each variant can return different results in the SERPs. Let’s see what Matt has to say about that:

A couple of years ago there was a lot of interest with converting a standard WordPress blog into a DoFollow blog. Meaning, the nofollow tag is either manually removed from the code or a plugin is used to achieve the same result. The purpose is to reward people by passing PageRank in exchange for leaving a comment on your blog post. This is still done today. But what does Matt Cutts have to say about this? Let’s find out. Pay attention to the point made at 2:00 minutes into the video:

Have you ever wondered why it takes a long time for Googlebot to come back to your site to reindex it? I have personally played around with this a few years ago and jokingly have called this Training the Googlebot. In other words, after Googlebot crawls your site, a short period later it will return to check for new content or changes in existing content. Over time, if new content isn’t available, or if the existing content hasn’t changed, Googlebot will stop visiting as often as it did before.

Knowing this, I “trained Googlebot” to visit many of my sites quickly by controlling the flow of new content being published. Meaning, if I wanted Googlebot to index new content FAST, I would train it to believe that my site was busy simply by published new content very often. The result ended with new content getting indexed within minutes of being published. A great example of a site that has a fast recrawl rate is Digg.com. New content on Digg will get indexed almost instantly. A great of a site that doesn’t get recrawled very often would be an old GeoCites webpage –if they still existed of course. Here’s what Matt Cutt has to say about Googlebot recrawl rates:

These are just a few of 300+ videos that can help you with solving the mystery with SEO. Many of these videos have less than 10k views. I really find that strange because the information is extremely valuable. The great news about the low view counts is that you will be learning from a resource that many other people don’t know about. This gives you an advantage over your competition. As mentioned in the beginning of this post, I strongly recommend subscribing to the channel. It’s a very valuable resource to have if you’re interested in learning more about SEO.

As a blogger, there’s many times when I need to create online video tutorials to share with my readers. Adding videos to your blog posts can help capture people’s attention, add different incoming traffic ports, increase the number of people who read and subscribe to your blog, and boost your organic ranking in search engines. The question is, where is the best place to upload videos to?

I can say that determining the best place to upload your videos to is up to you. The reason is because there are advantages and disadvantages with using different services. Below, I have included a copy of the same video that I uploaded into multiple online video sharing sites and also included are my opinions about each. You can review each video and read my opinions about each and determine which online video sharing site is best for you.

YouTube.com

YouTube.com is the most popular online video sharing site online. I would recommend using YouTube because of the added SEO value and traffic you can pipe back into your web site and pages. The disadvantages of using YouTube is that your videos will degrade in quality, and they can NOT exceed ten minutes in length. Because of the time limit, I was not able to upload my video to YouTube.com. Another thing that bothers me is that YouTube.com doesn’t inform me that the video isn’t going to process.

Yahoo! Video

I was actually quite impressed with Yahoo! Video. It has similiar qualities to YouTube.com, but doesn’t have the time restriction. The quality seems to be the same as YouTube.com. The disadvantages, in my opinion, is the lack of traffic, and SEO value. Uploading and processing the video didn’t take long at all, about 15 minutes.

MotionBox Formally AOL Video

AOL Video has been discontinued and traffic is being redirected to a service called MotionBox.com. I decided to give MotionBox.com a try and I am pleased with their service. The process of uploading a video was very clunky and not very systematic. The end result was a video higher in quality compared to YouTube.com and Yahoo! Video. The audio didn’t render quite as well. The disadvantages of using MotionBox.com is the clunky interface, lack of traffic, and I am sure lack of SEO value.

Vimeo Video

I enjoy using Vimeo a lot. It’s one of my favorite places to upload videos to. The interface is very user friendly and the uploading process is conducive to productivity. The problem I have with Vimeo is that it can take up to 30 minutes to batch videos if you have a free account. While this is annoying, I do understand and appreciate their business model. A premium account can be had for under $60 / year, which is very fair. The video and audio quality is amazing. The sharing features are brilliant. One of the things I enjoy most about the sharing features is that Vimeo will do the math for you when you’re customizing proper sizing.

Viddler Video

Viddler reminds me a lot of Vimeo but slightly lesser in quality, but much better than MotionBox, YouTube, and Yahoo. Viddler doesn’t quite match the quality that Vimeo can produce, nor do they offer the robust sharing features. A neat feature about Viddler is the fact that you can record videos on the fly, meaning you don’t have to use desktop software, such as Camtasia, to create the video. With Viddler, you can use record directly on their site.

Where Is The Best Video Sharing Site?

My vote goes to Vimeo. I would recommend upgrading to a premium account simply because it’s affordable, gives you a ton of more features, and it supports their efforts and helps keep them online. In my opinion, even the free account is superior to the other services.

After publishing this article, my strategy will be to use YouTube.com for it’s natural resource of traffic and SEO value. From there I’ll use Vimeo to actually display the videos direct on my pages so that readers can experience the best quality and ease of sharing with others.

I just found out about this and figured it would be an excellent opportunity for you to learn more about SEO. It’s a free online Webinar being offered by Jason McDonald. This online training course will be covering the top ten free SEO tools. It’s one thing to have free SEO tools floating around the Internet, but it’s a complete different ball game when you know how to use them. Jason McDonald aims to change that and teach Webinar students about some very good SEO Tools and most importantly, how to use them.

Jason McDonald is a search marketing teacher and trainer with eg3.com and a hi-tech publisher. He is a well known journalist in Silicon Valley and has managed eg3.com’s SEO, Internet and search marketing, and pay-per-click advertising programs since 1994. Jason McDonald is very qualified to teach this class, and I have no doubts that students will leave the Webinar having gained a lot of knowledge.

There’s two classes available. One on Thursday, Oct. 8th at 11:00 A.M. and the last class on Oct. 12th at 9:30 A.M. In order to attend the Webinar class, you’ll need to register ahead of time. Attending the class is absolutely free. The only thing you need to bring with you is your ears and something to write with to take notes. To view full details and to sign up, visit Jason McDonald’s SEO Webinar Registration Page. Drop a quick comment and let us know if you’ll be attending.

Keyword research is one of the most important factors in the success of your SEO or PPC campaign. When done properly, it will improve both the quantity and the quality of your website traffic. But if you make mistakes when conducting your keyword research, you could be shooting yourself in the foot.
Which mistakes should you avoid? Here are the 6 most common keyword research mistakes.

1. Targeting keywords that are too broad- Let’s say you own a company that sells tables. As nice as it’d be to rank #1 for the term “tables,” that’s not happening in this lifetime. Instead, you need to go after long-tail keywords like “glass top dining tables” or “contemporary dining tables.” Focused keywords like this will give you a better chance of ranking well and receiving targeted traffic to your website.

2. Choosing keywords with no search volume- Long-tail keywords will be the bread and butter of your website traffic. However, there is a fine line between a good long-tail phrase and a keyword that no one ever searches for. If a keyword gets no search volume, don’t waste your time targeting it.

3. Using jargon your customers don’t know- I think it’s always a good idea to get outside help with your keyword research. Here’s why: you might be too familiar with your business. In other words, you could end up using keywords filled with industry jargon that your customers don’t know about. Ask your friends and customers the types of terms they would search for if looking for your products. These are the types of phrases you should be using.

4. Not studying the competition- Competition analysis is an important yet often overlooked part of keyword research. You need to be aware of which keywords your competition is targeting. This will help you come up with the best strategy for surpassing them in the search rankings. It will also help you identify the keyword research mistakes your competitors are making so you can take capitalize on them.

5. Ignoring seasonal phrases- Almost every industry has various seasonal keywords that get high search volume for short periods each year. Many companies overlook them because they might not conduct their keyword research during the time of year when that phrase is hot, so it gets forgotten. But these seasonal phrases pose a huge opportunity for companies to increase their web presence during peak times of the year. Google Trends is a great tool for analyzing seasonal data for various keywords.

6. Thinking keyword research is a one-time action- Perhaps the biggest keyword research mistake you can make is to only research terms at the launch of your site. Keyword research is something you should be doing on a regular basis. Search trends are always changing, and new relevant keywords are always popping up. Don’t get left behind by sticking with the keywords you chose 3 years ago. Stay on the cutting edge of your industry by always conducting keyword research.

Have you made any of these keyword research mistakes?

Keyword research is great…but then what?

In previous posts, I have talked about tools that can help you when you are performing keyword research. As most people who have even a basic understanding of the SEO world know, keyword research is absolutely crucial if you plan on figuring out what you should be optimizing your website to rank for in the search engines. At the end of the day, if you don’t know what people are searching for in search engines, you really can’t optimize for any specific keywords or search terms.

Although a lot of people have a solid grasp on the concept of conducting keyword research, things get a little more fuzzy when it comes to taking action on the information that has been collected during the course of the keyword research. I think the reason that most people aren’t as confident about how to actually use their keyword research is that most blog posts don’t focus on the action aspect of this task. However, I would like to change that today, and give you some actionable information that you can use to start taking advantage of all the keyword research that you have performed.

Order Your Keywords Like Your Website: While you probably have a list that is ordered by the search volume of the keywords, you need to take things a step farther. You’ve got a good start, but you need to break the keywords down into groups so that they are easier to use in relation to your website.

While some people do things differently, the most logical approach to this step for me is to group your keywords like your website. For example, your navigation may go something along the lines of home, categories, sub-categories, individual topics, etc. So, go through your list of keywords, and break them down into groups that can be applied to these different areas of your website. You can keep them in order of their popularity, but just be sure that the groups align with your website’s structure.

On-Page: Once your keyword research has been broken down into actionable groups, it’s usually easiest to begin with the basic on-page changes. The main on-page changes that you will most likely want to make are including your target keywords in the title, incorporating them into the meta descriptions for your pages and ensuring that the keywords are actually used without your content (remember, keyword density isn’t something you should be worried about).

In addition to these changes, you will want to look at incorporating your keyword research into your internal linking structure. Whether it’s navigational links or deep links, adding keyword rich anchor text to your internal links can definitely benefit your rankings.

Off-Page: The main use of your keyword research in relation to off-page action will be working on getting links with keyword rich anchor text. Obviously, you want to have a varied profile for the anchor text of your backlinks (having all incoming links with the exact same anchor text can actually hurt your rankings), but knowing which keywords to focus on for some of your links can have a major impact on the rankings of your website.

Although you may have your own opinions about why Google provides these tools, you do have to admit that they offer some top notch tools for webmasters.  In addition to Google Analytics, another offering from Google that has grown significantly in its ability to provide value to webmasters is the Google Webmaster Tools set.

To show you some of what Google Webmaster Tools can do for your website, let’s look at five fairly common questions that a website owner may have, and how Google Webmaster Tools can be used to find out the answer to these questions.

Has your website been compromised by a hacker?

Although no one wants to think about their website being hacked, the fact is that it happens all too often.  This is especially true for bloggers or website owners who are using open source platforms like WordPress (which I personally love, but will admit is suspectible to hacking, especially when not updated right away).

In addition to using Google Alerts to monitor if your website has been hacked, you can also use the “What Googlebot Sees” feature to find out if hackers have been adding spam to your website. See this example from Google Groups about a webmaster discovering adult keywords hidden in his website.

Is your CMS breaking links?

While a CMS (content management system) can make handling all of the content on your website a whole lot easier, it can also cause certain problems. For example, if you change your WordPress permalink structure but forget to make all of the necessary updates, you may start creating broken links within your website.

Fortunately, with the help of the “Web Crawl” feature in Webmaster Tools, you can normally spot these types of problems. Check out a webmaster who used this feature to discover over 60,000 HTTP errors.

Are visitors being redirected?

While there are situations where it is acceptable to redirect users based on their IP, it’s important to avoid engaging in any type of cloaking. If you have any concerns about whether or not Google thinks your redirection is cloaking, you can monitor the verification of your site in Webmaster Tools. If you notice that your website becomes unverified, you need to modify your current redirection method.

Are there any issues with your server?

As we have discussed in the past, reliable hosting can play a major role in the success of your website. If your website happens to go down and Google decides to visit, the Bot will be unable to crawl your content. While you may not normally be aware of this issue, Webmaster Tools can provide a log of any “Network Unreachable” errors to let you know that this event is happening.

How is Googlebot viewing your website?

According to Google, the goal of their web crawler is to function like a normal human visitor. However, this does not always work out properly. Common problems that Googlebot can encounter include errors such as the 404 (file not found). An unoptimized robots.txt file can also cause issues for Google’s crawler.

To find out how Googlebot is handling your website, you can use Webmaster Tools to learn about any 302, 404 or 500 errors involving Googlebot.

(photo from lzzr)

If you’re the owner of a small business, you might be tempted to implement an SEO strategy by yourself. After all, it can get costly hiring an expert to do your SEO, and there are several things you can do if you take your time to learn SEO properly. Of course, you also open yourself to making many crucial SEO mistakes.

What follows is a list of 5 common SEO mistakes that will undo all of your hard word. Avoid these at all costs.

1. Targeting Broad Keywords- Let’s suppose you operate a small business that sells doors in Houston. As nice as it would be to rank for the phrase “doors,” the truth is you have absolutely no shot at doing that. Trying to do so is a waste of your time. Instead, you should try to rank for phrases like “hurricane proof doors” or “door installation in Houston.” The more specific your keywords, the more targeted your traffic will be.

2. Keyword Stuffing- As a copywriter, this is my biggest pet peeve. People get so caught up in making sure their keywords are peppered throughout the content that they completely ignore how it reads. Your readers shouldn’t be able to tell that your content has keywords in it. It should read like any other copy. What’s the point of ranking well if your content is unreadable?

3. Design not Crawler-Friendly- In order to give yourself the best chance of ranking well, your design needs to be crawler-friendly. Even though the search spiders have gotten better at crawling flash sites, you should stick with an easy-to-crawl CSS layout. This helps the spiders go through your site in a logical manner to ensure they rank your site properly for the relevant keywords.

4. Disorganized Content- Stop trying to do too much on your webpage. Disorganized content not only hampers your site’s usability, but it also prevents you from targeting additional keywords. Divide your content logically among several pages. This keeps each page short, focused, and targeted on specific keywords. It gives you the best chance of reducing your bounce rate and improving you rankings for multiple key phrases.

5. Ignoring the User- This is probably the most common SEO mistake I see. In a way, it goes back to point #2. If you’re new to SEO, it can be easy to get caught up in tailoring your site to the search engine’s specifications. The problem comes when you place a higher priority on pleasing the search engines than your human users. You should never sacrifice usability for the sake of accommodating the search engines. Instead, you can have the best of both worlds—SEO friendly and user-friendly. Keep your site easy to navigate for both the search spiders and your users. This way, you can convert those high search engine rankings into increased sales for your small business.

Link building can be a time consuming venture for search engine marketers and webmasters. There is no easy way to go about it, link building is hard work. Google as the search engine leader wants backlinks that are meaningful to the content of the page and on topic. Business profiles can provide a safe backlink to your important web pages.

Business Profiles Equal One-Way Links
Profiles online are a good way to find free links for your website. There are pluses and minuses to profile linking. The main limitation is keyword anchor text, generally the link pointing back to your page from profile websites is a url link to your homepage. Be sure to look carefully through the profile set up when adding in your information. There are times an additional link may be added for other pages of your website, such as in the work experience section.

Watch For Nofollow Links
What is a nofollow link anyway? It can be complicated to explain. The short version is that Google recommends nofollow for paid links such as paid text link ads on websites. Nofollow generally means the link has no value to the search engines, and can also mean a “down vote” for the quality of the link. Unfortunately this practice has become more common place for many websites including websites that feature profiles. Most often this is due to spammers missusing a website to gain an excessive number of links or the website owner fears they may get in trouble from Google and the other search engines for allowing regular links on their website. For your backlink to count for link popularity you must be sure the link is a regular link.

How Do I Identify Nofollow Links?
There are ways to find out if a link is nofollowed or not. A handy tool is the Firefox extension SearchStatus. When you add this toolbar extension to your Firefox browser it highlights any link that is nofollowed making it much easier for you to identify links that are nofollowed. After downloading the tool to your browser choose “all” for the search engines, click on the “q” symbol from your browser and checkmark the “highlight nofollow links” section. You can download this helpful browser tool here:

http://www.quirk.biz/searchstatus/

The Benefits Of Business Profile Links
Beyond the links back to your website a business profile tells the visitor about your company. Don’t skimp when it comes to providing information about yourself and your company in your profile. Be sure to provide information on services or products. Careful copywriting can interest website visitors who view your profile.

One thing to watch for is the possibility of your backlinks being nofollowed after you have added your business profile. Sometimes this happens with a website and suddenly the backlink no longer counts. The best you can do in this situation is know there continues to be benefit from visitors seeing your business information online. I know, an old fashioned idea marketing your website online with no links, but prequalified traffic is never a bad thing when it comes to your website.

The Search Engines Require Quality Links
In the long run Google and the other major engines want backlinks to be quality on topic links. A business profile is just that along with the option of sharing information about your business online. Examples of profile business websites include LinkedIn and Spoke as well as many other similar websites.

Using business profiles as part of your link building program will help provide long term quality backlinks to the most important web pages of your website and make your link building work easier in the long run.

We all understand the importance of proper SEO when it comes to search engine rank.  That said, many websites continue to make many serious SEO errors.  Want to know what some of these SEO errors are?  Read on …

Mistake #1 – Not Keeping Up With Search Engine Developments

One major SEO mistake is to simply not keep up with the latest and greatest search engine developments. As you may already know, search engines are continually upgrading their algorithms.  For instance, what worked a couple of years ago may not be so effective today. Thus, it is extremely important to educate yourself about all the latest search engine trends.

Mistake #2 – Not Choosing the Right Keywords

You want to choose keywords that potential prospects will actually search – don’t you?  While you may feel good that your website is ranked number one for some extremely obscure keyword phrase, how relevant is this type of situation?  Since no consumers will actually type in these keyword phrases when they search for something, optimizing a website for these types of obscure keyword phrases does not make sense.

It is relatively easy to find ‘good’ keywords – simply use a keyword tracker to discover approximately how many “real” people actually search for various keywords that are related to you specific industry.

Mistake #3 – Using a Splash Page on the First Page of a Website

Search engines consider the first page of a website to be the “most important one” … from a purely SEO standpoint.  Consequently, why would you want to waste this valuable opportunity to promote your website?  While you may like the looks of your website with a splash page, you are doing yourself no favors at all.  Instead of using a splash page, simply fill the first page of your website with optimized quality content.  Done and done!

Mistake #4 – Not Putting Description Titles and Tags on All Web Pages

While it may seem like a bit of a hassle to some, it is vital to place description titles and tags on all of the pages of your website.  Search engines do consider the description tag to be important. Also, if you write a compelling description, users may be more willing to click on the link to your site.

Further, you should not use the same description title and tags on all of the web pages.  Each of the pages on your website is different and as such, you should describe the pages in a way that lets the search engines know what is on each individual webpage.

Mistake #5 – Not Linking to Relevant Websites

Yes … linking to other website can increase your search engine rank.  That said, when you link to websites that are not related to your subject matter in any way, shape, or form, then your efforts will be in vain.  Why?   Your link credibility will simply decrease.  As a rule of thumb, only trade links with quality websites that are actually related to your industry.