SEO Hosting Blog

Have metatags totally outgrown they’re welcome?  In the early days of SEO, metatags were part of the marketing goldrush.  But that was back in the days when you could actually fool a search engine spider with ridiculous amounts of keyword jamming or adding a long list of keyphrases at the bottom of a page.  Amazing to think that these tactics ever worked.  Metatags worked in a similar fashion: instead of creating a list of links, you could “hide” these words within metatags.

This practice worked for a time – even after keyword jamming got a site instantly banned.    But metatags were used and abused much like keyphrases in content.  Website owners thought they were being sly by adding unrelated keywords in metatags.  Metatag spam became popular with some site owners.  Some even added adult-themed tags that might be flagged if they were contained in on-page content.  These practices basically ruined metatags for everybody because metatags are no longer an effective SEO tool.

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I have to consider that there are many people who don’t know what a robots.txt file is. In this article I am going to explain what a robots.txt file is, how to use it and why it is important. I am sure that there are many have heard about a robots.txt file is but might not know exactly what does it do and how will it benefit you? So let’s see if we can answer a few questions for you regarding the in’s and out’s of a robots.txt file.

The Simple Explanation

A robots.txt is a very small file that resides on your server that gives specific instructions to webcrawlers such as the famous Googlebot on which directories and files are allowed to be crawled and indexed. It is important to use a robots.txt file because it puts you (the publisher/webmaster) in total control of where webcrawlers are allow to visit on your website. A more detailed explanation can be found here on Wikipedia, at www.robotstxt.org, and here at Matt Cutt’s blog. (more…)

Recently, I launched a new website to promote my SEO copywriting services. Anyway, let’s just say that I’m not the savviest person when it comes to web design. I’m an SEO copywriter- not a graphic designer. However, I do know of the importance of SEO planning for a new website. Performing SEO on your website before it goes live can save a lot of time and energy down the road.

Do Your Research

Before you launch your website, you should conduct thorough keyword research for your industry. First, I like to brainstorm a list of words and phrases that people would type if they were searching for my services. After creating this list, I then enter these phrases into a keyword suggestion tool. Personally, I find the free Google Adwords tool to be sufficient for this preliminary task. I try to target words that (a) have decent search volume; (b) have low competition (one way I check is by doing an allintitle search in Google- it shows how many sites have that keyword in its title; and (c) are worded to where they can easily be fit into my content. (more…)

SEO should be invisible: to Google and to the everyday user.  As soon as you’re looking for a way to “fool” Google you’re going to be writing content and preparing SEO in a way that doesn’t anything but.  In my experience, the best way to accomplish SEO is to try to rank naturally instead of forcing the issue.

Perhaps this is the way I work as a writer: but writing by attempting to add keyphrases to your paragraphs can make the writing – and reading – process awkward.  By all means, you can go through the content after it’s done and add targeted keyphrases, but having this be your sole intention for the content will come off as unnatural and may very well be regarded as spam by Google – if not now then in the future. (more…)

A sitemap is a file that allows for search engines to quickly and easily find newly published content on your web site or blog. The sitemap.xml file has been widely adopted as the industry standard among popular search engines including, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft Live.

If you run a self-hosted WordPress blog, creating and maintaining a sitemap can’t be made easier. Arne Brachhold has provided the WordPress community with a wonderful WordPress Plugin called Google XML Sitemaps. This plugin is great because it does everything for you automatically. You don’t need to worry about having to learn how to make your own sitemap.xml file, which quite honestly can be very complicated to create and very difficult to maintain. (more…)