Now that we’ve explored how you can use your HEAD content to improve search engine listings, let’s move along to the BODY portion of your HTML code. Even if you never touch a META tag, you can still get good search engine performance if you have good content in the BODY of your web pages. Just keep in mind, content means text, particularly text that is meaningful and relevant to your business. Read more »
Like the TITLE tag, the META Description tag was once looked upon as an afterthought, something you played around with when you had nothing better to do with your time. Today, however, the Description tag is far more important to your search engine optimization efforts than the META Keywords tag. Here’s why… Read more »
As part of my endless and ongoing quest for solutions to SEO problems for clients and friends, I have been doing additional research lately regarding website analytic tools. (In English that translates to spending hours online reading marketing babble about software designed to help me analyze web server logs, and when that fails the process escalates to trading e-mails and phone calls with sale reps and tech support trying to get usable answers to seemingly simple questions.)
In the midst of my million-mile (virtual) march, I discovered a reference site and source that I had to share. Read more »
In the strange and confusing world of META tags, there are two that every online marketer knows about, even if what they think they know is wrong. The two tags in question are:
Over the years these two tags have been used and abused, and to this day the amount of bad advice I see regarding their use is astounding! The problem is that unlike other tags that may be ignored if used improperly, your ignorance or misunderstanding of these two tags can have serious consequences to your positioning within search engines. Read more »
Sorry for the delay on this installment. Things got kinda busy after New Years… 
Last time around we established that META tags are how we add extra, non-essential information to web pages. This extra information is called metadata, and while it can be useful, adding metadata is to your web pages is not mandatory. All metadata does is supplement the necessary information contained in digital files.
When used on the Web, this extra information is sometimes used by the end-user’s web browser. Other times it will be used by search engines, and still other times it will be used by third-party programs. Let’s take a look at the kinds of META tags you can use, and how each kind is built. Read more »
In my last post we took a look at some HTML source code and started exploring ways to optimize the HEAD content of your web pages. So far we’ve only looked at how to use the TITLE tag, but in this post I want to talk about META tags and what they really are.
META tags are the web’s version of metadata. If you’ve never heard of metadata before, don’t freak out. You have probably encountered metadata before but never had it explained to you what you were seeing. Read more »
We have entered the part of this series on search engine optimization where you need to have some basic knowledge of how web pages are built. I’m not foolish enough to expect that you will become an über scripter (meaning a person who lives to code and has no social skills), but I do expect you to be willing to do a little studying so you can understand the fundamentals. Read more »
By now you’re probably sick to the teeth with background information. You want to “get your hands dirty” and start applying all this search engine optimization theory in your website. Fear not! If it’s dirt you want, it’s dirt you’re gonna get! Read more »
My last three posts on search engine optimization have dealt with gathering information about your customers or clients, their wants, needs and surfing habits. To help you understand why I keep emphasizing text, text and more text, let’s take a quick tour down memory lane for a short and sweet history of the World Wide Web. Read more »
The past two articles have talked about what you can do to figure out your customers’ needs based on your own knowledge and expertise. But there is another very important way that you can discover what your customers want: analyze your web server logs!
Web analytics is possibly the best-kept secret when it comes to e-commerce and online marketing. The term “web analytics” can be translated into English to mean the study of how people use your website. But I’m willing to bet that better than 90% of people who have a website know nothing about analyzing their web server logs, let alone why it matters. Read more »
