newmediaMike

Beginning of the end for meta tags

Meta tags have been the cornerstone of SEO for many years. In fact, in the early days, the big three meta tags; title, description and keyword tag where of primary importance. As Black Hat SEOs squandered the usefulness of the keyword meta tag it fell out of favour. This gave more importance to the title and description tags. One down, two to go.

Search engines; oh who am I kidding … Google, are becoming much smarter. Google has been known to replace your description with text taken from the pages content. Google will only do this if it feels the description tag doesn’t offer the best description.

Now Google is suggesting they may be using the description tag less in the future. As users become more sophisticated and start using longer search queries, the descriptions need to move away from the generic one description fits all philosophy. By creating a description from your content Google can publish a search result that matches a search phrase more accurately.

There are two approaches to this – the first, the loss of the control over how your site appears in the search results; the second is to concede that a more appropriate description could lead to more clicks – that is, more visitors.

That will only leave the page title tag. I am sure that over time, if they are not already, the search engines will look for the first line of H1 defined text and use that as the page title.

What does all of this mean? Meta tags will no longer be required as a part of On Page SEO Best Practices. There are many web sites, particularly those that have been created by the users, and I include blogs in this group, that have no meta tags at all. They will be the big winners as this technology changes. Is it for the good? Time will tell.

The Importance of Long Tail Keyword Research

Today’s internet is not the same it was say, two or three years ago. Competition for keywords is quite competitive and keyword research is becoming more difficult.  To be competitive in today’s online marketing environment you essentially have two options. First would be to concentrate on regional SEO where the competition may not be as intense; the second option is to look a lot closer at long tail keywords.

Popular measurement provider Hitwise has reported a 7% increase in the number of 5 to 8 word search queries over the last year which goes a long way to show that searchers are now more comfortable with search engines and also  they are becoming more sophisticated in their use.

Searchers are no longer using one or two word search terms in their searches. Long tail keyword phrases have taken on more importance.

One of the first steps I take with a new client is to examine their analytics.  This helps me to identify which search terms are being used to find pages. With a little tweaking of existing pages with some of the new search terms and the effect on traffic is often quite dramatic.

One and two word keywords are now history. The future is to optimize for terms which are at least three to four words in length. Keyword research needs to be more in tune now with users and how they interact with the search engines. Limiting keyword research to one or two words based on your product or service won’t produce much in the way of traffic in the future.