Websites Under Your Control Blog

There was a time when filling your website’s pages with relevant keywords and incorporating a variety of search engine optimization (SEO) tricks would all but ensure you would rank high in search engine results. There were plenty of SEO tricks back then, and many proved to be highly effective. But, as they say, all good (or maybe not so good) things eventually come to an end.

Search engines make their money by selling ads, and need lots of users in order to sell those ads.  It is only natural, then, that search engines continuously improve the methods they use to deliver the best, most relevant search results possible. As it turns out, they are very good at it – and getting even better.

It is no secret that Google adjusts its search algorithms more often than most people take a shower. One of the primary purposes of these tweaks is to seek out and destroy the tactics being used to surreptitiously increase a site’s ranking in search engine results. Consequently, websites filled with pages populated with content created solely with search engines – rather than visitors – in mind are only going to continue their steady fall into oblivion.

This leads to the obvious question: What do we do now? Well, we do what we should have been doing all along. We fill our web pages with high quality content that is well-written, informative, and of interest to our target markets. Search engines will only continue to hone their ability to recognize high quality content, while putting the kibosh on SEO tricksters.

If you populate your website with informative, quality content, it will naturally include words and phrases that are relevant to your topic or to the searches your target audience will perform to find products or services like yours. As long as the site is built properly (see our posts on titles and headlines), this is what it takes to for search engines to prominently display your pages.

(Need help with your content? We offer a ghostwriting service for our clients. If you're not our client, see if your webmaster or marketing advisor can help.)

The days of keyword stuffing have passed, and poor quality content written just to appeal to the search engines will no longer be so easily forgiven. SEO strategies that worked wonders before will now do little to increase your ranking, and their effectiveness will continue to dwindle in the coming months and years.

Providing useful, high quality content that educates your visitors and holds their interest is your best option. Rather than fanatically calculating your keyword density and obsessing over whether “web site” or “website” has more local search juice, simply deliver good, useful content that meets the needs of your target market.

30 Seconds -- that's all you have!

Scientific studies and our own server statistics on hundreds of thousands of web page visits agree -- visitors who don't leave the page immediately will spend roughly 30 seconds on a web page, and it doesn't matter all that much if you double or triple the amount of text.

Adult reading speed is about 250 - 300 words a minute, so there is only time for the interested visitor to read about 125 - 150 words on your web page (which, if about average, has around 600 words).

How do readers learn anything when they read only 20% of the words?

By being very selective. They scan down the left side of a page very quickly for topics that catch their attention and spend most of their time in those topics. 

The eye tracking chart here, from web usability guru Jakob Nielsen, shows results that have been repeated in numerous studies.

7 Tips for getting your message across in 30 seconds...

1. Keep it short. If people will only read around 100-150 words, don't write 1500 words.
2. Stay above the fold.  80% of reader attention is in what they can see without scrolling, on pages too long to fit.
3. Skip the blah blah. Don't waste valuable space with meaningless filler text.
4. Use lists and bullet points to focus attention on key points.
5. Put key words at the beginning since readers scan down the left side to decide where to focus attention.
6. Use interesting, descriptive headlines, followed by short paragraphs.
7. Link to other pages with meaningful "anchor text" to both grab the readers' attention with the link itself, and to move longer narratives off the page.

What is "anchor text"? It's the text the reader sees in a link. Your reader (and Google) will pay more attention to a link that is descriptive such as "headlines are crucial for search engines" rather than "click here for more" or http://txzz.com/06. 

If you are using our Online Business Partner, just highlight the text you want to use as your anchor text while in the editor, click the link manager, and select the page you want to link.

We get asked repeatedly about adding "meta tags" to websites, usually the "keywords" meta tag.

Let's deal with the myth first. Meta tags don't help your search results in Google.  Period, stop, done, over and out.

All the major search engines stopped looking at the keyword tag in 1997, when the "adult" website industry started stuffing innocuous but popular search phrases into their website meta tag keywords, to hijack searches.

The only meta tag that Google looks at that we care about today is the description tag.

How is the description tag used? Google will randomly select snippets of text from your web page and display that as the text in their search results.

If you add a description tag, then Google will throw that description into the mix, along with whatever random snippets it finds on your page.

That's all. It won't boost your ranking at all.

According to Google's Matt Cutts, "Even though we sometimes use the description meta tag for the snippets we show, we still don't use the description meta tag in our ranking."

So, meta tag keywords? Don't waste your time. 

Meta tag description? As a low-priority task, put some creative and compelling text there, and it will show up once in a while in Google's results.

To add text to the description meta tag (or the keywords tag, if you really want to cover all bases), just click on "Add meta data to Web Page" link in your Online Business Partner page editor.

Then, type the text you want to be occasionally used by Google when it displays your page in search results, and click "Publish".  You are done.

(If you're not using our Online Business Partner, check with your webmaster, who will be able to revise your site to add a description tag.)

This won't get you higher up on Google, but it will give you a chance to provide one more bit of compelling text, so when people see it, they won't be able to resist clicking on your link in Google!

(Of course, don't fib. Google can get pretty cranky when you try to trick them!)