11.08.2007

Meta tag and alias reinforcement

Don't just take my, Yoni's and Ken's word for it: There's ample evidence out there in SEO-blog land regarding the importance of meta tags and aliases and how they contribute to keyword density of your pages and the call-to-action text that shows up in the search engine's themselves.

Witness today's post by Miles Price in Search Engine Journal: 12 Basic On-Site SEO Tactics for Optimized Results.

1. The Meta Keywords, Description and Robots tag — Google used description copy to market your site in its results, treat this as optimized sales copy. Make sure your sitemap.xml page is CONSTANTLY called up to the search engines

2. The Title Tag - The MOST important aspect of on-page SEO, just take our word for it...

5. The URL — The subdirectory folder and page of content should be SEO’d (i.e. http://domain.com/real-estate/real-estate-marketing-ideas.com would fetch a high ranking for a page dedicated to real estate marketing ideas - especially with many highly authoritative, relevant, deep in-bound links)

3 comments:

Kathy Schwartz said...

Is there anyway to SEO SAXO?

http://www.poconorecord.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20071108/NEWS/71108004

would be http://www.poconorecord.com/Fire_victims_identified_aid_funds_set_up for_survivors.html

Kathy Schwartz said...

Can we spend a couple of hours at the director's conference talking about SEO and doing actual exercises to learn how to do it with our sites? For example, I've no idea how to "Make sure your sitemap.xml page is CONSTANTLY called up to the search engines." And how can we rewrite the first sentences on our pages when our pages (the most popular) are news? I think some of the typical SEO tips are for primarily static sites, but I could be wrong and I want to know how to make my site be #1 -- but I don't have the time to read Google's Webmaster site and learn all the ways to SEO my site. I need someone to show me and then we'll adopt the practices.

Sean Polay said...

Yes, Kathy, we absolutely can have such a session. It's a great idea, and I'll see if we can carve out some time in our conference schedule for a search engine optimization conversation. I don't profess to have all of the answers you seek, but I do think some discussion around this topic could help us arrive at a consensus on an ideal work flow. That would be a great outcome.

To address one of your specific questions: I'm not sure rewriting the first sentence on all of our pages makes sense for our business. It certainly could consume more than a full-time job. However, the landing pages we create to aggregate content for hot news topics or subject areas that we should own in our markets must have an introductory paragraph that explains the content of the page. Not only will it help the reader figure out where they've arrived after clicking the 2-word link in our nav or elsewhere, but it will also provide an opportunity to contribute to keyword densities germane to the content of the page.

That said, the newsroom corollary to rewriting the first sentence on every page is our very own Web head practice: Our alternate Web-only headlines aimed at better reflecting the content of each story. We do it for immediate reader benefit, as you know, but it also has a longer term benefit for both story distribution purposes (via social networking sites or otherwise) and search engine optimization.