There have been several optimization techniques used
in the past that are still being used by many today.
These serve no useful purpose:
1. Stuffing keywords in comment tags in the
head or body of your pages serves no useful pupose.
Search engine spiders and robots do not index this
content. If you have comment tags for SEO purposes, take
them out of your code and clean up your pages. If you
don''t have them, good for you. You don''t need them or
want them. Programming comment tags to explain the
purpose or functionality of special programming features
in your code are fine, leave them. Makes the next
programmer''s job easier.
2. Stuffing keywords in alt image tags serves
no optimization purpose. What are alt image tags? If you
are using a current version of Internet Explorer, when
you mouse over photographs or graphic images and see a
little text box appear, you are seeing the alt image
tags which have been attached to the image. Major search
engines have not been indexing alt image tags for well
over a year. So, for search engine optimization, they
serve no useful purpose. If they are of value to the
human visitors to your website to explain the content or
context of an image or photo, leave them in. Just don''t
expect them to help your search engine algorithm score.
They don''t.
3. Meta keywords tag. The keyword tag in the
<head></head> of your page was in the early days of
search engines the place where you put all your keywords
for search rankings. That was ages ago. For over a year,
Google, MSN and Yahoo have not indexed the keywords meta
for algorithm score. We know this from research. What I
recommend is to include 5 to 10 words in this tag, not
in phrase order, the most important words about the
page, predominately nouns, no words repeated. Within the
past 3 months, Google has started indexing this tag
again - NOT for search engine ranking score - but for
SPAM. If your keywords are spammy with words repeated
over and over and over again, of if you have lots of
words that do not appear in the page copy, Google might
penalize you for SPAM. Clear up your tag, most of them I
see are poorly done.
One final point about the keywords tag - do you have
to use commas to separate the words or not? The answer
is, it doesn''t matter. The spiders and robots can tell
that a word is a word without a comma. What do I do? No
commas in the keyword tag for me, thanks. I use them for
toothpicks and save a ton of money.
It is important to remember that there are over 110
things that Google examines when analyzing your page to
score it for search engine rankings. Every little thing
like the ones listed here are the pennies that make up
the 110 cents to get you a high ranking. Every penny
counts? You bet they do.
A search engine optimization success story for me
this week. Search on Google for green marketing ideas
and see the new page in my web # 2 out of about
25,300,000. This page went online last week.
Keep adding content and working on your website.
Cheers,
Ron Castle
www.roncastle.com
