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SEO’s today generally agree that using meta tags to improve your search ranking is an old school (1990’s) approach to SEO, and tests, like the one I found on SEO Chat that was conducted by Jennifer Sullivan Cassidy, have proven that the most prominent search engines no longer use meta tags to determine the relevancy of web pages. The question now is “Should we do away with them altogether?”

My response and I’m sure many would agree would have to be, “absolutely not.” While optimizing your meta tags may not be an effective way to improve your rankings (I find it hard to believe that search engines totally ignore them), they still serve a couple of purposes.

Meta descriptions, for example, are used to describe your pages in the SERP’s. While not a ranking factor, this is extremely important. You do not have to be a marketing genius to realize the importance of a good description. By utilizing catchy/compelling descriptions you can effectively increase your traffic and steal some from the surrounding SERP results.

Meta keywords are not as important as the descriptions, but it is still a good practice to use them, especially since MSN still uses them to determine search relevancy. The trick to using keywords is moderation. If you use too many, your sight may be penalized for spammy keyword stuffing. Use only the keywords that are necessary.

Jennifer also notes that her curiosity was sparked when someone claimed that their search ranking improved after they removed their meta tags. This may have happened because their meta tags were spammy and they were getting penalized by the search engines.

If you haven’t reviewed your meta tags lately, it would probably be a good idea to do so now. This is just another piece of the SEO puzzle.

In one of my earlier posts, 4 Great Techniques For Optimizing Dynamic Websites, I mentioned a couple of techniques for configuring Apache and Cold Fusion Servers to create search engine friendly URL’s. I did not, however, give any advice for configuring Microsoft IIS and ASP to create friendly URL’s on dynamic websites.

So, after a number of questions and comments from IIS and ASP users, I’ve decided to redeem myself with the following list of URL rewriting tools.

1. ISAPI Rewrite
2. IIS Rewrite
3. XQASP
4. Portal Page Filter

Most of these come with a reasonable fee, but they are well worth it. I suggest learning about each one before making your decision, because they all have slightly different features.
Failing to mention solutions for IIS and ASP was a big mistake on my part, since I tend to reiterate the importance of good URL’s, and one of my recent projects, Affordable Tradeshows, has served as a reminder. It was ranking well before it was launched, and its rankings were due only to on page factors.

Good Luck
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I‘ve never questioned the relevance of textbook SEO practices, but evidently there are others in the search engine optimization world who are curious about whether are not they should concern themselves with basic textbook SEO.

A recent thread on the Cre8site forum poses the question, “Is Textbook SEO dead?”, and most of the participants in the discussion seem to agree that the dynamic state of SEO has made on page factors less critical.

My response to this question would have to be a definite, no. Textbook SEO is not, and never will be dead. The power of textbook SEO (spider friendly code, etc…) is relative to your level of competition. Naturally, high levels of competition will lower the effectiveness of your on page factors but that doesn’t suggest bypassing this step in the optimization formula. The goal of most search engines is to rank websites based on content validity and user engagement (Google can measure user engagement!). This would, of course, dictate a focus primarily on content rather than code, but the content still has to be easily crawled.

Frequently, I get SEO clients who are in markets with relatively low levels of competition (micro niche markets or local search) and usually textbook SEO, alone, will improve their rankings.

Then there are the clients, who have mature websites with a respectable amount of backlinks that cannot figure out why they rank poorly on the SERP’s. For these clients, I always look at their code first before analyzing any other part of their website. It only takes a glance to determine if they have failed to address basic SEO coding practices. Only after the code is analyzed, do I look for other areas where they may be getting penalized (duplicate content, hidden text, sharing an IP address with spammers, etc…).

Think of textbook SEO as the first piece of the puzzle. It may not be as important, but it is a piece nonetheless.

Anyone interested in textbook SEO should check out Aaron Wall’s SEO Book. It is a great SEO resource.

Is your HTML code spider friendly?

This is the first question to ponder when evaluating a website for SEO. Search engine spiders have a limited amount of time to crawl a website, so it is absolutely important that their time is spent crawling your relevant content. Using common sense coding habits and creating clean code will usually facilitate this, but there are many other techniques that can make your site easier to index.

I have found the following techniques to be very effective when building a spider friendly website.

Do not overload your pages with graphics. Flash and java look great but they are invisible to the search engines. Having too much of either will only clutter your pages and use up valuable crawling time. Moderation is the key. It is possible to make a website that is both attractive and spider friendly. Just remember to put your java and CSS in external files.

Meta tags no longer carry the weight that they once had, but they are still worth writing. The meta description should get the most attention because it is used to describe your pages in the SERP’s, and each page should have a unique description otherwise it may be ignored by the spiders.

Title tags are of utmost importance. These tags tell the spider what your pages are about and they are also the first line in the SERP’s. Some types of websites (i.e.dynamic/e-commerce) may require reconfiguring (mod_rewrite) the server to generate correct title tags.

Spiders tend to read your pages just like we do, top to bottom and left to right. Knowing this, you should always put your most pertinent information at the top of your page. This is one reason for having keywords and phrases at the beginning of your text. Also relocating extraneous code will make room to move your text closer to the top.

Spiders love header tags (h1, h2, etc.), but make sure to use only one H1 tag per page or it may be viewed as spam. Also, be sure to define your header tags in the CSS to make your site more visually pleasing.

Use tableless designs (XHTML & CSS) to avoid hiding your content from the spiders. Tables have a tendency to bury content.

Use a robots.text file to hide unimportant content and scipts from spiders. This will make your coding much cleaner.

Spider simulators, like the one Summit Media offers, are available to test your code and determine whether or not it is spider friendly. I recommend using these to refine and trouble shoot your design.

These are basic but important coding techniques that every SEO should be familiar with. If you’ve been concentrating on link building and your rankings haven’t improved, maybe you should take a look at your HTML code. The web (code) that you have woven may be too tangled for even a spider to crawl.

I like to stress the importance of link building when trying to increase your website traffic. Search engines are constantly changing the ways that they rank web pages based on on-page factors (coding, navigation, url’s, keywords, etc), but they will always give precedence to websites with good inbound links or off-page factors.

I recently ran across an article called “10 steps to getting links to your site” by Craig Fitield, who happens to be a product manager and search engine marketer at Microsoft.
His advice is valuable to any link building campaign, but the fact that it is coming from a member of the Microsoft team proves that even Microsoft bases their search engine primarily on link popularity.

Most of Craig’s tips are geared towards organizing your efforts (i.e. setting goals and using spreadsheets) and the rest are just good linking habits. While it isn’t new advice, it is good, sound advice worth repeating.

I would, however, like to add a few of my own tips:

When contacting a potential link partner for the first time via email, put extra effort into writing subject lines. Todd has a really good post on this and he also gives some examples of good and bad subjects.

Before getting a link, make sure that your link provider isn’t attaching a no-follow tag to the links on his website. If this is the case, don’t waste your time unless you stand to gain a definite traffic increase from having a link with them. Firefox has a toolbar feature that will highlight the no-follow links on a page.

Remember that when you link to a website, you will automatically be associated with that site by the search engines. So choose your friends wisely because if they are guilty of spamming, you too will be considered guilty by association.

Once you have done enough link building you will see that there is a methodology to it. Experience and creativity will then lead you to develop your own techniques.

Good Luck
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