Top SEO Real Estate for Your Website

Where and what are the most important parts or elements of your website for top search engine optimization impact? What things can give you the most bang for your buck?

1. The most important element is your title tag. This is found in your source code between title and /title. What you put here appears on your browser screen at the very top just to the right of the IE icon near the edge of your monitor. It should be keyword dense, on topic to your website and NOT contain your business name.

2. The second most important element is your navigation. If you are using JavaScripted drop down menus, you must supply text based navigation for search engines to follow or they will not move to the inside of your website to spider pages. Typically we will supply text links in alphabetic order in the footer of a page for a site like this. Better yet would be to build a site with navigation using CSS or text and not have to add footer links. But it is better to remediate than to not have your site be search engine friendly.

3. The third most important is the meta description. This is found only in your page’s source code. One of the biggest errors we see is the use of the same meta description and title tag site wide. Each of these elements should be unique for each page. Google did not for a period of time use the description that you created for you meta description tag, but is doing so now if you have header code to tell Google not to use what you have supplied to DMOZ.

4. Everyone asks about the meta keyword tags, but Google and we place no value on them right now. Should you still include them. Yes I guess you could, but I would not waste huge time on them, but I did feel the need to mention them but this field is not important.

If you have another element you think is important, just click comments and leave me one to share what you think is important.

Blogger, You’re Fired!

That’s right, we’re firing you Blogger. Frankly, you should take note of this post. For sites that have complex custom blog templates and are using Blogger custom FTP, the issues with blog post publishing are getting so bad that we are migrating many of our clients to WordPress.

Here’s a real world example:

Stern Environmental Group has a complex blog design. It is done in compliant CSS and using Blogger to FTP the posts to the www.SternEnvironmental.com/blog. In the last two months we have had nothing but trouble since our client’s new template was installed.

At first, we thought it was an issue of too many labels. One of our blog writers created a new label for nearly every post. We took time to clean up the labels and instituted a new procedure where labels were predefined for the writer. Still we had publishing problems and they were getting progressively worse.

This past week, even after Blogger had fessed up that their new update had impacted sites like this one with complex templates, and that they said they had corrected the problem a post from Wednesday did not appear until Friday. On top of that a post from Friday did not appear on the blog until Sunday. Mind you, I had been in to the control panel numerous times during this period trying to get Blogger to publish the posts.

In fact the problem was so bad, that the Friday morning post arrived to me via email via Feedburner, and the link to view the post online was broken; as Blogger had still not gotten its act together to publish the post. Good grief!

So, Blogger, you’re fired. Stern Environmental Group is moving to WordPress.