[Peter Lee]

Do you know that the use of SEO tags and some other SEO theories we had learned and have been using may be a little outdated. It could be a good time to find out what some of the SEO experts have got to say about this. I invited Nicholas Prudhon, PhD an internationally recognized Internet Marketing & SEO professional, as well as published author to guest post for me on my blog. His post is called "Less SEO Tags More Visitors". I thought I've learned quite a bit about SEO but have to say this old dog has now learned a few more tricks. It's also something we we have to contend with - changes that affect our getting top search engine ranking/SERP etc and coming from someone with authority on the subject, you may want to read what he has to say. It's an interesting approach. Like he says:

1) Now, did you know that despite your best SEO efforts, even if you are currently enjoying a top ranking in Google, you are potentially losing a lot of visitors?

2) if your on-page optimization does include Meta tags such as “Meta Keywords” and “Meta Description” I can guarantee you that you are losing traffic because of them!

3)Meta Description was first used to compensate the inability of the search engines to fully comprehend what your site was about… that was a long time ago.....

Well read the full post..it's very interesting. Also I invite all of you who have doubts on the topic or simply want to learn more ...to post your questions and get his answers. It's not often that you get to post questions to a seo expert and get instant answers on the same day....If you read the comment questions you'll know his answers are pretty indept and makes very good reading and understanding of SEO in a new perspective.

Well we live to learn...so we ought to learn as much as possible on SEO, since like it or not, we used it everyday in our business.

Less SEO Tags More Visitors

Peter Lee

[BIll S]

Thanks Peter,

The search engines are always changing and
we need to keep up with them!

Thanks,

[Peter Lee]

Hi Bill,

That is so true Bill. It's a challenge to keep pace with all these changes. Good to see you here.

Peter Lee

[Kooza]

Hi Peter, interesting post but I would have to question some of the statements.

That’s right, if your on-page optimization does include Meta tags such as “Meta Keywords” and “Meta Description” I can guarantee you that you are losing traffic because of them!"

It's highly unlikely you will lose traffic if you use meta keywords and meta description. It's been well known for a long time now that the SE's place very little weight (if any) on meta keywords. However it's still common practice for SEO professionals to implement them for their clients. Go take a look at The New York Times - Breaking News, World News & Multimedia

As for meta descriptions Google may pull the content which is most relevant to the search term however more often than not you could increase CTR by creating your own.

If you are like most of the folks out there and your pages are still optimized the old fashion way, your content is probably optimized around one good keyword only and you have prepared a killer description to invite all the people to click on your search result.

That was fine before, but things have changed in SEO and in the web users’ behavior.

People no longer search for one keyword or even a two words search term! They are entering much longer sentences or questions; and Google is acknowledging this behavior by extending its suggested snippets lengths.

I believe this is also false, short search phrases get more searches than long tail phrases the majority of the time. People generally will search for a broad term, if they don't find what they want they will enter something more specific and continue the process till they find what they are looking for. I manage some pretty big PPC accounts and it is clearly evident that this is the case.

I still believe the correct way to structure a site is to optimize your top level pages around the short term, high traffic phrases and within those pages you add your pages optimized around the long tail.

On page optimization is still extremely important, if you don't have a particular keyword on your page you will not rank for it. Unless you have links point to that page with that keyword in the anchor text. Also Google is now looking at keywords surrounding your back links and it is possible to rank for those also. However that's not something you want to rely on.

There are a few comments on there about the all in one SEO pack plug-in for Wordpress. No, it is highly unlikely that you will be penalized for using this. Google doesn't penalize sites anywhere near as much as people think. If you have a massive bunch of keywords in your meta keyword tag then Google will probably take the first 250 characters or so and ignore the rest.

Also if you use Google Webmaster Tools, Google encourages you to use your own meta description, and ensuring each is unique indicates a quality site to Google.

Google is really working to become more and more "organic" and any kind of attempt to manipulate the results are getting severely sanctioned.

Adding meta keywords and meta descriptions is not "manipulation" it's helping the search engines understand what your page is about. Sure other on page factors are believed to hold more weight but every little bit counts.

All the best,
Mike.

[Peter Lee]

Hi Mike,

Thanks for your feedback. Your knowledge on SEO is impeccable. What you have mentioned makes sense. If you don't mind I'm going to put your comments as a comment on my post to get a reply from Nicholas. I'm interested to find what he has to say too.

Thanks again
Peter Lee

Originally Posted by Kooza

Hi Peter, interesting post but I would have to question some of the statements.

It's highly unlikely you will lose traffic if you use meta keywords and meta description. It's been well known for a long time now that the SE's place very little weight (if any) on meta keywords. However it's still common practice for SEO professionals to implement them for their clients. Go take a look at The New York Times - Breaking News, World News & Multimedia

As for meta descriptions Google may pull the content which is most relevant to the search term however more often than not you could increase CTR by creating your own.

I believe this is also false, short search phrases get more searches than long tail phrases the majority of the time. People generally will search for a broad term, if they don't find what they want they will enter something more specific and continue the process till they find what they are looking for. I manage some pretty big PPC accounts and it is clearly evident that this is the case.

I still believe the correct way to structure a site is to optimize your top level pages around the short term, high traffic phrases and within those pages you add your pages optimized around the long tail.

On page optimization is still extremely important, if you don't have a particular keyword on your page you will not rank for it. Unless you have links point to that page with that keyword in the anchor text. Also Google is now looking at keywords surrounding your back links and it is possible to rank for those also. However that's not something you want to rely on.

There are a few comments on there about the all in one SEO pack plug-in for Wordpress. No, it is highly unlikely that you will be penalized for using this. Google doesn't penalize sites anywhere near as much as people think. If you have a massive bunch of keywords in your meta keyword tag then Google will probably take the first 250 characters or so and ignore the rest.

Also if you use Google Webmaster Tools, Google encourages you to use your own meta description, and ensuring each is unique indicates a quality site to Google.


Adding meta keywords and meta descriptions is not "manipulation" it's helping the search engines understand what your page is about. Sure other on page factors are believed to hold more weight but every little bit counts.

All the best,
Mike.

[Peter Lee]

Hi Planetman,

Thanks for adding to the conversation. While there is a lot of information on SEO, I guess we have to keep abreast of important ones and decide which ones we should take action. While it's impossible to follow everyone that sounds good, it is also not wise to completely ignore some of them.

Peter

[Kooza]

Originally Posted by Planetman

It's hard to folllow all the experts advice for SEO, to do everything on one site would takes mnths with no guarantee of success or rankings. Probably 60% of the paid for tips are fluff to sell products with results undetermined.

The problem with SEO is it is extremely difficult to measure what effect certain elements have therefore it is extremely difficult to prove a theory. You end up with a lot of theories with very little evidence to back them up.

I do agree with Nicolas's comment about quality content becoming more and more important. Quality content = more back links = better rankings. Google has focused a lot on ensuring that people can't use certain link building methods to increase their own rankings, reciprocal linking was the first to go now Google is clamping down on paid links and we saw Squidoo get hit pretty hard.

Every time Google updates the public version of PageRank (your actual PageRank is much more complex than a number out of ten, and is updated constantly) the forums are full of people asking why their PageRank has dropped. The majority of the time its not because Google has penalized your site it's because Google have devalued the links which you have pointing to your site. Because the same algorithm is being applied to your competitors you generally don't see a change in traffic or rankings.

Mike.

[Peter Lee]

Mike,

Nicholas responded to your comments as follows:

WOW, thanks a lot for sharing Peter!

Obviously that person failed to comprehend what was said.

Of course you don't get penalized by the search engines by using your meta tag, nor do you rank any lower either, it's not what I'm talking about.

What you don't gain is what you lose. If somebody look at the search result and decide to go click on a site that is not yours because their description in the result page looks more relevant to them, then yes, I do consider that you are losing some traffic.

Because you still implement them doesn't mean that you are "wrong", yet because some big sites still use them doesn't mean they are right either. big sites are hardly relevant when we talk about SEO because of the way they generate their traffic is very different than us. The New Your Times advertising budget is nothing to compare to mine (and yours I believe), SEO is a way to give us a chance (small guys) to level up with those big guys. Do you really think the New York Times needs Google for us to know they exist?

How can you optimize a single ad (your description) to fully be the most relevant for all types of searches? That's BS and anyone who have been any bit involved with PPC knows that very well for instance.

Short terms keyword brings more traffic... bla bla bla... Sure, optimize your site for "internet" and you'll find that your keyword really get a lot of searches about 300,000 per month, now, if you actually manage to rank for that... or even if you use PPC... tell me how many of those folks are actually going to join your affiliate program?

The key to the success of a site is not traffic, it's "Quality Targeted Traffic".

On page optimization has for sole purpose to identify your site for indexing, what rank your site is your inbound link strategy. The fact is that with a massive and powerful linking strategy, you could rank for a search term that doesn't even exist on your page.

I think that answers to all the comments made by this contributing person.

Obviously, some people are bound to disagree but isn't that what makes commenting and posting so entertaining!

[Kooza]

Hi Peter, you left out the bit where I was called narrow minded? Anyway I admit I may have misinterpreted some of his comments, I don't find his writing style very easy to follow. Not that mine is particularly good either

I agree with his overall message that Google can provide a more relevant snippet resulting in a better CTR. I wouldn't say this applies to every type of page though as he seemed to imply.

I look forward to more of his belittling comments!

All the best,
Mike.

[Peter Lee]

Hi Mike,

Yes I intentionally left that out as it was a little insensitive of him but everything else remained intact. It was good to hear both experts' comments on this. I've learned a lot just reading yours and Nicholas' comments. Like I said, your knowledge of SEO is impeccable and I've learned a lot from you as well as Nicholas. I await in bated breath his response. I hope to see this great debate end amicably

Peter Lee

[kanwarjot]

Hey Peter, I read few lines here and then i was compelled to read the whole article.Thanks a lot for posting such a nice article

[Peter Lee]

Hi Kanwarjot,

Thanks for reading the post and I hope you've learned some aspects of SEO. It's quite an important subject for all of us. Glad you read the full post otherwise you may get some misinterpretations.

Peter

[Peter Lee]

Hi Mike,

This is the response from Nicholas:

"Hi Mike,

It's actually good that you came in person to reply! It's much easier to talk directly with the person instead of an intermediary...

I didn't mean to insult you when I said narrow minded, but I do come across a lot of those people (and I'm sure you do too).

I think our experience and understanding of the global rules of IM and SEO takes us to discuss and argue at another level than what was originally intended here for the readers...

Obviously we both know that SEO is not the matter of one element but truly a combination of many including, structure, onpage, offpage, age, links, keywords, content, traffic quality, click through rate, ROI,etc...

I'm really glad that you replied because I does indeed clarify many things. It would appear to me that we agree on a global level, and what we are arguing on is simply different situations in different context only.

We could write a book with over 1,000 pages on SEO and this is only a small post... So if the explanation I gave weren't 100% backed within context each time for clarification, I apologize sincerely for it to you.

Ultimately, SEO is an art and not a science. The goal is still to get as many targeted visitors as possible to the site of our choice, be it by ranking high on search engine or not. How people achieve that varies a lot and in truth doesn't matter as long as it is an ethical way."