| LED Digest 2250: Are Meta Tags Unnecessary? |
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Responses today from two LEDers regarding Jill Whalen's comments about meta tags, both of which offer surprise that implementing meta tags (other than the meta-keyword tag) are deemed "unnecessary steps." ================================================== The LED Digest Moderated Discussion List "Effective Online Advertising, Since 1997" Data > Information > Knowledge > Wisdom pair Networks: The LED's Web Host Hosting and Domain Registration from a Trusted Leader pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains ================================================== List Moderator: Published by: Adam Audette LED Digest adam, led-digest.com http://www.led-digest.com .............................................. September 20, 2006 Issue no. 2250 .............................................. .....IN THIS DIGEST..... ==== CONTINUING ================= --== Are Meta Tags Unnecessary? [was: Getting Traffic] ==-- ~ Kym McLaughlin "...creating [strategic] meta tags and submitting manually...will get a site listed in a top position..." ~ Cynthia Copenhagen "I am surprised by your reply that implementing meta-tags has no effect..." --== Dropping PPC ==-- ~ Robert Bass "There is a lot we don't know and can never find out." --== Small Biz & Search ==-- ~ Rick Gortatowsky "Lycos at the time was the only one who gave us an 'off the record' response." ==== BILLBOARD =================== --== Image Galleries ==-- ~ John Brumage ======== CONTINUING =============================== From: Kym McLaughlin Subject: Are Meta Tags Unnecessary? [was: Getting Traffic] > ... implementing meta tags - more specifically the keyword > meta tag - is not going to have any affect on your rankings. > Neither will manually submitting your site to the major search > engines. Both are unnecessary steps that won't do a thing > for your rankings, your traffic, your conversions or your sales. - Jill Whalen, LED 2248 Hi Jill, I will agree that the "keyword meta tag" has no effect on a site's ranking. However, I stand firm that having good site content, creating strategically crafted meta tags (i.e. Title Tag and Description Tag) and submitting manually to the search engines will get a site listed in a top position with the major search engines. I have been using this method for the past 10 years and it is as effective today as it was then. And with the high success rate that I have achieved the only conclusion I have is that this method works. This type of strategy is pertaining to organic listings and not PPC campaigns. Kindest regards, Kym McLaughlin, Search Engine Optimization Specialist Advanced Internet Marketing http://www.top20promote.com -------- new post - same topic -------- From: Cynthia Copenhagen Subject: Meta Tags > ... implementing meta tags - more specifically the keyword > meta tag - is not going to have any affect on your rankings. - Jill Whalen, LED 2248 I am surprised by your reply that implementing meta-tags has no effect on a website's ranking in the major search engines. I have used this technique for many years myself, and have had great success with it. I agree that the keyword meta-tag has lost some clout in the past few years, but the title tags and description meta-tags are still effective tools in web promotion. Cynthia Copenhagen, Search Engine Optimization Specialist Web Promotion: http://www.seowebpromote.com Web Design: http://www.cgcwebsitedesigns.com -------- new post - new topic -------- From: Robert Bass Subject: PPC engines > Your post was a very good example of the effect on business of > a market becoming crowded... As you said, you used to get sales > and good ROI. So, clearly, the Emperor had clothes at some point ;) - Michael Motherwell, LED 2248 When I said the Emperor has no clothes I meant that click fraud does exist although Google and the others deny it. First off you have to understand that I am in a niche market, maybe I have five legitimate competitors on the internet. People do not have hundreds of choices, problem is they do not know it until after they have clicked on the "competition" only to find out that these people do not have the products. After a few attempts with these imposters I am sure they get frustrated and just abandon the whole thing. Although I admit they are getting better at it, the search engines still do not really filter out the fraudulent advertisers who actually do not have the products to which they attach their keywords, at least in my field. Should Google care? Yes. Do they? Obviously not, after all, it is still revenue for them. It is an old adage in retailing that you can't sell anything unless you get them into the store first, and that is the reason many people add keywords for products they do not have. Figuring that if they get them onto the site maybe they will buy something, and a certain percentage probably do, so it pays off. And Google lets it go by because it just increases the cost to everyone for PPC. Gets that revenue up, keep the stockholders happy, the bottom line of any corporate entity. There is more to it also. Google reports how much, on the average, each click cost and it always seems to come in a few cents below my stated maximum cost per click. ALWAYS. I have never had my max cost-per-click come in at half. It is always within a penny or two of max. Yet they offer no way to prove that, even when asked, they tell me they cannot reveal that information. And every month costs come in at about 10-20% over budget. When asked about that I was told that they "take the liberty" of running my ads about 20% over and of course they hit my credit card for the inherent amount. So how do we really know that we are paying the right price? We don't. Why do they charge my card sometimes six days from last billing, sometimes seven days and other times ten days? So that I (nor anyone else) could not keep track of how much action I am getting in any measured time frame. There is a lot we don't know and can never find out. I asked for a list of the IP addresses of clickers... more "sorry we cannot reveal that information". Why not? Because I might see that the same IP shows up too many times? Why else would it be a secret? How much discussion is entailed on the Google algorithms? Volumes. Best kept secret in the West. Algorithms that supposedly change constantly. IF the story that is currently out there about how many other sites link to yours affects your rating, how come I come in at second position on my main keyword (in the free listings) and I have a total of 27 other people linking to me. My nearest competitor, the guy in first place, has 8700 and counting. Surely there must be others who have more than 27 and less than 8700. But keep the story alive that the algorithms are always changing, and keep us all supposedly busy trying to figure out the latest one; tie up the advertisers with chasing their tails with all this and they won't have time to ask questions or analyze how it all works. The adage seems to be IF they keep doing business they will be happy, even if we take them at least part of the time for a ride. IF there is no click fraud then why do they tell us they have "software in place to detect that sort of thing"? I could write that software in ten minutes, I am sure most of you could also. But if I were taking in three billion dollars a year, and even only ten percent was coming from click fraud, why would I want to? As long as I could always say "we cannot reveal that" there is no reason in the world for me to do it. And there is no reason for them to do it either. Why did Google settle a class action suit about click fraud for ninety million dollars if there is no click fraud? Because it was the cheapest way out, defending the suit would have compelled them to answer a lot of the questions posed, questions they just do not want to answer. I don't think even Google ever figured this would turn into the monumental business it has become, and I do not think they know how to control it so that the game is played on a level field. The internet was built by website owners, not by Google, Google just capitalizes on our sweat. If there were no search engines people would still find us, mine do initially via my print magazine advertising, there is always another way. But there is always another website coming online, and always another website owner trying to get his piece of the pie, not knowing about all this that has been going on. So I fear this sort of thing will go on ad infinitum... but without me. By the way, since I dropped out they have sent me several emails offering me credits to reinstate my account, I guess despite all my whining and complaining, I was still a good source of revenue for them. Robert Bass, Webmaster www.jewelex.com -------- new post - new topic -------- From: Rick Gortatowsky Subject: Small biz search > What if I just want to use graphics only for a web > page, or a site created with an older version of > Flash, with little or no HTML text. How is a WYSIWYG > editor and no knowledge of HTML, CSS or > programming going to accomplish that? - Mark Whitman, LED 2240 Hi Mark, To answer your question creating a web page that is graphic only or Flash only is instantly a rather poor judgement to make when considering the WWW. Good web design revolves around many facets from considering content, potential visitors and said platforms they use from browsers to mobile devices and devices for the handicapped. We can also enter into issues of exactly how content is managed, how will search engines, affiliates perhaps, link exchanges, web rings etc. deal with our site? An imperative in Web creation exists in most forms of engineering. Volvo does not just sit down and say, "Well... Lets make an SUV" and just hop right into fabrication of the vehicle. Time is spent considering the vehicles overall design and then that overall design is broken down and analyzed. Object Oriented Programming came about in many respects to not only organize and make software more logical to code and maintain but also to STOP the complete LINEAR mindset's that engineers of software tended to live by. Yet, concepts of "OOP" were already applied long long before computers to... well... to just about everything. Now given the wide variety of possibilities the Internet affords from eCommerce to home pages, dynamic content or static content and mixes of everything in between when one thinks about it applying the concepts of "OOP" to Webs in advance of doing anything makes lots of sense. If revenues are involved then things become even more critical and as you pointed out content can vary on site concept. A online database of legal everything is quite different than a site which has hundreds of thousands of cataloged GIF images .vs. legal documents. One legal document site serves everything from a database, another uses a Content Management System that uses a database and perhaps makes a mess of the URL encoding (aka: Joomla / Mambo prior editions). Perhaps the best mechinism is a CMS that uses an offline database and simply creates static pages that are the resultant online pages and uses a database online only to service searches. The reality is that many projects are quite different and thus really there is no set formula by which one can always be assured that they will have the best prospects of search ranks etc. Individual projects need be assessed if the goal is to try and win top billing not to mention what happens if we do win it or if site extensibility is also an imperative. Many a wonderful site has been driven to dirt not-so-simply because they NEVER expected the response they received! So up goes a site, gobs of people start hitting it and there it sits, seemingly DOA due to a server unable to handle the load. Yes, in recent years top hosting firms like Affinity have worked hard along with software platforms to help distribute a hosting providers loading... But, there are still MANY out there that do not. You buy a dedicated server someplace and find that it simply cant handle say the loading on whatall, mySQL. So now we have to muck about trying to offload all DB queries to another server dedicated to that. Again... here we sit with the entire design dilemma. What is our expectant traffic as well as how do we achieve it? There are MANY variables involved in Web's creation and if revenue is the goal than its imperative that we dont as Nasa Astronauts like to say, "screw the pooch". Now in regards to your questions about Search Engines just bleeming your ranking. Indeed it happens. We had a software sales site that basically was made of pretty static pages. We achieved top ranking in virtually every search engine without spamming. In fact we ended up getting so good at it we decided to diversify it. So we had pages based on every form of computer gaming, applications, utilities etc. Not spamming... But instead of "Buy Software" on and on in every page we had thousands of pages that were different... Yet... If you typed, "Purchase Norton Anti Virus" or "Buy" or for that matter just Norton Anti Virus... Up we came, usually #1 sometimes #2 or 3... We did this across literally thousands and thousands and thousands of products. Now software sales are a VERY competitive arena on the net, its a natural seller not like trying to peddle shoe laces. Within a period of about a year as I recall every search engine swacked us. Sure, our pages were still there but buried 3-4 pages down. Why? Well... We called some of these places. Lycos at the time was the only one who gave us an "off the record" response. They said that some companies yelled, leading retailers basically. I'd wished they'd simply told us, "back off" and we could have adjusted pages to rank a bit more poorly. I understand it. Heck, if I were a SE I'd sure not want have those businesses upset that are paying me big money over some podunk who doesnt spend a red cent! Thats business! In fact, sadly perhaps thats business. Something I see more and more in America is big business not caring at all about the consumer or small businesses. They care about money and thats it. The only time they stand up and take notice is when heaps of parties are effected and then take action. They could care less if you call your State AG, however if there are 500 people who intend to do so and file a class action they'll fall all over you like we all came out of the same womb. Rick Gortatowsky ==== BILLBOARD =================================== From: John "Zeke" Brumage Subject: Image Galleries Same old timer, New Subject: I am seeing the http://blog.destination-fun.com entries appearing in google index within a week. For this reason, i always try to link to my new galleries from the blog. The thumbnail generator i use, Extreme Thumbnail Generator can read EXIF data from the photos and make captions automagically. To leverage this, as i am color correcting and selecting photos for the galleries, i use the great batch EXIF editing tools built into ACDsee. Those of you who were on the internet in the mid 90's remember ACDsee as one of the very first shareware photo viewers. The makers have continued to develop and upgrade the original product, thay are in version 7, or at least I am. Although consumer priced, the color curve manipulation and other "darkroom" tools make it a great addition to anyone's toolbox. "Lucy was right, there IS a great pumpkin, and its named Google" John Brumage Disco Legend Zeke ------------------------------------------------------- The LED Digest is sponsored by pair Networks: pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains Copyright 1995-2006 Orange Wheel, LLC. All Rights Reserved. ----------------------------------------------------------------- "The best of a book is not the thought which it contains, but the thought which it suggests; just as the charm of music dwells not in the tones but in the echoes of our hearts." - John Greenleaf Whittier |
