Category: Search

Long-time search engine optimizers have seen meta tags go from extremely important, in the early days of SEO, to unimportant (and a handy litmus test of an SEO who doesn’t know what they are talking about). Meta keywords still remain fairly unimportant, but the meta description tag has made an impressive comeback. If you haven’t been keeping up with recent changes at the engines, you are missing out on a very large opportunity.

Time to Revisit Your Meta Descriptions
Sites that have been around a long time have been forced to live with their ODP descriptions (Open Directory Project, editor-written site descriptions that were full of flaws) or their Yahoo Directory descriptions (another editor-written directory that was terribly neglected). Thanks to years of site owner complaints, on July 13th, 2006 Google introduced the NO ODP tag. Then on Feb. 28th, 2007 Yahoo introduced the No Yahoo Directory tag. These two tags allow you to control many of your search listings.

Here’s what you should do right now:

• Add the NOODP and NOYDIR tags to pages you are willing to write unique descriptions for.
• Write descriptions with your marketing hat on. This is your chance to draw visitors in. Remember to stay on topic for the page your are writing the description for.
• Don’t lie to your potential visitors to lure them in. The search engines have methods, and will continue to develop more, to know whether or not a user was satisfied after clicking on your listing.
• Related to the last point: though swapping out ODP or YDIR descriptions won’t change your rank immediately, I believe it can change your rank over time based on whether or not the searcher decides to click on your listing and if they are satisfied with your site.
• Be conscious of character limits. It’s okay to let your description run over, but it is not okay for your to leave the important info out.

Revisiting and rewriting your meta descriptions may be one of the most important techniques of a well managed SEO in 2007. A better listing will bring a higher volume of site visitors and strengthen your long-term rank. And the best part: the changes can happen almost overnight.

Dave Pasternack is at it again. I held back in joining in the SEO isn’t rocket science debate because I didn’t want to give Dave or Did-it any more attention then they deserve, but DMNews followed up with him and he not only stuck to his guns, but lashed out once again.

Dave implies that paid search is the only way to go, but it is terribly compicated—so you should just hire his company. He feels SEO, on the other hand is as easy as baking a cake:

“If I really wanted to bake one, I’d buy a cookbook (the Google guidelines) and bake away. Can you imagine bake shops trying to convince everybody that baking a cake is so complicated that it shouldn’t be left to mere mortals? Ridiculous. I wonder what percentage of Danny’s show attendees are there to find the ‘magic SEO elixir.’ ”

Well, Mr. Pasturesnack, I’ve got to agree with you. SEO is like baking a cake. Let me describe the cake I am currently working on.

My SEO Cake:

• My cake serving size is large. It needs to feed 10 million people a month. And if I continue to bake it properly, it should feed about 15 million people a month by year end.
• My cake can’t be made from a mix out of a box – it is much too complicated. The cookbook you mention is for beginners and couldn’t possibly replace my 10 years of baking experience.
• My cake is complicated. It has hundreds of thousand of ingredients, millions of variations and is constantly worked on by 70 blind cooks. Being the only SEO cook, I have to watch the other 70 to make sure they each mix ingredients correctly.
• Basking Robbins has 31 flavors. My cake has millions and people call them by different names. It is important that I understand and keep up with all possible flavors and names for those flavors to properly cater to their needs.
• My cake is valuable. One slight error in baking my SEO cake would result in all 70 cooks immediately losing their jobs. The cost of baking this cake is $0 – time is the only cost. To replace my SEO cake with a PPC cake would cost around $84 million a year.
• Though my cake is white, I need to know how the gray and black cakes are made. Otherwise my white cake might be mistaken for a black cake and could get burned in the oven.

Ovens? We can’t forget to mention the search engines ovens.

• The ovens are complicated. The main oven is known to have over 200 dials. Each dial’s importance changes frequently and dials are swapped out over time. Two other problems: the dials are unlabled. And they are invisible.
• The ovens don’t work properly. Some have been broken for years. Plus, they all come with bad cook deterrents, but good cooks get torched in the process. To make matters worse, there’s no number to call if one of the ovens burns your cake.
• The ovens change over time. Just when you get used to an oven, they swap it out for a new model. It’s not necessary to keep up with every mechanical modification in the oven, but it is important to know what types of cakes the ovens will favor in the future.

I’ve baked plenty of PPC cakes in my time. There’s no way they are nearly as complex, nor as fruitful as an SEO cake.

It seems that there is an SEO hacker on the loose. Today he took down Stuntdubl’s site and Graywolf’s site – two well-known and popular search bloggers. I actually noticed Todd’s site being hacked almost immediately because he had a great post I marked to read later, only to discover his site was missing css and all links went to fuc*ingpirate.wordpress.com. 

Threadwatch seems to have the best coverage. For the time being, you can catch the hacker’s notes at: fuc*ingpirate.blogspot.com (sorry, no link love). I imagine google will pull down that blogger account soon. He’s published a list of well-known SEO sites he’s targeting, along with non-SEO sites like Digg and Techcrunch. Here are some of his comments:

“I’m a well known white hat SEO. You can find me at v7n, threadwatch, webmasterworld, digitalpoint and reading stuff from blogs like personified, copyblogger; seomoz (In fact I’m a moderator at one or two of those forums!) I love to help newbie’s on forums, movies and long walks on the beach… I have an “evil” alter ego called Fuc*ingPirate.”

“I’m going to crack all the SEO related sites/blogs/forums that I can… Maybe once in a while a non-SEO site will slip into the list but what the hell! Who cares anyways?”

If you want to look professional at your business, you need to start ranking a WordPress site by having a good website for it and with a paragraph paraphrase tool that allows you to paraphrase your articles, assignments, essays and any other content you’d like.

“The SEO industry is just a bunch of self-proclaimed gurus making more money from their “guru” status than from SEO”

“The blogsphere (God I hate that word) is filled with countless “SEO blogs” syndicating what other “SEO blog” syndicated from another “SEO blog” that syndicated some bullsh*t guru”

Bottom line is that everyone who uses wordpress should immediately upgrade to 2.0.7 – just released today in response to the hack used to take down the two sites. Hacked sites should also work together to pinpoint the perpetrator (and realize that the criminal often injects themself into the crime investigation). I have a feeling he (yes, I’m assuming it is a he) will slip up at some point, if he hasn’t already! SEOs, in general,  are very sophisticated and very motivated. If he continues to hack these sites, he will be caught.