If that describes where you “are” in your own DIY SEO strategy, then I’ve got two links for you….links for totally free “health checks” for your website or a clients…but a disclaimer is necessary up front, eh!

The links herein, all take you to URLs where you are asked to plug-in an URL for your site. This automatically starts that site’s scripts up to look at your chosen site and to grade it according to a formula developed by the company who owns this website audit site. This is both a good thing and a bad thing all at the same time.

Good thing, in that the two sites I’ve listed here do a fairly nice job of ranking the basic on-page SEO items that we SEO practitioners know about. That is, they all use say <title> tags and your use of same, to identify what exists on your chosen site, and then they “rank” that use by you (or anyone reallly) against a formula that they’ve developed. Better ranking %’s mean that according to your on-page SEO tactics, you’re doing well….or not! So a gentle reminder that all these audit sites use their own formulas, so the actual % shown will vary — sometimes drastically as in our own www.canuckseo.com rankings too….

But there is also a bad thing to consider too…that you should not ever believe that just because you got a 95% ranking from one of these website audit sites, that either your job is done…or that this ranking will bring traffic. Your job is never ever done, eh! You need to upgrade your content, your backlink campaigns on a daily basis almost to continue to grow and get your site up and up and up in the serps. And one more thing too that can be or may be mis-construed by users of these free website audit sites — and that is that your content, the actual text and images on your site that will appeal to visitors and begin the marketing of your products/services aimed at conversion IS NEVER RANKED by these sites. That only you can audit by using your conversion metrics…but on to the examples here for these URLs…

Website Grader is one of the best ones we’ve found, and it’s run by the folks over at Hubspot, a well known and respected online marketing firm. I like this site and always run our own sites as well as any client prospects too thru same to get a sense of how the site ranks using their formulas. A nice thing about this site tool, is that you have to insert your email address too…and they both offer up the online report as well as email you same with a link there to the saved online report too!  A nice touch and a point I’d like to add is that their formula I believe is one of the best that there is for website users! Oh, you can also add a ‘badge’ too with your score on same, a nice idea but a bit – just a bit IMHO, hokey…..but the choice is up to you of course!

Woorank is the other website free audit site I wanted to tell you about too and this site is the result of much hard work by a group of online marketers and creative designers and yes, it’s free…and it’s different formula wise too! I like woorank and I think you will too…it’s the same as the websiteGrader one, in that it goes to your chosen site URL, and maps out all the variables that it needs to create a score….and then shows same in a nice online report that you can also export out as a .pdf too, a nice touch. But this audit is different….

What do I mean? Well, the first example up above at websiteGrader gave this site a 95% score according to it’s own formula — and woorank gave a score of 49% for this site — a whopping difference, eh! Why is the question, and that’s all according to the formulas that these two firms have that does the ranking on this site – on any site that they’re asked to rank!

So when you run your sites through both of these free audit sites, you will need to be remembering that your ranks will be different as they have their own formulas and they value various on-page SEO items differently, eh! But run them through both you must do…to drill down through each report to see the line-by-line items and how each found something different to rank on…and where you’ve not as yet done enough on-page SEO tactically to get higher ranking scores. Doing that, we’ve found, is a great way to increase your on-page SEO dexterity….and that’s a good SEO habit to pickup, eh!

First, let us begin with the best of all original lists for Canadian citations, from David Mihm the well-known and respected LOCAL SEO expert, which can still be found here…. 

This list was the basis for our own listings, i.e. we very much liked that David had taken the time to look into our Canadian marketplace and give all of us Canadian SEO types a list to make our forays into the world of LOCAL search, so this is a solid beginning, eh!

Next, we added to that in our own blog posting here….back in November of last year, and those three additions are still solid citation performers as we’ve learned over the past 8 months for our own client listings. Dev Basu, another well known SEO practitioner who works out of  the Toronto area, also updated the listings for Canadian citations right here…and they too were added to our own master list which we’ve updated here for all you DIY Canadian SEO types, eh! 

Note too, that in our listing below we’ve found a few “new” ones to be added….so our own mid-year 2010 Canadian citations list now includes 28 working citations listings….here in Canada.

A note please on the layouts below which “do” include PageRank, Google’s proprietary ranking method on it’s own algo to measure the “value” of the link from each of these citation domains. As we’ve long ago learned that PR does NOT help in gaining you any serp traction, we do find — but as yet can’t truly correlate same — that PR does count it appears for LOCAL search linkjuice. We can not as yet “get” the value of that factor as it appears that for some of our clients, the juice from a PR of 8 does NOT get added to gain any more client channel traction…yet somehow a lower PR of 5 does! We don’t know why. We, like the rest of the SEO world, test and only believe empircal values…but that’s a whole other blog post, eh!

So here’s the latest list, our new Master Canadian citations listings for mid-year 2010!

Name	Citation	PageRank
YellowPages	YellowPages	8
BBB – Canada	BBB – Canada	8
Canpages	Canpages	7
411.ca	411.ca	7
Yelp.ca	Yelp.ca	7
WorldWeb	WorldWeb	7
CanadaOne	CanadaOne	6
Profile Canada	Profile Canada	6
Scott’s Info	Scott’s Info	6
WCities	WCities	6
WebLocal	WebLocal.ca	6
iBegin	iBegin	6
BELL Business	BELL	6
Found Locally	Found Locally	5
eSourceCanada	eSourceCanada	5
CanLinks	CanLinks	5
Canada Web Directory	Canada Web Directory	5
Shop In Canada	Shop In Canada	5
ZipLocal	ZipLocal	5
HotFrog	HotFrog.ca	5
Canadian Enviro	Canadian Environmental	5
Where.ca	Where.Ca	5
ZipLocal	Zip Local	5
YLM Canada	YLM Canada	5
N49	N49	4
CanadaDirect	CanadaDirect	4
BuyItCanada	BuyItCanada	4
Zoomit	ZoomIt	4

That’s pretty much, what we’ve found working here in google.ca land…we have succcessfully used them all, as shown, for various clients in many channels here in Canada and while we know that this list is a “working” list only….i.e. your own mileage may vary, we trust these enough to publish them here for all to see…and use! And if you DO find others, add them to the comment section here for us all to test against, if you will please? Would help all us SEO types, eh!

What that means for us SEO practitioners, is that if you read, then you should  surely understand both the usage and importance of using an <H1> tag, and simply put, it’s used as a header for a few following paragraphs and it explains what’s to follow as succinctly and as honestly as is possible.

Huh? Yes, I know, what’m I talking about? To understand how to use an <H1> tag, perhaps you need to understand where it came from and why it was even created. And this short blog article does not have the space to teach the history of the HTML development, but here’s the short story. Invented by Tim Berners-Lee, it is the language that he developed along with others to create HTML  as a method to allow researchers (read academics I think) to share information. Hence HTML is to be used to explain stuff like research, hypotheses, papers…ie all things academic.

Of course, it’s morphed quickly into selling diapers and sharing music, but the origins are important in that the language of the web, the most basic of it’s building blocks, was created to be able to explain something….and that for us is the key to understanding much of the Google algo, eh!

Think about it. ie  follow me here. If HTML was created to be used to explain a topic, and if it was created to be used by academics, and if the Google founders allowed for some of that ‘rationale’ to be included in their own 200+ faceted algo items, then it stands to reason that an <H1> tag should be used to be the heading used to explain the following topic. Want to move away from that topic to another? Use another <H1> tag, in fact, use them like any academic would use them…simply to be the head of a new section of text.

And that’s what we think, and that’s the premise that we’ve been following now for over 6 years. But of course, that’s not the whole of our usage nor I suspect, for many other SEO practitioners either. What do I mean by that?

 What wiki has to say about the <H1> tag is as follows –

“Section headings at different levels. <h1> delimits the highest-level heading, <h2> the next level down (sub-section), <h3> for a level below that, and so on to <h6>. Most visual browsers show headings as large bold text by default, though this can be overridden with CSS. Heading elements are not intended merely for creating large or bold text — they describe the document’s structure and organization. Some programs use them to generate outlines and tables of contents…”

And from what I’ve seen over the years, the Google algo totally ignores any kind of “value rating” for HTML markups; all one has to do is to look at the hundreds of sites I see weekly to notice that Google could care less how you structure your HTML nor if the site validates….none of that is counted as relevant by Google. They just don’t care, eh!

So if Google pays no attention at all to HTML markup, why would they pay attention to an <H1> heading tag, or an <H2> etc?

Ahhh…there’s the rub in our mind! The usage of an <H1> tag MUST be used in our mind, as a ‘backup’ item for the Google algo — that is, it’s not important enough our own client serps show us, to matter on it’s own. Rather, it is being looked at in relation to the text that follows the <H1> tag. It must somehow (yes, I do wish I knew exactly too, eh!) outline, in a relevant manner, the topic that follows AND — most importantly, it can NOT be used in a ‘rubber-stamp’ mentality.

That means that you can’t dump like 15 <H1> tags on one page, unless, like in an academic paper, that page runs from Sudbury to Thunder Bay (ie it’s a long long one!) Using an <H1> outside of ivy tower usage in our mind, means that Google will disregard your header tags completely and discount same page after page…which is a total waste of time and effort. Instead, try to add your <H1> tags like your old college sociology professor would add them to his dissertation….always always relevant and always always explanatory!

So, use <H1> tags, and if needed then Google for “<H1> CSS” to learn what many of us already know that you can easily change the look/feel of your header tags to match your nicely formatted and spendidly fonted site!

The first question a business should answer is whether a website is targeting just a Canadian audience or whether it is targeting a world audience (including Canada, but also the USA, Europe, Asia, etc.).  This post will address only those businesses targeting primarily a Canadian audience. 

I will say only that if your business is targeting a world audience, and you do choose to use a .ca domain, we have seen no evidence that it will hurt your rankings in New York or London.  However, .ca does say “Canadian” and it is reasonable to expect change at any time – that Google and Bing might one day wake up and decide not serve up a .ca listing in results outside of Canada, or at least to reduce their rankings.

What we do know is that there are five ways to let the search engines know that your website is particularly relevant to Canadians: 

1. A .ca domain makes it very clear that the site is Canadian.
2. A site hosted on a Canadian server is usually considered Canadian
3. A site with a significantly disproportionate percentage of backlinks from .ca or Canadian-hosted domains is likely to be relevant specifically to Canadians
4. A website with an address located in Canada, or the word Canada written all over it is also likely to be of particular interest to Canadians.
5. In Google’s webmaster tools, you can associate a website with “Canada”, but that doesn’t help at Bing, Yahoo, Ask or other engines.

 The order I listed the five methods above is purposeful; a .ca domain is generally believed to be the single most effective way to signal “Canadian” to the search engines.  My own anecdotal experience confirms this, although I have not seen any statistically sound testing to confirm this.

 How effective is a .ca domain?  It can make a very big difference at Google.ca, making a website rank much higher than at it does at Google.com .  Here are some sample rankings for the top 6 most important search phrases for a client of mine who is on a .ca domain –

As an example, one of my clients with a .ca domain is competing is a highly competitive niche.  Here are a few sample rankings at Google.ca and Google.com:

Why this matters is because Google serves up Google.ca to all users whose IP address is designated Canadian.  That is a majority of Canadian searchers.  Having a .ca domain gives your business an advantage it does not have at Google.com . 

That does not mean you should ignore Google.com .  There are many applications, including the Google Toolbar and third party websites running Google searches, where geography is not factored in and Canadians are treated as if they were global nomads.  A .ca domain won’t help you in these searches, but other signals will.

Canadians searching through applications that ignore geography are much more likely to refine their search geographically (adding “Canada” or the name of their city and clicking “search” again).  This is just an assumption on my part; it would be interesting to see data, but I don’t believe there is any available.

Although right now a .ca domain does not give a business a natural advantage in Google.com searches from within Canada, there is no telling that it might not in the future.  If at any time it does, I know a lot of .ca domain owners who will be smiling.

By the way, I put my money where my mouth is.  Although my clients come from all over the world, I have a special interest in home base.  So my main, international website is at www.seo-writer.com, but I have a website just to attract Canadian clients at www.seo-writer.ca .

David Leonhardt left the offline world of public relations and issues management to found The Happy Guy Marketing.  SEO and SEM is really just part of the natural extension online of the old offline world of public relations…drop by for a look/see at this active Canadians site, eh!

Since the Reign didn’t put any keywords in the meta tags, I am forced to guess at what they might want to show up for. I am guessing Ontario hockey (90,500 global searches) and hockey in Ontario (9,900 global searches) could be good terms for them. 

Currently, for both terms, the Reign ranks on the third page (personalization turned off/logged out) of Google.com – but doesn’t even show up in a Google.ca search (from California) for Ontario hockey, and shows up in position 151 for hockey in Ontario. All of this to say the basics can probably go a long way for the Reign’s website.

We will start with the quick fixes – The title tag could use a couple keywords.  The Reign’s homepage title is “ontarioreign.com: Home”.  Start by changing this to “Ontario Hockey | The Reign, hockey in Ontario” should cover your brand and the two new keywords. Alright, title, done. Step two: let’s add some text, there is literally no text on this page other than their footer.  Putting 150 words, while not a lot, could have a huge impact, especially when they put their keywords in the text. Then we give the short paragraph a keyword rich title and make it an H1.

Now on to a slightly more challenging issues, canonicalization.  The www and non-www versions of the site are not canonicalized.  Set up a 301 from the non-www version to the www version and concentrate the link juice.  Additionally, we can add the canonical link tag in to the head section.  Adding these should establish the www version of the site as the canonical version and maximize the value of inbound links.

Finally, the Reign has some accessibility issues that should be addressed. Looking at their source code, the first thing that jumps out is that their main navigation uses JavaScript to call the sub menu of each category.  Since search engines can’t execute JavaScript, this makes the pages in the sub menu less accessible. By rewriting the code for these links in a search engine friendly manor, these pages will have more authority, as more link juice will be able to flow to them.  The end result is that these pages will be more competitive for the keywords these pages may be targeting.

I’m not saying that these changes along will put the Reign on the first page, but it should help them get on their way and make that large initial headway. While basics like these take less than five minutes to diagnose, they can make a large difference for many sites. Making many of these simple on page changes can result in big gains for many sites who have not actively engaged in SEO before.

This guest post is by Geoff Kenyon (www.geoffkenyon.com) a well known Internet Marketing/SEO practitioner from California on a local Californian hockey league site! Drop by his site to see more of Geoff”s take on same….

Home pages MUST rule. That is, if you think about it, you get one chance and once chance only to impress the website visitor enough that they want to “stick” on your website long enough to learn enough to get them to contact you or buy something. You get one chance. And that one chance comes from your home page, where they first “meet” your site and your abilities, eh!

“Meet,” you ask? What do I mean? Well, its the home page where folks land that will either convince the website visitor that yes, this is a site where they can spend a few more clicks to learn about your skills, your products or your services to make an informed decision to contact you for more information. This is the page that pre-sells your prospective client/customer to “buy-in” to the next step, of sticking around for a few minutes. Anything else in todays world, means they jump away and take that opportunity to sell something to them with them. Bub-bye!

So, if the home page is so important, and if you’re whole online existance is dependant on what it shows a prospective client/customer, then what are some rules to follow in making same “sticky” to attract drill-downs that will end with a “call to action”? Ah…well, here’s the most important rule, in my mind — your English usage!

I CAN NOT TELL YOU HOW MANY TIMES I’ve been in SEO forums or web boards or message pits and have seen the same type of #1 issue with this arise…that people who think that they’ve developed the best of the best websites in their channel, simply have no bloody idea! Mostly it’s because they are non English speaking site owners or developers and they not only do not understand grammar, spelling, idioms and slang, but that they get so dang upset when you point that out to them! I’ve been sworn at, had my email bombed with spam, have had my online rep trashed (or they at least threatened to do that) and overall, been told that I’m a racist or too too old to know s**t or too stupid to understand the ‘modern’ web world or too anti-pickanycountry- ist and lastly, yes, against their country because of where on the globe it sits. Honestly, that’s the kind of flack I’ve taken for pointing out just how poor their site is trying to communicate!

I’m pretty sick of it, I must admit and for the most part, I’ve about given those “Site Review” threads a wide berth in the past year or so. I don’t need the hassle, but I do want to make this point here….

That if you think you want to sell something to somebody online, then you need to do it in the most professional, best practices methodology to gain that new client or customer. And that means that you need to use perfect English, if the site sells to the English speaking world. You can NOT get away with second rate grammar. You must spell all the words you use correctly. If you use metaphors  or anythink like that, remember that they must be used properly and must be “on point” too! If you use idioms, then they too must be “spot-on” to once again ensure that your point is valid. Why, you ask?

Because of the general approach that all of us have, when we first think of searching for a product or a service. You need to “sell” to a visitor and you get one chance to make that first impression. Once chance to prove to them that your domain is THE ONE to contact.

Want to sell me a new furnace, for example? Well, as my kids will be living in my house and your furnace uses/burns natural gas, then I must feel that you have not only good pricing for that furnace, but that your installation team will follow the best practices when they do the installation too.  My family is at stake here, and if I get even a glimpse, a peek into your domains inability to follow the best of all practical methods of furance installation — via — your inablity to spell words right on your homepage — you get ZERO trust from me! And I surf away!

Give this a try. Go to your homepage and read it — better yet, ask a few of your current clients or customers to take a “hard look” at your home page and then get back to you with their own opinions. Include in the guidelines that you want to know if the copy on the page makes sense? Does it flow? Does it make them think that you DO know your business too? And anything but positive feedback here, means you need to look at that homepage with a fresh eye, eh!

Anything else, means you’ll never do well by never establishing TRUST to get online sales, eh! But don’t worry, you’re not alone….there’s hundreds of millions of sites just like yours….sigh….

If you’ve ever wondered what the criteria might be, to see if you need to take advantage and use the Google LOCAL Maps SEO to gain  new clients or customers, then here’s a rationale that you can follow to see what’s involved.

To rank well in the Google MAPS area, or the LOCAL search engine comprises a set of tasks that must be accomplished in order to both be listed, and then ranked. But before you bother, here’s what you should know to see if this is the best way to gain that new traffic….but let me ask first, do you want new business? And if so, then this simple DIY blog post will help, eh!

Are you a LOCAL business, would be the first question?
That is, think for a moment as to where your own clients/customers come from. Do they live within say 50 miles of your offices? Or do they work within that 30-50 mile radius? Do you sell products or services that are consumed by those same clients/customers within that 30-50 mile limiation? If the answer to any of these is “yes,” then you run a LOCALLY oriented business.

Think of lawyers, plumbers, electricians and dentists. Think of plastic surgeons, autobody shops, funeral homes and all other businesses that find their clients/customers all come from the region surrounding their office locations. While the 30-50 mile radius is my own threshold, in some instances it’s much smaller say in cities with over 1 million inhabitants; and in some smaller regions that radius will grow to be 100 miles too. No matter what the radius of your marketplace, know that there is such a region around you and a simple check for addresses of say the past 12 months worth of clients/customers will show you the area upon which you draw new business.

Am I close enough to my city core to rank well?
Time was, when Google used the core of the city, it’s “centroid” as it became known to measure the distance from your offices to that centroid, to determine how well you would “rank” in the LOCAL search results pages. At least that’s what our numbers (and other SEO practitioners too) have shown in the past 12 months or so…a reduced reliance on that distance measurement. However for two smaller clients, in smaller cities (of less than 25,000) it still appears to be holding true, that the closer your office address is to that city centroid, the better you will rank. So, “location sensitivity” still appears to be a factor in the Google LOCAL algorithm, eh!

Do we even need a website to be found?
As odd as this question looks, it’s perfectly acceptable to Google, to rank businesses in their LOCAL Maps algo that do not even have a website, and there are thousands of such entried tucked away in their index. Think about it for a second as say a Pizza shop owner. You dont’ need a website, because all of your customers either call in for delivery or walkin for takeout. Websites market a companys products (or services) by offering up information to a website visitor and let’s face it, you can’t tell how good that double pepperoni and anchovie pie is going to be by a picture of same. So no website, but that does NOT mean that Google doesn’t know about you, hasn’t indexed your business in it’s Maps index and that you wont come up if someone types in “Dundas pizza” — because you will.

Go ahead, give it a try…do you see the #2 listing for Master Dundas 2 For 1 Pizza? I do, and yes, they do NOT have  a website.  They don’t need one and they still come up on the LOCAL search page! How’s that for an SEO ROI!!!

In summary, then…lastly, think about this as a valid Canadian DIY SEO strategy…

Clients and customers can come from anywhere to buy your products and services. If you go to the Google LOCAL Maps website there is a pretty easy methodology and DIY process to follow (which they’ve outlined nicely for you) to follow to get your business listed and verified. Many of you readers I know will have already accomplished this and yes, you’re gaining new LOCAL clients/customers from that signup. But some of you I know will not bother and that’s the real shame. You don’t need to be close to your city centre and you dont’ need to even have a website to gain traction from the LOCAL Maps rankings….so please let me ask one more time, you DO want new business now, don’t you? And dont forget we have our own CanuckSEO Whitepaper available to learn even more about using Google LOCAL Maps to market your business to local clients and customers too, eh!

Okay, let’s see if we can finish off the whole <META> tags area with this third chapter on DIY Canadian SEO, shall we?

Once you’ve read Chapter 2 here, and understand that I do NOT like using (under any circumstances) the <META> keyword tags for a whole variety of reasons, you should then learn that I do like using the <META> description tag for all clients…but what’s the difference, you ask?

Simple, really. The <META> keyword tag, as I explained is a simple — they give information about an HTML page to the browser but are usually not seen by the user who visits the site. They have been severely limited in usage over the past 5 years or so due to the fact that they were so easy to manipulate to try to force higher rankings for websites that Google has simply said that their algo no longer uses them to rank a website at all. Yahoo still uses them but ever ever so slightly to count towards a site’s rankings that it just doesn’t matter. And BING, well, they say that using same does count…maybe not much and maybe not a lot….but on their site they do offer up some <META> keyword advice, all of which I discount and do not believe. In my world, the <META> keyword is dead for any real SEO rankings use, and that’s that.

But…ah…always a but, eh…the <META> description tag is a total other store. Wikipedia describes this tag as follows — “…unlike the keywords attribute, the description attribute is supported by most major search engines, like Yahoo, BING and Google and will fall back on this tag when information about the page itself is requested.  The description attribute provides a concise explanation of a website page’s content. This allows the Web page authors to give a more meaningful description for listings than might be displayed if the search engine was unable to automatically create its own description based on the page content. The description is often, but not always, displayed on query reports, so it can impact click-through rates. Industry commentators have suggested that major search engines also consider keywords located in the description attribute when ranking pages. W3C doesn’t specify the size of this description meta tag, but almost all search engines recommend it to be shorter than 200 characters of plain text…”

As you can see, Wiki has covered nicely the major items to learn here, which I wanted to comment on myownself by using an example here first to show you what is meant by using this <META> tag. No Canadian would doubt that the Globe & Mail newspaper offers up canuck news….so I thought I’d use them to show you what I mean. Go to google and type in “news from Canada,” and await the results page and then scroll down to the #6 spot and what do you see?

Do you see the second line that describes for the viewer, just “what” content will be found at that site? Sure you do, and if you want to see where it came from then simply go to that linked page and then View Source to see this –

<meta name=”description” content=”The Globe and Mail offers the most authoritative news in Canada, featuring national and international news” />

Looks familiar eh? Yup, the phrase that Google used to describe the Globe & Mail site, is the same phrase that their SEO guy used, verbatim, in the <META> description tag. This is how it works and this is important for a host of reasons….not the least of which is the fact that as stated by Wikipedia, mostly all the search engines support the <META> description tag. This is important to realize that the term “all” is really say the top 10 or 20 of same. There are thousands of search engines and they come onto the web by the dozens daily, but as you most likely know they end up being sadly underutilized because they never ever climb up to even get noticed by web users who would then list their sites with same. The top 10 search engines cover about 99% of the world’s searches which when I last checked run at about 200+ million a day back in 2006…and from what I’ve heard lately that is now in the BILLIONS per month.

One more thing then, about the <META> description tag, is about that which Google only refers to as “rich snippets.” And what’s a rich snippet, you ask? Well, in the words of Google themselves, they are additions to the query results that show a potential website visitor “convenient summary information about their search results at a glance….and we are currently supporting data about reviews and people.”  You need to use a special markup type of text insert to take advantage of these annotations; and the best spot to learn more is on the Official Google Webmaster blog…give that a read and see what I mean.

So then you should know that to get a search engine to ‘index’ what you want them to know about your site, via their bot, means that if you use the <META> description tag to actually show them what a page’s contents are all about, will mean that if and when one of those billions of searches brings up your site, the potential website visitor will then see what you want them to see, content wise. Which should, if you’ve done your SEO tasks correctly, bring you new targeted leads that will convert to new revenues….least that’s the real rationale behind SEO! Still following me here?

Hope so…cause there are hundreds if not thousands of potential customers or clients who’ve yet to buy your services or products, who will never ever find you unless you DO use the right SEO tactics to bring them to your site. And that’s the dang truth, eh! So use the <META> description tag to describe your page contents up to that 200 char limit….and do it well as your new revenue stream depends on it!

To carry on with our DIY Canadian SEO series I thought that today I’d give you the straight goods on the whole <META> keyword tag issue that seems to have been on many forums in the past few months…and what’s spot-on and what’s not!

First, what is a <META> keyword tag? Wiki offers this definition which works for me and should for you too! In one form, meta elements can specify HTTP headers which should be sent before the actual content when the HTML page is served from Web server to the client. For example: <meta name=”keywords” content=”wikipedia,encyclopedia”/> In this example, the meta element identifies itself as containing the ‘keywords’ relevant to the document, Wikipedia and encyclopedia….do you follow me here?

<META> keywords then give information about an HTML page to the browser but are usually not seen by the user who visits the site. Instead, they have been used in the past to help search engines (read Google here for example) to provide a classification of that web page and the SEO practitioner community quickly learned to manipulate their sites or their client’s sites by using this tag to gain high rankings! Then it appeared that Google et al started to pay attention around 2000 or so, to ignore these <META> keywords in their ranking algorithms. At least most of us learned that the <META> keywords had lost their “juice” and moved to other factors to gain better rankings….but that’s for a later article.

So, <META> keywords….do they matter at all anymore? Well, let’s see…

Google ~
First here’s a link to Matt Cutts, the Google software engineer who speaks for them online…wherein he looks at the simple question “Does Google use the keywords’ META tag?”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jK7IPbnmvVU

And answer is – no they don’t! The <META> keyword tag is not used in their rankings. Period, end of story! Oh, they do use other <META> tags like description to provide communication between the page and the Google index but again that’s not on point here.  So ignore it for Google rankings.

Yahoo ~
Next, Yahoo and their usage of the <META> keyword for rankings is a bit “muddier” but fairly easy to see what the right tactic is here too. The links below leads to a great blog piece by Danny Sullivan, one of the real gurus of search here –

http://searchengineland.com/sorry-yahoo-you-do-index-the-meta-keywords-tag-27743

Basically the issue seems to be that Yahoo stated just a  couple of weeks ago, that they do NOT use the <META> keyword tag in their ranking algorithms. But, then Danny challenged that statement, by  testing…and found that they DO  still index the keywords….so did they lie, maybe? Well, it appears that wasn’t the case, but in fact, that maybe the Yahoo spokesperson just didn’t know….dunno if I believe that, but that’s what appears to be true. Yahoo says now, that yes, they do still index a <META> keyword string, but that this is given their rock-bottom “juice” in their ranking algorithms….and any other ranking signals present on the page will take precedence…..

So what’s that all mean? To be totally honest, I  have not tested for this as yet, but we’ve been totally ignoring all <META> keyword usage for over 4 years now, so I’m not “chuffed” by their waffling on this!

BING ~
Well, now things’re real muddy, eh! BING has a public position on the use of the  <META> keywords right here –

http://www.bing.com/community/blogs/webmaster/archive/2009/07/18/head-s-up-on-lt-head-gt-tag-optimization-sem-101.aspx

But, then if you do read this, they say quite clearly, that “…there’s no need to ignore the tag. Take advantage of all legitimate opportunities to score keyword credit, even when the payoff is relatively low….” which means to me then that they DO rank for keywords. Maybe not much, maybe not even a little more than a teensy bit…but they do rank for that tag.

So, what’s a new DIY SEO practitioner gonna do? Google with over 80% of the search engine traffic, says don’t bother. Yahoo says that while they do read the tag, they don’t use if for ranking…and BING says that it’s not a “juicy” tag but that they do use same slightly.

Answer is then, do you put in the <META> keyword tag  and then list your targeted keywords for the search engines to use, no matter how very very little? You may think that the answer to this would be yes….but in fact for a whole different reason, it’s NO. Do not use the <META>  keyword tag at all, ever.

Why? Simple really, competitor intelligence rules on the web, and there is NO sense in showing your competition what keywords and phrases you value and are trying to gain rankings for. Provide no easily seen list for them to see what you’ve found are THE keywords to vie for….no sense in giving up all that keyword research and time and effort and work….to anyone who pops open the View > Source button, eh!

So the DIY bottom line on using the <META> keyword tag? Dont’ use it but be sure to drop by next week when we look at the <META> description tag and rich snippets!

In the next few months, I’m going to be putting forth a series of Do It Yourself SEO chapters for one and all to enable any website owner to learn what we feel are the best tactics to use, in gaining search engine rankings that climb. This series of chapters will be somewhat detailed so that not only can I explain the “how-to’s” of Canadian SEO, but also the “whys” of same. So here’ s the first chapter, on the creation and development of the <TITLE> tags and why that is so so important.

Okay, first look at your own title tag, which of course is up top in the browser’s blue bar. See that string of data up there that comes before the brand name of the browser itself? Well, that’s the title tag. For example, here’s what I see when I go to one of our websites at www.kkti.com — <title>Hamilton web developer — Hamilton Search Engine Optimization– KKT INTERACTIVE</title>.

This short string of characters (actually it’s 79 characters by design) is the title of that page and it as you can see, carrys keywords that we’re trying to get ranked for in various search engines. I wrote that string and it properly identifies this site as both a web developer site and an SEO site too, which of course is who we are. Internet Explorer and Mozilla and FireFox and Safari all show exactly that same string as our title tag is properly written and counted out to be 79 chars as a maximum number. But why that number?

Simple really, as all search engines do have their own limits on the actual char counts that can be used, the lowest maximum that they all will show is 95 characters. That is you as of today, you can use up to 95 letters, numbers, symbols etc in Internet Explorer (but past 150 chars in other browsers) and that’s the point, really, of us deciding that as IE is “the” business-world browser, we should not go past that maximum char threshold that IE relys on. Sure, it’d be nice if we could have more as I’d have loved to have added in some more keywords, but for us our keyword phrases just wouldn’t “fit” more terms into that 95 char max, so we stopped then at 79 chars. (Google sometimes “fluctuates” this number too, fyi) Also one more item…note that we used double hypens to seperate the two keyword phrases that we chose for this page. They work fine, as do pipes (|) or even single hypens (-) too…the choice is up to you as all search engines ignore same.

But maybe more importantly than this browser knowledge is the “why” is this <title> tag important anyways? And for that one has to understand that this is basic “on-page” optimization strategy, that the search engines do use to rank the pages within their index. Search engines LOVE the <title> tag. They use same to boost your rankings and as far as our own testing and analytics have shown that’s for ALL of the top 10 search engines. SEOmoz, a great SEO site ranks the <title> tag as the most important part of any on-page SEO tactics….more than 66% of their 72 SEO experts in their latest survey agreed on that being the most important factor!

You must use your own keywords in your page titles and by doing so, make your various site pages more descriptive too as you must always remember that while the bots come to ingest-then-index your pages, it’s “humans” that will be doing the actual reading of same! You see, search engines give a  BIG boost in their rankings to sites that have descriptive, keyword <title> tags by both relevance and ranks too. When a visitor likes your pages enough to then actually Bookmark same, then it’s that <title> tag that will be saved and recorded and that’s a good thing too! Descriptive <title> tags can then get your both Bookmarked AND repeat traffic too…follow me here? Try this, go to google.ca, and type in “Hamilton web developer” — see that #1 listing? Yup, that’s and the <title> is what you see! This is the CTR or click thru rate and that’s important to all of us who depend upon search engines to bring us a steady stream of prospects…

So bottom line here?

• Make each and every page on your site complete with a unique <title> tag that describes (using your keywords) the page itself.
• Try to stay within the 95 char limits that IE imposes to not end up with a cut-off keyword or phrase.
• And remember that a keyword in the <title> tag should always also appear on the page itself!

 Tune in again later when our Chapter #2 will talk about the whole <META> schmozzle… i.e. what’s true and what aint! And thanks for dropping by, eh!