Remember the days when we were perfectly fine not knowing where everyone was all the time. When we could just go through our day completely unaware that our best friend was picking up a sandwich from Subway. Well, the world is not what it used to be.

With the increased popularity of applications such as FourSquare, sites such as Yelp, and services such as Yodle, we are constantly being connected to the people and places around us, even if we are unaware of it happening. In the last 3 months, I have noticed a drastic increase in the use of Foursquare. People declaring their “mayor”-hood of the coffee shop around the corner or their favorite burger joint. Being a Foursquare mayor basically means going to a place and telling people the most.

So what does this mean for social media? It means that people are starting to think of these tools as a way to connect to their local community instead of the global community. The trend seems to be piggy-backing on the larger “think globally, act locally” mantra. The tools we are using are global, but the way we are using them is connecting us more to our direct communities. Although social media can still be used to keep in contact with people around the world, it is having a bigger impact on those places and people closest to us.

We can find an area restaurant since their SEO has been “upped” by Yodle, go there cause we read glowing reviews on Yelp, and then Foursquare that we are there. Has there ever been a time when your community has been more accessible?

However, although I do love late night Chinese food…am unsure if I want the world to know I could be “mayor” of the New Hong Kong.

As I’ve shared with you in a previous post, getting your keywords targeted on your website is important, period. There are several top-level steps that are really considered basics to SEO practice. One of these steps is entering your keywords into the meta keyword tags within your website code. Back in October I shared some insight about Google meta keywords tag and the fact that it is NOT considered important in the Google algorithm. Well, some people have said the same goes for Yahoo, but that’s not necessarily accurate.

In case you are tilting your head in confusion, let me go over why some search engines don’t value the meta keyword tag. Years ago, more like a decade, webmasters did everything they knew about to get their websites found. Search engines were no where near the quality they are now. If you searched for something there was a good probability that the results would have a mix of content – some what you wanted, some completely unrelated. A reason these results were less than accurate was because of the meta keyword tag. Webmasters would enter a slew of keywords in the code hoping that popular searched keywords would get their sites seen…even though the content had NOTHING to do with the keyword.

For instance, if the website was all about customizing computers, the keyword meta tag may/would include ‘cars’, ‘bmw’, and ‘money’ for the sole purpose in simply getting visitors. As the person doing the search, it made finding what you wanted far more painful than it should have been.

So…that’s when Google started developing more sophisticated search algorithyms to provide relevant, quality results. At some point (I doubt it was right away) Google stopped including the keywords meta tag in the search algorithm but not all search engines have followed suit. You can’t assume Yahoo or any other search engine plays by the same rules as Google – they don’t know all the rules Google uses, nor do I unfortunately.

Simple tests have been performed to debunk whether or not Yahoo really looks at the keyword meta tag. Despite what Yahoo announced it seems they DO still look for the keyword tag. To learn how this was determined, read the post at Search Engine Land on why they claim Yahoo still uses the meta keyword tag.

So don’t neglect to include your keywords tag within your website. Just because Google doesn’t look at it isn’t a good enough reason not to include it.

Soon I’ll be reporting on the results of Bing/Live since that’s the other big search engine in the group. Since “Bing” is so new, it might be harder to find similar answers. And, who knows, maybe they too will announce less-than-accurate data.

Stay tuned!

When thinking about SEO (Search Engine Optimization) there are an endless number of ways to improve your website for various search engines. But your main strategy should focus nailing down specific keywords and phrases that relate to your business (and website content) and mapping them to appropriate pages in your site – without this, SEO is pointless.

As you’ve probably heard “content is king”, and it’s true. More pages of content are going to be better than less. Websites that have only 8 pages of good content will usually have a tougher time getting traffic and better ranking than that of a website with 16. It makes sense – having more pages broadens the opportunity that searchers will find you based on a wider range of keyword possibilities. For example, let’s say you target 2 keywords per page. In this example, one website is targeting 16 keywords while the other is targeting 32. See how the numbers can quickly grow?

An important but overlooked area to take advantage of SEO is with website and webpage URLs. Have you ever seen a web page with an Http address such as yourwebsite.com/page/page.aspx?ID=4278asg while browsing? It’s entirely too common and those types of addresses are not search engine friendly (SEF). On top of that, you lose potential keyword targeting when all you have is a number or ID that doesn’t help to describe the page content in any way, shape or form. Now, if those website URLs were like yourwebsite.com/services/website-copywriting.aspx you’re now allowing search engines to rank you higher.

URL addresses are an excellent and important place to add your keywords for each page of your website. If a specific page is meant to target “social media consulting” you might have your address for that specific page as “yourwebsite.com/social-media/social-media-consulting.html” – search engines will read the keywords in that URL. As long as you use the same keyword in the page title, description, and a few times within the content, you’ll be setting yourself up for success rather than failure. Getting this part of the SEO equation right early on is certainly better than having to go back later and adjust it.

Take a look at your website URLs, evaluate each page and the targeted keywords, and determine if you need some adjusting.

On September 16th, I wrote a post on how to choose keywords for your website (here) in which I gave a very brief overview of how to go about deciding what your keywords will be for each page of your website. The reason for this post is to say “Just Kidding!” – It turns out that Google Search Engine does not look at your meta keywords when ranking your website/pages.  In my previous post I mentioned Google, Yahoo and Bing being the top three search engines but I certainly don’t know all their criteria for ranking.

Now let me state that I wasn’t playing a joke in my previous post. I stated that it’s important to have the meta keywords information embedded in the html code for search engine optimization purposes, however a new finding developed 5 days after that post, on Sept 21st.

Matt Cutts, google software engineer and head of their webspam team, published a blog post AND video talking about Google’s use of meta keywords. Long story short, Google does NOT consider this information in determining ranking of websites. That does not mean you shouldn’t include this in your website – Yahoo and MSN/Bing may very well use it in ranking consideration and likewise, it’s not going to hurt you…unless used in the wrong way.

The timing of this information being publicized is interesting (since I had just posted 5 days before about it) but we were informed on twitter that Google says it doesn’t provide value.

Several years ago I can recall when search engines lacked the ability to provide us with good quality results, but that has certainly changed. During the past few years search engines have dramatically enhanced their search capabilities, accuracy, speed and functionality. The top three search engines to date are Google, Yahoo and Bing (previously known as MSN/Live) which serve millions of searches every month on an unlimited number of subjects.

As a website or business owner, it’s in your best interest to carefully target your website with keywords that will help get you ranked high on these (and other) search engines. But how do you do this without the expertise? It can be somewhat time consuming but a modest attempt can do enough to make a difference in your search engine ranking.

To help you, I’d like to stress the following key points:

• Break down your website so you have each page targeting up to 3 related keywords. For example, if you have a page that is selling writing services, you can target copy writing, copy editing and website copy.
• In the website code, your ‘keywords’ meta data should list the same keywords you are targeting in your page. In the above example, copy writing, copy editing and website copy would be the keywords. There is no need to use more than 5 keywords here.
• Try to use the keywords (at LEAST one of them) in the <title> of the page. Again, this would be in the code as well.
• The meta description should use the keywords, all of them if possible. The keywords will show up as bold text in the results when someone does a search.
• Use internal links (to other pages on YOUR website) to related content/pages.

Those are basic necessities to using your website keywords properly for SEO purposes. You should also do some simple research to find out who your competition is for the keywords. Simply go to the three above listed search engines and perform searches for the keywords you want to target. You can see what they do on their website which may be helping to keep their rankings high. Additionally, you must realize that your website will not have an immediate effect to searches so give it a week or two to get indexed.

Update: Please read this update regarding choosing meta keywords