While not giving any advantage to keyword stuffing, Google came up with the idea of using external links to rank the websites. Webmasters, having the older conception in mind, believed that Google too uses the keyword meta tag.

Thus, since its inception, Google had never used the keyword meta tag, since people started to stuff it up with keywords even irrelevant to their website. Other search engines might use it but Google, which is the major source of traffic for websites, don’t bother about it.

Finally, after lots of confusions and contradictions, Google officially announced on their webmaster blog that they DO NOT use keyword or keywords meta tag for ranking in search results. Although this is an earlier known fact, but most of the SEOs didn’t believed it and they had the misconception that keyword tag plays a major role in getting higher rankings. It doesn’t solve any purpose other than helping your competitors to steal the keywords which you had chosen after putting in lots of time and efforts.

Google definitely use other meta tags, such as description tag, which is displayed in search results, if it is informative. So next time if some one uses your brand name in his keywords tag, don’t bother to sue him. It’s not going to benefit him or harm you in any way.

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Future of SEO - Dead or Live?

Most of the SEOs are of the opinion “NO, SEO will continue till search engines continue to rank sites. Though the techniques used may change.”

I would say that SEO might be dead. As the search engines especially Google are changing the way they rank sites, SEO will not be needed anymore. Since its inception, algorithm of Google to rank sites has changed a lot. Earlier it used to rank sites based on the keywords in ‘keyword’ Meta tag. Later it made the use of this tag obsolete.

The latest algorithm is much intelligent which considers the demographics and geographical location of the user and the search history (if you are logged in your account). And in the future, it has plans of developing the search engine into a more intelligent machine which will show the results according to the intent of the person using it. So, I guess SEO comes in no way.

But yes, if SEO means to you reaching your targeted audience rather than just getting top rankings on search engines, then you have a long way to go. SEO (better to be called as online marketing) in the true sense, means making your site impressive and useful for customers. Building your brand and reaching your potential customers should be your motive.

Rightly quoted by Bob Massa:

“I believe anyone can be successful at online marketing or even traffic generation and search engine placement specifically, if they just stop looking for ways to trick machines and instead look for ways to connect with humans.”

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Yahoo! Valentine's Season Special

On every occasion/ holiday season, Google comes up with something nice in their search results. This Valentine’s Day season, Yahoo! announced something similar. They are running a heart-border around the Valentine’s Day ads on the right side of search page. The hearts show up on certain Valentine’s Day queries like gifts, cards, candy etc., to grab the user’s attention so that they can easily spot what they are looking for.

So, to make profits, this is a good opportunity for Yahoo! Advertisers who are selling Valentine’s Day products.

Unfortunately, I didn’t found any hearts . Is it available only at specified locations? Please let me know whether you can see it or not.

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Chris gave a presentation explaining 10 points on writing blog post for corporate blogs. Points covered by him were as follows:

1. Blocking and Tackling – Gather data from various sources about the hot topics and trends of searching.
2. Focus blogging and search – Know what people are doing online. According to a survey, 85% of search clicks happen in organic results. Search is the only metric you can manage. So, isn’t online marketing obvious? More and more people are searching online and therefore, to reach them, you must increase your marketing efforts.
3. Social Media – Rethink everything you hear about social media. It doesn’t mean that you should not get indulged in it, but it means you should prioritize the social sites according to the probability where people might be searching for you. Very rightly said by him, “Don’t spam social media. It’s not a place where you can yell at people anything you want”. (I agree with you, Chris. This is one of the most misunderstood points these days by SEO professionals.)
4. Content and Volume – Content is the most influential factor. Content drives awareness, not advertising. More number of posts drives success.
5. Keyword awareness – You must be aware of what your blog is all about. Keywords guide you. Although there are many keyword tools, but Google AdWords is the best keyword tool these days. Select those keywords which are searched for maximum number of times.
6. Dumb it down – K.I.S.S rule… Keep It Simple, Stupid! Keep your post simple, quick and easy to understand. Think how people are consuming your content.
7. Widespread employee blogging – Blog about customers’ problems and not your products or services. Ask your employees, who would want to blog in your company? More participants give more variety.
8. Great Local – 50% search has local intent. Reach your local customers first. Mentioning streets, cities, zip codes, townships, counties etc. help in increasing local presence.
9. Coupons – Blogging for coupons. Offer your customers coupons to buy your services.
10. Measurement and metrics – Measure the impact of blogging. Measure the keywords that drive traffic. Measure over time and quantity. Less posts, less traffic. When posts increase, traffic will also increase.

Conclusion:
‘Get out of SEO weeds’. Only optimizing your site doesn’t guarantee you top rankings. Write good content and get people’s attention. This is the ‘success mantra’.

Followed by the presentation, he answered a few questions asked by various bloggers. But due to an emergency, he evacuated the place and the session was taken over by Megan Glover, Director of Marketing.

A very good question answered by her was:

Q: How transparent content should be?
A: The content should be such that personality comes out. Try to engage your visitors in a conversation. Rest, it depends on business too that how much information they can reveal.

Unlike the Google webinar, this webinar didn’t offered any way to interact with other fellow bloggers but overall it was a nice experience.

So, are you gonna start corporate blogging? Lemme know if you want to.

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“Is it time search engines (especially Google) devalue links from sites like linkedin, myspace, facebook etc. I dont have anything against these sites and I myself use linkedin with good success. But I feel these sites dilute the quality of SERPs. I maybe wrong, what do you think Preeti?”

Firstly, thanks Vishal for your query.

Web 2.0 concept emphasizes on social networking sites like myspace, digg, facebook etc. But does Google really value such links? Most of the social networking sites are using ‘nofollow’ attribute in the links to external sites. And Google can’t crawl ‘nofollow’ links.

The main point behind using these social sites is ‘Human Vote’. To get to the top page of Digg.com, people need to like your content, and if people don’t then you won’t get on the top page. Why do SEOs want to get to the front page of Digg? Well, not only does it send a lot of quick traffic, it also encourages Digg users and others to blog about your content. That means more links. As mentioned in my post Google Webmaster ‘Tricks and Treats’ Webinar, Jonathan too said that links are a way to bring visitors. Thus, more viewers, more links.

Google says “Always focus on the users and not on search engines when developing your optimization strategy. Ask yourself what creates value for your users. Investing in the quality of your content and thereby earning natural backlinks benefits both the users and drives more qualified traffic to your site.”

So the two major challenges for an SEO are:

1. Get your content on high spots of social sites.
2. Need to have people write and link to your content on their own websites.

I think that by next year, i.e., 2010, Google is going to change its algorithm altogether. And Web 2.0 will be over-powered by much advanced Web 3.0. But till then, follow Web 2.0 and keep connecting.

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