Till 20 Sept 09, having a lot of keywords in Keywords meta tag‘ was considered one of the most important trick for securing good rank in Google. But someone has correctly said that reality is stranger than fiction. And the reality is Google does not use the keywords meta tag in web ranking. The fact was made clear by yesterday’s post at Google’s webmaster central wherein Matt Cutts explained the reality in a video below

Answering a question Why doesn’t Google use the keywords meta tag?, the post says, About a decade ago, search engines judged pages only on the content of web pages, not any so-called “off-page” factors such as the links pointing to a web page. In those days, keyword meta tags quickly became an area where someone could stuff often-irrelevant keywords without typical visitors ever seeing those keywords. Because the keywords meta tag was so often abused, many years ago Google began disregarding the keywords meta tag.

Does it mean that Google doesn’t use any meta tags. Well, the answer is No, Google does support several other meta tags. This meta tags page provide detailed information on the meta tags that Google use. For example, Google do sometimes use the “description” meta tag as the text for our search results snippets, as this screenshot shows:

Since, the keywords fact is clear now therefore do not worry if you find same keywords on your friend’s or competitor’s website. It doesn’t matter at all as far as search engine named Google is concerned.

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Friends, I just switched from free wordpress blog to self hosted domain and shared my learning about the process in my post Move from free wordpress blog to self hosted domain. If you have gone through those post of mine then you must be aware of the fact that I am pretty novice in terms of knowledge about  web world.  So, after moving to my own domain I decided to read some more stuff which will help me in maintaining my website. During this research, yes this was a kind of big research for me at least, I came to know about something called as SEO which stands for Search Engine Optimization.

So, the first question that came into my mind was what exactly is SEO. Yes, I wanted to know more than just full form .  I did some further reading and found that SEO is nothing but creating a website in a way which makes it noticeable to various search engines. In short, making some changes to your website so that search engine can see it. Here I got answer to my first question. Well, the story didn’t end here. This answer resulted in some further questions like How can I optimize my website, What points should be taken into account, Do I need to make changes at coding level.  The last one was quite scary for me. But, the most important of all these was Why.

Why it is so important to get noticed by Search Engines.Well, it didn’t take much time to find out (from some articles)  that almost 50 percent of the visitors comes from the search engines. Yes, you can always think  about the other 50 percent.  These 50 percent hits come from the regular visitors who already know your website. But, my website was new and people doesn’t know about the site. Which means, I need to make people aware of my website and search engines are  most effective way to reach people. You can always send URL of your site to your friends, colleagues and relatives but it won’t be enough until or unless the combined number is in thousands at least. Still, all of them might not be interested in your topics and what about those who are but doesn’t know about your site. I always go to google to search for something and if I find the link useful then I directly go to the link in future. This clearly indicates that whether its the first 50 percent visits which comes  from the search engine or the other 50 percent which comes from direct visitors, the solution is search engine because it is search engine only which helps you build regular visitors to your website. Of course some blog directories also but the basic idea is same which is getting noticed, becoming searchable. So, we know that search engines are important when it comes to making your website famous.

Now coming to which search engines people use. Well, there are a number of search engines but a few are the most used. Namely Google.com, AOL.com, MSN.com, Yahoo.com, Bing.com. These are the 5 most used search engines. Just think of searching something on the internet and you will definitely have one of these 5 in your mind. Magic !!

Well, now its time to answer other important questions like How can I optimize my website, What points should be taken into account etc. Following are the same. But for this you need to examine source code of your page. You can display the source code via Menu option ‘View’ -> ‘Source’ in Internet explorer.

1) Title tag : TITLE tags tell a browser what text to display in the browser’s title bar, and they’re very important to search engines.Title of your page is always enclosed between <TITLE> and </TITLE>.Following is an example of how Title tag looks like

<title>Tech2know-Spreading knowledge through TechKnowledgeY</title>

So, it is must that TITLE tag is present in yor page. If these tags are not there then you’re not giving the search engines one of the most important pieces of information about the page’s subject matter. Further, its is highly recommended to keep the title tags close to <HEAD> because if they are too low in the page, search engines may not find them.

2) DESCRIPTION tag : This tag is also important because search engine may use it to provide the site description on the search-results page. The tag looks like the following

<META NAME=”description” CONTENT=”your description”>

Like TITLE tags, DESCRIPTION is also important because this tell search engines about the content of your website. Therefore, replace “your description” with the keywords relavent to your website.

3) Use Image description ALT attribute: Its quite important to describe the image in a few words while pasting it on website. Actually, search engines cannot see an image as we do and hence cannot figure out anything about the image. Search engine read the associated description to get idea about the same. Below is an example

<IMG SRC=”image.gif” WIDTH=”500” HEIGHT=”100” ALT=”Antivirus main screen”>

4) Robots tag : In a new wordpress installation this tag is set to noindex, nofollow by default.  This tells search engine bots not to index this page and do not crawl the page. well, his is not a good until or unless you want the search engines not to index and crawl your website. So, change it now to make them index and follow. You change this via ‘Settings’–>’Privacy’ in wordpres and change blog visibility to I would like my blog to be visible to everyone, including search engines (like Google, Sphere, Technorati) and archivers.

5) Create a Sitemap : A sitemap is a list of pages of a web site accessible to crawlers or users. This helps visitors and search engines in finding pages on a website. Some sites have a large number of dynamic pages that are only available through the use of forms and user entries. The Sitemap files can then be used to indicate to web crawler a how such pages can be found.

This is quite important for search engines. Search engines like Google, Yahoo, Ask and Bing supports sitemap protocol. The file should be in XML for format. You can create sitemap of your website absolutely free from www.xml-sitemaps.com and upload the file in public_html directory. Google need the site map file name to start from capital ‘S’.

6) Create robots.txt file: Well, there are a number of directories and files in a wordpress installation and search engine bots doesn’t know where not to crawl. So, generally you find that search engine bots crawl the directories like wp-content, wp-include etc which really not required. So, how to tell search engine bots what not to crawl. Robot.txt file is the answer. The file tells a bot or spider not to waste time in crawling the mentioned directories and files.There’s no real list of WordPress directories you should keep hidden from bots, it’s pretty much what you’d like to hide.

Following is an example of a robot.txt file:

User agent is name of the search engine bot. If it is star * then its means the following restrictions are valid for all the bots. Disallow, tells a bot not to crawl to the mentioned directories like wp-admin, wp-includes etc. Once you create robots.txt file, you should upload it in public_html folder.

7) Find good keywords : Yes , it is also very very important to find best suitable keywords for your website/posts. Here good keywords refer to the keywords that can be used by someone to search some information on a topic. It is a total waste to optimize your website for keywords that are not even being searched for. You can use Google keyword tool for the same.

8 ) Look for any malware links in your site : These are Links on your website that lead to malwares on other websites or themselves contain malicious content, such as a maliciously corrupted image or document file, or a harmful ActiveX control or JavaScript etc. These type of links make various search engines think that your site is not safe and they show a message like ‘This website contains harmful content’ or ‘Content on this website may harm your computer’ whenever a visitor find the page via search. This will reduce the number of visitors on your site. Moreover a search engine may remove such a page from its index. So, do take care of this aspect also.

9) Quality of content : Last but not the least, in fact the most important is that you should have content that can be useful to others and the same is explained is a understandable manner. If  the content is not useful and understandable then SEO won’t help. Obviously .

Friends, I am not an SEO expert. Above are some small learning which I came to know in the past few days since I started my blog site. and thought to share with you. You are most welcome to provide additional information on the topic or if I can improve something else in my site in terms of SEO.

The easiest way to stay informed about everything on Tech2know is to go for at lease one of below options :

Subscribe to my RSS feed / Subscribe by E Mail / Follow me on twitter /Become a fan on Facebook.

Stay tuned for more.

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