Meta-tag keywords and Google ranking

Martin_Man · 4 Mar 2010 at 17:32

I am doing some research online as I am trying to get my site top ranking when typing in 'what can you see' as a keyword. my domain is obviously whatcanyousee.co.uk. So far this is what i get in google

what can you see - No results
whatcanyousee - 1'st page > 2nd link down.

Looking at this video, Matt Cutts who works for google as a software engineer explains that using keywords in meta-tags means basically nothing. What do i need to do to boost my ranking? he mentions that you need good meta-tag description but does this help at all?

I have been looking into a lot of SEO(Search engine optimization) training but its to expensive to proceed

Pho · 4 Mar 2010 at 17:36

read this - no idea how 'good' it is but it looks pretty nice. Keyword density might be useful.

Keyword page density is a measure of the relative frequency of the word in the text expressed as a percentage. For example, if a specific word is used 5 times on a page containing 100 words, the keyword density is 5%. If the density of a keyword is too low, the search engine will not pay much attention to it. If the density is too high, the search engine may activate its spam filter. If this happens, the page will be penalized and its position in search listings will be deliberately lowered.

The optimum value for keyword density is 5-7%. In the case of keyword phrases, you should calculate the total density of each of the individual keywords comprising the phrases to make sure it is within the specified limits. In practice, a keyword density of more than 7-8% does not seem to have any negative seo consequences. However, it is not necessary and can reduce the legibility of the content from a user’s viewpoint.

Martin_Man · 4 Mar 2010 at 17:49

Looks interesting, i'll read through it.

I just came across Wordpress as well, it comes with Search Engine Optimization which makes it easier for the google search crawler to browse through your site.

welshdragon · 6 Mar 2010 at 10:29

I'm interested in this as well. Relatives run a health and safety website which ranks on page 2000 during a search. How can they get it so if someone search says H&S Wales or something they are on the first page, preferably towards the top. A consultant has offered to do it for them for £250 a month but there must be way I can do it?

AJK · 6 Mar 2010 at 10:36

This is an article from 2006 but still extremely good:
http://www.seomoz.org/article/beginners-guide-to-search-engine-optimization

seomoz.org is a great source for SEO guides, discussion, etc. There's plenty of free content as well as premium paid stuff.

reefoid · 6 Mar 2010 at 10:39

If you can get hold of SEO Warrior from O'Reilly, I highly recommend it. Made SEO much clearer for me and I've seen the benefits already in the two months since I started implementing recommendations from the book.

http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596157081

Tripnologist · 6 Mar 2010 at 10:55

welshdragon said:
A consultant has offered to do it for them for £250 a month but there must be way I can do it?

1. Nobody can actually guarantee top placement. Regardless of what they say.
2. Of course you can do it yourself. Just like anything else, you just need to put in the time and effort to learn how to do it.

reflux · 6 Mar 2010 at 11:02

Get your keywords in as many pages of your site as possible, have a large number of pages, make sure youre on google maps, and hit social media hard. basically.

Martin_Man · 6 Mar 2010 at 17:20

reflux said:
Get your keywords in as many pages of your site as possible, have a large number of pages, make sure youre on google maps, and hit social media hard. basically.

Thats correct, the more understandable the content is displayed on your site, the more google crawler can pick out keywords. But what i have been reading on SEO, if you cram to many keywords into your site though, the google crawler will sence this (which they call this as keyword spamming) and could block your site from being on the results at all.

Tetsujin · 7 Mar 2010 at 13:03

Any "consultant" claiming they can get you page 1 for £250 a month is a liar

If he was charging at least 20 times this then he might be for real, but still, there's no guarantees, and *no* professional SEO firm actually guarantees positions

Meta keywords have been ignored for so many years I don't even recall the last time I set one.

As you've already got the domain part sorted, the basics are:

Make sure page URLs are distinct
Make sure they contain hyphens as word separators and not underscores
Make sure they contain words and are mapped from faux directories such as blah.com/this/that/dave.htm rather than blah.com/articles.php?id=45839&type=toasters (wordpress does this natively)
Use nice tidy html with h1 tags for headers and make them distinct across your site (where possible) and relevant to the page subject (again WP makes this easy)
DO NOT read anyone's advice if they talk about keyword density, especially if they give you a number you should aim for. Write your content so that it is useful for human visitors, don't try to fool google, because: you won't

However you can ignore all that becase the number one metric to be concerned with is: number of inbound links. The internets, and google's sorting of it, is a democracy, and in this analogy a vote is a link.