Mostly it helps with the keywords and their proximity. Most leading engines, such as Google, pro actively use the concept of keyword proximity as part of their ranking formulas. Keyword proximity is like the reflection of proximity search - it measures how close in the text the keywords are. The best positioning is when the keyword combination act as a unit with no other words between them. Keyword proximity is applicable for keyword phrases that consist of two or more words.
We can use as an example the keyword “Melrose funeral home”. If all these 3 words are one after the other, this is the best combination for optimization. If “Melrose” is in the first paragraph on the page, “funeral” is on the second paragraph and “home” is located on the third – search engine spiders consider them as a keyword too. But this may not be as successful as the first combination unit mentioned above.
Friday, December 12, 2008
Understanding of natural human languages
One can not be considered a serious SEO specialist without at least some understanding of Natural Language Processing. NLP studies the problems of automated generation and understanding of natural human languages. All search engine spiders and robots use NLP in a certain way for improving text processing and analysis of billions web pages on the Internet. Of course, spiders empowered by artificial intelligence and text analytics capabilities are still in the process of growing up. There are many pros and cons of artificial intelligence that I am not going to discuss in this blog entry. I just want to point out that, eventually, search engine spiders will become more and more sophisticated. And I am talking not about some distant future but of something that may happen within a couple of years.
When a search engine visitor is looking for some words and expressions and clicks on the submit button, search engine starts a certain proximity search by looking for Internet documents where two or more separately matching term occurrences are within a specified distance, where distance is the number of intermediate words or characters. Now what can this knowledge help search engine optimizers?
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When a search engine visitor is looking for some words and expressions and clicks on the submit button, search engine starts a certain proximity search by looking for Internet documents where two or more separately matching term occurrences are within a specified distance, where distance is the number of intermediate words or characters. Now what can this knowledge help search engine optimizers?
Read more ...
Meta tags mostly lost their relevancy
Although Meta tags mostly lost their relevancy, for the time being they still get spidered by MSN and Yahoo. Some of them still matter a little for reasons not directly related to search engine rankings. For example, description attribute of a Meta tag, where the webmaster usually put the description of the web page, helps to improve the user’s experience during searches. The contents of the description appear in the organic search engine listings. Description should not exceed 25-30 words; it must be brief and informative.
In my opinion, the Meta tag attribute keywords gets ignored almost completely by Google, although Yahoo! And MSN still notice it to some degree. Yet even the latter two may start ignoring this tag too and without a short notice. There is no harm to keep this Meta tag on the web page as long as a webmaster adds there no more than 10 – 20 keywords. These keywords need to be represented on the web page though, or this may lower down the rankings.
Note ... Apparently, there is still no clarity or consensus about usefulness of keywords attribute. I read in Wikipedia that “37 leaders in search engine optimization concluded in April 2007 that the relevance of having your keywords in the meta-attribute keyword is little to none”.
Historically, the refresh Meta element was used to refresh a web page after a certain time interval. The refresh attribute of a Meta tag is also one of the ways to redirect visitors from your site to another. When used for a long time, the refresh attribute is regarded as unethical SEO practice and this can hurt your ratings.
In my opinion, the Meta tag attribute keywords gets ignored almost completely by Google, although Yahoo! And MSN still notice it to some degree. Yet even the latter two may start ignoring this tag too and without a short notice. There is no harm to keep this Meta tag on the web page as long as a webmaster adds there no more than 10 – 20 keywords. These keywords need to be represented on the web page though, or this may lower down the rankings.
Note ... Apparently, there is still no clarity or consensus about usefulness of keywords attribute. I read in Wikipedia that “37 leaders in search engine optimization concluded in April 2007 that the relevance of having your keywords in the meta-attribute keyword is little to none”.
Historically, the refresh Meta element was used to refresh a web page after a certain time interval. The refresh attribute of a Meta tag is also one of the ways to redirect visitors from your site to another. When used for a long time, the refresh attribute is regarded as unethical SEO practice and this can hurt your ratings.
Meta tag and its elements
I still have mixed feelings about Meta tags. As an old school webmaster, I think that Meta tags can help when you need to provide some structured information about a web page. In the good old times metadata helped search engines to categorize web pages correctly. But the situation changed in the beginning of our century when web consultants started to pro-actively manipulate Meta tags in order to achieve higher rankings on search engines.
Meta tag and its elements (also called attributes) are still supported by a very limited number of search engines. Yet, most major search engines, like Google, don’t use them for relevance anymore. Our advice is not to take Meta tags and their attributes too seriously as a way of improving your search engine rankings. This still does not mean that we should discard Meta elements completely, because they can still be important for the proper web page structure. As an example, we can point out at language attribute of the Meta tag that gains some importance if the web site uses specific language(s). Search engines may have become more sophisticated but they still consider this tag.
Read more ...
Meta tag and its elements (also called attributes) are still supported by a very limited number of search engines. Yet, most major search engines, like Google, don’t use them for relevance anymore. Our advice is not to take Meta tags and their attributes too seriously as a way of improving your search engine rankings. This still does not mean that we should discard Meta elements completely, because they can still be important for the proper web page structure. As an example, we can point out at language attribute of the Meta tag that gains some importance if the web site uses specific language(s). Search engines may have become more sophisticated but they still consider this tag.
Read more ...
The recommended standard density
The recommended standard density for body text is 3-7% for each keyword you optimize on that page. Basically, this means that every keyword or key phrase should repeat 3-7 times for every 100 words. If keyword density goes over 10%, it looks suspicious to search engine spiders. Each web page should generally be optimized for no more than three keywords or phrases.
When the keyword is located in HTML headings, for example between <> < /h1 > or <> < /h2 > tags, it is considered important by the search engine spiders. Yet, putting keyword in the heading tags is not good enough, if the web page does not have actual text about this particular keyword.
Keywords that are located in the beginning of the web page text also matter, although not as much as keywords in the title or headings. The most important thing here is to understand that beginning of the page does not mean the visually viewed first paragraph of the text. So, check the source of the page in order to be on the safe side.
Spiders don’t read images; they just skip them with one exception. They can read text that describes the image in the ALT attribute of the <> tag. If there are images on your page, fill in the ALT attributes with some keywords about images that you describe.
When the keyword is located in HTML headings, for example between <> < /h1 > or <> < /h2 > tags, it is considered important by the search engine spiders. Yet, putting keyword in the heading tags is not good enough, if the web page does not have actual text about this particular keyword.
Keywords that are located in the beginning of the web page text also matter, although not as much as keywords in the title or headings. The most important thing here is to understand that beginning of the page does not mean the visually viewed first paragraph of the text. So, check the source of the page in order to be on the safe side.
Spiders don’t read images; they just skip them with one exception. They can read text that describes the image in the ALT attribute of the <> tag. If there are images on your page, fill in the ALT attributes with some keywords about images that you describe.
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