If you are in the SEO business it is likely you will use the Google Keyword Tool. If you are logged in to Google with your account you may notice you see different traffic volumes and other data as opposed to when you are not logged in. I saw something on Search Engine Round table that actually mentioned this and they give a reason, via the use of some webmaster forums as to why this is:

The results yielded by the Traffic Estimator in your ad group and the standalone Traffic Estimator may differ for two reasons:(1) Performance Data: The past performance of an ad group will influence the Quality Score of all the keywords in that ad group. Your ad group’s Traffic Estimator considers the ad group’s performance details when making estimates about your keywords. The standalone tool, on the other hand, does not. For the most accurate results, use the Traffic Estimator in your ad group.

(2) Double-Serving: In accordance with our double-serving policy, we will only show one of your ads on a search for a particular keyword, even if that keyword appears multiple times in your account. The Traffic Estimator in your ad group accounts for double serving among your keywords when making estimates, whereas the standalone tool does not. Therefore, the standalone tool may yield higher estimates when it evaluates a keyword that appears multiple times within your account.

This seems to answer the question but it isn’t the most clear thing in the world. I think with past experience it is best to use the keyword tool as a guideline but don’t live by it, as the results are often innaccurate.

The title of a page is one of the most important on-page aspects of SEO. The meta title describes what your site/page is about and it is the first bit of content that the search engines view when crawling your site. Users searching on search engines will also see your title in the results, so deciding what to put is pretty important. If what the user has searched for appears in your title (one of the reasons you are ranking for that phrase) then they are more likely to click through to your site.

The title acts as a synopsis of the content for the page so making sure that the title is unique (like with content) is very important. The topics and content on different pages shouldn’t be different and neither should the title, keywords and descriptions. If you are promoting your brand as part of your online strategy then add your company name at the end of the title tag (after keywords), otherwise leave out the company name.

Be careful when writing title tags and don’t over stuff keywords in the title. This will dilute the power of the title tag and defeat the purpose of ranking more highly in the search engines. You should not and cannot promote all of your keywords in one page. Normally, you should promote 3 to 5 keyword phrases per page. I would recommend no more than 4 or 5 really. The title should contain around 3 important keywords that match the page content.

Some general tips:

• Limit the length of the title tag to 65 characters. Although some search engines allow up to 70 characters it is important not to cut off the last word of your tag.
• Use a divider – the pipe symbol (|), the arrow (>), the hyphen (-) and the comma (,) all work well in seperating keywords. My personal choice is the comma as it looks the neatest and uses up less characters by not having to have a space after and before the keyword.

So there you go, some tips on writing meta title tags that should be of use to you. If you already knew about title tags then great, this might have acted as a refresher for you. It is sometimes a good idea to be reminded of the best SEO practices so we don’t get totally distracted from proven strategies that we know work well.

Today Google has started clamping down on over using its search functions. Anyone or any company that uses Google excessively currently experiences a captcha code that needs to be filled in before continuing to the search results. Today it seems that this captcha code just refreshes whenever a code is entered. If you are experiencing this problem you are not alone.

In the meantime I am using Bing – who probably will be feeling the benefits of Google’s loss of use. Maybe I will get converted to Bing in the meantime!

Last week it was reported that Google was letting a single domain dominate the search results for some particular search queries. When you searched for something, quite often 80% or more of the search results Google provided would be from the same web site.

Surely this was a bug? If you think about it then does this actually help the user to find a resourceful link? Maybe on some occasions a website is SO good it is seen as an authority by Google but is this not a bit mad?

According to Google though this is not a bug but a feature, a feature they reckon is useful to their users. I don’t get how it is useful to achieve 80% (or more) of the search results for a single query from the same domain. Google are the experts though so who are we to question?

A statement from Google on the feature said:

Today we’ve launched a change to our ranking algorithm that will make it much easier for users to find a large number of results from a single site. For queries that indicate a strong user interest in a particular domain, like [exhibitions at amnh], we’ll now show more results from the relevant site:

Prior to today’s change, only two results from www.amnh.org would have appeared for this query. Now, we determine that the user is likely interested in the Museum of Natural History’s website, so seven results from the amnh.org domain appear. Since the user is looking for exhibitions at the museum, it’s far more likely that they’ll find what they’re looking for, faster. The last few results for this query are from other sites, preserving some diversity in the results.

The more intelligent Google becomes however, the more and more useful it’s results can be for users. It seems that this latest feature could improve the way people find the most relevant website for their search…

What do you think?

One of the questions that can often arise when rebuilding a website or restructuring one is what do you do with your old pages?

Today I wrote  a blog post for the Just Search SEO Blog detailing the best method of dealing with URLs when changing your website. The blog will be going live sometime soon so find it here.