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.

In some recent and interesting news it is believed that Firefox’s ever-increasing popularity means it may overtake Microsoft’s Internet Explorer for number of users. The July browser market share reports are somewhat inconsistent, but if we believe StatCounter, then it looks like Firefox will be overtaking IE’s market share in the next month or so. The two browsers are both within 1 point of 40% market share, IE above and Firefox below. Europeans are seemingly more interested in Firefox than Americans but in Germany (obviously full of well-informed, techy people), Firefox has a 61% market share, while IE has only 25%. Google Chrome is, according to StatCounter, now above 10%.

This is great news for people in the web development industry as for a good 5 years or so Internet Explorer has been less than adequate for many people as a browser. Firefox is more stable, better for security and actually quicker overall. The sooner IE is fazed out the better!

Today I gave a presentation on manual link building and why it is important for SEO. If you want to read the full article then head over to the Just Search SEO Blog.

The main points I covered involved budget/time management, different types of links, competitor analysis, liaising and purchasing links and the pros and cons of manual link building over automated link services.

Google Webmaster tools have for a long time had the option to create custom 404 pages. If you are unsure on what 404 pages are then you should have a quick read of them here. I have always been a fan of the custom 404 page which basically allows the 404 page to display the template of your website with only the content area changing. Within the content area you would place the message “Page not found” or something similar, but crucially it allows you to add a search feature where a user can navigate through the website to find something relevant to their initial search.

I’m a bit of a hypocrite with this as I don’t always do it, as you can see on this blog! However that is mainly due to the fact that I used a WordPress template and everything is kinda done for you – no search feature this time though. Something else you can add is an internal HTML sitemap for inner pages so the user can choose from any of these, just as easily as searching for something they want.

The beauty of the custom 404 page is in the name. It really is custom and you can tailor it to suit your users. Find out your most popular pages or posts and offer links to these, and of course, add the search box. Webmaster forums has a page which shows you how to do this for your site here.

In terms of SEO, there is no harm in not having custom 404 pages, as long as you locate your 404 pages and redirect them before they get found by Google (and other search engines). It is more a case of usability and user experience. It offers alternatives and you are more likely to keep users on your site by using this method.

On Tuesday the 10th August I will be presenting to my colleagues my method of manual link building. The main areas of coverage will be:

• Competitor Analysis
• Keyword Research
• Data Analysis
• Contacting Relevant Sources
• Liaising On Prices and SLAs
• Research competitors links
• Find where your site’s weaknesses are
• Choose your keywords and work out how many links you need for each
• Use SEO Moz Linkscape
• Open Site Explorer
• Filter relevant data
• Look into “authority” of domains
• Categorise Links into paid, directories, articles, blog comments, forum comments etc
• Contact webmasters and liaise

I will post the summary of the discussion after the presentation to explain other methods and ways to develop my own method.

Today a colleague and I looked into link popularity and how to increase it for your website. You can find the full SEO Blog here but a summary is below:

As we all know building links is still a big deal in the SEO industry. Websites such as Twitter and Facebook can improve your online presence and it can be more interesting using social media channels to build links. The problem is that it can take a lot of time and may not suit everyone.

Another way of getting people to link to you is to have quality content on your website. A quick breakdown of doing this is below:

• Make Top 10 Lists (can be different, but you get the idea)
• Videos
• Images
• Interviews
• Free Downloads
• Studies/Reports
• Tutorials

Some important things to consider for this strategy are;

• Is your market more likely to link to content that’s humorous or informative – find the most relevant subject for your audience.
• Is your site SEO friendly and also user friendly? Will people be able to link back to your URLs easily or are your URLs really long with query strings?
• If you provide good quality content for the audience and visitors to your site, backlinks will naturally follow, so don’t obsess over how to get the most links from every post or article.