Much like the saying goes in the temple of Delphi, “Know Thyself” is a concept that applies equally to SEO. One of the most common misconceptions that are addressed on a daily basis is, “If the keywords are in my meta tags, I should rank for those terms right?”
Maybe back in 1994 when all it took was on page search engine optimization to catapult your pages to the top of the search engine result pages, but now, thanks to the advent of internet marketing companies and weekend webmasters popping up faster than Google can say take a number, competition for your once unique keyword combinations are being snatched up faster than the road runner on a Saturday morning cartoon in 1978. The point being, meta tags are just one piece of the equation and as time progresses with shifts in search intelligence like latent semantic indexing, personalized search and web spiders with esp and (BS) sniffers built in to the algorithms artificial intelligence, you need more than fancy SEO tricks or techniques to have your pages pass the scrutiny of the top 10 VIP club. Now ranking involves the real deal, so if you are not ready to put your money where your mouth is and actually have the content on your pages that you wish to rank for, chances are your site will get breezed over by a web page with more useful or contextual relevance.
My immediate suggestion to anyone who really wants to create an impact and develop correlations between their on page content and how search engines see your site is:
1. Make a list of the main keywords you want to rank for.
2. If possible try to refine them to key phrases that people might actually search for.
3. Use the keyword combinations in unison in two or three word combinations as the anchor text in hyperlinks when link building.
This way you start to create a net for keywords used together that reference your website or industry.
By systematically building up the main keywords that pertain to your site, you have the ability to catch the long tail of SEO and put it to work on your behalf. If you are perplexed, use Google Webmaster Tools and look at the page analysis section to see what terms are being used as external links pointing to your site. If you only see a small fraction of the terms you want to rank for, then at least you know that it is time to get busy building links with the missing terms so that you have the ability to rank for them as they are added to the list of associated phrases that correspond to your site via inbound links.
It’s time to check some baggage at the door as we progress into the new era of search, having said that, let us finally lay some other well known misconceptions to rest in the modern arena of SEO 2.0.
Seo myth #1: The Title Tag Quandary
In order to rank for a term, it has to be in the title, right?
Seo Myth Debunked: Maybe in the past, but now, relevance is determined by any combination of text that matches the query of the one searching for the term. Depending on how SEO friendly your pages are, you can find results to your queries by simply omitting your description and keyword tags and search engines can parse your pages and extract the gist of the content. Although, the description tag in my opinion is the new “catch all” for placing keyword combinations the way that people might search for them. Using “exact match” key phrases increases the likelihood of your website being selected, so long as you are keeping the rest of the content in the body of the page on topic with the description.
Stay tuned for more SEO myths debunked from Seo Design Solutions.
Agree. Page title is the most important factor of On-site SEO factors. The meta description, however, could help better CTR… :-)