Page titles, metadata and metakeywords are all important elements in their own way when it comes to search engine optimization.  They are also relatively simple to develop and implement, however, not everyone employ these elements correctly.  I have put together a quick cheat cheat that outlines everything from maximum character length to total impact of page titles, metadata and metakeywords.

Page Title:

Maximum Length:  63 Characters (including spaces)

Format:  Description with Keywords – Site Name

What they are:  Page titles appear in the top of a user’s browser window.  Page titles also appear in the link text on search engine result pages. 

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Meta-keywords:

Maximum Length:  256 Characters (including spaces and commas)

Format:  Each keyword or keywords should be separated by comma.  Each keyword is only to be used one.  Although you have a 256 character maximum to work with, all 256 characters do not have to be used.

What they are:  Although not weighted very heavily in modern search engine algorithms, meta-keywords do provide search engines with one more element to describe the page.

Meta-description:

Maximum Length:  156 Characters (including spaces)

Format:  This should be a short summary of what that specific web page is about.  It should only be single sentence.

What they are:  Like meta-keywords, meta-descriptions are not taken into great account by search engine algorithms.  However, they are more important than meta-keywords.  This is because, meta-descriptions, if properly implemented, will be displayed beneath the page title in search engine result pages as a marketing message.

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Creating and implementing a keyphrase strategy is both the most complex and important part of the search engine optimization process.  An effective keyphrase strategy will elevate website traffic and conversions if applicable.  However, search engine optimization techniques that ignore keyphrase strategy or implement a weak strategy can be a waste of resources and even harm a website’s popularity and brand reputation.

But what is a keyphrase strategy anyway?  When using a search engine, you find what you are looking for by typing in keywords, a group of keywords makes up a keyphrase.  The end goal is to “rank” for your keyphrases.  The better your rank, the more visible you will be in the results for a specific keyphrase search.  A successful keyphrase strategy compiles a list of several keyphrases that are used by potential consumers when searching for a specific product, service, or company.  For example, if you own a website that sells boats online, prospective keyphrases could be “boat sales”, ” buy sail boats”, “used power boats”, etc, depending on the specifics of your company’s offerings.  However, it’s not quite that simple, some keyphrases are better than others.

What makes a great keyphrase?  Or more importantly, what makes a bad keyphrase?  When creating a keyphrase strategy there are several elements to keep in mind.  If a keyphrase is too broad, it will be difficult to gain an edge on competitors who are an authority on the subject already.  If you own a local computer repair shop in Boston, it would be next to impossible to rank for a keyphrase such as “computers” or “computer sales.”  However, it may be more realistic to choose a more specific keyphrase such as “Boston computer sales.”  Still, it is important not too chose keyphrases which are too specific or too broad, because although you may rank well for a specific keyphrase such as “small Boston computer repair shop that has a red roof” how many consumers will actually search for that?

Although there are several daunting obstacles surrounding SEO strategy, creating a keyphrase strategy that is not too broad or specific and still yields high search volumes will result in a successful SEO engagement.

                During the late 90’s it may have seemed as if the market was already flooded with search engines.  Still, two graduate students from Stanford University thought their idea would help retrieve relevant information from searches better than any of the existing technologies.

                The idea behind their search engine algorithm reflected an essential element in any academic paper, citation notation.  The more citations a paper has, the more reputable it is.  More importantly, the more reputable the citations are, the more reputable that paper is.  Google took this concept and applied it online, considering links to be citations.  If website X is linking to website Y, website X must consider Y to be a reputable site.  Each link counts as a “vote” to Google, some votes are worth more than others depending on their reputability.  These votes are calculated to formulate what Google calls a PageRank.  This PageRank is what determines the position a website will get on a list of results when its content is searched for.   

                The two Google founders and developers shopped this PageRank technology around to several potential buyers, but none were interested for the time being.  However, it took less than a year for Google to receive a $100,000 in seed funding.  And the next year, they received $25 million in capital.  Word spread quickly of the budding search engine, and Yahoo and AOL took notice, choosing Google as their search partner.

                With the advent of spider-created catalog files, came the birth of several search engines.  One of the first engines was introduced by the creator of the “WebCrawler” bot, also called “WebCrawler.”  The search engine was later sold to America Online who later sold it to Lycos.   As time passed, search engines evolved, making searches more complex and thus more efficient, delivering more and more accurate results. 

                Early search engines used very little data from website indexes to perform searches.  For instance, the JumpStation engine collected only website header and title information, and used this to execute searches.  As you might imagine, this information could be quite vague and result in misleading, incomplete, or all together incorrect query results.  Even worse, the results that were returned were displayed in the order in which they were found by the engine.  In other words, the results were in a random order, regardless of any other elements.

                The problems with these primitive search engine techniques were clear, and the evolution of search methods continued.  Excite was started in 1993, it separated itself from competitors by searching using statistical analysis of word relationships.  Doing this produced exceptionally more relevant search results, leaving its competitors in the dust.  Still, this was only the beginning.  As companies had more and more bandwidth at their disposal, it opened doors for them to employ more complex search algorithms.  For example, AltaVista was among the first search engines to allow natural language queries.

                Although impressive at the time, these engines were only scratching the surface of search efficiency.  In the months following the search engine boom, a monster would be introduced to the market.  While it took much longer than its competitors to gain any attention, when it finally did, there was no turning back.  When it did hit the scene, Google turned the world wide web upside down.

                During the mid to late 90’s, the world wide web’s popularity grew exponentially, as did its virtual wealth of information.  However, this data was becoming lost in the vastness of its online environment.  Developers were quick to recognize this problem, and find a way to organize the world’s data and make it accessible to users across the world.

                The first step was to index the information on the world wide web.  Doing this would mean going through every website in existence and identifying what information each site contained.  What may have seemed like an unattainable goal to a single person, or even a large team was easily made a reality by a piece of software called a bot or spider.  One of the first widely implemented bots was “WebCrawler.”  Bots perform their task in a recursive manner, which is perfect given the organization of the web.  A simplified demonstration of how a spider operates illustrates this recursive behavior:  A bot is given a website as a starting point.  The bot collects information contained on this site, and then searches for any link on the site.  The bot will then follow the link found to another site.  The bot then collects information from that site, searches for a link, follows it, and so on.  Webcrawler did exactly that, just on a much larger scale.  Over time, it built the first publicly-available full-text index of a large piece of the world wide web.  In the following years, several more bots were created by entrepreneuring companies including Google.  

                Now that an index of the web’s information was publicly available, it was only a matter of time before developers would flood the net with applications capable of searching through this catalog, delivering results to user submitted queries.  The world wide web was about to be introduced to the search engine, and it would not be long until this relationship would change the way the world found its information.

When starting any online marketing initiative it is vital for marketers to review the level of competition in the search landscape and analyze what tactics specific competitors are deploying. With many ways of advertising online, ranging from organic search engine optimization to sponsoring sections of industry relevant websites it is in a search marketers best interest to take the time necessary to review the competition before making important decisions about where to allocate resources.

As the landscape of business evolves and companies and organizations continue to push more and more business through online channels, a simple competitive research technique that we all learned in Marketing 101 can still apply here; SWOT Analysis. SWOT Analysis stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. The goal of any marketer analyzing competition whether the competition be offline or online is too determine the position that should be obtained for your business or organization in that medium.

What is SWOT Analysis?

SWOT Analysis, is a method of strategic planning that evaluates the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats connected to a project, business venture or marketing initiative. SWOT Analysis includes determining the objective of the project, business venture or marketing initiative as well as researching the internal and external factors that are going to influence the objective. 

• Strengths: characteristics of the business or organization that will be helpful to achieving the objective.
• Weaknesses: aspects of the business or organization that can be detrimental to achieving the objective.
• Opportunities: external factors that can be helpful to achieving the objective.
• Threats: external factors that can be harmful to achieving the objective.

For more information on SWOT Analysis, please visit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swot_analysis

How Many Competitors Should I Analyze?

It is important to analyze a broad-sampling of the competition within the search landscape so a better understanding of what tactics are successful and what tactics are failing can be determined. The recommended amount of competitors that should be analyzed depends on the competitive nature of the industry a specific website is competing in; we always recommend to review at least five other industry related websites before starting an online marketing campaign.

How do I perform Competitive Research for Search Marketing?

Every search engine marketing professional uses different tools to scour the Internet for information about their competition. There are literally hundreds of tactics that can be correlated to online success for a specific website, so it is crucial to narrow a competitive analysis to certain key components of the campaign to ensure that the proper steps are taken without wasting valuable time and money.

What are some recommended things to look for when analyzing a competitor’s website?

• Review the current link popularity of each competitor
• Review how well the competition is indexed throughout each search engine
• Analyze the keyword density on your competitor’s sites
• Track their current organic search rankings
• Determine who in the industry conducts a Pay-Per-Click campaign

Some tools we suggest for doing search marketing competitive research:

• http://tools.seobook.com/firefox/seo-for-firefox.html
• http://www.webuildpages.com/cool-seo-tool
• http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com
• http://www.seologs.com/keyword-difficulty.html
• http://www.urltrends.com

Many search engine users do not realize that the search box within each search engine allows for shortcuts to be entered when performing a search to aid in finding the information a user is looking for more efficiently. Below is a list of Google shortcuts that you can incorporate into your everyday searching (If we have left any out please comment and we will be sure to add it to the list. Thanks!)

Google Search Shortcuts:

For more information on Google search shortcuts, please visit: http://www.google.com/help/features.html.