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.

Behavioral Targeting is a method of advertising used by online marketers to increase the effectiveness of their online marketing campaigns. Behavioral targeting allows marketers to deliver a relevant branded message to a specific target audience.  The concept behind this marketing technique is to track an internet user’s behavior and then return the most relevant advertisement. If delivered properly, behavioral targeting can provide a medium for marketing online that yields a high click-through-rate and ultimately increase not only the conversion rate but also the number of conversions (sales).

Who Should Do Behavioral Targeting?

Typically behavioral targeting has been used by large companies and organizations to attempt to reach out to a greater potential audience, but more recently a fair amount of small companies are seeing great success from running behavioral targeted online campaigns.

Behavioral targeting offers large and small businesses alike another avenue to reach their potential audience directly. The integration of technology with the science of understanding a user’s clickstream (clickstream is the recording of what a computer user clicks on while web browsing or using a personal computer. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clickstream) and search patterns has allowed publishing networks to offer advertisers the phenomenon of being able to serve an advertisement directly to a primed consumer.

What are the Benefits of Behavioral Targeting?As with any marketing initiative whether it is online or offline the end goal is to generate more conversions. When incorporating behavioral targeting as a marketing technique into your overall online marketing strategy a marketer can expect to attract three types of visitors: 

• Existing customer retention: If behavioral targeting is integrated with an organizations CRM (customer relationship management), the organization can expect to see conversions increase due to the direct traffic control behavioral targeting offers. Traditional methods of communicating with existing clients do not allow marketers to individualize marketing materials with the precision behavioral targeting can. 
• Brand awareness: Large companies are more likely to initiate a behavioral targeted marketing campaign for reasons of brand awareness than small companies. Larger companies use this technique of marketing to get their name in front of their potential audience as much as possible. The end goal of these advertisements is not necessarily to drive the conversion that instant but yet to get the potential consumer to be aware of the company or organizations existence.
• New customer acquisition: This benefit of behavioral targeting allows for the easiest ROI tracking. As with many marketing initiatives the objective of this approach is drive an immediate conversion (sale) from consumers who are already looking in your industry’s landscape but previously did not know your organization existed.

Who Offers Behavioral Targeting?

Throughout the past decade many companies have come and gone that claim to offer behavioral targeting marketing and only a few have survived the rigors of the online marketing industry. We suggest checking out the following service offerings, if you are interested in starting a behavioral targeting marketing campaign:

1. Adknowledge (http://www.adknowledge.com)
2. Tacoda (http://www.tacoda.com)
3. Revenue Science (http://www.revenuescience.com)

Important Tips When Behavioral Targeting

1. Always be sure to have a defined objective at the beginning of the project
2. Know your target audience
3. Understand the possible benefits from a behavioral targeting campaign
4. Monitor the progress of your campaign to aid in making better decisions
5. Ask yourself if this marketing technique is right for your business? If so, start slow and work your way to a more comprehensive campaign once you have proven ROI.
    

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.

An XML Sitemap is used to communicate to search engines the URLs that exist on a website and that are available for crawling. The communication that takes place between a website and the search engine is called ’sitemap protocol’ and it is typically in XML format. The sitemap protocol was written in such a way that it would allow for scalability so it can accommodate sites of any size. XML Sitemaps also allow websites to share information about each specific URL on a website; enabling the search engines to more accurately crawl each page on a website.

Information Communicated to Search Engines through an XML Sitemap:

1. When the URL was last updated
2. How often the URL changes
3. How important the URL is in relation to other URLs on the site

For more information please visit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sitemap_Protocol

A Robots.txt file is simply a file that is placed on a website’s server with the intention of telling the search engine spiders not to crawl and index pages or sections of a website that would be otherwise publicly viewable.

A few suggested ways to use a Robots.txt file are:

1. To block the search engines from indexing an entire site.
2. Prevent specific sections of a website to be blocked from being indexed.
3. To communicate specific indexing instructions to individual search engines.

Does My Site Need a Robots.txt File?

With the emergence of so many search engines over the past decade, Robots.txt file have become standard protocol for search engine spiders to attempt to locate and view when they first arrive at a website. Search engine spiders are trained to start their crawl looking for the Robots.txt file; this allows the spiders to know which pages to index and which pages should be disallowed from being indexed. Even though your site may not have any pages that you would currently want blocked from being publicly viewable it is still a recommended best search engine optimization practice to include a Robots.txt file on the root folder of your site. It will act as an invitation with the search engines to successfully communicate the message to crawl all the pages on your site.

Some reasons why you may want to exclude spiders from your site:

1. The website is still in development and you do not want your unfinished work to be found by the public.
2. The information presented on your page only pertains to your specific audience once they have arrived at your site and is of no interest to an outside viewer
3. Certain common pages such as: Thank You pages, Privacy Policies, Etc. are prime candidates to be excluded from the search engine indexes because there is no benefit for a web visitor to enter the website onto them. 
4. You may want to exclude your site from specific search engines entirely; whether it be because you do not believe in that search engines procedures or it is a known bot that collects data you do not want shared (i.e.: email addresses)
5. If doorway pages are used on your site (we highly recommend not using them) you may want to exclude specific search engine spiders from viewing them as they will have a negative impact on your optimization efforts on search engines such as Google and Yahoo.

Creating a Robots.txt File

A Robots.txt file is simple to create. It can be created right in Notepad or any text editor. Once it is created it needs to be uploaded to the root folder of your website. Each entry in a Robots.txt file only contains two lines of text.

Layout for a Robots.txt file:

User-Agent: [Spider or Bot name]
Disallow: [Directory or File Name]

Examples of Robots.txt Files:

1. Exclude file or directory from a specific search engine spider:

User-Agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /section/examplefile.htm

2. Exclude a specific section of a website from every search engine spider and bot:

User-Agent: *
Disallow: /examplesection/

3. Allow spiders to index the entire site:

User-agent: *
Disallow:

4. Disallow spiders from indexing any part of the website:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /