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9 Essential Items for a Quality Site

A web site is like everything else in life – there are good ones and not-so-good ones! Professional web designers have a check-list of elements that make up those in the first category. Here are the nine main elements to be considered – each contributes to the impact and success of your site.

Visual Impact

Your home page is your billboard or store front – it creates an immediate impression on visitors to your site, so it’s got to create the right impression … right?

It should look:

•Clean
•Uncluttered
•Professional
•Attractive

Aim to “underwhelm” rather than overwhelm! Too many flashing lights, colours, drop-down boxes, graphics etc will be distracting. It’s a bit like those stores that play loud, frenetic music – your heart rate rises, your stress levels go up and you just want to get out – fast!

Content

Whether you have a business site or a personal page, you have to give people a reason to stay on your site – we’re mercenary little critters, we humans, our first question is always, “what’s in it for me?”

That doesn’t mean that you have to give away free programs, books, tickets or holidays – it does mean that you have to offer something. That “something” could be:

•Information
•Entertainment
•Advice
•Help with a problem
•Opportunities to contact similar minded people
•Links to useful sites

If you do have a business site, you need to give information about your product or service that is:

•easy to follow
•easy to find
•easy to order

Loading Time

We all know that speed is the key to keeping visitors. I often catch myself getting impatient because it’s taking me 20 or 30 seconds to connect to some site or other. Then I stop and think about the fact that here I am, sitting in my office on the east coast of Australia, connecting to a site in the north of England, on the west coast of the US, in Canada, South Africa, India or one of the dozens of other places I regularly contact, and I shake my head in wonder. How quickly we become accustomed to technology.

However, we DO get impatient if it takes us too long to make contact – so you must ensure that your home page at least, loads as quickly as possible. That means no big, flash graphics.

Keep reminding yourself that your first page is like a billboard. When driving your car, you don’t have time to read detailed descriptions, or admire intricate pictures on billboards. The signs flash past you and have to make an immediate impression.

Your web visitors are ‘flashing past’ as well, so keep your front page simple and fast.

There are numerous articles on the net about how to improve speed – take the time to check them out and then discard anything that slows down your home page too much.

Colour, Lay-out and Graphics

The graphics and lay-out of your home page contribute to that first impression – think about what image your site is trying to convey and make sure everything on your site contributes something towards that overall image.

If you have a serious business site, you don’t want garish cartoons on your front page – but if you have a games site, then cartoons can be an integral part of the image.

Graphics are what eat up the loading time of your site. A rough rule of thumb to determine good loading time for a page is to keep the entire page around 30k.

Images should be between 6 – 8 k. Each additional 2k adds approximately one second to loading time.

If in doubt, right click the image and then click on Properties to get the size of the image.

Colour is also an important part of your site; colours have different effects on our emotions:

•Red and orange excite the senses and increase heart beat
•Blues and greens are more restful
•Yellow reminds us of sunshine and is a happy colour

Consider the effect you want to create and choose a colour that is appropriate.

When reading Western texts, the eye travels from the top left of the page, across and then down to the bottom right. Remember this when you’re placing graphics on your page.

Any graphic which has a directional aspect should be placed to point the eye towards the most important section of the page. If you have a picture of a bird on the top left corner of your page, make sure it is facing inward and that its beak is leading the eye to the centre of the page, not away from it.

The same applies to all graphics:

•Faces should ‘look’ to the centre of the page
•Cars should be ‘parked’ facing towards the centre of the page
•Roads, neck ties etc should all be placed to lead the eye across from left to right, or down from top to bottom

This is also why you should place your navigation bars down the left side of your page – it keeps them constantly in the visitor’s field of vision.

Readability

This doesn’t refer to the words you use (we’ll look at them in detail later) – but to the way the words look on the page.

Going back to the concept of the billboard, your words need to stand out on your page – you need to surround them with plenty of white space.

Think over some of the sites you’ve visited – some make you feel as if you have to duck your head to read them! Dark backgrounds make you feel as if you’re in a small space and also have a depressing effect on your mood.

Certain coloured backgrounds make it very difficult to read the text; purples, orange tonings and reds dazzle the eyes.

The colour of your text is just as important – bear in mind that different browsers read colours differently – what looks great on your browser, could well be invisible on another!

Take a lesson from the newspapers and divide your text into columns for easier (and quicker) reading – even two columns are better than one slab of text that covers the entire width of the page.

Another element that contributes to text readability is the font you choose. Plain fonts (Arial, Times New Roman, Garamond and Courier) are the easiest to read. Fancy fonts are fine for headings, but not for full pages (imagine trying to read a whole page in Gothic, Script, Westminster, or Cloister). Your eyes would soon tire of the effort involved and you’d be reaching for the back button!

See what I mean?

Segmenting and Sign-Posting

You have to make your page as easy for your visitors to read as is humanly possible and this means breaking it up into little ‘chunks’ for them. We’ve already looked at the need for columns, (which divide the page vertically) – you also need to divide your page horizontally, by the use of headings and sub-headings.

When you were at school, your teachers told you to use headings in your notes – apply the same principles to your web pages. Look for the key points on each page and write a short statement that summarises each point – this is your heading.

Read through each section and see if it can be further divided into smaller points; write a summary of these sub-sections and these are your sub-headings.

Select a font for all your headings and sub-headings (and stick to it). It’s not necessary to have a different font for headings (just go up one size for headings, and then use bold on all headings and sub-headings).

This way it’s easy to recognise which is a heading (large and bold) and which is a sub-heading (same size but bold).

The point of this is to make it easy for your visitors to glance at your page and to take in all the key points. If what they see interests them, they’ll stay and keep reading – so it goes without saying, that your headings should be written with care!

To draw attention to other important points, you can also highlight them – by putting a whole sentence in bold or a different colour (or both). However, take care with the colours you select – some are quite difficult to read – even against a white background.

Navigation

Your main navigation bar should run down the left side of your page, for two reasons:

•We’re accustomed to reading from left to right and from top to bottom
•We’re accustomed to finding navigation bars on the left of web pages – why buck the system (especially when it works)?
On a long page. It’s also a good idea to have a brief nav bar along the bottom of the page (just home | top of page will suffice).

When you’ve found a system you’re happy with – use it on every page, so that your visitors know where to look for the information.

Make a blank page which has your page layout (columns), any logos or standardised graphics, alt tags and navigation bar already built in. Call this ‘blank” and then when you make a new page, you have everything already set up and just have to enter the content, html tags and then save it as “whatever.htm”.

Customer Security

If your site is a business site, then one of the most important things you have to do is to ensure that your potential customers feel confident dealing with you. On the web, you do this by telling people exactly what you’re doing to safeguard their interests – in particular, how you’re protecting their privacy. It’s worth having a separate page which sets out – in detail – your policy towards their email addresses; how you accept orders; how you gather information; who has access to this information; how you use information gathered from children and so on.

Visitors also like to know that real people have used your products or services, so it’s worth asking your satisfied customers if you can quote any positive comments they’ve made about you. Don’t be afraid to ask for testimonials – we all like to know that our opinions are valued.

Set up a separate page for your testimonials and offer to include links to your customers’ pages in return for using their comments. This is one of those “win-win” situations!

Words, words, words

Now we come to the most important element – if this part is wrong, the rest of your efforts are largely wasted. How many times have you been impressed by a site’s initial appearance, only to be disappointed by poor spelling, careless grammar and punctuation?

It reflects badly on the site owner and indicates that whoever is responsible for this page, is sloppy, careless, lazy, unprofessional or all of the above! Would you entrust any of your hard-earned money to someone who doesn’t even care enough to check the expression of his/her own site?

•You can take steps to improve your own writing skills
•You can employ someone to proof read and edit your work
•You can employ someone to write your pages for you.

There are places that will assist you with any or all of these steps. Don’t spoil all your hard work by skipping this one, vital step!

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Bruce Simmons asks:

Social Network sites like Digg and StumbleUpon and what not seem to have unspoken rules about who can promote a blog. What I mean to say or ask is: OK, with Digg, one cannot submit their own blog. But Twitter, you can chest thump all day long.

Do have a list of what sites you can ‘chest thump’ on and other sites that you are reader dependent on?

What are social networking sites?

This is an interesting topic, and I feel that we should start with some very basic information. Contrary to what some people might think, social networks were not born online with Friendster and MySpace. Social network, in fact, is a very old term used to describe any social group where individuals and/or organizations form a specific structure with nodes and connections. Here is the Wikipedia definition:

A social network is a social structure made of nodes (which are generally individuals or organizations) that are tied by one or more specific types of interdependency, such as values, visions, idea, financial exchange, friends, kinship, dislike, conflict, trade, web links, sexual relations, disease transmission (epidemiology), or airline routes. The resulting structures are often very complex.

The Internet completely changed the way people used to communicate and interact, so it was a natural step to create virtual social networks, or social networking websites. Back in 1979 Usenet, a global Internet discussion system, was already attempting to accomplish this.

Then in 1995 you had perhaps the first online social network as we known them today, ClassMates.com, which the purpose was to allow school mates to connect.

What about social bookmarking sites?

While websites like Digg and StumbleUpon do have a social factor, I don’t think we can classify them on the same level as MySpace or Friendster. Mainly because they have different scopes: the first two aim to let people share and discover new websites and online stories; the second two aim to let people with similar interests connect online.

You could consider Digg and StumbleUpon a sub-category of social networking sites, for example. Social bookmarking sites is what I would call them, but you have many other definitions floating around, including community bookmarking sites and social news aggregators.

Centralized vs. Decentralized Social Networks

Now that we have a clear understanding of social networks and social bookmarking sites, let’s get back to the central question. What are the unspoken rules of these websites? When someone can promote his own content directly, and when one should refrain from doing so?

In order to draw the line that divides the accepted and unaccepted behaviors, I think that we need to classify those social networking sites under two different groups: centralized social networks and decentralized social networks.

Note: That is a classification that I came up with, so I am not sure if it has being used in the past or not, and if with the same meaning. Feel free to suggest other interpretations or to disagree with my theory in the comments below.

Centralized social networks are those where the actions of the single elements will inevitably affect the whole community. That is, all the actions flow to the center.

Digg is an example of a centralized social network. Every time you submit a story, digg or bury a story submitted from another user, ask for votes or try to manipulate the system in your favor, your actions are inevitably affecting the whole community.

That is because all members of Digg use the front page of the different sections to stay updated with the hot stories around the website.

The same principle applies to StumbleUpon. The central part of their system is the “Stumble!” button on the toolbar. Virtually all the members use that button to discover new and interesting websites. As a consequence, whenever you give a thumbs up or a thumbs down to a particular story, and whenever you share the stories you liked with friends, you are affecting the experience of all the other members of the community.

Twitter, on the other, is a decentralized social network. There is no central or core location where the actions of the single elements flow to. The system allows you to create you own micro communities, and your actions inside those communities will not affect people outside of them.

That is, you can decide who you follow, and other people in turn will decide if they want to follow you back or not. Suppose someone starts using Twitter solely to promote his own website. Users that are not following that person will not even notice what he is doing, and the ones that are following him can simply remove the follow to stop receiving his messages if they find them annoying. Finally, if someone likes to receive the promotional messages about the website of this person, he can keep following him.

Now you might ask me: so are all social bookmarking sites like Digg or Reddit centralized, and all standard social networks like MySpace and Facebook decentralized?

That is a good rule of thumb, but it is not always the case. Most social bookmarking sites are centralized, including Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Mixx and Propeller. Some, however, are not. Del.icio.us is an example of a decentralized social bookmarking site. Provided you use the service to save your own bookmarks or to share them with friends, the actions of other users will not affect your experience.

As for standard social networking sites, I would say that most of them are indeed decentralized. Of course you have people trying to spam and manipulate those websites nonetheless, so the action of abusive users can end up affecting the whole community. But that is the exception and not the rule.

Conclusion

By now you should already know the answer to the original question. Whenever we talk about decentralized social networks, you can use them in whatever way you desire (well, excerpt for spamming). You can promote your website, yourself, express your opinions and what not. You will create your own micro community on those sites, and your actions there should not affect the other members, so they will hardly care.

Consider Twitter again. There are people who use it as a micro blogging tool. Others use it as an instant messaging utility. Others yet use the tool to promote their websites, and some people are even trying to sell their Twitter accounts on eBay! It is all good though, because each user has the autonomy to decide who he will follow, who will be able to follow him, and what micro communities he will join.

As for centralized networks like Digg or StumbleUpon, you will need to play under the rules of the community. Usually these rules will encourage you to be active in the community and to actually help it grow. Self promotion and system manipulation are frowned upon.

Practically speaking, can you get away with the occasional submission of your own stories? Yes. Can you use it over and over again solely to promote your own stuff? No.

Over to you

Do you agree that some social networks are centralized, while others are not? Do you think people should avoid completely promoting their own content, or there are exceptions?

When you build your website, you should have not only your readers, but also the “web spiders” in mind. You need to create a website that flows and is easy to navigate for both your readers and the search engine crawlers.

Here is an important article from SubmitEaze about planning your website’s page structure.

Ideally you should think about the structure of your website before you start coding your web pages, as once you’ve implemented one method it is tricky to change things around at a later date.
I recommend that when you design your structure you try to keep the structure as flat as possible. This does not mean that you should put everything in your root directory for best results, but just make sure the structure goes no deeper than two or three levels deep. Below is an example of a flat directory structure with two levels: –

Flat Structure.

This would mean the URL for page three on theme three would be:

http://www.mydomain.com/theme3/page3.html

You should not however design your structure like this: –

Vertical Structure

The URL to get to theme 3, page 3 will now look like this: –

http://www.mydomain.com/Theme1/Theme2/Theme3/page3.html

When you organize your structure you should try to maintain similarly themed pages in the same directory.

The main reasons for keeping a flat directory structure is because search engines might not deep-crawl your site. That is, when a search engine visits your website it might be set to crawl only to a certain depth of your website. So say for example you have a new website, the search engine might only crawl to a depth of 2, so in the case of the vertical page structure above only Page1, Page2, and Page3 of Theme 1 will be indexed by the search engine. The other pages might as well not exist! Whereas if you’d have the flat directory structure then all of the pages on your site would have been crawled.

Sitemaps

For more on this, you can read our older article entitled, “Why are Sitemaps Important?”

When you’ve finished your website, it is a very good idea to create a sitemap. A sitemap provides a link to all of the different pages on your website from one single page. This means that the search engine (or a person) can jump to any other page on your website from this one single page.

If you link to the sitemap from every page on your website then it has the effect of interlinking all of your pages with each other. This means that the search engine will attempt to crawl every page on your website.

So now you’re thinking, ‘well if I make a sitemap then I don’t need to be concerned about my page structure’ Wrong! If you remember, search engines often only crawl to a certain depth, so when it finds a link on your sitemap to
http://www.mydomain.com/Theme1/Theme2/Theme3/page3.html
it will disregard it as the depth of the web page is greater than its maximum crawl depth.

Here is an excerpt from an article I read on this site. Read below:

The first and most obvious potential benefit is to gain new customers by exposing your business in another online venue. But to do this you need to be creative and interesting in a social setting. Think of it like going to a party with the aim of picking up business vs. picking up business at a business conference – you will need to act differently in the “social media” arena than on your business’ website. You need to stand out and say something of interest to the people in your arena.

Blogging about the benefits of your products/services is not going to attract viral marketing (i.e. friends telling friends about a web page) – you can leave your product/service information to your standard web site. To attract interest and any sort of following you need to offer opinions, advice and stories of interest or humor.

The second and less obvious benefit from blogging and “tweeting” can come from links you place on these social websites back to your company website. While there are a number of aspects that go into increasing traffic to your website, links remain one very important aspect. This is because every link to your site that exists on the web counts as a vote towards your Google page rank.

The more links that you have on the web, the higher your ranking will be in the search engines – which means more people will discover your website. You can place links in the body of your messages and you can leave them in your message “signature” as well. In time, the search engines will deep scan the web and find those forum links.

Content is (still) King

Read our previous article on why content is important.

Whatever social medium you choose to utilize – DO NOT SPAM! Have something to say and do not just attempt to blatantly ask people to click on your link. This will of course not work with any legitimate potential customers – but possibly more damaging could be blacklisting by the social website. When posting to forums and blogs stick to areas which are relevant to your business – this is obvious for a few reasons but not least in that it will keep you interested and provoke ideas from you.

If you contribute to online social networks with quality and interesting posts (and tweets!) then your presence will be appreciated and your efforts should go rewarded with new inquiries for your business.

Links to Popular Social Websites:

Twitter – www.twitter.com
Facebook – www.facebook.com
Linked In – www.linkedin.com
Orkut – www.orkut.com
Digg- www.digg.com

Search Engines Don’t Like SEO

It’s no secret that search engine operators don’t like people manipulating the results through optimization, but this is exactly what search engine optimizers (SEO’s) do. So if you make it blatantly obvious that you are performing SEO on your website then the search engines are going to penalize your website. Therefore when performing SEO for your website you must always make sure what you’re doing is not frowned upon by the search engines.

If your website gets banned by the search engines then it means you’ve probably done something drastically bad to the extent where they don’t want to list your website at all.
So how do you know if your website is banned?

So how can you check whether your website is banned by a search engine?

Check the search results

If you go to Google and simply type the URL of your website you should be presented with something similar to below: -

If you enter your domain and you get a message saying “Sorry, no information is available for the URL: xyz” then chances are your site is banned.

The only other time you may receive this message is if your website is brand new and hasn’t been crawled by the search engines yet.

Check the PageRank Bar

If you download the Google toolbar (http://toolbar.google.com) then you can view the PageRank of every website you visit. If you navigate to your website and you see a gray bar where your PageRank would normally be displayed (as the graph above displays), then this is a very strong indication that your website has been banned.

So what are the tell-tail signs of optimization, and how I avoid them?

When you optimize your website you should always think about how your website will appear from the point of view of the search engines. There are six common pitfalls that people fall into when optimizing their websites, and will usually account for 99% of all problems:

No diversity in Anchor Text

Search Engines like natural linking, that is where a website links to another out of choice, so if a website has 100 inbound links that all have exactly the same anchor text, is that natural? No, quite the opposite, it’s highly unnatural. In order to avoid this pitfall, you should vary your link anchor text for each link partnership you set-up, or each time you submit to a web directory. If you’re smart about your link anchor text then there is no way your linking strategy will look unnatural

Getting Backlinks Too Quickly

If you operate a new website and you get backlinks too quickly then this is often a clear sign of optimization tactics. Even worse, is the situation where all of these backlinks contain exactly the same anchor text (as previously mentioned). If you operate a new website you should build links slowly. As I’ve mentioned already, the search engines like to see natural linking, if your website is only a week old and already has 200 backlinks, is that natural? Link building should be a gradual process, and you should resist the urge to try to get thousands of links as soon as you launch your site. Although your intentions may be well intended, you may actually be doing more harm than good.

Keyword Stuffing

Another important step to prevent being your website being penalized is to ensure you don’t over-optimize your website. That is to say don’t ‘keyword stuff’. Keyword stuffing is a form of spamming where you use your keyword or keyphrase over-and-over again in your web page in order to increase the keyword’s weighting in the body text. The search engines can spot deliberate spamming quite easily, and as a result, should be avoided.

Usually if you write a well written, informative web page then there is no need to ‘optimize’ a web page, as you will have naturally mentioned your keyword/phrase in the text. The only thing you should consider optimizing is the Title tag, this should always contain your primary keyword or phrase.

Title Tag, Meta Tag , Image Alt Tag Spamming

In addition to over-optimization of your body text, you can also be penalized for spamming your tag attributes. For example if you create a title tag that looks like

Then the search engines are likely to take a dislike to this and may penalize your website.

Duplicating Content

Search engines like unique content; they don’t like seeing the same information being duplicated across multiple domains. I have seen instances where websites have been dropped from the search engines for doing exactly this. If you must insist on duplicating content from other web pages then you should disallow access to it using your robots.txt file to avoid any potential problems. To do this create a file in the root of your website so that it can be access by going to http://www.mydomain.com/robots.txt

In the robots.txt file your can disallow access to particular files on your website

Disallow: myduplicatedpage.html

Or you may also specify directories:

Disallow: /mycontent/

Hidden Text

Hidden text is where you create text on your web page that is the same colour as the background colour, so it is in effect hidden. This allows you to enter your target keywords and phrases without the viewer of the website aware that the text is there.

In this example I’ve gone to a website that has hidden text (I’ll keep their identity secret)

Hidden Text Example

If I then select all of the text on the website by pressing ctrl-a I can see that the website has a lot of hidden text at the top of the page

Viewing Hidden Text

Drastically Changing Your File Structure

By drastically changing the file structure or filenames of your website, you run the risk of damaging your search engine rankings. Although there’s no actual reason why search engines would penalize for this. However, I have seen occassions where websites have changed their file structure and filenames and have seen their search engine rankings take a big hit because of it. One way around this is to redirect your old pages to your new pages, in time the search engines will update their listings and you will not suffer any adverse affects

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See original article here.

More than making your website beautiful and standards-compliant, it is also important that it is full of relevant content. Our main goal should always be making the site “seen” throughout the web. This is why we do SEO. And this is why you need to make your website “content-packed”. But you have to do it the right way.

There are five (5) most important ingredients of a complete and most of all, search-engine friendly sites:
• Standard-compliant and beautiful design
• Good navigation
• Relevant Information
• Link popularity
• Link exchange

All these elements need to work together properly in order for the site to maximize its potentials and serve its purpose. And content is of major importance because without a good one, there would basically be nothing for the Search Engines to crawl.

In writing website content, you take note of the following:

• Conciseness of information

Keep it short and crisp. Be positive and direct to the point. Never be too abstract and no need to create so many long pages about the same blurbs. Make all your pages relevant to the information or services you offer your readers or target customers.

Do not overload a single page with so much information under one heading. Make it a habit to create subheads and put limits to the number of words depending on what you are writing about and your target readers. The ideal is 400 -500 words generally and 1000-1200 words for the more informative sections of the site.

• Relevance of SEO Keywords

Never forget to include in your content the words that your target audiences are most likely to type on the search fields of Google, Yahoo, MSN, Bing, and other search engines. Keep in mind that you need to put these keywords in the title tags, meta tags and descriptions and of course, scatter them all over your content to make them searchable.

• Good grammar and sentence construction

Poor content can be such a turn off to readers, especially those that are absurdly constructed. The web is a universal venue for exchange of information and since English is the universal language, you must learn how to write your content in grammatically correct English sentences so that your site will be taken seriously by readers.

• Relevance of Links

Never post unnecessary links or those that do not have anything to do with what your website is all about. Doing so could decrease your site’s credibility.

There are different types of sitemaps: the Conventional ones, which are in either .txt or HTML format; and the Special one, which is in XML form. The difference between the two is that conventional sitemaps are for both human and spider use while the latter is specifically for the Googlebot spiders. This is why the XML Sitemaps are called Google Sitemaps. Yahoo and MSN still keep the HTML format. Both the Conventional and Special forms can be used on your website and it will not be penalized by Google for the duplication. XML Sitemaps follow the Google Sitemap Protocols.

How do Search Engine robots use sitemaps? They will follow every single link on your sitemap that leads to the pages of your site and thus, the pages will get crawled and then indexed. SEO experts believe that best place to put the sitemap link for the conventional sitemap is on the homepage at the top right side of the page.

XML Sitemaps are made especially for Google. The conventional ones do not give Googlebot spiders any restriction on what pages they can crawl. There are some parts of the website that cannot easily be reached by the Google crawlers. Examples of these are the dynamic elements behind a search form. But Google sitemaps provide web developers with a way to direct Google to the pages on their site that they want to be crawled and give details on what order these pages should be crawled, how important they are in comparison with one another and how often they are updated or revised.

You can also use Sitemap Generators to create sitemaps for you. Sitemap Generators crawl the URL you provide and generate sitemap details and the number of pages in that website. You can just download the generated file and save it as “sitemap.xml”. You can try the Sitemap Generator at http://www.sitemapz.com/

Once the sitemap is created, the next step is to submit it to Google.

Using a sitemap might not bring results too easily but keep in mind that search engines dynamically improve their sitemap indexing algorithms and in time, they will surely index websites faster through sitemaps.

I was told that they work like magic and are able to put your website on top of the ranks. You just have to put them on your website code as elements of the HTML or XTML. They should provide the metadata, data and detail the page description, keywords and other information about the webpage where they are placed to make that page search engine-friendly.

But further readings on Meta tags led me to realize that these things I learned about them are now mere magnifications of their power and benefit for my website. In short, Meta tags and other Meta elements are no longer as important as they were before.

About 10 years ago, Meta tagging was the hottest thing to do for SEO. Simply by putting these elements on your page, you could easily improve your website’s search engine rankings. But this was until they got misused and abused. Spammers started to use spam keywords with these tags to make them rank higher than the straight and genuine websites. For these reasons, all the major search engines dropped meta tags from the equation.

The improvements in search engine spider technology have also caused the robots to ignore the tags in the website codes. Google, as a matter of fact, no longer uses meta tags, keywords, or descriptions at all.

According to Dave Bush, one of the SEO gurus and experienced developers I once worked with, there are three basic rules in SEO.

Rule number one is that anything that can be abused will be.

Rule number two is that anything that can be abused will get discounted in the equations.

Rule number three is that the more “natural” the links to your website and your site itself looks, the better the chance of making it to the higher ranks.

Although some websites say that it has completely lost it’s worth in SEO, I believe that meta tagging still does work somehow. Some search engines still do utilize these tags and descriptions and Google uses them to search for websites and generate results.

Meta descriptions can still help the click through. For example, your main phrase is “seo wordpress plugins”, the Title tag should have that and the description should lead off with that phrase.

The description should also be basically a sales copy, sort of like writing a Google ad word advertisement. Doing this will increase the chances that Google will use the description rather than using some random text in the middle of the page. Using this technique, you are 7 times more likely to make a sale off natural search than real ad words.

In summary, both meta keyword and content descriptions still have their place in SEO but not too much fuss should be spent on them. Since they are now just small elements in optimizing your website, too much time and resource should not be given them. In short, they don’t work like magic at all.