Before actually writing these tags, it’s important to understand the primary role they play in your SEO campaign. The title tag is one of the most important components of a webpage in which to tell Google, “…this is what this page is about.” Whether Google chooses to ‘believe’ that tag represents the page is up to them, but that is a much different story all together. I like to refer to the title tag, especially the first 70 characters of the tag, as valuable real estate in which to place important, and relevant keywords. Not using the tag properly or maliciously is a shameful waste of that valuable real estate.

Next we have description tags. The proper use of description meta tags is often overlooked as so many people attempt to stuff too many keywords in the sentence, making it unreadable gibberish. I still believe that many SEO’s cannot grasp the concept of description tags no longer playing a factor in rankings (that is not to say they don’t play a factor in the rankings for personalized search and/or logged in Google users). Meta description tags should describe the page and serve as a marketing pitch to draw more clicks to your site from the SERPs. And always remember that Google can choose to display a description snippet of whatever they feel is most relevant to the search query; they do not have to display the description you’ve written.

On to meta keywords tags. This topic will receive as much as my attention as it deserves; none. Google, Yahoo, and Bing have all publicly stated that they do not read the meta keyword tag; case closed.

Similar to your description tag, your main header tag (H1) should be used to reaffirm to the visitor that they have indeed landed on a page they’d expect based open what they clicked on in the SERP. The way I write H1 tags would be to either repeat (with slight variation) the title tag, or provide a complimentary reciprocal version of the title tag’s main keyword. If my title tag is: Fort Lauderdale Personal Injury Lawyers – Firm Name Here, then naturally my H1 tag will be: Personal Injury Lawyer in Fort Lauderdale. The value of an H1 is really a fusion of your title and description; half for the search engines and half for the user.

NOTE: All of these general principles aside, the first and foremost rule to follow is that of relevance and value added for the user. All of your tags must be relevant to the page they’re written for. For more fantastic tips, take a look at this article from Search Engine Land.

So for this Fort Lauderdale injury attorney site, here is the data set I would used based upon the above principles:

• Title: Fort Lauderdale Personal Injury Lawyers – Firm Name Here, P.A.
• Description: Personal injury attorneys in Fort Lauderdale, Firm Name Here represent clients involved in personal injuries, car accidents, and injuries in the workplace.
• Keywords:
• H1: Personal Injury Lawyers in Fort Lauderdale

So there you have it. It truly is not rocket science. Move away from writing these sets of data solely for the search engines and more into driving visitors to your site and keeping them there.

…semantic search is defined by the ability of the search engine to cognitively recognise and index content based on the actual sentence structure and meaning (or, in other words, the ability of the search engine to actually READ your content).

In layman’s terms, it’s an attempt for a search engine spider to read website content much like any average human user would. Remember, the core of any search engines success is relevance for their users and providing the best information catered to every search. The only way to achieve this is to continually innovate with new technologies and processes to better understand the web while discounting ‘spammers’ who tend to keyword stuff like there’s no tomorrow.

One question I got this week was, “…then how will I ever rank for these specific phrases unless they are ‘stuffed’ into my page content?” My answer to this every time is, “…do NOT stuff keyword phrases in your content in order to achieve better rankings.” When writing SEO content, the first and foremost target audience needs to be your users. What good is being #1 on google for a term like personal injury lawyer if no one wants to read your content and immediately leaves the page?

Google has the ability to ‘learn’ about content on the basis of keyword synonyms, word placement, inbound links with anchor text, as well as common themes they’ve made across various other sites with similar content or subject matter. This can be a crucial reason why your site needs to live in a safe ‘link neighborhood’.

Of course there are many other parameters that go into semantic search, but all technical reasons aside, the one thing to focus on when writing content for SEO is your users. If you write for them, you cant go wrong. Create valuable content that is appeasing, informative, and perhaps even link worthy. Get that right, and rankings will surely follow.

I’ve been to a lot of SEO conferences, and I do not recall any where members of the crowd challenged a speaker who is an expert in his field that had volunteered his time to speak at the conference.  In the end, the audience were the only ones to lose out by cutting down the time Corey had to demonstrate and share new SEO ideas, tactics and strategies.

In speaking with Corey afterward at the Tonic happy hour, he concluded that there needed to be a few different levels of SEO classes – beginner, intermediate, and advanced.  Too many people wasted everyone’s time by asking such questions as, “what is an h1 tag?”  For the sake of everyone paying to attend, I hope next year Wordcamp at least considers the multiple levels of SEO classes.

First of all, let me quickly explain what a vanity URL is.  Put simply, it is a custom url for a profile/page that includes either your keywords or brand name.  For example, my brand name is East Coast Sports.  I can claim a profile URL on facebook that is facebook.com/eastcoastsports.  It is a great way of branding and even possible to take up spots in the SERPS.

So on to my tip of the week.  How do I know if my brand name vanity URL is even available? Knowem.com.

KnowEm checks the availability of your brand name, user name or vanity URL on 120 popular Social Media web sites.

Just type in your brand name, and knowem will query all the major social media web sites that offer vanity URLs.  There is a premium service that I have not used yet, but it will essentially register your brand’s vanity URLs for you on select sites.  Might well be worth looking into.

The most common scenario is an e-commerce website that exists in multiple languages and/or currencies. If my target markets are both the United States and United Kingdom for example, I may or may not opt for the .com and .co.uk versions of my domain. So the question is, in it’s raw form, will Google treat these sites as the same and label them as dup content? Absolutely.

So what do we do. Well of course the easiest way to rectify the situation is to 301 redirect to the primary domain TLD. Apart from a 301, you may also do well to place the canonical link element in the head wrapper of the secondary site(s).

My advice? If my small business was in this scenario, the only reason I would have multiple TLDs for my domain is for brand protection. All of my TLD’s would be 301 redirected to their respected sub domains (ie if someone types in www.mydomain.co.uk – I will 301 that to uk.mydomain.com). Now if that UK content is identical to my primary content, I would then make use of the canonical link element.

The ideal situation would be to take the time to make uk.mydomain.com unique content that is specifically targeting the UK market. A lot of people think that you need to have a .co.uk TLD to rank high in the UK SERPS. Well this is no longer the case – Google is now smart enough to detect what content will best suite different global markets.

My end goal is to have unique content in each applicable sub domains, and if done properly, can certainly outrank other .co.uk domains in the google.co.uk SERPS.

So what does this mean for the small business SEO campaign?  Not much more than we ethical, white hat SEO’s already know to be honest.  A few big changes I see coming are:

• More ranking weight for social networking sites.
• Back link thematic quality truly surpassing quantity.
• Direct correlations between analytic data and rankings.

I believe social networking sites, especially Twitter, will start to become a heavier factor in Google’s SERPS.  Facebook has been offering vanity urls for a few months now, and may also play a large role in rankings.  It is important to snatch up your small business vanity URL on these major social networking sites as soon as possible.

Back links.  While it has always been an SEO 101 best practice to create relevant and thematic links to your site, I don’t think the full wrath of this has come to fruition until now.  Caffeine will dive even deeper into the links pointing to a site, analyzing their relevant strength more and more.  Gone are the days where simple blog commenting on high PR blogs will suffice for a successful link building campaign.

What I’ve always hoped would become a large part of Google algorithm is on-page visitor analytics.  As smart as Google is, they certainly cannot rank every website on the web in the most appropriate fashion.  Rather they need to rely on the millions of users who use Google everyday.  A site ranking #1 for a highly competitive phrase with a bounce rate of 90% will no longer bask in the glory of first page rankings.  I strongly believe average page views, time on site, bounce rates, etc will have a significant impact on rankings.

As indicated by Google, the average Google user will not notice any difference in UI, nor will they notice major differences in the SERPS.  SEO’s should not be worry or scared of Caffeine, as it is merely Google looking to enhance their current search ranking algorithm.  Stick to your white hate principles, and good things will come.

This question has been a very common theme lately amongst SEO’s, and there seemed to be an ongoing debate of how these links are treated.  Matt Cutts of Google finally settles this debate, reinforcing my original arguement.

I spoke about Boiler plates (also known as shingles) in my review article of Search Engine Strategies (SES) NYC.  Boiler plates are essentially any section/element of your website that remains constant throughout your site.  Common examples are of course navigation bars, blogrolls, footers, etc.

So why is an external link less valuable in these positions?  I will answer a question with a question – what value does your boiler plate link provide to any particular page or article at any given time?  More often than not, the answer will be, ‘slim to none.’

This may sound a bit confusing so let me provide you with a concrete example.  Let’s say I am visiting a website dedicated to soccer fans/news.  The homepage is a broad overview of all the latest news, articles, scores, etc.  In the blogroll I see a link to ‘Fantasy Soccer’.  Great!  That CAN be a relative and value-added element to this site, so I go ahead and click on it.  But then I go back to the original soccer site and click on a post about a specific player in Showbiz.  I look at the sidebar and sure enough the Fantasy Soccer link remains.  How does that now provide value to me on this current page?

Get your links/anchors placed contextually in pages or articles that are relevant to your given anchor, homepage and/or the sub page in which you are linking to.  Forget about soaking up link juice from being in a blogroll displayed on every page of the site – get your link placed in a relative, user value-added section of the site.

The bottom line here is to remember that boilerplates are not unique – they are static.  Why should Google place value on a link that took a webmaster 15 seconds to add to a blogroll rather than amongst well scripted, unique content?

These are of course my opinions and would certainly enjoy any counter-argument.

My first SES session focused on duplicate content and multi site issues.  While we are all aware of the dangers/ineffectiveness of duplicate content, both for users and search engines, there were a few interesting thoughts I took away from the session.

One of the major things talked about was website shingles/boiler plates.  Simply put, these are elements such as navigation, headers, footers, and/or other wrappers that appear on multiple pages within a website.  This can also be true for titles/metas/headers IF they are the same across multiple pages (hence the reason why these fields should contain BOTH what’s important to the campaign, as well as what’s on the page).

Part of Google’s algorithm may choose not to look at boilerplate elements when crawling a site.  This is why it is extremely important to focus on optimizing the unique content areas on each page of your site.  While I can’t say for sure Google already has this boilerplate recognition foolproof in their algorithm, you can bet they will in the very near future.

A statistic I found quite interesting was that one third of the web is duplicate content.  Now I’m not quite sure of the validity and/or the source of this statistic, but you get the picture.  I’ve been saying for the longest time to look at the big picture; how Google operates, what are their core business models, why they dominate search market share.
Stop, sit back and think about this.  Search engines (specifically Google, Yahoo, and Live) are all businesses like any other business.  Ask yourself:

•    What is their product?
•    How do they make money?
•    How do they ensure future revenues?
•    Who are the customers?

Spoiler alert.  Search engines are in business to provide relevant, quality, and unique information.  Think about it, most people use Google because they usually find exactly what they are looking for based upon their search query.  If they didn’t, they’d move on to other search engines.

Back to some more specific examples from SES, the next theme I thought was valuable was article/blog post syndication.  Nothing really new here but I will reiterate some things many of us already know.  To better explain this, I will give an example of what I do for article syndication.

Whenever I post an article written by an attorney on their website, I usually Digg the article upon publication to allow Google to naturally find the new content.  I would argue this method is much better and faster than simply updating/pinging your sitemap.  I make sure my Digg article title and 1-2 line description is unique from the article itself.  Google will pick up and index this new content very quickly with this method.

The only other topic discussed in this session was the overall lack of understanding between domain.com and www.domain.com.  I could go on for another 2 pages about my frustrations on this topic so I will leave it at that.