A client lists over 20 keywords for its website, is there any drawback if putting all into the <meta keywords=""> on only one page?
FACT: Meta keywords have no effect on SEO.
Also, there is no official requirement regarding the length of a 'keyword' tag, but generally you'll find people listing it all across the internet anywhere from 100 to 255 characters.
Make sure to use the words that match the content of your client's website. And yes, don't worry about anything else.
Meta keywords don't have an impact on SEO anymore. Instead, you should focus on content and getting backlinks to appropriate pages.
Related
I have a this website
http://www.webtrainingcentre.com/
which is on web development tutorials.
My Question is Can I have multiple page with same keywords but different content for eg.
Here is a page that is tutorial on if/else condition in php
http://www.webtrainingcentre.com/php-tutorials/if-else-condition/
I want to create few pages like this
http://www.webtrainingcentre.com/php-exercise/if-else-condition/
http://www.webtrainingcentre.com/javascript-exercise/if-else-condition/
http://www.webtrainingcentre.com/php/if-else-condition/
All these pages will have different content which are needed and make sense
I am using the SEO Yoast plugin in wordpress which said you are using a duplicate keyword.
I want to know if Google will understand that these are different pages with different context/content and are needed by users or will it penalize me for using duplicate keywords in page titles and url's.
No, this would not be an issue. Google looks at your url, meta title and the content of your pages to understand what they are all about. If the content is sufficiently different between them, but they do share a couple of keywords, it is not going to be an issue at all. No worries.
At most, if the content is not specific at all, they might be considered near duplicate content, but you are not going to be penalized for that. At worst, such pages would not rank well.
You don't choose the keywords your pages are relevant for. They are or are not relevant for keywords based on many factors, some of which, but not all of them, are the titles and URLs of the pages. You do get to choose the topics the content is about, though.
Additionally, it is common for pages to have a lot of keywords and content in common. What matters is that they are not the same content. Writing a tutorial about if/else statements in PHP is different than writing one for Java.
The only way you may run into issues is if you copy the content from the PHP article to the Java article and than do a blanket search and replace of PHP with Java. That's low quality content and bad for SEO. But if you take the time to write custom content for both this is fine for SEO and your users.
All the articles I Googled on this subject are dated back in 2004-2005.
Basically I am structuring precanned searches, and it is based off of categories the client will input.
Example
content/(term name)/index.htm
Does it matter if I used the raw term with a space, which is converted to %20 in the URL, or should I convert the link to '-' and remove that before querying for results?
I already have it working, but does anyone know if this definitely has a negative impact on SEO and ranking?
No impact on SEO. A - just looks nicer, that's all.
You'd use %20 if you needed to preserve the exact term including a proper space when you read it back from the URL. Probably you don't.
I personally think it should be "-"
I don't remember seeing a website that was using %20
"-" is one character and %20 is three, so you can put more stuff visible in the address bar
for an example, what is better
Do spaces in your URL (%20) have a negative impact on SEO?
or
Do spaces in your URL (%20) have a negative impact on SEO?
Yes don't use them - Google, Yahoo and bing does not know how to leverage the spaces and more importantly you are wasting good opportunity to communicate both with the consumer and search engines more about your product or page URL and what the topic of the content is all about.
However, sometimes it can't be helped because you have a website / ecommerce site for years and the site is indexed and already on good page ranking.
In that case, if you do want to get better naming convention, you will want to re-name the urls but take all of the existing url with space and place it into 301 redirect and map them to the new urls.
%20 does not effects SEO but it will destroy the readability of your URL. since the CMS have taken all the intention, so now it's easy to set-up dynamic URL structure. I recently read an article on SEO Friendly URLS which will help you to avoid Google penaltyimprove your chances to rankandmake your links meaningful hope it helps.
As mentioned, it really doesn't matter from a search engine perspective. With that being said, however, it's generally not good practice to use spaces in URLs (%20). Replace it with a dash or concatenate it.
I use blogger and while adding labels to blog post, the link to that label page has space which is converted to "%20" but i have no control over that with blogger. When I try to make the labels with '-' instead of space they are not nice to humans, so i go with spaces and "%20" in urls, i think this should not affect SERPs.
We use "%20" all over the place on our website and have not experienced any negative effects. We began doing this about two years ago, and at that time a few search engines had problems, but they have since disappeared. Some browsers will display a "%20" in the address bar, while others will display an empty space, but this really doesn't matter.
We're not so sure though that this has any positive effect on ranking, though it definitely has no negative effect. The thing to remember about Google is that while having a keyword as part of the base url, such as www.greatwidgets.com, is very helpful, using keywords as part of the page url, example: www.myexample.com/widgets.htm does not appear to result in any advantage. What matters is the page content and how many other pages out there have the exact same content. Also, incoming links from relevant websites with high rankings, without the rel="nofollow" tag are extremely important.
You cannot "trick" Google with fancy-looking URLs and h1 headers. That's right, h1 headers mean nothing, because Google doesn't require your input to tell them what's important.
Remember, if you're selling products and copying content from the manufacturer's website (or the competitor's website), Google's PANDA is going to be very angry. You'll need to reword your content so that it's not a verbatim copy from some other website. Google rewards originality, and severely punishes plagiarism. Seriously, PANDA will put the offending page on page 50 until it's brought into conformity with Google's policy on duplicate content.
Always use sitemaps to help the search engines.
I believe it looks better in a link if an underscore (_) is used.
content/term_name/index.htm
content/term-name/index.htm
content/term%20name/index.htm
It's better to use "-" instead of %20 since it shows unprofessional coding to the search engines and to the visitors. You really think a visitor could remember a URL with %20 ? Make the pages for the users and not for the search engines. You will get the most benefit form this and SE will appreciate it.
according to my view spaces in url should not be there as this is not good practice. we should use hypens between the URLS. the website should have sitemap.xml file.
according to my view spaces do have negative impact on seo. and secondly when creating a url structure hypens should be placed instead of underscores.
yes they do have negative effect as it effects the user experiences. the users would like to have easy to remember urls. google suggest you should seperetae your words with ' - ' and ideally not to use '_' or spaces '%20' .
Something else to consider is that if you use spaces in your URLs, it will break automatic URL detection in many software (e.g. emails, chat, etc) where they think that a space is the end of URL. This might impact negatively the "sharability" of your URLs.
Using spaces in URLs is still not common practice in 2020 and Google still recommends to use - instead:
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/76329?hl=en
If I name my HTML file "Banks.html" located at www.example.com/Banks.html, but all the content is about Cats and all my other SEO tags are about Cats on the page, will it affect my page's SEO?
Can you name your files whatever you want, as long as you have the page title, description, and the rest of the SEO done properly?
Page names are often not very representative of the page content (I've seen pages named 7d57As09). Therefore search engines are not going to be particularly upset if the page names appear misleading. However, it's likely that the page name is one of many factors a search engine considers.
If there's no disadvantage in naming a page about cats, "cats.html", then do so! If it doesn't help your SEO, it will make it easier for your visitors!
If you want to be on better place when someone searchs for 'banks', then yes, it can help you. But unless you are creating pages about cats in banks I'm sure that this wont help you very much :)
It shouldn't affect your search engine ranking, but it may influence people who, having completed a search on Google (or some of the other great search engines, like um...uh...), are now scanning the results to decide where to click first. Someone faced with a url like www.dummy.com/banks.html would be more likely to click than someone faced with www.dummy.com/default.php?p_id=1&sessid=876492u942fgspw24z because most people haven't a clue what the last part means. It's also more memorable and gives people greater faith in getting back to the same site if you write your URLs nicely. No one that isn't Dustin Hoffman can remember the second URL without a little intense memory training, while everyone can remember banks.html. Just make sure your URL generation is consistent and your rewriting is solid, so you don't end up with loads of page not found errors which can detriment search engine ranking.
Ideally, your page name should be relevant to the content of the page - so your ranking may improve if you call the page "cats.html", as that is effectively another occurrence of the keyword in the page.
Generally, this is fairly minor compared to the benefits of decent keywords, titles, etc on the page. For more information take a look at articles around Url Strategy, for example:
"I’ve heard that search engines give some weighting to pages which contain keywords users are searching for which are contained within the page URL?"
Naming your pages something meaningful is a good idea and does improve SEO. It's another hint to the search engines what the page is about, in addition to the title and content. You would be surprised if you opened a file on your computer called "Letter to Grandma.doc" and it was actually your tax return!
In general, the best URLs are those that simply give a page name and hierarchical structure, without extensions or ID numbers. Keep it lowercase and separate words with dashes, like this:
example.com/my-cats
or
example.com/cats/mittens
In your case you will probably wanna keep the .html extension to avoid complexities with URL rewriting.
Under circumstances this can be considered a black-hat SEO technique. Watch out not to be caught or reported by curious users.
Google's PageRank algo has hundreds, thousands or even millions of variables and factors. From this point of view, you can be sure that the name of the files that you use on your website will affect your pagerank and/or your keyword targeting. Think about it.
There are few on-page elements that have significance. The URL, while it can be /234989782 is going to be more beneficial if it's named relevantly.
From any point of view, Google and all search engines like to see a coherence between everything: if you have a page named XYZ, then google will like it better if the text, meta, images, url, documents, etc, on the page to have XYZ in them. The bigger this synchronisation between the different elements on a page, the more the search engine sees how focused the content of that page is, resulting in more hits for you when someone looks up that focused search term.
If you have an image for example, you're better off having the same:
caption
description
name
alt text
(wordpress users will recognize that these are the four parameters that can be set for images on wordpress).
The same goes for all files you have on your website. Any parameter that can be seen by a search engine is better of optimized in regards to the content that goes with it, in sync with all the other parameters of this same thing.
The question of how useful this all is arises afterwards. Will I really rank lower if my alt text is different than the name of my image? Probably not by a lot. But either way, taking advantage of small subtleties like these can take you a long way in SEO. There are so many things we can't control in SEO (or that we shouldn't be able to control, like backlinks), that we have to use what we can control in the best way possible, to compensate.
It's also hard to tell if it is all useful after the Google Panda and Penguin. It definitely has less of an impact ever since those reforms (back then, this kind of thing was crucial), the question is simply how much of an impact it still has. But all in all, as I said, whenever possible, name your files according to your content.
Today algorithm is totally different when the SEO was introduce. The seo today is about content and its quality. It must produce a good reader and follower so any filename and description are no longer important.
Page name doesn't affects much in terms of SEO. but naming a page is also one of the Google 200 SEO signals.
Naming a url different sure will reduce your bounce rate a little. Because any user comes to your site through organic search results doesn't understand what the page has.
Even search engines loves when a page name is relevant to the topic in the page.
A bit of an SEO question here.
I've got a site with a ton of pages, of content. I know lots of the content is the same on each page.
I thought that Search Engines keyed off of the differences in page content so that they could promote the correct data, but when I look at the summary in google and bing, the summary shows my 'feedback' block (which is where I just ask for feedback).
Yahoo (and the summary in Facebook) shows my search options menu.
These aren't really things that are going to make a person want to click on the page.
So I'm wondering what the best way is to either hide this content from search engines, or improve the visibility of the other content that should get indexed.
The page structure is pretty consistent, so I thought it would have been easy for the search robots to pick this stuff out, but apparently not.
You may want to try using a meta tag like this.
< META NAME="description" CONTENT="Here is a short summary of the page" >
Search engines also prefer title and header tags over regular text.
Meta is the best way to do that.
However,Beware that your structure of page is a also important, which means search engines prefer to use metal tag, but they also weigh the structures, keywords, headers things like that.
I encountered such trouble couple of months ago. I found Google showed price and download rather than meta description. I solved that by reorganize meta description(more accurate and shorter,177 characters)eliminate tags from price and download tags. And made some slight adjustments to the structure. Now the Google summary is what I want.
Hope this helps you!
We've got Ultraseek 5.7 indexing the content on our corporate intranet site, and we'd like to make sure our web pages are being optimized for it.
Which SEO techniques are useful for Ultraseek, and where can I find documentation about these features?
Features I've considered implementing:
Make the title and first H1 contain the most valuable information about the page
Implement a sitemap.xml file
Ping the Ultraseek xpa interface when new content is added
Use "SEO-Friendly" URL strings
Add Meta keywords to the HTML pages.
The most important bit of advice anyone can get when optimizing a website for search engines and indeed for tools like Ultraseek is this...
Write your web pages for your human audience first and foremost. Don't do anything odd to try and optimize your website for a search engine. Don't stuff keywords into your URL if it makes the URL less sensible. Think human first.
Having said this, the following techniques usually make things better for both the humans and the machines!
Use headings (h1 through h6) to give your page a structure. Imagine them being arranged in a tree view, with a h1 containing some h2 tags and h2 tags containing h3 tags and so on. I usually use the h1 tag (there should be only one h1 tag) for the site name and the h2 tag for the page name, with h3 tags as sub-headings where appropriate.
Sitemaps are very useful as they contain a list of your pages, consider this a request of pages you would like included in any index. They don't normally contain much context though.
Friendly URL strings are great for humans. I'd much rather visit www.website.com/Category/Music/ than www.website.com?x=3489 - it does also mean that you give the machines some more context for your page. It especially helps if the URL matches your h1 and h2 tags. Like this:
www.website.com/Category/Music/
Website
Category: Music
Welcome to the music category!
Meta keywords (and description) are useful - but as per the above advice, you need to make sure that it all matches up. Use a small but targeted set of keywords that highlight what is specifically different about the page and make sure your description is a good summary of the page content. Imagine that it is used beneath the title in a list of search results (even though it might not be!)
Navigation! Providing clear navigation, as well as back links (such as bread-crumbs) will always help. If someone clicks on a search result, it might not be the exact page they are after, but it may well be very close. By highlighting where people have landed in your navigation and by providing a bread-crumb that tells them where they are, they will be able to traverse your pages easily even if the search hasn't taken them to the perfect location.