Cash Campfire » On-page Optimization

How to Use Meta Tags to Increase Website Traffic

Christina Crowe — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 18:25:36 +0000

The degree of impact that meta tags have on your website is discussed by many entrepreneurs and is often disagreed on. However, it has been proven that meta tags do have some effect on search engine results. The effect they have vary depending on the search engine. According to Michael Fleischner, author of the book SEO Made Simple: Strategies For Dominating The World’s Largest Search Engine, the MSN search engine especially loves on-page optimization, including meta tags.

Meta tags are just HTML codes that tell search engine bots what your website is about. Visitors browsing your website won’t be able to see the metadata at all, unless they looked at your source code. Search engines basically use your meta tags to label your website and decide where to put your website in search results. Since meta tags aren’t seen by website visitors, they are perfectly harmless and can help increase search engine traffic to some degree, as long as you aren’t keyword stuffing your meta tags.

The three main meta tags that webmasters use are the title, description and keywords meta tags. The title meta tag tells search engines the main subject of the page, and this meta tag gets displayed on search results as the title of your article. The description meta tag describes your content in a sentence or two and is also displayed in search results. The keyword meta tag should include only the main keywords that can be found on your website or in the content of website pages. However, you should include your main keywords in the other two tags as well, not just the keywords meta tag. Another meta tag that is helpful is the robots meta tag, which tells search engine spiders to crawl through the entire website. These meta tags should be used on your website home page and every new post you publish.

Webmasters who have WordPress installed on their websites should use the All in One SEO plugin to help them with meta tag placement. This plugin allows you to just type out the meta title, description and keywords of each new post before you publish it, making entering in metadata incredibly easy.

Like most websites, this website uses meta tags as well. The following is an example of how to format your meta tags, and they are the meta tags we currently use on our home page.

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Of course, with the All in One SEO plugin, you don’t need to type everything in code form. The plugin automatically does that for you. So, you would only need to enter in your meta keywords for the keywords meta tag and that’s it.

To add the robots meta tag, simply log on to your WordPress account and go to Appearance > Editor > Header.php. Place the code in between the two head tags () after the title tags ().

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Have you noticed an increase in search engine traffic since adding meta tags on your website?

*This post has some affiliate links distributed in the content. Read more about them on the Disclosure page.

Keyword Stuffing: When Keyword Density Becomes a Problem

Christina Crowe — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 16:59:25 +0000

Keyword density, the percentage of keyword phrases in the web content of an article or website, can increase your position in search engines if you also take advantage of other optimization methods, like meta keywords and backlinking strategies. Though keyword density does have its benefits, it can’t be overused. Overusing keyword density is called keyword stuffing. Keyword stuffing isn’t just harmful to your search engine rankings. It is also harmful to your readers.

Photo by NightRPStar (flickr)

Think about it. You’re browsing for information on how to combat bad acne. You visit a website from Google search results and the first sentence you read is “Treat adult acne with adult acne treatments.” The first thing that pops into your mind is, “Huh? This website must be spam.” Or maybe you don’t even stop and think. You just hit the “Back” button on your browser and move on to another website that will meet your needs.

Keyword stuffing is detrimental to your Google SERPs (search engine results pages) as well. Because Google frowns upon keyword stuffing, you risk the chance of getting banned from search engines. This prevents any search engine traffic from accessing your website, so your earning revenue gets a big hit.

Now, some websites do get away with keyword stuffing, but only because Google hasn’t found them yet. Don’t think that you’ll get away with it, because it’s only a matter of time until Google does ban you from the search engine. Many people take part in keyword stuffing because they just don’t know that it’s wrong or could harm them more than help. In fact, keyword density is a form of on-page optimization. According to SEO Made Simple by Michael H. Fleischner, off-page optimization has a bigger effect on Google SERPs than on-page optimization. So you should really be working on obtaining backlinks, a form of off-page optimization, than stuffing your website with keywords.

You want your readers to understand your content, subscribe to your RSS feed and keep coming back for more. After all, no one wants to read the same keyword phrase over and over, even if your article does provide useful information. Keyword stuffing makes your website repetitious and spammy. Would you visit such a website? I would think not.

How to Avoid Keyword Stuffing

Type without the barriers of keyword density. Don’t think about keyword density at all while you’re typing.
Maintain a keyword density of 1-4%.
Make sure the keywords that you use are the main focus and subject of your article.
Read your article out loud and see if it makes sense. If a sentence would make more sense without a particular keyword, don’t use that keyword.
Use a keyword density tool to check for keyword stuffing.

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Do you know additional ways to help avoid keyword stuffing?

*This post has some affiliate links distributed in the content. Read more about them on the Disclosure page.

Using Keyword Density to Your Advantage

Christina Crowe — Thu, 20 May 2010 01:40:29 +0000

Webmasters use keyword density to determine the percentage of keywords or keyword phrases that are in their articles so that they can optimize the number of keywords in their content. Keeping track of your keyword density is just one way to optimize your websites or articles for search engines. Though major search engines don’t place a heavy weight on keyword density as they did before, it’s still good to know, since it will help you boost your search engine rankings.

To calculate your keyword density, divide the number of keywords or keyword phrases by the number of total words in your article and multiply this number by 100. For example, if I have 8 keyword phrases in my blogs post and the total word count of my post is 400, my keyword density would be 2% (8 / 400 * 100 = 2%).

A keyword density of 2% is considered very good by many webmasters, and it should help with getting that 1st page position on Google. However, before increasing your keyword density to, say, 6%, know that most search engines will actually penalize you if you have a large keyword density. They do this to prevent keyword stuffing, which is a big no-no.

How do you know if you’ve been penalized? Simple. Your website just won’t show up in search engines at all, no matter how hard you try. Now, if you just made your website and it hasn’t been indexed yet, that’s another story. However, if your website has been around for several months and you’re adding fresh content on a regular basis, chances are you’ve been penalized if your website suddenly disappears from Google.

If you’re a serious writer and value your content, this shouldn’t concern you all too much. Chances are, you also despise keyword stuffing, since this conflicts with your content’s value. If you were ever to keyword stuff, readers would take one look at your website and label it as spam. Unless you want to drive all your customers away, you know that keyword stuffing is best to be avoided at all costs.

To avoid keyword stuffing, try to aim for a keyword density of 1-2%. Anything lower than 1% wouldn’t help you so much in ranking on search engines and anything higher than 3% would be considered keyword stuffing. My best advice is to just write naturally and add keywords as you go. If your content doesn’t look natural, visitors won’t want to read it. If visitors don’t read your content, what’s the point of optimizing for search engines? You won’t get money anyway. Therefore, natural content is the key to success.

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What keyword density do you like to maintain?