SEO & AI Search (GEO) Expert

Improve your Google ranking with Peter Mahoney, 20+ years SEO & Wordpress experience

Does Google use meta keyword tags?

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Does Google use meta keyword tags? Wordpress SEO ExpertHere’s a brief history of keywords. There’s a lot of misunderstanding and misinformation out there.

When search engines first came out (pre-Google), the idea that they could read a whole website was out of reach. It would take too long, require they store too much data, and generally there needed to be a quick, simple approach to scanning a website. The simplest of the simplest techniques was “meta keywords”.

This was a small piece of code that lived behind the scenes of a site, that listed all the keywords a site owner wanted their site to rank with. The list was delineated by a comma, so looked something like this:

<meta name=”keywords” content=”SEO, search engine optimisation, WordPress” />

This method was open to huge amounts of abuse on the part of a website owner. There was nothing stopping someone using keywords which were known to rank well, but didn’t even appear in their website. We started seeing tens of thousands of search results which were really a bait and switch, and it was eroding from the quality of the internet.

Google came along, and was one of the first search engines to really have a strong ethos behind it, in that they wanted to find a way to keep the internet useful, and digitally clean & tidy.

The solution was to index every site’s entire contents, scanning all the text that a real human could actually read, and working out based on sentence structure, density of nouns etc what a website was really about.

The next step was to start overlooking the meta keyword tag entirely.

And that was about a decade ago. Other major search engines followed suit, and as a result that list of keywords has been defunct and totally ignored for the best part of a decade.

Unfortunately for a host of reasons (many SEO “experts” don’t actually keep ahead of best practice, or are too happy to just do whatever their clients ask without explaining the process, or just that keyword lists entered the collectively consciousness at a formative time in the internet’s history) people still think they’re going to be useful.

One of the most popular SEO plugins for WordPress actually says next to the “Use keywords?” field, “I can’t think why you’d want to know. The search engines don’t”.

Sadly a lot of people get caught up on these, and their focus disappears from what is important to something that absolutely is not.

It’s not helped by the number of places that lists of words and phrases ARE still used, like Google Adsense for example. We also track our website’s analytics based on what search queries people found us with, etc.

I prefer to call these things “search terms”, or occasionally “key terms”. I try to steer clear of the (possible) synonym “keywords”.

So what I do in this regard is to look at your site as Google et al try to, (pretty well) as a human being. I read your site to see what it’s really about. I then run tests just like they do to see what words and phrases you use most often, and check that those do a good job of describing what your site is actually about. Most of the time, as long as someone has written their website from their own knowledge and experience of their industry or topic, these match just fine.

Occasionally I find someone thinks they have a site about, say, “window fitting”, but really it comes across as being about “buy my product”. You can imagine how that might happen, but it’s not want the search companies want to see so it’s not what we want to give them.

If I come across a discrepancy like that, I let my clients know that they need to rethink their content asap.

As long as they do match, I make sure I reinforce those terms everywhere we know Google et al want to see them. In image tags, in the description tag, in the page titles.

So, the short answer to a long history is let me take care of that–if I need to alert you to an issue I’ll let you know, and please don’t be surprised if you look at your site’s code when I’ve done and there is no outdated “keywords” code.

Create a Google Account using an existing email address (Drive, Google Plus, Calendar, etc.)

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You can create a new Google account to access their suite of tools using your existing email address. The only Google app you’ll not be able to access is Gmail. which is fine because your email is already managed elsewhere.

This saves you having to have a Gmail account that you need to check in addition to your current email. This is great for me, I’ve already got three addresses and the thought of an extra email is a bit much.

Rather than going through the “Create and account” option you’ll see when you sign up for a Google service like Goggle+, go here instead:

https://accounts.google.com/newaccount

You’ll note the option “I prefer to use my current email address”–use that!

Like most things, it’s easy when you know how. Or in this case, where.

Google update!

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Yet another reason why keywords are dead, and genuine, organic content is King.

Google’s latest update, Hummingbird, rewrites the way search works from the ground on up.

We may at last, have arrived at the point where manipulating a page to pack it with keyword terms is pointless. If this is true, it means we can get back to crafting well-written, informative content. We can once again produce work to share and create value, and to communicate ideas.

Will hashtags replace keywords?

Google authorship in the code

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It goes without saying that we love Google Authorship, and the snippets produced by having it set up.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, here’s all you need to know in one photo:

Having this set up grabs peoples’ attention.

Part of the process of setting these up is to have a link on your pages back to your Google Plus profile. All the guidance from Google, and therefore most online sources, is to have an icon or short piece of text that links to your profile.

Not everyone wants to link to their Google+ page. And for good reason; a lot of website authors only have G+ accounts for the sake of getting these authorship snippets working. They certainly don’t want to drive visitors to a social profile they aren’t actively using.

Here’s a solution I worked out myself. As far as I know, I’m the first to be publishing this.

Simply drop this code into your website, anywhere at all. It doesn’t display anything on the site—it just sits in the code, but works 100% as a Google Author link.

<a href=”your-profile-url?rel=author” />

So for example mine is:

<a href=”https://plus.google.com/u/1/110002801838494280534?rel=author” />

It’s that simple!

New Google Webmaster Tool, “Manual actions”

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Another tool within the Google Websmater Tools suite, “manual actions” shows you if you’ve been penalised by Google for anything, and gives you the opportunity to request a review after you’ve fixed it.

Nice.

Basically, if you violate Google’s webmaster guidelines, such as acquiring shoddy paid links pointing to your site, publishing spammy content, using hidden text, or engaging in other SEO sins of the sort, your site may be flagged by Google’s algorithms, triggering a manual action.

via Google rolls out manual action notification & response tool.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO): Links & stuff

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In the final part of my SEO primer series, let’s look at the bit most people think about first. Links.

Back links, social links, white-hat links, black-hat links.

I called this post “Links & stuff” because while the value of links is simple enough to understand, the jargon and terminology can make it seem more confusing than it is.

At its most simplistic—you really want as many links to your site as possible. You want them on blogs, local news sources, forums, social media, even from competitors sites (I’ve got a tip for that later on).

Because the more places on the Internet that link to you, the higher you get ranked in search engines. Google has always been very transparent about this, in fact the idea of indexing websites based on how many other places deem them useful enough to link to was their whole original idea. Which naturally has been replicated by other companies ad nauseum.

In a nutshell, that’s it. But like everything with SEO, it’s the nuances that make a real difference.

A link to your online presence from a popular website dedicated to your industry is better than a little-read blog. Links from Facebook sit somewhere near the lower end of that scale, with Twitter slightly behind. It’s all worth having, but what you really want are high quality links on respected websites.

Sometimes the best way to get high quality links back to your site (backlinks, as they’re known) is to just ask for them. You’d be surprised how many professional blogs relish having guest bloggers—people who write once off entries for them, or perhaps even a short series of posts. It can take the stress of deadlines off them, or help them out when they can’t work owing to illness or preferably, a holiday. And of course they always link back to your site in the byline.

A quick way to generate backlinks that are from well known sites related to your field of expertise is to comment on posts that are already there. It’s quick and effective. In my case, I go to Google, search for “SEO”, and click on a recent high profile blog result. After quickly reading the article, I’ll post my thoughts in the comments, and link back to a related post on my own site. If I don’t have a related post, I make sure I do very quickly. It never hurts to have published my own ideas on a recent hot topic anyway.

And that brings us to the cheeky competitors site tip. Go to their site, and comment on their blogs. If possible, find an article there that relates to something you’ve already written about, and say so. “Interesting to see you finally catching up with this one, I’ve been thinking about it for ages”. Cheeky. But include a link to your post, and not only do you get the SEO benefits, but you can hijack part of their readership.

Make sure you have Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin profiles that can be publicly accessed, and link to your posts from there.

Make sure other people can share your posts socially easily too; sharing buttons beneath each post on your website can make a real difference.

I maintain a separate blog, peter.mahoneywebmarketing.co, which has the sole purpose of containing links to my own work. But (importantly) it has other short content there too, after all if it was nothing but links to my own work Google would see right through me.

And that brings us to the whitehat/blackhat concepts. In computer jargon whitehat is most simply defined as “not doing anything dodgy”. Blackhat is the opposite.

There are all manner of techniques for building backlinks to up your search engine ratings. Anything you pay for is usually blackhat. Not illegal, but not exactly cricket either.

Here’s an example. Link pyramids. These used to be very popular, and at times quite costly. You’d pay someone to create an army of low-level links on social networks and lesser known blogs. Then those would link to more popular sites, but again these were all manufactured by the vendor. Then they’d point to a few really highly ranked site, and in turn they would point to your pages.

You were at the top of the pyramid, enjoying the view from the top of search engines rankings.

Then the search engines realised what was happening, and wrote highly intelligent algorithms to find these pyramids, and penalise them. A lot. I’m managing SEO for a client who had to move domain names just to get away from their previous ill-gotten reputation (earned before my involvement, I hasten to add). They had thousands of links, felt at the top of their game, then woke up one morning to find in the eyes of the world wide web, they barely existed anymore.

And then the link building industry moved to a link wheels, and again the cycle began, only to fall later.

And this is a very important lesson I can’t impart strongly enough. SEO is a long game, because it should be organic.

Yes, you can optimise your code, your site speed, your images, etc. Yes, you can spread the word by sharing links to your site on other related blogs, but that’s all real people doing real things. Have great content that people will want to engage with, and share.

But if you try to cheat the system, you’ll be slapped for it. And for many of us, with so much of our business conducted online, a slap can send us under.

Organic growth. Humans interacting. It’s what the Internet was supposed to be about. Search engines make unexpected guardians of that dream, but when it comes to being found online, they hold all the keys.

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