Forum Moderators: open
It's alot of time i read this forum, but the fist time i write here. I hope somebody will give me an answer about these simple questions:
1) Can anybody tell me what is the advantage of having anchor text for inbound links? I doubt that is taken in account in any PR evaluation routine. Maybe i am wrong?
2) I wonder if anybody had (like me) the impression that somewhat recently the "weight" taken in account by G for keywords contained into the "title" tag of HTML has been changed and probably reduced. I have the same impression with METAs - i know METAs are not particularly important in G algos, but it surprises me that actually many websites completely lacking META information score in the very first positions for many searches. Maybe another PR boost against other factors?
3) About optimization of keywords: what you think is a safe boundary to avoid over-optimization? I am free put my keywords in title, headlines, anchors, meta ... or i should consider omitting them somewhere?
Thx, sorry for my bad english.
At one point, my site was the #1 search result for a term not mentioned anywhere on my site. Why? Because I had 40something incoming links with that term in the anchor text.
It does seem to be important though for other parts of the ranking algorithm dealing with page topic/semantics/theming. PageRank is just one of the more than 100 factors that Google claims in their algo - anchor text is probably influencing one of these other factors.
/-m
i know METAs are not particularly important in G algos
2) Meta is generally thought to not affect google rankings at all. Perhaps description has some effect, perhaps not.
Many people are probably omitting because they know it doesn't help with Google and perhaps may lead to scrutinizing for over optimization for those keywords or penalties if the site doesn't actually appear relevant to some of the words used in the Meta tags.
3.Try using some variance, not just h1-h2-h3: keyphrase 1, title: keyphrase 1, all your anchor text: keyphrase 1, meta tags: keyphrase 1, etc,etc.
P.S. - Welcome to WebmasterWorld Fabrizio.
I have one site which is the only site with may targeted keywords in the title. However, even with some incoming links, and decent on-page SEO, this page just does not beat other pages which DO NOT have those keywords in the title tag. This particular page with good on-page SEO including right title tag keywords is always at result no. 10-20 and pages without the keywords in the title tags are 1-10 in SERPs.
Or maybe I am just a bad SEO :(
[webmasterworld.com...]
"... perhaps may lead to scrutinizing for over optimization ..."
Now this sounds really interesting: so perhaps omitting METAs can help better "optimizing" the pages.
Don't you think the same can apply to other "special" html tags?
Thank you.
i meant anchor text for "inner" links of site ("from" and "to" pages of the same domain).
Still can't understand if using this kind of anchor text makes sense... doubt it.
Of course it does - what makes more logical sense than using anchor text to describe an inner page you're linking to?
TJ
I reckon the description is certainly used. Our site ranked very well for "location widget" but not so well for "location widgets" (plural). The title used "widget", so did the description. I changed to "widgets" in the description and BOOM, a few days later the page was No1 for the plural and singular. The description was the only thing changed.
That's a great piece of info. When was that from?
Odds are pretty good that Google will pick this up as well. What other solution is there? You certainly don't want people to have to put mispellings on their web page or in anchor text.
I'm just saying that it's possible that it indicates to the SE's which words/phrases you're actually targetting. That kind of puts the spotlight on those words and if you are using them incorrectly or not using them at all.
Only saying there is some "possibility" and that's perhaps why you're seeing the absence of Meta's on some big players' sites.
For 'location widget', I am no.1. For 'location widgets' I am no.30 even though the title, description says 'location widgets'.
Google is ranking me higher for what I havevn't attempted :) while ranking me lower for what I have. Competition is the same for both phrases.
I'm beginning to believe title tag doesn't have the same importance it once had as well. I have oodles of non competitive terms that used to show up in the top three results on G. Not nowadays:( Back to page 3,4, or 5. No problem with Yahoo or MSN though.
I know that the meta description does play a role, as when looking over a site for a friend I found that his site ranks well for "welcome to the ..... website". The words "welcome" and "website" appear only in the meta description, and he put them there only after paying someone to advise on what should go in the title and meta description fields on his site. I'll advise that he takes them back out.
