SEO BLOG

Suicide by frozi.

I’m shocked! Not only do bloggers waste time with meta tags although most of them are worthless for Google, bloggers hurt themselves using meta tags. It does not get better it seems it gets worse. Lately more and more people commit Google suicide by adding “privacy” to their blogs. I’m all for privacy but if you blog you blog for people to read your blog so in most cases you do not want to bar them from arriving there. Other people commit blog suicide by telling hackers to hack them.

Also the title element, which resides in the page head of the HTML document as well still gets abused and wrecked all over the place like it’s 1999. Blog suicide by title-tag is an awful, slow death but many people choose it anyways. A messed up title tag will make Google de-index you partly, devalue the content in the search results and finally scare away the remaining users that might have found their way to your blog in spite of all that.

These are the top 7 title & meta tag mistakes that kill your blog, blogging is beautiful, do not commit blog suicide!

meta name=”robots” content=”noindex,nofollow”
This is basically a “no trespass” sign for Google or in other words Google suicide. You will still get indexed with a URL but you won’t get visitors from Google. Spam bots will still crawl you though. Not only newbie bloggers commit suicide like that, some “of UK’s most influential online journalism bloggers” (problem still pertaining despite me pointing it out 2 weeks ago) green activist blogs (meta name=”suicide” removed by now after my intervention) or even SEO bloggers!

meta name=”description” content=”SEO, seo, Seo, SEO blog, seo blog, blog seo”
This is telling Google users “this is spam” and “get off”. Either you do not use this tag at all, then Google displays text from your page or you enter a short and encouraging sentence here, something like “This SEO blog will kick your ass SEO 2.0 style!” ;-)

meta name=”keywords” content=”SEO, seo, Seo, SEO blog, seo blog, blog seo”
This is telling Google “look out, potentially spam”. Meta keywords do not count for Google ranking but many believe believe that Google checks whether the keywords contaianed in the meta tag are also in the page copy. If not you get downranked.

meta name=“generator” content=“WordPress 2.x.x”
This is basically telling hackers “come in”, as WordPress vulnerabilities abound and WordPress itself always advises you to upgrade to the latest version at least once a week it seems. Also Technorati will de-index you if you use an older Wordpress version. Delete it!

more meta tags = better
Back in the days I assumed that the more I tell the search engines in my meta tags, the better. The contrary is the case. Google and most others do not care. They just notice that your page heading is full of useless crap and the real page content is far down so you get downranked for a lower code to text-ratio than average.

<title>Search Engine Optimization And Marketing Blog Offering Tips, Tricks And Links To Make Money Online</title>
Nobody will read that, people will bounce and you won’t rank in Google for any of these keywords besides some bizarre long tail combinations. Keep it short.

The same or almost the same title tag on several or all pages
Consider a post title like this: “New SEO tool”. And then add your blog title like “Search Engine Optimization And Marketing Blog” or longer. More than a half of the title is the same now so Google will treat the page as very similar to other pages. You might even end up categorized as duplicate content. This results in one page of the two not to show up in search results. Also you won’t rank for SEO tool if more than 50% of the title is stuffed with other keywords.

This is really very basic stuff you need to address. You might be a wonderful blogger but if you fail here it won’t be any good. So please do me and yourself a favor and do not commit blog suicide do not make one of these 7 title & meta tag mistakes that kill your blog.