G
Gertrudes
Guest
Pob said:
Hope you all excuse my ignorance here, but does that mean that two words won't necessarily have to be together for it to work, it is about keywords on their own rather than word combination? In other words under the above header, if I search for, say, "Independent News", Sott will still come up because those two words are present within the same sentence, although not necessarily together?
Guardian said:
So perhaps it's a good idea to not yet try to bump Sott up ourselves by keyword search and page clicking, so that we can better evaluate whether the words work any differently for the public out there?
Rich
The Living Force
Guardian said:
Effective then. Though that is not a widely used search term. So if it isn't picking up 'independent' or 'unbiased' then might be worth spending some time looking at what the optimum string would be.
Global monthly searches for the following are:
alternative news media 2,900
alternative news source 1,900
alternative news sites 1,300
alternative news websites 1,000
best alternative news 1000
They seem quite small numbers but would build up over a year and generate some traffic.
It may be more effective in terms of targeting more frequently searched keywords to have
"Best Alternative News media source"
Sorry for the rather clunky trial and error suggestions. I've dabbled in SEO but as you know it isn't my day job :)
S
Sirius
Guest
The only thing that Sott.net needs in order to get higher ranks is SEO because this is also what it lacks. It has, as you know, a lot of content that already surfaces on Google quite well but if there are only a few technical things here and there that could be done for prosperity, why not doing some work on it??
I've already mentioned here an issue concerning duplicate content (fixed meanwhile): http://cassiopaea.org/forum/index.php/topic,29043.0.html
[quote author=Mr. Scott]
[…]
It's in the <title> tags, too.
Does it actually HAVE to be included as text inside <h1> tags or something? I just don't know where the heck to put it...
[/quote]I saw that the current version of Sott.net has no <h1> tag. This is very bad! There should always be a structure of headlines present which is analysed and processed by Google. This is an important SEO factor.
It is done the following way correctly: One <h1> tag on each page that is similar or equal to the <title> tag, e.g. "Title of article - Sott.net - Alternative News" plus a more elaborated meta description. Either the <h1> text is visible to the user or not. If the site uses a banner for its title or a logo, the <h1> tag should be still present in each case but invisible. Never do this: <h1 style="display:none"> Do this instead h1 { display:none } in your stylesheet (obfuscate invisibility). The <h2> tag should correspond to the article's headline. But there may be multiple h2, ..., h6 but only one h1. Use <h3> for subsections within the article. Sections within the sidebar should also be represented by headline tags.
[quote author=Mr. Scott]<meta name="keywords" content="alternative news,independent news,earth changes,truth,psychopathy,ponerology" />[/quote]The keywords tag is highly deprecated and should be omitted entirely. There is absolutely no need for this. The only thing it does is adding a few unnecessary bytes to your source code. Google officially ignores the keywords tag. It's a waste of time.
Important aspects to consider: Meta tags including canonical, description, robots and the title tag; internal linking, a good tagging system, relations and internal linking between articles, separate page for comments, better categorisation with different feed channels. Furthermore, it is important that there is no duplicate content and no irrelevant pages like category pages which contain excerpts or summaries of other articles are being indexed. You can control this with the robots meta tag. Consider upgrading the markup base to HTML5 which gives you more features for structuring pages which could be considered by search engines one day.
If you need models, take a closer look on professional and popular news sites and how they embody content (ads excluded). There is a consensus what is effective.
I've already mentioned here an issue concerning duplicate content (fixed meanwhile): http://cassiopaea.org/forum/index.php/topic,29043.0.html
[quote author=Mr. Scott]
[…]
It's in the <title> tags, too.
Does it actually HAVE to be included as text inside <h1> tags or something? I just don't know where the heck to put it...
[/quote]I saw that the current version of Sott.net has no <h1> tag. This is very bad! There should always be a structure of headlines present which is analysed and processed by Google. This is an important SEO factor.
It is done the following way correctly: One <h1> tag on each page that is similar or equal to the <title> tag, e.g. "Title of article - Sott.net - Alternative News" plus a more elaborated meta description. Either the <h1> text is visible to the user or not. If the site uses a banner for its title or a logo, the <h1> tag should be still present in each case but invisible. Never do this: <h1 style="display:none"> Do this instead h1 { display:none } in your stylesheet (obfuscate invisibility). The <h2> tag should correspond to the article's headline. But there may be multiple h2, ..., h6 but only one h1. Use <h3> for subsections within the article. Sections within the sidebar should also be represented by headline tags.
[quote author=Mr. Scott]<meta name="keywords" content="alternative news,independent news,earth changes,truth,psychopathy,ponerology" />[/quote]The keywords tag is highly deprecated and should be omitted entirely. There is absolutely no need for this. The only thing it does is adding a few unnecessary bytes to your source code. Google officially ignores the keywords tag. It's a waste of time.
Important aspects to consider: Meta tags including canonical, description, robots and the title tag; internal linking, a good tagging system, relations and internal linking between articles, separate page for comments, better categorisation with different feed channels. Furthermore, it is important that there is no duplicate content and no irrelevant pages like category pages which contain excerpts or summaries of other articles are being indexed. You can control this with the robots meta tag. Consider upgrading the markup base to HTML5 which gives you more features for structuring pages which could be considered by search engines one day.
If you need models, take a closer look on professional and popular news sites and how they embody content (ads excluded). There is a consensus what is effective.
S
Sirius
Guest
Bing, Yahoo, Yandex, etc. are a minor source of traffic generally. However, only Mr. Scott can tell who can access real statistics about his site.Guardian said:
It is true that Bing also analyses the keywords tag but not the way a naive person would think. It rather aims at ascertaining a level of authenticity of a website or page, meaning that it will do nothing regarding your rank if the keywords look accurate but fine you if they appear contradictory.
One official statement by an MS guy:
_http://www.webmasterworld.com/msn_microsoft_search/4328329.htm said:
