Sott on google

Okay, I changed it from this:

<meta name="title" content="Sott.net Alternative News" />
<meta name="keywords" content="alternative news,earth changes,world events,truth,psychopathy,ponerology" />
<meta name="description" content="Signs of the Times: The World for People who Think. Featuring alternative news and commentary on world events." />
<title>Signs of the Times Alternative News for Fri, 23 Nov 2012</title>

to this:

<meta name="title" content="Sott.net - Independent Unbiased Alternative News" />
<meta name="keywords" content="alternative news,independent news,earth changes,truth,psychopathy,ponerology" />
<meta name="description" content="Signs of the Times: The World for People who Think. Featuring independent, unbiased, alternative news and commentary on world events." />
<title>Signs of the Times - Independent Unbiased Alternative News for Fri, 23 Nov 2012</title>
 
Mr. Scott said:
Okay, I changed it from this:

Kewl, lets see what our rankings look like tomorrow and Sunday...goggle is indexing slowwwwwwly at the moment, probably due to the vacation load.
 
Pob said:
"Signs of the Times Independent Unbiased Alternative News" Could work for the Title

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:
Kewl, lets see what our rankings look like tomorrow and Sunday...goggle is indexing slowwwwwwly at the moment, probably due to the vacation load.

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?
 
Guardian said:
Gawan said:
Couldn't this be switched off via deactivating the google web-protocol, so that it doesn't show personal results based on history and search activity?

Nope, which is kinda scary. As far as I can tell, there is no way to make google stop recording and integrating search history's from both individual IP's AND entire IP blocks.

Oh well, I was afraid of that.

Skyalmian said:
Gawan said:
Couldn't this be switched off via deactivating the google web-protocol, so that it doesn't show personal results based on history and search activity?
Use _https://startpage.com . :D

That's also cool. But when it comes to clicking on articles I don't know if google would count them. Anyway it's an alternative.
 
Well, we have not changed position on a search of "alternative news" BUT we are now the #1 hit on a search of "unbiased alternative news" ( no quotes) out of about 1,220,000 results :D
 
Guardian said:
Well, we have not changed position on a search of "alternative news" BUT we are now the #1 hit on a search of "unbiased alternative news" ( no quotes) out of about 1,220,000 results :D

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 :)
 
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.
 
Sirius said:
The keywords tag is highly deprecated and should be omitted entirely. There is absolutely no need for this.

You're right about google, but Bing and Yahoo still use them, and some people still use Bing and Yahoo.
 
Guardian said:
Sirius said:
The keywords tag is highly deprecated and should be omitted entirely. There is absolutely no need for this.

You're right about google, but Bing and Yahoo still use them, and some people still use Bing and Yahoo.
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.
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:
bingdude,

What is Bing's treatment for the Keywords Meta Tags?

I remember seeing a Youtube on Matt Cutts of Google saying that Google doesn't use the Keyword Meta Tag anymore for its Search Engine signals.

For Bing search engine, is there any value adding the Keyword Meta Tags to the <head></head> section?
Well, I did post up a couple weeks back explaining I'd be away at a conference and then on vacation... ;)

To get this answered, I'll make this statement: meta keywords is a signal. One of roughly a thousand we analyze.

Getting it right is a nice perk for us, but won't rock your world. Abusing meta keywords can hurt you.
 
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