After a long time talks and billion dollar buyouts Microsoft and Yahoo have finally come to an agreement. Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz and Microsoft’s Chief Executive Steve Balmer came to an agreement today at 5:30 am PST. Carol Bartz, formally the CEO for Autodesk took over in January this year and has already struck a deal with the IT giant.

“Microsoft and Yahoo know there’s so much more that search could be,” said Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer. “This agreement gives us the scale and resources to create the future of search.”  In return for turning over promotions to its search engine to Bing, Yahoo will get to keep 88 percent of the revenue from all ads that run alongside search requests on its site for the first five years of the deal. Yahoo also will have the right to sell ads on some Microsoft sites. The details of this deal have yet to be released but this is going to be changed over the next 24 months until Yahoo’s backend is Microsoft ready. There was hopes for some sort of cash up front payment by the share holders, but it will be all revenue share.

There are still many questions, like what about the Yahoo data center planned for 2011 in Lockport NY? Is it still going to come to Western New York and add 75 jobs in the dying market?

All of this is plans to attack the search market share, which is being ran by Google with 65% search market share.

During your SEO campaign set up you come to a point where you brainstorm on keywords to target giving search engines something to rank you for. Effective keyword research will allow you to find that broad search terms like “SEO” will receive more traffic due to the broad range of phrases that can be made using that one word. A long tail search phrase like “Learn How To Do SEO” which is more specific in what the searcher was looking for.
The challenge of broad search terms in any SEO campaigns is the amount of competition you will have trying to target the same term. Using long tail search phrases you will find a lot less competition and you will find a higher conversion rate on the searches that do find you. Keep in consideration Google and most search engines do not recognize certain words as search query words. “?” “if” “for” “a” are examples of words and grammar that they don’t recognize.
If your website has a product or service to offer chances are you can set your website with keywords getting more specific as a searcher clicks deeper into the site. On your home page should contain the most used search terms and the broadest of all the terms brainstormed by you.

Many friends ask me, what can I do to help with the optimization on my site, or their site. Since none of them are really technically savvy, I have them perform the off-page optimization, basically the stuff that doesn’t happen on the website.

Some off-page optimization can be:

• Link Building (with minimal reports/adds for a developer to do after)
• Website Promotion (getting the name out there, talk to people, emails)
• Directory Submissions
• Blogging
• Social Media Optimization (facebook, twitter)

The worst part about off-page optimization is that it all is dependent on the on-page optimization and page content being accurate enough to convey the correct message from the off-page optimization.

Off-page optimization can be done daily to improve search engine rankings. The process of link building should be a consistent process in order to build a habit of forming relative external links back to your site. Blogging can also increase visibility and diversity of the entire site allowing the spiders and crawlers to index the pages for various keywords. If you keep it informative and relative, you can come up with hundreds of keyword variations all supporting the content on the site, thus increasing your search engine visibility.

There is more things you could do for off-page optimization but if you came for the free tips, you obviously wanted to learn how you can do SEO without spending any money and these steps don’t cost you anything.

Earlier this month Microsoft released Bing.com, their awaited answer to Google and Yahoo. Live Search and MSN.com are no longer their search platform. Overall look of the search page itself is very similar to live.com, and they rotate daily (and you can go back to view the previous days background). Searching for videos is easier than before as the in page video blurb allows you to view a few seconds of the video before clicking on the link. This is to ensure you find what you are looking for on the first click without actually having to visit the site providing the video feeds.

Every business with a website will at some point realize that they need to concentrate on optimizing their website. Chances are that no one in the company will have the skill set needed to accomplish the optimization plan. So the next course of action is finding a third party to optimize the website for a fee.

There are benefits to outsourcing the optimization of your website. First, you do not have to employ the company or person doing the work, saving you employee-related expenses. Second, your staff can concentrate on their assigned duties and everyday tasks. Selling to and/or servicing your customers will remain your team’s priority, while your optimization is managed by an expert.

A downside to outsourcing is coming across the company that says they can do it, but in reality cannot due to lack of know how. Conduct your own research on the companies you are considering. Visit their websites to see if theirs are optimized properly. If their website is not optimized properly, how will they successfully optimize yours?

A quick check to see if the company is an optimizer includes finding what you can identify, which are the title, keywords and description. These are a part of the source code for the pages. See if the page title aligns with the keywords and description.

<title> Web Design, Web Applications, Search Engine Optimization, Website Design : Buffalo,
NY : 360 PSG </title
<meta name=“Keywords” content=“website design, web developer, internet applications,
web hosting, content management system” />
<meta name=“Description” content=“Servicing web solutions including website design,
custom web applications, e-commerce and e-mail marketing campaigns in Buffalo, NY, across the
United States, and around the world.” />

The above is a perfect example of a non-optimized web page. Notice the title, keywords and description all reflect different services the company performs. A properly optimized website will have these all very similar, if not exactly the same, including the positioning of the keywords in the title, keywords and description.

<title>Learn how to do SEO :: Free Search Engine Optimization Tips :: SEO :: PPC :: SEM</title>
<meta name=“description” content=“Welcome to SearchandRank.com home for free SEO search engine
optimization tips on how to help improve your rankings. From what Meta-Descriptions, Keywords are
to (PPC) pay-per-click strategies. Learn how to SEO for free or have our experts do it for you!” />
<meta name=“keywords” content=“SEO, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Marketing, SEM,
Free SEO Tips, PPC Strategies, Learn How To Do SEO, Online Marketing” />

The second example shows what the three sections of the source code should look like – an alignment of all 3 categories which will improve search engine rankings regardless of what else you do to the page. This is because you are improving the relevancy of the page in the back end, where the search engine spiders look. So, please be careful in choosing your SEO company. The ones that promise and don’t deliver are the ones giving companies like mine a bad reputation, probably because they are still in the infant stages of their studies about SEO.

What to look for in a CMS (content management system)

1. Be able to optimize page titles, meta-description, meta-keywords and text content on each and every page to obtain unique pages.

2. Be able to optimize each and every image (alt attributes).

3. Have a page for conversions (static “thank you” page for purchases) need to install tracking code on each conversion page.

4. Make sure pictures and images are smaller, the larger the page the slower the load time and the lower the rankings because of it.

5. Navigation rollover scripts, other JavaScript-based code, and all CSS scripts should be taken out of the code of each page and put into external files to which each page of the site is referenced. Doing this has several advantages, but one of the most beneficial is that any site’s keywords and content all move up in the code, communicating their importance to the search engines and boosting the site’s relevancy ratings. In other words, this can boost search engine rankings by improving the code to text ratio of the page. This is a simple and relatively inexpensive thing to do, depending on the total number of pages in the site.

* Important *

o It can take a while for the search engines to index a site and the rankings to change for that site. For some search engines, the lag time between the work and seeing results can be as long as six months. Clients need to be patient and have realistic expectations (from sales) regarding the time frame involved with organic (the natural, non paid results) search engine rankings. If the business need for increased search engine prominence is greater than can be met with optimization alone, I recommend adding a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign to the marketing campaign mix to bridge the time. PPC campaigns such as Google’s AdWords can be set up in a matter of a few hours, allowing for immediate results.

Content Piece of the Puzzle (the design)

You get better results if you design with optimization in mind from the beginning. If you incorporate optimization into the very construction of your website, it is much more seamless and genuine than if you build your site and then try to tweak it for optimization. The most search engine friendly sites are straightforward sites built from basic, non-frame, non-Flash, HTML documents. Your site should also use basic HTML links (not links in dropdown flash menus or hidden in fancy animations) as these are most easily followed and indexed by search engines.

First, a site loaded with high-quality content of interest to site users will give them a reason to stay and a reason to come back. After all, the reason they came to the site was to find information. Second, you will receive the added benefit of serving up exactly what the search engines want – content. Search engines will have more information to store about the businesses and products; that information will translate directly into the ranking they give the site for related keyword phrases.

o Each page should contain about 200 words of text content increasing relevancy ratings and thus making optimization of the pages easier to monetize increasing the search engine rankings.

Prominence of Targeted Keyword Phrases – It is not enough to have your keyword phrase(s) somewhere on the web page, the placement and prominence given to them also affects your search engine placement. For example, leading off the site’s first paragraph with your keyword phrase gives it more weight than burying it half way down the page in the middle of a paragraph. Also, using larger font sizes and bolding the text can emphasize its importance and positively affect the page’s ranking for that phrase.

Using keyword phrase(s) in the <h> tags of the site will also improve search engine rankings. Specific use of just one type of header will not be as effective as using multiple <h> tags on the page.

Text-Based Navigation – Search engines cannot read images. If the site’s navigation system is done with images (most are), you will need a text-based navigation system that the search engines can follow to ensure that all the important service and product-related sub-pages of the sites are indexed by the search engines.

I perform searches on a daily basis. I use Google, sometimes Yahoo, but usually Google. I have searched for SEO answers to my questions and the way that I search for the question as specific as I can be, I still come up with articles from 8 years ago. People this is not good, especially with stale content for search engine optimization tips, which changes all the time. Search algorithms that Google has especially, normally sift out garbage. But what is happening is that all the SEO rookies that are looking for assistance are getting nothing but stale content with outdated information and are going to hurt themselves in the rankings. However this may be a cruel lesson to be told, but we have all been there with the amount of crap informati0n you come across.

Moral of the story is that you really need to keep the content up to date, include dates in the posts and in the meta data. This way a trend of adding a year on the end of a search will generate higher efficient searches for our articles based on the year. Rankings for our articles struggling to get to the top will proceed as high as need be based on a term and a year “search engine optimization tips 09′”. That pretty much takes out all the necessary information out of the article plus gives a time frame.

Searching the web is an art and a science. Understanding how people search is essential to tuning your website so they can find you, and knowing how to search effectively and quickly will help you get the best results from the web. Anyone new to computers or the Internet has surely found themselves staring at their web browser and wondering, “how do I find what I’m looking for?” If you yourself are web-savvy, you’ve doubtless been the recipient of questions from friends and family asking what to type into that mysterious search box. My dear ol’ mom has commented hundreds of times, “with 139,242 search results, how can I find anything at all?” I have to admit, to the un-initiated, those kind of numbers must seem daunting!

Finding the answers we seek, and the search results we need, is made much easier when we know the right questions to ask. This has always been true – any wise old sage or tasty fortune cookie will tell you that knowing what you want is an absolute prerequisite to actually getting it. When discussing web searches, this almost seems a bit over-complicated. We know what we want! Or do we, really?

Consider finding a new store to shop for clothes. Spring is coming, and it’d be nice to sport the latest fashions, not to metion that you favorite white shirt was attacked in the laundry by your favorite red socks, becoming a ghastly shade of pink. Computers have come a long way since they crawled off the desk, bidding their slide-rule ancestors goodbye. But, they still aren’t very smart, and will throw in the towel if we simply ask, “Hey Google! Can you recommend a new place to pick up some clothes? Some place that’s hip, and not too expensive?”

So first, define your question. Clothing stores. Where, in your city? How about nearby townships? What kind of store – a department store? Trendy urban outfitter? Perhaps you’re looking for discount or clearance items, or maybe premium designer threads are your thing. Once you have a handle on this, you can begin to form your question. Boil it down to the most important aspects of what you’re looking for.

To best ask a computer for information, you have to think like a computer. Don’t worry if you’re a luddite, it’s easier than you may think! First, understand that search engines have a lot of information to sift through, and so they tend to ignore the boring and uninformative words. These include all the shorter connecting words, like: a, and, the, of, in, etc. So you can leave these out of your search query.

Second, computers don’t understand language very well, and so asking them questions with a full sentence generally doesn’t turn out well. (There are some exceptions, and it never hurts to try it, just don’t expect to hold a conversation!) The most important thing to keep in your mind is the concept of keywords – these are the most important, concise, and descriptive words you can use to describe what it is you want. (You do know what it is you want by now, right?) If you had to tell your friend what you wanted, using three to six words only, what would they be? You can see here that you have to pick these words well. Choose your search keywords by thinking of unique attributes of what you seek, that may not be found in combination elsewhere. Link concepts together, like trendy, clothing, store, Chicago, spring fashions. Search using these keywords.

Once you’ve tried your search, glance over the first page of results and see if you are getting things that are close to what you want, or at least make sense. If not, change your search terms around a little bit. Try synonyms, or similar ideas. Eliminate words that seem to take you in the wrong direction – oftentimes certain words are used in a completely different way on the Internet, and your searches will go astray. Remember that spelling counts, too, although some search engines are sly, and will suggest other search terms if you happen to spel wun rong. (They will also suggest misspellings, if that particular mangled version of the word is common!)

Some things are easier to find than others, but these days there is so much on the Internet that it’s getting easier to find useful information. Searching is an artform, and takes practice. These basic concepts will help you along your way to becoming a web sleuth! And of course, knowing how to search, and how other people search, will help you to optimize your own website so your mom can find it among those 139,242 results.

In the second article on this topic, I’ll go into some of the more advanced search engine features that will help take your web searching into the realms of mastery.

Trademark Keywords?

There are lots of different opinions and different court cases even where the question of whether or not you can use trademark words in advertising campaigns such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN. There was a few mentions in those articles about meta-keywords, which is very important when relating to your content. My general rule has always been to insert the keywords that really decide how the page should be optimized for are the ones that are in the content of the page. Sure Google and Yahoo are trademark names, and surely when someone was looking for your site they wouldn’t type in Google and necessarily want to land on your page. The content on your site is probably google related, but not Google itself, so you would need to target a phrase, like in seo case, “How to advertise on Google” would be a good phrase to compete for robotic knowledge from the mother ship or my site which I specialize in MAXIMIZING profitability while keeping cost down. This is a simple way from staying away from trademark infringement in your future.

Keep your description relevant to the content and if need be include the “possible trademark threat” include it. When in doubt, dont do it in SEO, to avoid the problems and possible banishment from search engine results.

Reference:

• http://www.ivanhoffman.com/keywords.html
• http://www.destinationcrm.com/Articles/ReadArticle.aspx?ArticleID=42993
• http://tcattorney.typepad.com/ip/2008/06/use-of-trademar.html

Keywords are probably the most valued feature of your SEO plan.  You should have already made a list of keywords, one word, two word, three word phrases that identify your page that you are optimizing.  Yes I said it, you are going to do all this work for ONE web page.

You usually want to use some sort of spreadsheet with your keywords listed in it, you are going to need the space.  In order to analyze  for the proper keywords, you need to understand the business, the location, the product(s)/service(s) to be able to have a good starting ground.  Take for example www.searchandrank.com, this site is about: SEO, SEM, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Marketing, Meta Tags, Keywords, Descriptions and much much more.  You would take these keywords and should have them spread in the content of the page, but make sure that the content makes sense with the keywords that you are using.  Do not add them sporadically throughout the page, include them in properly structured sentences, and try to use them in the first 200 words of the page, if the text content is more than 300 or so.  Using Google’s traffic estimator featured on the seobook tool bar this will allow you to see the value to the keywords you are targeting.  If your business is specific to a region or city, you should key that into you campaign, add it into phrases that you use within the site meta data and content if at all applicable.

Sometimes there will be an opportunity to add links to give additional information while browsing the content on any given page, the use of anchor text will allow those keywords that associate to a page within your site or another site, to have additional weight in your pages rankings.

Free SEO Tips

Bounce Rates in Search Engine Optimization

I have just spent the last few hours looking at posts from the past few years about bounce rates in Google Analytics and I think that there is a lot of information out there that Google must laugh at.  In this post about bounce rates, he talks about how someone else says it better than he does and he passes on the torch to another useless post about bounce rates.  At least one truth from both of the posts is that a low % is a better %, however breaking them down into what they are for and what they can tell you is completely off kilt.

• Low bounce rate is telling you that people come to your site and at some point and time during their visit, go to another page. Meaning that a low percentage of the people that visit your site only visit the first page.  This doesn’t mean your home page necessarily, it could be a product page if you are an commerce site, or another post within your huge blog.
• High bounce rate means they came, they saw, they left.  No clicks to anywhere else in your site, just viewed the landing page and left.
• There is no time limit on how long a person can stay on the page before clicking to another page, if they click in and click out 2 hours later, it’s a bounce.

If your bounce rate is high, evaluate the type of site that you have, if its a blog, expect people to hit it and forget it.  That is really what a blog is for, to provide available information quick and easy.  That’s why you need to make sure that the content within the pages of your site are right to the point, don’t have too little or too much information.  You don’t want to misinform or bore your site visitors.

Bounce Rates in Pay-Per-Click

There are a few things to think about when you are looking at the bounce rates of your ppc campaign, you have to look at the possibility that your price is too high, product wasn’t really what the searcher wanted, or your page itself doesn’t have enough stickiness to keep them on the page.  When someone is shopping they are more likely to leave the site entirely to “shop around” rather than shop around the site that didn’t provide them with the content they were looking for.  Make sure that your landing page supports the words you are paying for, because even if they click on your site and bounce off, it still costs YOU money! Knowing what to expect before hand does make it easier to swallow, it still doesn’t take away the costs you are going to incur.  Good luck and happy bouncing.

Alright you have your site, you performed your SEO plan to the best of your ability, how do you track the success?  Reading earlier you may have learned how to use Google Webmaster Tools and installed them on your site.  Now you may want to get more into the meat and potatoes of tracking SEO success.  Google Analytics is the easiest and most affordable way to track your results (its free!).

All you need is FTP (File Transfer Protocol) access and you can install a simple code and let the tracking begin.  Install the code between the <body> and <body/> tags in your site.  If you have no clue what you are doing you may want to contact your hosting provider to give them the code that google analytics provides to you after you sign up your site.  Just send them an email that you want them to add it to all the pages of your active site, 24 hours later you will have some data and going forward you will be able to track each visitor to your site.  You can track, IP, city, network, browser type and more!  You can even track when a searcher lands on your site and proceeds to a checkout or maybe even a contact form.  You can track your month to month results to show where you were last month and where you are today.  See how many visits you got today, yesterday, last week or last month.  Look to see what is your most popular page, what page gets the most hits, or how many pages the avg. site visitor views before leaving the site.

You can use Analytics to really gauge how well your SEO campaign is doing, or your PPC program.  Bounce rate is a very important statistic of your site.  This tells you how effective the web pages in your site are for what they are being found under.  Meaning if someone was to search for blue widgets, and found your green widgets page, chances are they are going to leave the page to find a blue widget, giving you a bounce. More to come with bounce rates and how to use Google Analytics.

Did you know that search engines provide search results for other search engines and those search results contain directories, or databases of websites like superpages.com or thomasnet.com?  These databases or directories,  that is a site with drop downs or drill downs to the specific area that you service.  People do use these directories because they are human derived, meaning they  go through approval by an admin before they are put into the directory.  You do have to submit your site, it doesn’t just automatically appear in their search results.  Being listed in a directory for traffic is not an effective way to draw traffic.  Use this as an opportunity to build some sort of link trust within the search engine industry.  If that directory has 50,000 monthly visitors, that’s 50,000 visitors to the site, not your specific industry.  Say if 10%, 5000 visitors per month were potential site visitors  to your industry, where there are over 100 other sites competing for those potential visitors.  10% is a very hopeful number and realistically would be great but isn’t the truth.

Your best bet overall is to have your site in the major search engines and play the SEO game of trying to increase your site rankings for keywords you choose based on the content of your site.  Direct traffic from the major search engines may not wield the kind of conversion rates that the second tier or third tier search engines may have.  However these 2nd and 3rd tier search engines may not have the same amount of traffic that the may have either.  Use both of the options, but just don’t pay for higher position in the lesser engines.  This is just going to cause you to spend a lot of unnecessary money, save it for Google Adwords or Yahoo! PPC.

A search directory is usually associated with Search Engines as a place to query searches.  When its a database of websites that are associated strictly by categories.  Categories range from Autos to Zoos.  With a lot of other categories that may be minor categories within the major ones.

When you submit your site to the directories you have to make sure that you:

What User Based Directories may use to evaluate your site that you are attempting to list.

1. Pick the proper category that your site will fit into.
2. That you choose descriptive Titles and Descriptions for your listing.
3. Title and Description are relevant to the content within your site and links you point them to.
4. Make sure that your domain names match the site title to avoid your site from being listed. They are user based databases.
5. Make sure your site is secured for online purchases, use Paypal if you don’t have proper online ordering capabilities.
6. Proper contact information within the site, usually 1 click away or on the home page.
7. If you are associated with any certs that you have a link on your home page to show security.
8. Make sure that all the content on the site will show properly on all computers that may use a search engine or directory.
9. Make sure all code is free of errors including all JavaScript.
10. Make sure all internal links that are pointing to any internal pages work properly and have reasonable load times.

Here are some directories that you can use for free to get your site going:

• Yahoo Directory
• The Open Directory DMOZ
• Google Directory
• SearchSite
• Or you can check out SearchEngineWatch for a detailed list of directories.

Search Directories are a great starting ground for 2 things, links and possible searchers looking for more links or for a particular product or service.

Are you really looking to see what is happening with your site on a global level?  Using tracking within you site can do this.  You can see how many sites are linked to you and how many links you have to other sites. Google Webmaster Tools provides alot of information that can keep you informed on what you need to know for decent SEO.  If you have a commerce site with a lot of dynamic pages you may not know which of your pages that are cached in search engines that are dead links 404 pages so that you may be able to remove them from the search results to avoid affecting your search engine rankings.

You would need FTP (File Transfer Protocol) access in order to verify that you are the owner of the site.  Normally on a global include file which is templated to go over all pages that are and are already created.  This will let you see the good bad and the ugly within your site so that you may see what you can do to fix the problem and move on.

With the links, you see who is linking to what, which can let you figure out why.  Not to mention that you see if the sites you link to do exist and to make sure they are relevant to the content you are trying to provide in the first place.  Make sure that your internal links aren’t broken as well.  This can give you a better view of your link structure, which determines two things, that search engine spiders can find your pages easier, since they are scanning the content. Even the people that are reading the pages, they can get more info as they read the content.

As soon as someone mentions the word “keywords” everyone associates them with their websites.  Which is great, because that is where you would use them, not to mention in advertising campaigns as a whole.  Your SEO campaigns start with keyword research and what people are using to get to your site, basically what they put into the search engine as a search query to get results generated for them.
After you get the keywords generated, you then should be starting to incorporate them within your site, in the Title, Content, anchor-text, you then can put them in your meta tags, aka meta-keywords.  This is the back end source code of your site that pretty much labels your site on how search engines should categorize it.  A very crucial part of the business but you have to keep in mind, putting down every single word in your content in the keywords is not going to get you found that way.  Careful choosing and experience will get you picking the correct terms, and remember even if you are listed at #1 you still may not be receiving traffic.

You can use the Google Keyword Tool, Keyword Discovery Tool or WordTracker for information on keywords if you cant decide what works.  Although this is half the battle, it is still a chunk of what needs to be done for the site, wash the keywords or take out duplicates and any other terms that may not work for the particular content of the site and than redo the process until you have about 7 unique keywords per page.  Yes per page, otherwise you will be competing with your own pages and cause a bit of an issue when attempting to rank all your pages.

How many times have you sat down in front of your mac/pc, went to Google Yahoo, or MSN, searched for something, found your results and went to a site? While you were on the site, how many times have you found yourself reading, click on the clickable link and start reading more information on another link, or another page of the same website? You just used anchor text to get to the other page. Anchor-text is no different than one of the nav buttons you use to get to a different page, it’s just used within the text content of the page itself as more navigation. But for whom, Search engines like more navigation and searchers aka you and I, do to, to an extent. We don’t want to get bounced around because we may feel a sense of mistrust and misdirection, thinking that for some reason we got scammed. The webmaster knows that’s not true and so do the search engines, but who are we kidding, without the searchers, there would be no search engines. Think of if there were no televisions in the world, would there be need for a commercial? Cause there would be no networks to broadcast there is no need to advertise.

Search engines wish to see coherent links within the site, supporting or promoting another site shows trust. Anchor text to link to other pages within your site will also allow spiders to crawl through your site more efficiently. Keeping that in mind, don’t obviously go put every word on the site a text link that’s just going to confuse the searchers and mislead the search engine spiders into thinking you are a link farm.

Also consider using all your keywords that you are targeting as anchor text as much as possible, but not exactly making 4 words out of a 7 word sentence your keywords. You really need to match the content, with the title, description and keywords to show signs of usefulness to be ranking where you should be.

Obviously there is the unwritten book of the algorithm of Google, so it’s judgment, statistics and gut with this part of the SEO process, but if done correctly can be extremely beneficial for you search engine rankings.

What is that line of text within your source of your web page that says  <meta name=“description” ? Very simply put, it is a brief summary of the content on the particular page.  Each page has it’s own meta-description, but most sites that have a meta-description already installed keep the same description for most to all pages of the site.  It makes life easy to just copy and paste something that works for a whole theme for your site, however having a unique meta-description for each page of your site will allow each page to compete evenly with each other.  When you have the same description for each page you are actually outranking yourself and pushing other pages of your site down the rankings of search results.

Take time and effort with this process because this is also what shows up in the search results, giving the searcher a little information about you page and will be in sync with the page <title> itself.

Meta-Description results from Source Code on Google.com

If you don’t choose to put in anything in your meta-description, Google will extract a brief summary of the page and post that on search results until you put something in the description itself.  Then you have to wait until the search engines come back to the site and re-index the pages to update the meta’s if applicable.

Using keywords where ever possible is always a plus, but do not use this area to stuff more of your keywords, you are only going to harm your rankings and/or get banned from the results.

Page title these days is a big decider on search engines ranking your site.  If you have phrases or words in your title that are not spread through the content within that page, chances are your rankings are going to suffer.

Page Title

An example of a page title shown above through a search results page on Google.  Most everyone makes their decision on whether or not to go to the page based on the information provided in that first line, your search usually has at least one of your search terms in the title, which is highlighted in bold giving you something to catch your attention.  Having a good keyword phrase will enhance the look of the search and increase the chances of someone clicking through to your site. You really want to keep it to about 50-70 characters in order to have all of the characters to appear in the result. You don’t want the important terms cut off from the results if those are the terms you want people to use to find you, keep them to the front of the title increasing the chances of someone landing on your page.

Your page title should be the most important keywords from that page’s content, ensuring that when someone searches on a search engine that those keywords will appear in the blue line letting potential surfers know that you are what they are looking for.  Just make sure you have content on the site to support the commitment to those keywords, or your efforts will be useless.

Today Microsoft announced that they are in agreements with Dell Computers as the primary search engine that would show up automatically on the desktop screens of most new Dell consumer PCs beginning in February.  Their agreement with Verizon will allow them to be the primary search engine for handsets for the next five years.

This move was something that needed to be done in order to keep Google in check with their constant stride to be the only online search engine.  60% of search queries originate from Google, where as Yahoo comes in a steady second with 20% and Microsoft/Live comes in third with 8%.  Even though Internet Explorer comes as the default web browser for all Microsoft OS’s, people still have the opportunity to change their Internet properties default home page to support any search engine they desire, but the people they are targeting are the consumers that don’t necessarily use search engines on a day to day basis.  These are the ever so often search for a pizzeria or restaurant in the area they are in allowing them to provide more opportunities for their paying advertising customers.  Verizon cell phone users will now be faced with MSN/Live search results on their cell phones, which would give MSN customers the opportunity to place ads in front of the potential customer providing them exclusive opportunities to Verizon Wireless customers.

As of right now there is no competition between the search engines, and I do not anticipate this to change anything in the long run.  Since they will have exclusive rights to both Dell and Verizon, they are also going to have to skim some of the advertising costs with the 2 making their profit levels lower, and increasing the cost to advertise on the search engine itself.  Today’s market is at a steady decline with unemployment increasing and job opportunities decreasing giving big business’s less profit and making their companies downsize to keep their doors open.

The Verizon/Alltel merger expected to happen sometime in late 2009 early 2010, was expected to downsize some Alltel locations, which this merger may bring some extra income and extra work for worrisome Alltel employees and maybe even kick start the merger faster than anticipated.  Hopefully this will make life easier for SEO specialists by giving them 3 targets rather than just 2 to focus their SEO efforts.  This would allow more room for trial and error with other markets and search algorithms   and possibly bring unity to how search engines rank their sites.  Ultimately search engines want the searcher to find what they are looking for fairly quickly within a few clicks after their search.