~~~High Search Engine Rankings~~~
From: Don Reinken
Jill & Heather,
I enjoy your weekly emails and the great, clear insights you give us
on SEO and copywriting.
It appears that you value meta tags in your articles...and ignore them
on the home page of your web site. Why is this?? Some secret guru
thing?
Thanks.
Don Reinken
REINKEN INFORMATION SOLUTIONS
Web Site Development / Marketing / Data Systems
http://www.reinken.com
~~~Jill's Response~~~
Hi Don,
Darn! You've exposed my secret guru thing! But seriously, I've been
asked this question a number of times since the inception of Rank
Write. Basically, the truth is that we just haven't gotten around to
optimizing the Rank Write site (www.rankwrite.com) for the search
engines. Yes, yes, I know that we're constantly telling the rest of
you to think of your optimization first, and write the copy for the
site based around the keyword phrases you'd want to rank high with,
and so on and so forth. However, for many sites, getting found in the
search engines isn't necessarily a priority.
Search engine optimization and being found in the engines isn't
something that's always necessary for every site (although it doesn't
hurt!). This is especially true for an email newsletter site such as
ours. Our main priority is getting this newsletter out weekly and
making sure that it's friendly, interesting and extremely informative.
The website was created as an adjunct to the newsletter. It really
was never intended to be a stand-alone site, although it is growing in
that direction. Its true purpose was to be a place where our readers
can go for additional information, past issues, fact-filled articles,
and of course to subscribe and unsubscribe to this newsletter.
Because it is growing so quickly and becoming a resource in its own
right, we do intend to eventually get around to doing some real
optimization work on it, but it's not a priority at this time.
Because the articles themselves are naturally keyword rich and
informative, I did do some quick and dirty optimization on their
titles and meta tags while I was putting them up on the site. I have
found from experience, that articles can rank very high in some
engines if people are searching for the specific ideas discussed in
the articles. The optimization done on those pages is very minimal,
and certainly not what I would consider my best work. However, I
noticed a few weeks ago, some people found my meta keyword article,
(http://www.rankwrite.com/metakeyword.htm) in Google by searching for
"meta keyword tag" (and I never even submitted it!). If you do a
search in Google today for "meta keyword tag" the first two results
are my article, however, not the Rank Write version of it. The first
result is my article, which is posted on the Search Engine Guide site
(http://www.searchengineguide.com/rankwrite/story/metakeyword.html),
and the second is the same article, which is posted on the Workz.Com
site (http://www.workz.com/content/1089.asp). (Both sites have
permission to post it.) Neither of those pages was "optimized" for the
search engines to rank high for those terms, but because the article
is full of good information pertaining to those search terms, it
naturally ranks high. This truly illustrates the importance of the
text on the page in determining high rankings. I've often said that
if you have good text, you *almost* don't have to worry about your
tags, and now I have proof! Of course, that is as it should be in a
perfect search engine world. Unfortunately, because of so many
spammers and the length the engines have to go in order to keep them
out, it's not always as simple as that for all search terms.
The bottom line is, if you're looking for clues on good tags, etc., I
wouldn't recommend using the Rank Write website tags as your example.
(But you should definitely read the articles discussing these things!)
- Jill
~~~Send Us Your Questions~~~
If you have questions about online copywriting or search engine optimization (or both!), just zip us an email to questions@rankwrite.com. We've had some folks ask if their question
was "too basic" to be printed - and you don't have to worry about
that! There are no "stupid" search engine optimization or copywriting
questions, so ask away!
