Do you think it is advisable to select some mis-spellings of certain commonly used keywords when I am researching the keywords for my site?

Arthur Wilburn


Answer:

Hi Arthur,

No, I never recommend that people optimize their web sites for mis-spellings of keywords. One of the things that people forget when they think of search engine optimization is that getting high rankings in the search engines is not the ultimate goal - the ultimate goal is to translate that higher rankings into higher sales. What good does a #1 position do, if it doesn't bring in any visitors to your site who buy from you?

When you optimize your site for a mis-spelled keyword, you will need to create a page which repeats that mis-spelling a number of times. Now, there is a common misconception among web marketers that merely putting the mis-spelling in the Meta Keywords tag will itself get them a good ranking for that mis-spelling. And since the Meta Keywords tag is invisible to humans, they will never get to see that you have a mis-spelling in your site (unless they view the source code of the page). However, the reality is, merely putting a mis-spelled keyword in the Meta Keywords tag will almost never get you a good ranking for that keyword. In order to get a good ranking, you need to use that keyword a few times in the body content of your site. What kind of a first impression does it create on your visitors when they see a mis-spelling being repeated in a page? Sure - they themselves inadvertently made the same mistake, but what would they think of a company which makes the same typo over and again in a page? They will probably not understand that you deliberately made those mis-spellings in order to get traffic for such keywords - they would think that you are simply careless. Would you want to do business with a company who is so careless? I certainly wouldn't.

The only way you can get a page ranked highly in the search engines for a mis-spelling without letting your human visitors see that mis-spelling is if you use page cloaking. And that is something I don't recommend you do either, because it can get you banned by the search engines for spamming.


QUESTION 2:

Is it true that Yahoo! only lists companies that display their full address (not even just a po box no.) on their frontpage?

Richard G Lewis.


Answer:

Hi Richard,

Yahoo! requires that all commercial sites display their contact information in their site. This should include their mailing address, a phone number, an email address, and a fax number, if you have one. Now, there are two issue here:

Firstly, as far as displaying a p.o. box address or the actual physical address of your company is concerned, I would always go with the actual physical address. Although I have seen sites which display only the p.o. box address get accepted, you are better off displaying the physical address. This is important not only from the point of view of getting listed in Yahoo!, it is also important from the point of view of improving the credibility of your site in the eyes of your visitors. Because of the impersonal nature of the Internet, consumers do not get the same confidence when buying from a site, as they would when they are buying from a "real world" store. In order to instill confidence in your customers that you are a legitimate business, you need to do everything you can to improve the credibility of your site. Displaying the physical address of your site is an essential part of that process. Personally, I would never feel comfortable doing business with a site which does not display its contact information prominently or which displays a p.o. box address instead of a physical address. I would wonder what the company has to hide.

Secondly, it is not essential that the contact information be displayed in the home page itself. However, if you can do it, you should do it. If you do not want to display the contact information in the home page, you should have a Contact Us page which contains your contact information. The Contact Us page should be linked prominently from the home page.

For more information on how to submit your site to Yahoo!, see my article at http://www.1stSearchRanking.com/t.cgi?99&yahoo-submission.htm


QUESTION 3:

I have a question with regard to the alt tags present in images. Do they really influence the search engine ranking of my site all that much? When I initially designed my site, I did not include any of my keywords in the alt tags because I did not know too much about how to optimize web sites for the search engines. Now that I am a bit more knowledgeable about it, I think it was a mistake. However, my site already contains hundreds of pages, and adding keywords to the alt tags of the images present in these pages will take up a lot of time. Do you think spending this time is worth it?

Mark Symonds


Answer:

Hi Mark,

The alt tags are important - however, they, by itself, won't make or break the search engine ranking of your site. Thus, while keyword rich alt tags should be used whenever possible, you should not lose sleep over the fact that you haven't included alt tags in the existing pages in your site. My advice to you is to add keyword rich alt tags in any new pages that you create. Also, whenever you change some of the existing pages in the site, you can add some keyword rich alt tags to the images present in those pages. Since you are changing the pages anyway, you might as well take the time to change the alt tags. However, you don't need to spend the time to add alt tags to all the existing pages in your site, unless you are changing those pages in other ways as well.

Of course, while initially creating your site, you may not have added keyword rich body content to it since you mentioned that you were not aware of search engine optimization then. In this case, you would most definitely need to spend the time to modify all the existing pages in your site so that all of them contain keyword rich text. Spending the time necessary to do is worthwhile because without this, you may not be able to get good rankings in the search engines.