I generally enjoy John Gruber's writings, but today he's dishing out SEO advice about HTML title tags. Some of it is bad advice. So with respect, here's how I'd suggest you write page titles in a way that can please search engines and humans alike. What Is An HTML Title Tag? Let me go back to the basics. The title tag is a section of HTML code that every page should have. It declares what the page's title is. For example, here's the title tag for the Search Engine Land article I wrote earlier this year, Some SEO Advice For Bill Gates: The <TITLE> tag appears within the &l [...]

Related Topics: Features: General | How To: SEO | SEO: Titles & Descriptions | Top News

Oh, that this weren't true. Last week, Yahoo made news by disclosing that it had quietly dropped support for the meta keywords tag. As a long time hater of that tag and the insane questions it has produced, I was thrilled! But today, I see conclusively that Yahoo still supports the tag. The test was simple. I placed a unique word in the meta keywords tag on the home page of Search Engine Land. This word -- xcvteuflsowkldlslkslklsk -- generated no results on Yahoo when I looked earlier this week. Today, when I searched, it brought back the Search Engine Land home page. Thus, Yahoo indeed ind [...]

Related Topics: Features: General | Microsoft: Bing SEO | SEO: Tagging | SEO: Titles & Descriptions | SEO: Writing & Body Copy | Top News | Yahoo: SEO

And then there were none. Yahoo has long been the only major search engine that supported the meta keywords tag. However, the search engine revealed today that like the other majors, it no longer supports it. The news came during the Ask The Search Engines session at SMX East in New York today. The search engines were all asked about their support of the tag. Moderator Danny Sullivan noted that only Yahoo provided support of the tag -- prompting Cris Pierry, senior director of search at Yahoo, to announce that support actually had been ended unannounced "several" months ago. Bing doesn't [...]

Related Topics: SEO: General | SEO: Tagging | SEO: Titles & Descriptions | SEO: Writing & Body Copy | Top News | Yahoo: SEO

A month ago, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft announced they will be supporting a new canonical tag that allows you to tell search engines that page X is a duplicate page to page Z. In a way, it is a 301 redirect, without the physical redirect. The tag is incredibly powerful, as are 301 redirects and using this tag should be done with caution and slowly. Matt Cutts posted a new video explaining how one should go about using this tag, being that it is so new. Here is the video: [...]

Related Topics: Google: SEO | Google: Webmaster Central | SEO: Blocking Spiders | SEO: Duplicate Content | SEO: Redirects & Moving Sites | SEO: Submitting & Sitemaps | SEO: Tagging | SEO: Titles & Descriptions

Matt Cutts of Google has posted two short videos on the topic of links. One video answers how Google handles links that are 301 redirected and the other video answers how Google handles nofollowed links from authority sources. Here is Matt's video on 301 redirects where the question asked is does anchor text carry through all 301 redirects: His answer, if you don't want to watch it is. Typically yes, but Google deserves the right to pick which they pass. If all your links are through 301 redirects, then that looks suspicious. Matt's second video on nofollowed links answers two [...]

Related Topics: Google: SEO | Link Building: General | SEO: General | SEO: Redirects & Moving Sites | SEO: Titles & Descriptions