Apr 5, 2012 at 2:46pm ET by Chris Fernandez

As part of a site audit special series, we're going to review an interesting website, Bank Information Center (BIC). BIC is a non-profit organization that does some very cool things but, like most non-profits, hasn’t updated their website for many years. Needless to say, they have almost no Internet marketing or SEO strategy which led them to ask for help by submitting their site for this series. In this post, I’m going to break down: Who the business is and what they do First Impressions: Overall analysis of website look, feel, targeting and usability Second Impressions: [...]

Writing HTML Title Tags For Humans, Google & Bing

Dec 21, 2010 at 3:30pm ET by Danny Sullivan

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 [...]

Sorry, Yahoo, You DO Index The Meta Keywords Tag

Oct 14, 2009 at 2:31pm ET by Danny Sullivan

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 [...]

Yahoo Search No Longer Uses Meta Keywords Tag

Oct 6, 2009 at 2:15pm ET by Barry Schwartz

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 [...]

Google’s Advice On Using The New Canonical Tag

Mar 13, 2009 at 9:19am ET by Barry Schwartz

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: [...]

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