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:

1. Who the business is and what they do
2. First Impressions: Overall analysis of website look, feel, targeting and usability
3. Second Impressions: Overall analysis of social media and Web 2.0 presence
4. Top Level SEO: Keywords, navigation, rankings, competition, backlink profile, content, etc.
5. Page Level SEO: Structure, tags, usability, etc.
6. 3-step action plan for biggest/fastest improvement

So let’s get started.

[Editors Note: Remember, opinions and recommendations made are that of the contributor - Search Engine Land does not actively provide site audits as a service; nor is this intended to be a complete and thorough review by the author. Advice given is merely intended to be constructive criticism and a jumping off point for sites looking to improve their website marketing efforts.]

1.  What Does The Organization Do?

As explained to me in layman’s terms, the Bank Information Center is a watchdog group for the World Bank.

The World Bank isn’t a bank in the traditional sense in that a single person cannot open an account or ask for a loan.

Rather, the World Bank provides loans, grants and technical assistance to countries and the private sector to reduce poverty in developing and transition countries.

Sometimes though, the Bank’s huge projects —like roads, power plants, and dams— displace people from their homes or hurt the environment.

BIC’s mission is to raise awareness of when this happens and try to work with the World Bank to fix the problem or create new rules that will keep the World Bank from doing more harm than good. You can read more about BIC here.

2.  First Impressions Count: Website Usability

When I loaded up the BIC website, I was taken back to a nostalgic time – 1997 – when hand coded websites ruled the world and just having a website was a big deal for most institutions.

Needless to say, BIC has some work to do to bring their overall website and online presence up to speed.

Now, while there are several factors to consider – the purpose of the website, budget, organizational focus and probably most importantly for BIC, resources – I believe that BIC should start with a refresh of their entire Internet presence.

The primary reason for doing so should focus on relaying the organization’s purpose, mission and bringing attention to those efforts.

It took me about 20 minutes to figure out what they did and I was purposefully looking for that information for this site audit.

Since I still didn’t fully understand it, I had to ask them to explain to me in plain English what they did, which I passed along in the previous description.

What Is The Purpose Of The BIC Website?

It seems to be trying to do many different things, which is a part of the problem – there is no clear unique selling proposition (USP), call to action or general purpose.

And what does their tagline mean?

In addition, there’s a donation button/link buried at the bottom of the homepage, but shouldn’t that be highlighted more significantly?

If individual donations are not a large part of BIC’s revenue, they may consider removing this area entirely, or put it in another part of the website to clean up the clutter on the homepage.

The same applies to the often cold, obtuse and corporate-speak language used in the latest news updates, ad copy and navigation.

If the site is designed for corporations, trusts, or larger institutions that understand and respond to that language, then keep using it; otherwise, it needs to be made much more conversational and easier to understand.

I certainly shouldn’t have to email the company to get a better understanding as to what they do and how they do it.

These and other issues, beyond the scope of an SEO/Internet marketing audit, need to be addressed before an SEO action plan is put into place.

Key Takeaways

• Website looks tired and old – lacks trust, social proof and “gut” feeling of a reputable organization.

• BIC needs to decide who and what the website is designed for: individuals, or organizations/trusts that already know the nomenclature, and design it accordingly.

• Website has to quickly and easily allow the user to find what they are looking for, whether it’s information on how to contribute, or the latest work the foundation is doing.

Overall Score: 3 out of 10

3.  Second Impressions: Social Media Presence

This section is supposed to be devoted to a quick look at a company’s social media presence.

Well, BIC made that super easy!

They don’t have one – not even a blog – just an “updates” section on the site.

Other non-profits like Kiva.org use social media in a very compelling and advantageous way and I think BIC needs to address this shortfall immediately.

Key Takeaways

• No social media presence – must be addressed immediately especially with such a targeted and passionate audience.

• The “updates” section is a good place to start. BIC needs to flesh this out and offer user participation and make it a part of a larger content marketing strategy.

• Add comments and social sharing icons for all blog posts.

• Make their email sign up form more prominent.

Overall Score: 2 out of 10

4.  Top Level SEO Review

This analysis will vary from website to website based on a company’s goals, target audience and other factors.

In addition, because of space and time constraints, I simply cannot cover every single aspect of a company’s SEO profile, but will choose those I feel have the potential for the largest impact.

For BIC, because I know it would be really easy to pick on them for poor keyword choices (or none at all) or site navigation and other related issues – instead I wanted to focus on low hanging fruit – things they could easily/quickly/cheaply fix that would give them the biggest bang for their buck.

Important note: It should go without saying, however, that BIC needs to perform and implement a complete top-down keyword research strategy in order to understand their market and what keywords they need to rank for in order to reconstruct their site navigation around those goals and keywords.

Total Domain/Website Authority

First, let’s look at BIC’s overall authority using some broad level metrics.

• Toolbar PageRank: 6 (out of 10)
• Domain Authority: 62 (out of 100)
• Domain MozRank: 5.17 (out of 10)
• Domain MozTrust: 5.91 (out of 10)

From these preliminary metrics (because they are logarithmic in scale), it looks like BIC’s website and domain are highly authoritative, trusted and influential – which is a great start.

Backlink Profile

Next, let’s do a quick check of BIC’s backlink profile to take a peek at the possibilities for ranking higher for different keywords over time and get a sense of their SEO efforts – even if they are entirely accidental.

Here’s a look at BIC’s backlink profile courtesy of Majestic SEO.

Needless to say, I was very impressed:

You can see that BIC has been gaining backlinks very steadily over the last 5 years.

In addition, their backlink discovery profile has been very steady with a couple of blips.

First, there was a large spike in backlinks and referring domains in late 2010, early 2011.

After speaking to BIC, it appears that this was likely due to the fact that there were protests going on for several major projects in Spanish-speaking countries. Because BIC had information on these events in Spanish, they received a ton of backlinks as one of the only sources for information.

Then, over the last year or so, backlink discovery has dried up or disappeared entirely, depending on what month it was.

According to BIC, this was likely due to the fact that they had budget/staff cuts, so their information wasn’t being updated as frequently if at all, leading to a loss of backlinks to new content.

Overall though, BIC has a fantastic track record of being able to acquire links from all over the Web from high ranking and trusted authoritative websites – which in turn has elevated their website into an authoritative and trusted website.

Even if these links were purely accidental in nature – BIC was not doing anything specific, aside from day to day operations to get these links – the fact that they were able to grow their backlinks and authority without “trying” makes the potential of the website incredible.

Referring Domains

As an addendum to the above two points, BIC has an incredible dossier of referring root domains.

Here are the top 25 referring domains taken from Open Site Explorer:

In addition, you can see from the screenshot below, also taken from Open Site Explorer, that most of the referring domains are from .org domains, and 6% are from .edu’s (out of the top 300 referrers).

It’s no wonder BIC’s own website has gained huge amounts of authority and trust.

Anchor Text Analysis

I probably already knew the answer to this question, but I wanted to confirm what anchor text was being used to reference the BIC website from other websites.

Was BIC getting link juice for other corollary keywords or to other pages on their website? Or were they merely getting generic links to their homepage?

Here’s a list of the top 10 anchor text phrases being used to link to BIC’s website, courtesy of Majestic SEO:

Sadly, I was right in my assumption. BIC is getting anchor text pointing mainly to their homepage while using generic anchor text or the “Bank Information Center” company name.

This obviously won’t help BIC rank for other keywords without some effort.

First Page Rankings for Company Name

After taking all of the previous information into account, I now wanted to make sure BIC at least dominated the first page of Google for their company name: Bank Information Center.

Here are the results:

As you can see, while the company does occupy the top spot (with some nice sitelinks to boot) and one other spot below (with an old Vimeo profile that is no longer in use), you can now see how their lack of social media presence is really hurting them.

They should be dominating the first page of Google and could easily occupy more spots by simply claiming their social media profiles on Facebook (screenshot below), LinkedIn, Google+, YouTube and Twitter, and linking to those pages from their website.

Because their largest source of traffic is for branded terms, at the very least, BIC needs to make sure they are dominating that entire first page.

Other Housekeeping Items

The above are broad-spectrum site-level SEO recommendations designed to identify low hanging fruit and areas where BIC can make some powerful and highly impactful changes for their overall SEO profile.

I now wanted to briefly touch on some other “housekeeping” items that should be taken care of as well:

• Title Tag (Homepage + Other Pages): The title tag on the homepage and other pages is too long – this is a big no-no. As well, it contains the word “Welcome” – an unnecessary use of 7 characters.

• Title Tag Part 2: There are literally hundreds of pages on the site with identical or nearly identical title tags. Each page should have a distinctive page title. Remember that the title is the most important on page SEO factor. Here’s a video I created to teach you how to effectively write great title tags.

• Ugly URL’s: BIC is losing some SEO juice because their URL’s are generic, not keyword rich, and end with the wasted extension of .aspx. This might be a by-product of their Content Management System (CMS) but they should look to clean all of this up. 

For example:

The Africa Region link looks like this:

http://bicusa.org/en/Region.1.aspx

It should instead be something cleaner like this:

http://www.bicusa.org/en/bic-in-africa

Or:

http://bicusa.org/en/bank-information-center-in-africa

BIC should then do the same for all of their updates/blog posts:

Instead of:

http://www.bicusa.org/en/Article.12606.aspx

It should instead say something like:

http://www.bicusa.org/en/lphu-launches-global-campaign-for-disability-rights

In addition, the BIC website is not returning a 301 redirect from www to non-www or vice versa. This means that Google may cache both versions of your site, causing site wide duplicate content penalties. Courtesy of Virante.com.

Description Tags Missing

Where are the META Description tags? The description tag is vital to getting folks to click through to your website. The entire BIC site is devoid of them…oops! This was courtesy of Screaming Frog.

Duplicate Content

Some other things to consider and check, especially as BIC institutes some of these changes, include duplicate content and canonicalization issues.

I could go on forever, but these were some glaring mistakes that should and can be corrected immediately.

Key Takeaways

• BIC needs to institute a complete top-down keyword strategy before anything else gets done.

• They then need to execute that analysis by upgrading their navigation, titles, descriptions and URL’s across their entire domain and online presence.

• Finally, knowing what they want to rank for, they can begin a link outreach campaign for specific keywords.

Overall Score: 3.5 out of 10 – because of domain authority only!

5.  Page Level SEO Review

This audit has already gotten longer than I intended…I guess that’s what happens when there are a lot of things to fix, right?

(I suppose in that respect, BIC was an excellent choice to kick off this site audit series! Huzzah!)

At any rate, I’ll try and cut to the chase and analyze one page of BIC’s website for its on-page SEO and then apply that same advice to ALL of BIC’s pages.

We’ll use this page for our example:

http://www.bicusa.org/en/Region.1.aspx

Some quick hits that should be taken care of to make sure the page is SEO friendly:

• The page layout is cramped and makes it hard to find information. This should be a part of the overall website redesign strategy.

•  I would like to see more information on all of BIC’s pages – make them more in depth with better and more comprehensive information.

• The page header should say something more than just Africa. Page headers are a part of search engine algorithms, so your page header should be descriptive – something like: “Bank Information Center in Africa” or whatever keyword phrase you are trying to rank for.

• Page META title needs to be shortened and more descriptive (see Top level SEO advice).

• The page URL should be fixed as previously mentioned.

• Code is not using Image Alt text or Title text. For instance, the image in the middle of the page, has the alt text as: img alt=”Mararaba 1″:

This word isn’t used anywhere else on the page. Instead the alt text should be more descriptive about something on the page so search engines can better understand what your page is actually about.

Instead, how about using:

img alt=”BIC Helping The World Bank In Africa”

Then, the title attribute (which is entirely missing from all your pages) when you hover over the image should say something like:

title=”BIC helps villages in Africa have a voice”

Key Takeaways

• BIC should make their pages more “juicy” with deeper content and easier navigation.

• They then need to fix the titles, descriptions, section headers and image alt and title text, at the very least for their main pages and from now on for their “updates”/blog pages.

Overall Score: 2 out of 10

6.  Three Step Internet Marketing & SEO Action Plan

When I selected BIC as my first “victim” I never realized until I rolled up my sleeves and started digging deeper, how much work and guidance they really needed.

The sad part is that I just don’t have the space to go over every last detail, but hopefully with what I covered here, BIC – and just as importantly your organization – can take immediate action on the highest level priorities.

To that end, here is a specific action plan for how BIC can systematically fix what is wrong with their website, SEO and Internet marketing strategy for the biggest return on their investment.

Step 1:  Overall Site Redesign and SEO Upgrade

I highly recommend that BIC undertake a complete makeover of their website, SEO and online marketing presence taking into consideration the GOAL of their online presence and their target audience.

I understand due to cost considerations, resources and time constraints that this might be difficult, if not impossible.

Therefore, the next best thing would be to immediately implement the Top Level SEO changes that I specified above.

These should include:

• Figuring out the goals of BIC’s website, their target market and then their overall objectives before implementing anything
• Creating a master keyword list and overall SEO strategy
• Fixing/upgrading the link architecture and navigation throughout the website using this information
• Fixing/upgrading the content on as many pages as possible
• Fixing the title tags for at least the top 50 – 100 pages
• Adding Description tags for at least the top 50 – 100 pages
• Adding Alt and Title tags for all images on the top 50 – 100 pages
• Fixing the URL extensions for the top 50 – 100 pages and making sure to REDIRECT the old pages using a 301 redirect to the new pages
• Checking for duplicate content on the entire website and either removing it, or at least canonicalizing it

Step 2:  Social Media Implementation

BIC should immediately claim and develop all available social media accounts.

My top recommendations are: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn and Google+.

BIC should then make sure to add social sharing icons on their blog and perhaps throughout the site, as well as adding the ability for folks to comment on their “blog”.

Once that is done, BIC should curate and build up these channels immediately by creating a social media marketing strategy that involves their main website, blog and social media properties to provide unique content and value to each of them, while also leveraging their powerful brand and Internet presence.

Step 3:  Link Outreach, Traffic Generation and Inbound Marketing

With everything cleaned up and in place, BIC should now look to expand their traffic and diversify the company’s inbound traffic strategy through other sources.

This means asking other websites to link to BIC using various anchor text — to appropriate internal pages – that will in turn help BIC rank for keywords people are using to find their website that they aren’t ranking for now, but can easily rank for with a little outreach.

It also means mining their social media, blog and other channels to create a veritable self-fulfilling loop of goodwill, brand affinity and traffic through their continued updates, content and user interaction.

This will then culminate into BIC’s most desired outcome for their website: whether that’s to get donations, inform, generate awareness or some other goal that BIC ultimately decides upon.

Bottom Line

The Bank Information Center is an incredible non-profit with a seriously powerful and underutilized website property that is losing vast amounts of traffic (and potentially donations)  because they haven’t taken the time to map out a sound Internet marketing – SEO and social media strategy – and implement that strategy on an ongoing basis.

If they systematically utilize the information I’ve broken down for them in this audit, they’ll see a huge increase in their rankings, traffic and ultimately, what all businesses care most about – even non-profits – an increase to their bottom line that will grow and sustain their entire organization.

[Submission Instructions: If you would like to submit your company for consideration for this series, please visit the LinkedIn discussion group that we created for this series by clicking here. You’ll find instructions on that page on how to add yourself and what information I’ll need from you to consider your website. Note there is no guarantee your site will be selected, nor is there a set schedule for audit times.]

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 <HEAD> section of a web page. Other content may also appear in the header area, including meta description tags, the canonical tag, special tags for Facebook and much more. In my example above, I’ve eliminated much of what’s in the head area so that we can focus on the title tag.

How Is An HTML Title Tag Used?

Every page can have an HTML title tag, but how that tag is used can vary. Most browsers will show the title in the reverse bar at the top of the browser window. Below, I’ve showed how that “Some SEO Advice For Bill Gates” article that I mentioned appears in Internet Explorer, Safari and Firefox:

Chrome is also shown in the illustration above. Rather than use the title in the reverse bar, Chrome uses it at the top of the “tab” for each page it displays. The others also do this in addition to using the title at the top of the browser window overall.

Title Tags Versus Headlines

The HTML title tag is often used by many blogging systems and other content management software as the main headline for a web page. Again, here’s that page I used as an example:

You can see how the HTML title tag is also being used as the main headline on the page.

This is common, but it is not required. For example, here’s a recent New York Times article that attracted much attention about a merchant who believed that being mean to customers was helping him rank better on Google:

Notice how the title tag, which is used at the top of the browser window, is different from the main text on the page.

Title Tags For Bookmarking

When you bookmark or make a page a favorite in your browser, the title of the page will be suggested as name of the bookmark (generally, you can edit the page name before saving). Here are the two articles I’ve mentioned above, as bookmarked in Firefox:

The title tag will often be suggested as the text used to record a page with social sharing sites, such as Delicious:

Here’s another example at Digg:

Title Tags As Displayed By Search Engines

Search engines make use of title tags in two ways: for display purposes and for ranking purposes. In John Gruber’s article today, Title Junk, he gets upset about title tags that produce a bad display or readability situation. He’s correct, on some fronts. He also suggests that title tags play no role in ranking. He’s dead wrong, in that regard.

Let’s talk about display first. Below is a search on Google for seo advice:

You can see my article listed. The headline of the listing matches the page’s HTML title tag. In most cases, the listing will do this. Not always.

When Google Ignores Your Title Tag

In some relatively rare cases, Google will make use of the Open Directory’s headline for a page. Similarly, if a page lacks a title tag, Google may create a listing title by looking at common text used to link to that page. Additionally, Google sometimes decides to craft a listing’s title by combining text from a title tag, text from links, text from the page, the domain name or other methods that it decides is best.

As a site owner, I hate this. I want Google to use whatever page title I give it. Google argues back that it has to be creative, especially in cases where people have failed to provide titles. I’ve argued in the past that as a solution, Google should provide site owners with some type of “yes, I’m really really sure” meta tag to declare that they absolutely want their pages titles to be used. I’ve not won that argument. But, at least, Google will obey the NOODP meta tag and not use Open Directory titles, if you object to that.

Good Titles Versus Too Many Keywords

One of the things Gruber is upset with are titles that seem “sloppy” or filled with “junk.” Perhaps the best example of overload is MSNBC, which has this title tag:

Breaking News, Weather, Business, Health, Entertainment, Sports, Politics, Travel, Science, Technology, Local, US & World News – msnbc.com

Gruber writes:

Who are these title-junk keywords aimed at? Google? Do you they really think that putting “breaking news” in their home page title makes it more likely that Google will rank them higher when people search for that term? It’s like they’re taking advice out of an SEO book from 1995.

I’ve actually been doing SEO since 1995 and writing advice about it since 1996. I can tell you that my advice from back then wasn’t to shove in a billion keywords like this. From April 1996:

Focus on the two or three keywords that you think are most crucial to your site, then ensure those words are both in your title and mentioned early on your web page.

So I agree. I think MSBC is overdoing it. It has 12 different news topics that the home page’s title tag is targeted. Really, it should focus on only two or three topics. But I’ll get back to this more when I talk about ranking issues.

How long is too long? Google and Bing don’t really care. If you have a long title, they’ll simply truncate the excess, like they do in this case for a search on breaking news, which brings up MSNBC:

Some, like Gruber, may feel having a title cut short like this is ugly. Some searchers might not care. I’ve never seen studies that say one way or the other. Personally, I’d prefer titles that fit. But ultimately, I’m not writing my own titles to precisely fit within the space that Google and Bing will display (about 70 characters at both places).

Site Name In The Title Or Not?

Gruber also offers suggestions on what he views as the only sensible formula for creating page titles. These are to show:

• Name Of Site –Headline
• Headline — Name Of Site

I’ll provide an simpler formula:

• Show what you think is important to your potential reader

Do you think that your readers need to know the name of your site on each and every page? I don’t. Not for my site. That’s why we don’t put Search Engine Land into the title of all of our articles.

For example, here’s a search on Google for pages from Search Engine Land about SEO. Most of these are articles, features and columns that we’ve written. None of those types of pages carry our site name in the title tag:

Search Engine Land has what I believe to be a good brand in the search marketing space. I suppose putting our name in the title of each article might further resonate with those who do a search at Google and know our brand. However, I also know that people will also look at the entire listing, and the name of our site is included in our URL.

More important, I expect many people who search for the content we provide do NOT know our brand. They’re new to search marketing, and I think a short, focused title will be more likely to attract them to visit. So, in our case, we leave off our site name.

That’s not in every case. For example, we have a number of guides about popular search topics. In those cases, we deliberately want our brand to be known, so we include that in the page title:

Over at the New York Times, that publication clearly feels having its brand in the title is important, which is why you see it in its titles, tucked at the end:

In the last listing, “NYTimes.com” is in the title. It just doesn’t show, because it’s at the end, and the title gets cut off.

Ultimately, You Decide What’s Best About Titles

What exactly you put into your title ultimately depends on what you decide is best — not what I personally think is best, not what John Gruber personally thinks is best. No one will know your site and your visitors better than you (assuming you’re a diligent publisher). Advice can be good, but advice from afar can also lack specific insight.

Going back to Gruber’s advice, the idea of some type of template that you use for most of your pages does make sense. Do you want your site to be listed in the title or not? Make a deliberate decision about that. List it first or last? There have been debates on what’s best in this regard (or even if it’s required) that go back for years. There’s no definitive answer.

I will suggest that when it comes to home pages, they’re special. If you’re a known brand, in a space where there may be brand confusion, especially consider adding the word “official” to your title tag. Yes, others could pretend to be official as well. But they usually don’t, and you’ll usually come first.

While adding “official” doesn’t make sense for every page, it does make sense that every home page should be focused around one to three key terms that you hope the entire web site will be found for. Your most important terms. They go in your title. They do help with ranking. Leaving them out is like handing out a blank business card.

Yes, Virginia, Title Tags Do Help With Rankings

I’ve been writing about SEO for nearly 15 years now. I’ve moderated around 50 “Ask The Search Engine” sessions at conferences with reps from the major search engines. Consistently, from SEOs and search reps alike, title tags are consistently said to and found to have a ranking impact, when this question comes up.

For example, keyword in title tags were found to be the fourth most important SEO factor in SEOmoz’s ranking factors survey in 2009. Google has written about the importance of titles on its Webmaster Central Blog. Google also offers an SEO Starter Guide. I’ll get back to more advice from it in a moment — as well as a link to it — but the guide says:

A title tag tells both users and search engines what the topic of a particular page is.

The tag tells users about the topic from a display perspective. It tells search engines from a relevancy ranking perspective. A descriptive title helps the search engine know what the page is about, which in turn can help the page rank for the key terms in the title.

The title tag is not the only thing Google uses. It quite famously has over 200 signals that it contemplates. Bing similarly has a complicated recipe or “algorithm” that it uses to analyze which pages should rank tops. Yes, pages will rank well even if the key terms are not in their titles. But having key terms within a page title can help, and it is recommended as a good SEO practice.

Getting Focused

Going back to MSNBC, a good SEO practice would mean breaking its title tag down to the most important topics, maybe:

Breaking News, Politics, Sports & More From MSNBC.com

If MSNBC wants to be found for other topics like “weather” or “business,” it has other pages within the site that can do the heavy lifting for those topics.

Then again, while Gruber might not like how MSNBC’s long title looks and makes an assumption that having “breaking news” in the title doesn’t help MSNBC rank, the site IS showing up for that term:

In fact, EVERY page in the top results for breaking news makes use of those words in their page titles.

Of course, you could argue that it’s natural that the most relevant sites for breaking news would use those words in their page titles. If they suddenly dropped those words, maybe they’d retain their ranking. Maybe. Or maybe not. But when Google — and Bing — and scores of SEOs tell you that title tags matter, why on earth wouldn’t you create a short, descriptive title for your home page that encompasses what it’s about?

If Books Get Good Titles…

So when Gruber writes:

Surely, the name of the site should be the first thing (and in many cases, the only thing) in the title of the home page.

I have to disagree. It’s like saying that the title of a book should only be the author’s name. A web site is like a book. It deserves a good title, just like a good book does.

By the way, while I’d agree that MSNBC might want to trim its title to be more specific — which could then include having its brand showing — consider this search for MSNBC itself:

Notice the title is “msnbc.com” — but this is the exact same home page that has that long title before. What’s up? This is one of those cases where Google is trying to do the right thing. I searched for MSNBC. Google has changed the title that it shows for the page, probably using patterns of how people link to it, to present a title that Google believes is most relevant.

Some Closing Advice

Goodness knows there are plenty of people who dismiss everything about SEO as junk. SEO is not junk, and people who continue to have that type of knee-jerk reaction are simply ignorant of how search engines work.

If someone cannot distinguish between spam and SEO, if they cannot distinguish between good SEO practices and going overboard, if they write off all of SEO off as nonsense, my advice is to safely ignore anything they have to say. They are effectively web bigots, and you should treat their advice as you would the rantings of any bigot.

I don’t get the impression that Gruber is such a bigot. I think he understands there are good SEO practices and is justifiably upset at some excesses. As I said, I agree with much of that.

However, writing off the importance of title tags period is bad advice. That takes me back to that SEO starter guide from Google (PDF format & the image at the top of this article comes from it). It’s from Google! Unless you buy into a conspiracy that Google is deliberately trying to mislead publishers about the importance of title tags, I think it’s good advice to follow. Here’s what the guide has to say about title tags:

Accurately describe the page’s content

Choose a title that effectively communicates the topic of the page’s content.

Avoid:

• choosing a title that has no relation to the content on the page
• using default or vague titles like “Untitled” or “New Page 1″

Create unique title tags for each page

Each of your pages should ideally have a unique title tag, which helps Google know how the page is distinct from the others on your site. using a single title tag across all of your site’s pages or a large group of pages

Avoid:

• using a single title tag across all of your site’s pages or a large group of pages

Use brief, but descriptive titles

Titles can be both short and informative. If the title is too long, Google will show only a portion of it in the search result.

Avoid:

• using extremely lengthy titles that are unhelpful to users
• stuffing unneeded keywords in your title tags

It’s basically what Gruber wants — short titles that are relevant to the page. No disagreement there. But if you want to “trust the Googlebot to figure it out,” as Gruber writes, then you should also trust that Googlebot does indeed want some help in doing that figuring. That means being descriptive, even on your home page.

Heck, if Google said “Google: The World’s Leading Search Engine” in the title tag of its home page, maybe it would finally start ranking itself for those words!

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 indexes the content of that tag. (And to be clear, I looked before writing this article. In short order, this article itself, along with others, will appear because they’ll make use of that word).

During the session last week at SMX East, when Yahoo said it no longer supported this tag, several in the audience said they didn’t believe it. I was kind of struck. You’ve got a search representative flat-out saying they don’t do something, but no one wants to believe them? How things have changed. Sure, I can see distrust on some controversial issues (such as whether Google really does not count nofollowed links out of Wikipedia). But why would Yahoo lie about something like meta keywords support?

To be clear, I don’t think Yahoo was deliberately lying. The representative was probably confused in some way. Similarly over at Bing, despite them NOT supporting the tag (it’s not mentioned here) and never having done so since they launched their own search technology, they recently blogged much advice about using the tag.

As I commented about this:

That reads like someone got a copy of really old SEO advice and decided to put it out there regardless of what Bing actually does. I mean, my head hurts, but not everyone cared about commas or not. And no one had this 874 character limit. I mean, if you went over, it was no big deal. And the don’t repeat more than 4 times? According to what. Microsoft never, ever had its own guidelines like this.”

It’s a good reminder to the search reps. In many ways, you occupy god-like status on issues relating to SEO. Everything you write, everything you say will be fully believed by some. And if you’re not correct, you’ll confuse people and cause others to lose faith in you. If you don’t know, don’t say — or qualify: “I’m not sure” or “I’ll check on that.”

Postscript: Yahoo’s sent me this:

What changed with Yahoo’s ranking algorithms is that while we still index the meta keyword tag, the ranking importance given to meta keyword tags receives the lowest ranking signal in our system.

Words that appear in any other part of documents, including the body, title, description, anchor text etc., will take priority in ranking the document – the re-occurrence of these words in the meta keyword tag will not help in boosting the signal for these words.  Therefore, keyword stuffing in the keyword tag will not help a page’s recall or ranking, it will actually have less effect than introducing those same words in the body of the document, or any other section.

However, when no other ranking signal is present, unique words that only appear in the meta keyword tag section of documents can still be used to recall these documents.

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 support the tag. Google has never supported it and in fact clarified this again in a special post last month. See Google: Stop Suing Over The Meta Keywords Tag, We Don’t Use It for more about that.

NOTE: See our follow-up post, Sorry, Yahoo, You DO Index The Meta Keywords Tag.

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:

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 questions. The first, does Nofollow tag devalue the Google algorithms? The second, does Google take into account nofollowed links from authority sites, such as Wikipedia? Even thought it is nofollowed?

His answers, if you don’t want to watch the video are:

(Q) Does Nofollow tag devalue the Google algorithms? (A) Matt said the nofollow is used very rarely on the web, relative to all the links on the web. He said it is “miniscule” compared to all the links.

(Q) Does Google take into account nofollowed links from authority sites, such as Wikipedia? Even thought it is nofollowed? (A) Google doesn’t take into account the nofollowed Wikipedia links. But people may find your resource via Wikipedia and link to you without a nofollow from their site, so that might help you.

Matt did add that if a site has a lot of trust, like Wikipedia, does deserve the right to take the nofollow off. But it is up to the site to decide if they want to take off that nofollow tag. Matt goes as far to say that Google would support Wikipedia if they want to put into their policy a way of removing nofollow links from trusted editors and their content.

Plus, Peter Linsley from Google Image Search has a video up at the Google Webmaster Central blog with his presentation from SMX West on Google Images:

Postscript: Matt posted another video today, answering why Google has not yet built a ranking report in Webmaster Tools. The quick answer is that it is a resources thing. Google is constantly improving Webmaster Tools and adding features like the canonical tag element, which they think are more important then simple rank checking. Here is the video answer:

The screenshot above shows what you get in a search for president of the united states at Google. A similar situation happens for a search on president:

Ah, but it’s only been a few hours — surely Google will catch up with the changed page soon. Look closer. Google already knows the page has been updated. While the title may say “President George W. Bush,” the description says “WhiteHouse.gov is the official web site for the White House and President Barack Obama, the 44th President of the United States.”

What’s going on? In this case, Google is using the title for the White House web site that is provided from the Open Directory Project here. Because the searches above use the word “president” in them, Google in its mistaken wisdom has decided that a third party title for the web site is more accurate than the site’s own title.

There’s a solution — the NOODP meta tag. Using that prevents Open Directory descriptions from being used and though Google’s help document isn’t clear, it should also suppress the ODP title as well. Hopefully, the Obama team will install the NOODP tag on the site soon.

Things are better on the Google front when it comes to a search for white house:

There, you can see Google is using both a current title and description for the page.

Over at Yahoo, it has yet to catch up with the times either for a search on president of the united states or white house, as shown below:

The same is true at Microsoft for white house and president of the united states.

By the way, curious about what will happen with the “miserable failure” search that was ranking the US president’s home page number one for those words when Bush was in power? My Bush: Fix Your “Miserable Failure” Googlebomb Legacy Before Obama Takes Office article has background on the situation.

Today, I noted that the old location for Bush’s biography is not being redirected to a new location. I suspect that should finally kill the bomb for good, at least for “failure,” where it is still going off at Google right now:

That should also stop it for “miserable failure” on Yahoo and Microsoft, where it still ranks Bush tops.

Of course, the change also breaks anyone over the years who has linked to Bush’s bio for educational or other non-political purposes. It’s also a change I don’t think was deliberately done. All US presidential biographies were moved to new pages (George Washington was here but is now here, with no redirection from the old location to the new one). That means lots of broken links out there (nearly 5,000 of them, according to Yahoo).

Postscript: Jason Kottke and Dave Naylor note how little the Obama administration is currently blocking from search engines compared to the old White House web site.

Like other search engines, Google already distinguishes between various types of content. You can search specifically for images, videos, books, blog posts, and so forth. Google has separate search engines for each. But two recent changes suggest that Google is improving its ability to classify different types of content that’s gathered from ordinary web pages. Search Engine Roundtable points to a discussion on WebmasterWorld about the addition of dates at the beginning of some search results — something Michael Gray spotted in mid-September. From my personal experience, this seems to be happening mostly on content that Google can identify as blog posts and news articles — but not exclusively on those types of content.

And speaking of identifying types of content, Google Operating System points out that Google is starting to show special forum-related information in search results when it can identify that the result comes from a message board. Author Alex Chitu suggests this could mean new advanced search options in the future:

This new feature shows that Google is able to automatically classify web pages and to extract relevant information. Once Google starts to show data for other kinds of web pages, we can expect to see an option to restrict the search results to a certain category (forums, reviews, blogs, news articles).

The screenshot above has examples of both cases, the top showing dates in the snippets, and the bottom showing forum information.

Personally, I think meta-tag content gets a bad rap because, in the past, many SEO professionals and website owners exploited meta-tags to achieve undeserved search engine visibility. As a result, the tags’ content was devalued in favor of other criteria. Overall, though, if you look at the big picture, meta-tag abuse contributed to the evolution of better, more accurate ways for determining the "aboutness" of web documents.

As an SEO professional, I optimize meta-tag content because there are multiple reasons to use meta-tags on web pages and other files, apart from ranking purposes.

Meta-tag content and relevancy

Some commercial web search engines use meta-tag content to determine page relevancy. Some do not. Most of the time on a text-based document, meta-tag descriptions and keywords are not used to determine whether or not a page ranks. Search engines have long evolved to use other on-the-page and off-the-page criteria, as many SEO professionals know.

Due to the emergence and ubiquity of blended search results, many SEO professionals need to re-think their meta-tag optimization viewpoints. What file types are appearing in search engine results pages (SERPs) for targeted keyword phrases? Optimization strategies for text files differ slightly from optimization from non-text files.

Meta-tag keywords and descriptions become more important when the search engines are not able to determine (or have a difficult time determining) the "aboutness" of a file, such as a video file. In this situation, a keyword-focused meta-tag description can make or break search engine visibility.

If I am able to help implement SEO best practices at a company, I try to make metadata optimization for all file types part of a normal process. Once copywriters, graphic designers, video and audio producers, and web developers make it a habit to produce high-quality metadata content, it does not seem like a daunting task.

Going back and re-optimizing (or initially optimizing) 2,500 video files can seem like a daunting task. But people have to start somewhere, and one properly optimized video file is better than no optimized video files. I might have ten people optimize ten video files per day, minimum. I always begin with the video files that have the greatest impact on achieving business goals. All too often, management needs to see some relatively fast results before committing staff time to full implementation.

If everything goes as planned, within a few weeks, the optimization for those files is complete, and now the optimization procedure has become a habit at the company. If I am working with a company that has a great web analytics package, I always measure the ROI of video optimization.

Meta-tag descriptions and search behavior

Since some major search engines use meta-tag descriptions when displaying a page’s (or file’s) listing, it is important to write meta-tag descriptions that accomplish the following:

• Encourage searchers to click on the link to your web page

• Reinforce content that is already available (and visible to users) on the page
• Help to obtain top search engine positioning in the search results that use meta-tags to determine relevance

How listings are displayed in search results is very, very important. I often feel as if search engine advertisers have a better grasp of display effectiveness than SEO professionals. Snippet length and term highlighting greatly affect a listing’s clickability.

For example, for navigational searches where users wish to go to a site’s home page or a specific page on your site, smaller snippets are often more effective. On informational searches where searchers desire information irrespective of where the information might be found, longer snippets are more effective (What are you looking for? An eye-tracking study of information usage on web Search – PDF version).

With navigational queries, the destination is important, and the URL provides a clear indicator of the final destination. Some Google research showed that 17% of mobile queries were navigational (A Large Scale Study of Wireless Search Behavior: Google Mobile Search – PDF version). With informational queries, however, the URL becomes less important to searchers because the desired information is the main target, not necessarily the URL.

Which pages on your site are better pages to display in response to navigational queries? Which pages on your site are better pages to display in response to informational or transactional queries? Understanding your target audience’s intent with various keyword phrases will help you create better pages and more effective listings, leading to a more positive user experience.

Often, search engines do not take listing descriptions from the meta-tag description. They might take the listing description from other on-the-page content, or use a combination of the two. For this reason, I prefer to have meta-tag content reinforce the most important keyword phrases on the web page. However, if I know that the main searcher goals are navigational, for example, I will try and keep the meta-tag description short to help searchers achieve their goals more easily.

Meta tags and site search engines

The meta-tag keyword attribute often gets a bad rap because many of the commercial web search engines do not use this content to determine relevancy. Nonetheless, the commercial web search engines are not the only search engines in existence. Many sites utilize their own site search engine. The content in the keywords meta-tag can make site search engine results more accurate, which is exactly what users want.

Conclusion

Many website owners still cling to the mistaken belief that meta-tag content alone can make or break a ranking in the web search results. Heck, my co-author had to persistently correct a university lecturer about this common misconception only a few weeks ago, which he found rather frustrating. I understand his frustration about the narrow view of meta-tag usage, especially since optimization strategies have evolved.

Nevertheless, metadata certainly has an effect on long-term search engine visibility and ROI. I always try to optimize meta-tag content based on usability testing and observing search behaviors during those tests. Web analytics data also provides helpful information. Your best bet? Do not ignore meta-tag optimization, but rather try and understand its role in the big picture.

Shari Thurow is the Founder and SEO Director at Omni Marketing Interactive and the author of the book Search Engine Visibility. The 100% Organic column appears Thursdays at Search Engine Land.

• Detecting more “undetectable” webspam
• The anatomy of a search result

The first, Detecting more “undetectable” webspam, should trigger some heated comments at his blog. It shows how he was able to find what was claimed to be “undetectable” cloaking and web spam. Matt then issues his warning to webmasters:

More generally, if someone is trying to manipulate Google by deceptive cloaking, it means that a webserver is returning different content to Googlebot than to users. That’s a condition that can be checked for by algorithms or manually, and such cloaking is certainly not “undetectable.” For cloaking to be completely “undetectable,” it would have to be like that Steven Wright joke: “Last night somebody broke into my apartment and replaced everything with exact duplicates.” And a cloaking script that gave users and Googlebot exactly duplicate pages would be a bit pointless.

There are currently over thirty comments at Matt’s blog, I assume you will be able to find over a hundred by the end of today.

In Matt’s other post, The anatomy of a search result, he breaks down how the search result snippet works. He describes in the video below each of the following components: the title, the description, the plus expansion box, the URL, how Google bolds keywords, the cache link, similar pages link, and, Google notes, Site Links and the more results link. Here is the video: