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 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.

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 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.

In the past, SEO success was measured by rankings of target keywords; then the focus moved to traffic; today we have moved into the bottom-line era: organic traffic should be measured by its impact on revenue. This post is based on a presentation delivered at eMetrics San Jose 2009. It is about ways to integrate and improve SEO and website usability (using web analytics) and create a synergy that will improve the conversion rates of websites.

Measuring SEO success using rankings is out-of-date: rankings fluctuate significantly and do not show any improvement on the website success. Traffic does not fluctuate so much, but it still does not show you the money. The way to measure SEO is by measuring its ROI.

Many people still think of organic traffic as free traffic. Although it is possible to get free organic traffic, to go to the next level and attract the masses to any website, it is highly important to invest resources, either with an agency or in-house people. Besides, many changes to the website are needed. Therefore, it is very important to consider all the expenditure with SEO, be it with consultancy, in-house development, or other. This way, it is possible to get to the understanding of the SEO ROI: how much profit you are getting from your organic traffic?

Content is king, but usability is queen

As we all heard time and again: when it comes to SEO, content is king. We don’t disagree. Relevant content is really essential in any website, both for SEO and for conversions. However, there is a clear tradeoff between content and usability (the design). Sometimes people are so worried about one of these elements that they completely forget about the other one.

The image below represents all the content (above the fold) before/after a change made for SEO purposes. The only change was the addition of fresh content above the product info, which pushed all product info to below the fold. Including more content on the page should not hurt the conversions of the website. However, the product pages have a very high conversion rate, and we saw a significant decrease in the visits on product pages. Conclusion: we saw an increase in the organic traffic, but a decrease in the overall conversion rates of the website.

As Nathan Rodriguez puts it, “Content is King, but sometimes the Queen rules!”

SEO for landing pages

When we talk about paid search campaigns, it is very natural to talk about landing page optimization. However, this is not so obvious when talking about organic SEO campaigns. But the importance is the same; both should be highly efficient in converting incoming traffic. The first question we should ask is: “Should I create or use an existing page for a keyword I am targeting with SEO?” And the answer: It depends! Depends whether your site already has relevant content for this keyword or not.

If you have a juice website, and you want to rank first for “soft drinks” it is not very efficient to use your homepage or another juice page for the keyword “soft drinks.” Even if you do succeed to rank first for this keyword you will probably have 100% bounce rate. But if you create a special page in which you show a comparison of different types of juices and soft drinks, it might persuade people to read further. A useful tool to test the success of SEO landing pages before you target them is AdWords. You can create a campaign in which you send visitors coming from “soft drinks“ to different pages and decide on the best SEO landing page. If content is the king and usability is the queen, relevance is the prince!

aniBoom is an animations’ website where people can create and upload their animations to be seen by other people. The site owners target content creators and they have a web-application called ShapeShifter in which users can create animations for free. The ShapeShifter main page receives traffic for keywords such as “create your own animation” and “free animation software”. When analyzing the organic traffic to this page, we saw a very significant bounce rate and understood something was wrong. The problem was that the most prominent element of the page, and probably the first words people read, are “$59.99″ (this banner was from one of their partners). When people click on “free animation software” and see a big $ on the landing page, they are very likely to bounce! Here is how the main element of the page looks before and after the analysis:

Another important element to optimize is the snippet that appears on the search results page: this is the first interaction of the user with your website, and ultimately may determine the click through rate from visitors coming from search engines. The snippet is what you promise to your user; are you delivering it in the landing page? You should be.

Targeting customer intent using internal site search

It is very common nowadays to optimize SEO by measuring the success of keywords bringing traffic to the website. While this is great, by doing that we lose a precious source of keywords: the keywords your customers are typing in your website, i.e. your internal site search. This is what they are really looking for, and you should check if you are targeting those keywords. Here is an example of a way to analyze internal search and optimize your SEO efforts using it.

TED is a very interesting conference that makes some of their talks available on their website (we did not analyze TED website, but did the same analysis for several websites). In the table below you can see on the left-most column search terms used by the visitors in the website (which keywords were typed in the internal search box). Each additional column represents a KPI for this term: how long users stayed on the website after searching, how many users clicked on a result from this search, newsletter signup (conversion), and registration (conversion). For each KPI, you can see if the keyword ranked above or below the average.

So, for example, people that searched for “good talks” in the website stayed longer than the average searcher in the website, they clicked more often than the average on the results, but they converted less than the average for both conversion types. Sir Ken Robinson was above the average for all KPIs.

TED always has some kind of cloud tags in its homepage, either with text links or image links. The way they usually organize the homepage is by recency of the talks, meaning that the latest talks get the better spot. Although this might be a good way to organize the website, we think a different way could be to organize it by highest converting search terms. So for example, it might be that every single person that gets to Bill Gates talk (which was the latest talk when this article was written) leaves the website. So why should it be the first one, just because it is the most recent one? Based on internal site search we can find the most converting terms and include them in the homepage: this would improve the usability of the website, meaning that people would find what they are looking for on the homepage, and it would improve the ranking for this specific term on search engines. These high-converting keywords should certainly be part of your target SEO keywords.

In summary, it is essential to adopt a customer centricity approach to web analytics. Rankings and traffic are not good measures of success for SEO efforts; we should focus on conversions and be sure to calculate the ROI of our organic traffic as we do for all other medium. A few takeaways: keep in mind the tradeoff between including content in the website and keeping it focused on conversions; choose carefully and optimize SEO landing pages; use your internal search to expand your keyword targeting on search engines and to give customers what they are looking for.

Full slides for this presentation are here:

In part 1 of What SEO/SEM Professionals Should Know About Website Usability, usability experts Peter Morville and Susan Weinschenk answered the question, “What should SEO professionals know about usability?” For this installment, website usability guru Jakob Nielsen and Kim Krause Berg share their observations and perspectives. Enjoy!

Jakob Nielsen’s formula for website success

“The main thing SEO professionals should remember about Web usability is the formula for website success,” said Jakob Nielsen, Principal at Nielsen Norman Group.

What’s the formula?

B = V x C x L

Where:

• B = amount of business done by the site

• V = unique visitors coming to the site
• C = conversion rate (the percentage of visitors who become customers); note that the concept of conversion applies not only to ecommerce sites, but to any site where there is something you want users to do
• L = loyalty rate (the degree to which customers return to conduct repeat business)

“Narrowly considered, SEO might be thought of as the goal to rank as highly in SERPs for important keywords,” Nielsen continued. “While important, these rankings are only half of the ‘V‘ element of site success. Besides ranking high, you also need users to click the listing, so clickthrough provides the other half of ‘V.’ Clickthrough is determined by usability considerations; more specifically content usability, in form of the guidelines for writing for the Web.”

“The page title is the most important: it must be written to provide strong information scent and to extrude usefulness,” he said. “The article summary and the URL are viewed less, but are still important to help users determine whether to click a top search hit or to proceed to the next one.”

“After V comes C: It does no good to drive traffic to the wrong page that doesn’t convert visitors into customers,” said Nielsen. “Conversion rate, of course, is determined by usability: do people understand the landing page, does it speak to their concerns, and can they find their way around the site to solve their problem and understand your product line?”

“Finally, I believe that L is the most important variable for long-term website strategy: It is imperative that websites liberate themselves from being overlydependent on search engines and regain the positioning as the place users turn for the type of problem they address,” he said. “Right now, the best loyalty mechanism is the email newsletter, so it’s important to balance the site design in such a way that it encourages newsletter sign-ups at the same time as it also drives conversions.”

“The key duty of an SEO should be to advise management on how to lower search-engine dependability. Don’t worry: this won’t put you out of your job, because there will always be a need for search-driven traffic,” he added.

“Returning to the narrow SEO job of high rankings, that’s of course highly dependent on knowing the vocabulary customers use when they think about the problem your site purports to solve,” Nielsen concluded. “You can get a lot of ideas for new keywords simply by listening to what people say during user testing, so that’s a last way in which SEO and usability intersect.”

SEO tunnel vision

“Being an SEO that switched over to 100% website usability, I feel that my work supports and fortifies the procedures and steps a search engine marketer takes for their client,” said Kim Krause Berg, owner and creator of Cre8pc.com and the popular Cre8asiteForums. “Most usability-oriented SEOs will say that SEO without usability is illogical. They’ll point out that the money value invested in SEO and online marketing is doubled when applied to a site that’s been designed properly for the user experience. This is correct.”

“However,” she continued, “a usable and accessible website will be remembered by site visitors whose needs were satisfied. Give them a pleasant online experience, from search result to whipping out their credit card, and they’ll refer the site to friends, return themselves, bookmark it, link to it, blog about it, submit user generated content to it, and more.”

“I find there’s a bit of tunnel vision toward usability by web designers and SEOs,” she said. “You’ll hear SEOs say, ‘Let’s make sure the navigation works,’ or ‘We need to be sure pages aren’t cluttered.’ How many SEO companies ask for user persona or demographic data to help with optimization and targeted marketing? Why are we not user testing during the design phase, especially for rebuilds? Where are specifications documents that include search engine optimization, accessibility and user experience requirements?

“SEOs have the skills to enable search engines, not manipulate search behavior. I think sometime they forget visitor expectations,” she explained. “For example, landing pages. How great and necessary to plant the seed in search engines, but is the page task based? Is there a value proposition? Call to action? Can someone using assistive software use the page? Or was the point just to be found, but not serve? An expert blend of SEO and usability elements can fine tune pages to rank and satisfy expectations. I wouldn’t invest in one without the other.

“I think if search engines didn’t exist, and we had to find websites based on word of mouth, print, newsletters, forums or blogs instead, the impact on user experience and usage would be more obvious,” she concluded. “We’d quickly learn that enabling search engines is not enough. We don’t remember sites because search engines rank them well. We remember and return to websites that work for us and give us what we want, when we want it.”

Conclusion

First, I want to thank Peter Morville, Dr. Susan Weinschenk, Dr. Jakob Nielsen, and Kim Krause Berg for sharing their knowledge. I always learn something new or how to improve client websites every time I talk to them or read their books, articles, and blogs.

Many SEO professionals might not agree with some of their observations and perspectives. Some of their viewpoints surprised me a bit, too, but I always listen, reflect upon, and then test their observations on actual client sites. Result? I almost always end up creating more effective web pages.

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.

One of the biggest challenges B2B clients grapple with is content creation. Developing material that is fresh, relevant, and keeps users coming back—while also being SEO-friendly—can be difficult. This is a problem. Fortunately though, there’s an easy and effective solution. And it’s closer than you might think.

The situation

For the most part, B2B organizations struggle with content development for one reason, and it’s not because they don’t have anything to say. Rather, the problem can be attributed to staffing, or a lack thereof, as content development typically is quite lean in most B2B organizations.

However, these same organizations tend to have solid PR teams in place—whether in house or on the agency side—that are ready, willing, and able to generate new material. In essence, what these organizations lack in the area of content development, they make up for in PR.

The solution

Given that, B2B marketers struggling with content development should try to capitalize on PR to generate new content. Doing so could provide the ideal solution. In fact, my experience has shown that once PR is brought up to speed on the goal and how they can assist, they are excited to contribute.

But before you run down the hall to ask for their help, let’s first take a look at how you can get the most out of the resource.

Getting clarity

To start, if you are going to partner with PR, then it’s critical to get some clarity. Specifically, what constitutes content? Good question. And timely too, especially given the development of blended search.

Over the last year, the major search engines have started to display blended results, which integrates different forms of digital content—images, news, videos,—into the general search results. Now web pages are not the only type of content that matters. Instead, the search results landscape has changed.

This is actually a good thing. The change represents considerable opportunity for marketers as it allows them to leverage their various forms of digital content, and as a result, increases their chance to stand out amongst the clutter in the search results.

But for some reason, when marketers think of content, they limit themselves to web pages. This is a mistake. For example, most marketers fail to realize that a white paper is content too—just in a slightly different format—and that if it is optimized properly, it can do quite well in the search results.

But now with blended search, there’s so much more opportunity. Images, videos, and yes, even press releases are considered content too. In fact, a recent study on blended search reveals that of all the types of specialized content now displayed in the general search results, users prefer news items the most.

Success factors

Clearly, the opportunities for content development are endless, and PR is a great resource to leverage. However, what are the chances that the PR team is idly sitting around waiting for your call? My guess? Not very likely. So if you are considering tapping into PR, you would be wise to keep the following factors in mind as you move forward. Doing so could make the difference between the success or failure of the initiative.

Strategy. If you want to leverage PR, you’ll need their buy-in first. To start, discuss your overall strategy with them. Take the time to explain the content challenges you are experiencing, and that you value their opinions in developing a solution. While this might seem like a very trivial part of the process, it’s not. I have seen numerous organizations fail right from the starting blocks because they did not get buy-in from their PR folks.

Education. To successfully tap into PR, you need to educate them first. Again, this might seem very basic, but it is another area where organizations regularly shoot themselves in the foot. Most of the PR folks I have worked with on this were initially intimidated by the task of developing content for searchers. For the most part, I think their trepidation can be attributed to the fact that this is a new area for them. To help them feel more comfortable with the task, provide a few training sessions on what SEO is, what your goals are, and specifically what you are looking for them to do. But keep in mind that your PR folks may be wary that you’ll want them to turn everything they create into marketing fluff instead of meaningful content. Given that, be sure to spend a good amount of time discussing the types of content you are looking for them to produce. Then allow them to brainstorm some ideas; it will get you more buy-in that way.

Develop a pilot. To effectively leverage PR, start small. From my experience, the most successful initiatives start as pilots. The benefits of doing so are twofold: Not only will it help you get it right—by getting everyone on the same page first—it will also make it much easier to create momentum and show the results. This will get people excited about what you are collectively accomplishing, and as a result, they’ll be more willing to make it a regular effort.

Other formats. Leveraging PR for content development also means capitalizing on other media formats. You can involve your PR team in the optimization of additional types of digital content such as videos and podcasts. Many PR teams already create these digital assets for a variety of reasons, so take the time to train them to make subtle but effective changes, such as incorporating keywords in questions and using keywords to describe the video.

Measurement. Last, but not least, to fully capitalize on PR, you need to set goals and measure performance. A good way to start is to work with your PR team and the results of your pilot to set goals for your efforts. Be sure to set goals in terms of pages of content and frequency of update. More importantly, you must also set performance goals. But be mindful that the best goal setting is done as a collaborative effort. Make these performance goals aim for better placements in the search engines, more traffic, and more registrations or leads (some form of business results). And make sure to track these metrics monthly and report back to all involved so that everyone feels as though they are part of the effort.

Overall, if you are a B2B marketer struggling with content creation, your PR team could be the solution to your problem. But to make it work, you need to get their buy-in, run a pilot, and set and measure the goals for these efforts. If done properly, you have the chance to really make a difference.

Brian Kaminski is managing director of search engine marketing firm iProspect in San Francisco, and can be reached at b.kaminski@iprospect.com. The Strictly Business column appears Wednesdays at Search Engine Land.

Landing pages are an important tool in any online marketing campaign. They are one of the best ways to convert web clicks into clients, and can help to maximize your online performance. Here are some tips for getting started and building an effective landing page that meets the needs of your clients.

What is a landing page?

A landing page is a web page that a visitor reaches after clicking an online ad or a link, and contains detailed information about the specific product or service that is mentioned. The landing page should be considered part of the marketing campaign and shouldn’t just be another page on your website.

When you start developing a landing page you should really consider its purpose. What are you hoping visitors will do when they get there? Is your goal to sell a product, help visitors learn more about a service, or do you want them to provide you feedback? All of these goals would need different landing pages.

An effective landing page makes your visitors’ lives easier by providing them all the information that they need without having to scour your site or the web for answers. Using landing pages can significantly impact your conversion rate. A survey by Atlas OnePoint found that the average conversion rate when companies used their homepage as the destination for an advertisement or link was only 6 percent. However, companies that used targeted landing pages had almost double the conversion rate, with 12 percent of their visitors converting.

Landing pages can also improve your search engine optimization because they are filled with keywords about your business or product. Search engines want to provide the most relevant results, so these keyword-rich pages can improve your rank.

How to make a superior landing page

Content is an important part of a landing page, but knowing what to include and what to omit is very important. Your landing page should do one of three things—give your prospect reason to convert, enable them to do so, or resolve any concerns the prospect may have about converting. If any of the information on your page does not accomplish this, then it shouldn’t be there.

The site should provide relevant, focused, and detailed information about a specific product or service. It is most beneficial if this can be included on a single page. According to website optimization firm, Interactive Marketing Inc., this can increase conversion by 55 percent. This information should also be visible “above the fold,” or without the need to scroll down.

It is important to keep in mind who your audience is and make sure that the information you provide is relevant to them. This may mean you need to develop multiple landing pages for a single product. This will allow you to target your message to each specific audience.

Landing pages, as mentioned earlier, have a purpose, either to ask people to buy or to provide them more information—to meet that goal, your page needs to have a call to action. This can be a simple button asking people to purchase a product or click to read a free report. The button should be clearly labeled and should explain what you want customers to do.

Having a well designed page can heavily impact your conversion rate. Eye-tracking studies and other research have given online marketers new information about how users interact with websites.

People tend to look at the upper left hand side first, then at the headline and then at the left side of the page. To maximize your success, the most important information should be in these positions.

Additionally, the look and feel of your page should be consistent with your other marketing materials, and it should appear trustworthy. Users want to see a design that is consistent with the advertisement or link that brought them to your page so they know they’re in the right place. If you change your advertising campaign, you should change your landing page as well.

The impression your site gives visitors is crucial. A Stanford study found that 46 percent of web sales are lost on sites lacking the critical elements to build trust. The number one reason people indicated they don’t buy from a site is because it had an unprofessional look and feel that lacked credibility. Building this trust is crucial if you’re trying to gather personal information about your website’s users. The most common answer submitted on personal information forms online is Mickey Mouse. If you want fewer “Mickey Mouses” on your prospect list, this key is building trust.

The headline and page title on your landing page are very important. The page title is in the bar at the top of your web browser, and the headline is the biggest piece of text on the page. These two items have the greatest potential to impact your conversion rate. Include the keywords or phrases you used in the advertisement to get visitors to the site. Position these items where your eye travels first—the top left of the screen.

You now know the key to developing an effective design and helpful content, but what if you don’t have an in-house web designer or the resources to hire someone to design a landing page for every online marketing campaign? Luckily, there are online sites that help you create your own landing pages relatively easily and inexpensively. These sites don’t require that you know HTML, and designing a landing page can be as easy as creating a PowerPoint slide. For example, Marketo.com offers landing page creation tools and hosting.

Landing page optimization

To improve your landing page—test and test again. There are a few elements that are very important, including load time and headline.

Try to keep load time under 5 seconds. Cater your page to the slowest dial-up connection so as not to lose these visitors. Web analytics software can tell you how many of your visitors are using a slow connection, and a variety of sites, such as iWebTool, offer free tools to test your page load time.

Headlines can alter conversion times, so test a variety of them to see which is most effective. Headlines should tell the benefit to the customer, not necessarily the product features.

A landing page is also a good place to test different prices for your product if you display them online. An Allbusiness.com article about the psychology of pricing noted that prices that end with odd numbers, especially 7s or 9s, tend to be associated with lower prices than even numbers.

Finally, test the call to action to find one that delivers the highest conversion rates. This includes the buttons themselves. Large, red buttons tend to have the best conversion.

Tuning your landing page

Just building a landing page isn’t enough; to be effective, the page must be routinely updated. Updated content can boost your search engine optimization, it can help you track what content generates the best conversion, and it can improve traffic. The more you update, the more reason people have to visit your page. A Marketing Sherpa eye-tracking study showed that consistently updating and tweaking content can increase traffic by 40 percent.

One of the most important things to update is pricing changes. A landing page that misquotes a price will frustrate and most likely turn off a prospect. In a recent survey, Enquiro found that users of B2B websites preferred to see pricing information but it is often unavailable. Supplying a price range may help customers determine if you are within their budget, without requiring you to list specific prices.

Finally, make sure that none of the links are broken and remove any outdated links.

Landing pages are a great way to provide your customers the information they need in one convenient location, and they can help you convert web clicks into clients. While they may take some work to set up and maintain, they can drastically improve your online marketing efforts.

Julie Mason is general manager of Kellysearch.com. The Back To Basics column appears periodically at Search Engine Land.

The main problem with marketing is it’s too much marketing and not enough problem—your customer’s problem. Too often, we focus on our product instead of what our customer needs. Instead of trumpeting how great our products are, the Internet rewards companies that let their customers come to them.

And just how do you let your customers come to you? Search marketing is a good place to start. Some of the most successful search marketers know how to focus on the customer’s problem to allow customers to come to them.

Consider an example. You’ve just been named the product manager for a new line of organic lawn care products, to be branded “Green Can Be Green.” Beneficent Chemicals is branching out from its current brand image and its research scientists have given you an exciting new product as the first foray into the new line—Chinch Away. It’s totally organic, but it rids your lawn of those nasty chinch bugs that eat it to death. And your product does it in half the time as the old methods.

But it’s not that easy. Beneficent wants to start out selling totally online so that the new brand doesn’t get mixed in with its older brand image. You’ll get a Green Can Be Green Web site and you’ll ship all your products direct to consumers. Your job: Get them to find you and buy from you.

Immediately, you know that search marketing will be a critical part of your marketing mix. So, you start thinking about the keywords you’ll want to optimize for. “Chinch bugs,” of course. Maybe even “chinch” by itself. “Organic lawn care” and “organic insecticide”? Maybe. You start to look through all of your product materials and find some more words and phrases. Then you design a nice web site, filled with information about your product. About how fast Chinch Away works, how easy to apply, and, most of all, how green it is.

And it works. You’re attracting customers, you’re selling online, and you even start buying paid search ads for a few of the keywords. But you’ve missed a big chunk of potential buyers. You’ve missed the ones that don’t know they need you.

Think about the problem from your customer’s point of view. A homeowner’s lawn suddenly develops circular patches of yellow, wilted grass. That’s a problem. And the bigger problem is that the homeowner doesn’t know why. He turns to his favorite search engine, starting with “problem words,” such as “circles yellow grass.” If he knew what would solve his problem, he’d search for that, but he doesn’t. If that doesn’t work, he might try “yellow wilted grass” or just “yellow grass.” He’ll keep looking for information about the symptoms until he finds some ideas about what to do.

Unfortunately, it’s unlikely that anyone would diagnose chinch bugs from what they find. They’re finding random questions on message boards about “yellow grass” and there are myriad causes of a yellowed lawn. Chinch bugs are rarely mentioned first. When confronted with this kind of information, people typically head to the store—a store that does not carry Chinch Away (because you sell only online).

What can you do about this? Well, you can provide the information that is needed. You can set out to provide the absolute best resources for diagnosing the cause of “yellow grass” that the Web has ever seen. You can walk the customer through each step they can take to determine what the causes could be. You can use photos, videos, whatever is required to make it as easy as possible.

Write it like a magazine article—as objective as possible. But (oh yeah), when you get to the part about diagnosing chinch bugs, it’s OK to link to your Chinch Away page to persuade them that yours is the best solution. But the rest of the article should focus totally on the customer’s problem. And each possible cause should get the same attention as chinch bugs do. It helps establish the credibility of the article, and you’ll be happy later as you expand your Green Can Be Green product line to handle other problems.

Why would you go to all that trouble? Because writing articles that are truly helpful to your customers (rather than sales pitches) benefit your search marketing in big ways:

You attract people searching for different keywords. If you can attract people searching for “yellow grass” when none of your competitors do, you have the first chance to sell them. These folks may never search for “chinch bugs” if you give them what they want. Many of them want to die ignorant of the array of chinch bug products out there—they just want the problem gone as quickly as possible. What’s more, this target segment might prove to be more loyal than the others—if their problem returns in a few years, they might head straight for your product because it worked.

You attract search engines looking for different content. Google’s Universal Search (as well as similar approaches with other search engines) puts more of a premium on non-text content than ever before. Your photos, your videos, and other forms now appear in the main search results pages and give you new ways of reaching your audience.

Your article is tasty link bait. Think about what kinds of information is linked to from other sites. It’s not your sales brochures or your product spec pages—it’s information that really helps readers. Information that solves their problems.

Searchers will pass your information to others. People pass on things they think will help other people, not sales pitches. Take advantage of the social media explosion to tap into “word of mouse.” Problem-solving content is more likely to be passed on than most of what sits on your web site.

Is anyone actually doing this? Absolutely—maybe the most famous example comes from longtime marketing innovator Procter & Gamble. “Problem marketing” is a key part of P&G’s approach. Check out their Home Made Simple site. Or try searching for “remove bbq sauce stain from cotton” and see if P&G’s Tide site still comes up #1. Maybe you didn’t expect a detergent manufacturer to be found for this search, but that is what problem marketing does for you. Tide’s site contains hundreds of combinations of stains and fabrics so they can be found for exactly what their customers are struggling with.

This kind of approach won’t work for all businesses—no one is thinking about solving a problem when they drink a Coke. But lots of businesses really are solving customer problems, and using “problem marketing” techniques gives you a new way to connect with customers that few of your competitors take advantage of.

Mike Moran is an IBM Distinguished Engineer for IBM’s OmniFind search and analytics products. He can be reached through his Web site mikemoran.com.

In part 2 of our 3-part series, today’s infographic details an essential element of keyword research: exploring conversations that are happening on the web. By combing through competitive and industry websites, relevant blog postings, and popular tag sites, new phrases are discovered and search frequencies can be determined.

Graphic by Elliance, an eMarketing firm specializing in results-driven search engine marketing, web site design, and outbound eMarketing campaigns. The firm is the creator of the ennect online marketing toolkit. The Search Illustrated column appears Tuesdays at Search Engine Land.

Thorough keyword research, done with the website’s goals in mind, is critical for a successful search marketing campaign. In part 1 of a short series dedicated to keyword research, today’s infographic explores the first—and arguably most important—step in the process: thinking like the customer.

Graphic by Elliance, an eMarketing firm specializing in results-driven search engine marketing, web site design, and outbound eMarketing campaigns. The firm is the creator of the ennect online marketing toolkit. The Search Illustrated column appears Tuesdays at Search Engine Land.

If there’s anything I particularly hate when it comes to SEO, it’s the meta keywords tag. I so wish it had never been invented. It’s practically useless, yet people still obsess over it. In this article, I’ll explain more about why you shouldn’t worry about it except perhaps for misspellings, as well as which search engines support it.

The meta keywords tag is one of several of meta tags that you can insert into your web pages to provide search engines with information about your pages that isn’t visible on the page itself. For example, my Meta Robots Tag 101: Blocking Spiders, Cached Pages & More article covers how you can use a different meta tag — the meta robots tag — to block pages from being indexed. Users don’t see this information (unless they look at your source code), but search engines do.

Meta Tags & Your Header

Meta tags go within the header area of your web pages. A typical head might look like this:

<head> <title>Welcome To Shoe Central!</title> <meta name=”description” content=”All the best prices on shoes!” /> <meta name=”robots” content=”noodp” /> <meta name=”keywords” content=”shoe, shoes, shoee, shos, footwear” /> </head>

The header is the section that begins <head> and ends </head>. Between those elements, in our example, you have these tags:

• Title: The text here becomes the title that is shown in search engine listings, in most cases.
• Description: The text here is text that search engines sometimes use as a description for your web page when listing it (a meta tag lesson for another time).
• Robots: This particular tag is configured to ensure that the page isn’t described using the a description that the Open Directory might have for it (Meta Robots Tag 101 explains this more).
• Keywords: This tag is the topic of this article, so read on!

History Of Meta Keywords

I’ve long written about search engines and meta tags, but I have never been able to pin down exactly who created the meta keywords tag. There’s a December 1995 internet draft memo that’s the earliest and most authoritative mention of the tag I know of. It says:

<META HTTP-EQUIV= “Keywords” CONTENT= “Italy Product, Italy Tourism”>

The spaces between a comma and a word or vice versa are ignored….

These ‘keywords’ were specifically conceived for exhaustively and completely catalogue the HTML document. This allows the software agents to index at best your own document. To do a preliminary indexing, it’s important to use at least the http-equiv meta-tag “keywords”.

Sounds good, right? Like this is designed for the search engines to use? The issue is that HTML specs like these (especially drafts) are not necessarily used by the search engines. They can use them, ignore them or build upon them as they see fit.

As it turns out, several of the major search engines got together in May 1996 to talk about meta data. That meeting gave birth to a common standard for the meta robots and the meta description tags. As for the meta keywords tag, it was discussed, but no specification emerged.

Despite no specification, both Infoseek (later Go.com, these days no longer crawling the web) and AltaVista (now owned and powered by Yahoo) offered support for the meta keywords tag in 1996. If you looked at their help files at the time, they encouraged site owners to use the tag. Inktomi (now owned by Yahoo) also provided support when it began operations later in 1996, and Lycos (no longer crawling the web) added support in 1997.

That year — 1997 — was the last year that the meta keywords tag enjoyed support among the majority of major crawlers out there (4 out of 7 – Excite, WebCrawler and Northern Light, also crawling the web that year, did not support it).

Support Dies Off

When new search engines emerged in 1998, such as Google and FAST, they didn’t support the tag. The reason was simple. By that time, search engines had learned that some webmasters would “stuff” the same word over and over into the meta keywords tag, as a way of trying to rank better. At the time, search engines didn’t rely so heavily on link analysis, so page stuffing like this was more effective. Alternatively, some site owners would insert words that they weren’t relevant for.

In July 2002, AltaVista dropped its support of the tag. That left Inktomi as the only major crawler still supporting it, causing me to somewhat famously in the SEO world to declare the tag dead, since it was no longer a major ranking factor for even Inktomi:

Traffick.com’s Andrew Goodman wrote recently in an essay about meta tags, “If somebody would just declare the end of the metatag era, full stop, it would make it easier on everyone.”

I’m happy to oblige, at least in the case of the meta keywords tag. Now supported by only one major crawler-based search engine — Inktomi — the value of adding meta keywords tags to pages seems little worth the time. In my opinion, the meta keywords tag is dead, dead, dead. And like Andrew, good riddance, I say!

Since that time, Inktomi was rolled up into Yahoo, which continues to support the meta keywords tag as part of its Yahoo search engine. Or does it?

Search Engine Rep Confusion

Last month, I moderated my last “Meet The Crawlers” panel for the Search Engine Strategies conference series (Goodbye Search Engine Strategies! explains more about my shift from SES to my own SMX: Search Marketing Expo series). That perennial favorite question came up during the session. Who supports the meta keywords tag?

Sigh. But if this question still coming up wasn’t depressing enough, then the search engine reps starting responding with a load of confusion. To paraphrase:

No, we don’t support it. Well, we read it. We read it, but it doesn’t matter. Actually, maybe we don’t read it.

Even Evan Roseman from Google said at one point that Google reads the meta keywords tag, suggesting no doubt to some that Google uses the tag.

To be clear, Google doesn’t. I’ll prove it further below, but it doesn’t, OK?

I gave Evan (hopefully) some good humored hassle afterward for saying this. He’s at least the second Google rep to declare this on panels I’ve moderated in as many years, and the problem is that the engineers (from any of the search engines) often take the question too literally.

Indexing Versus Retrieval Versus Ranking

To understand, let me talk about three different things a search engine does when it crawls and lists your page:

• Indexing: This is where the search engine effectively makes a copy of your page. The search engine is going to read and store the HTML content it finds — all of it. Evan was right when he said that the meta keyword tag is indexed by Google. Google knows that the tag exists and has recorded what’s in it. But that doesn’t mean it does anything else with it.
• Retrieval: This is where the search engine finds all the matching documents relevant for what you searched for. Most of those documents will actually have the words you searched for on them, in the sections that the search engine searches against (there are some exceptions, such as when anchor text is used to find pages. Google Now Reporting Anchor Text Phrases, Google Kills Bush’s Miserable Failure Search & Other Google Bombs and Google Declares Stephen Colbert As Greatest Living American explain more about this). While the search engine has recorded the entire page, it won’t search against everything indexed for retrieval. In other words, Google will look to see if words you searched for appear in the body area of a document, but it will NOT look in the meta keywords tag for matching words. The keywords tag, while indexed, is not used for retrieval at Google. At Yahoo, it is.
• Ranking: This is where the search engine looks at all those documents retrieved for a search and puts them in order of most importance, according to its algorithm. Retrieval (or what information research professionals call “recall”) is about finding everything). Ranking (or what the IR folks call “precision” — see Tim Bray’s excellent On Search: Precision and Recall document) is about getting the best stuff up to the top. Yahoo, while using the tag for retrieval, really doesn’t assign much weight to it for ranking.

Testing For Retrieval

Back to my panel experience. Since the reps were unclear, I declared to the audience that I’d just go out and test it again myself. It’s literally been about five years since I’ve last tested the tag, because I (and many others) feel it is so useless. There are better things to do with our time. But since that question needs a big old stake to the heart, I rolled up my sleeves and got cracking.

On the Search Engine Land home page, I inserted this meta keywords tag:

<meta name=”keywords” content=”qiskodslajdmnkd, ddakaieciuaj jkdalladpaoaw, wdaopeqndlkakljad” />

I had searched for all of these words on the four major search engines of Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Ask and found no pages that matched. If these search engines made use of the meta keywords tag, I’d know in short order, if my page started coming up.

The tag went up on August 28. I then needed to wait until I could see each search engine had the most current version of my page (Squeezing The Search Loaf: Finding Search Engine Freshness & Crawl Dates explains more on how to do this).

Google: No

It took two days, until August 30, for Google to show the latest version of my page in its index. I searched for each of the words, and my home page didn’t come up. The meta keyword tag was not used for retrieval and thus not supported.

Microsoft Live: No

It took five days, until September 2, for Microsoft to show a version of my page with the meta keywords tag on it. As an aside, Microsoft is kind of annoying. It will say something like this in the cached copy of the page:

This is a version of http://searchengineland.com/ as it looked when our crawler examined the site on 9/2/2007. The page you see below is the version in our index that was used to rank this page in the results to your recent query. This is not necessarily the most recent version of the page – to see the most recent version of this page, visit the page on the web.

If you glance quickly at the date, you might think the page has been revisited fairly recently. But as the text explains, it might be older. Indeed, when I looked on September 2 (as is the case today), the copy of the page in the index was as of August 30, as I could tell from the stories shown.

As with Google, I searched for each of the words, and my page didn’t come up. The meta keyword tag was NOT used for retrieval and thus not supported.

Yahoo: Yes

It took two days, until August 30, for Yahoo to have my latest page. Searches there did bring up the home page for all words. So the meta keywords tag IS used for retrieval.

Ask: Yes

Ask took the longest to show the most current version of my page, not reflecting the changes until today. Actually, when I look at the cached copy even now, it says that the page is from August 13 and uses a redirection URL rather than my http://searchengineland.com address.

Still, I can tell Ask has a version with the meta keywords tag on it since I’m getting back my home page when searching for words in that tag. As with Yahoo, the meta keywords tag IS used for retrieval.

Should You Use It? Sure, For Misspellings

So there you have it — half of the major crawlers (Yahoo & Ask.com) DO support the tag. Should you begin using it? My advice would be only for misspellings and really unusual words.

As explained, the tag can help with retrieval. A word in the tag is treated as if it were a word visible on the page itself. Now that’s handy for misspellings. For example, say you’re writing about Basset hounds. You suspect some people might misspell the name as Bassett hounds, adding an extra T. You could misspell the word yourself on the visible page, but that makes you look bad. You could insert the word and then try to hide it using CSS styles or putting it in the same color as the page background. But this type of “hidden” text is generally against search engine guidelines.

Enter the meta keywords tag. Just do this:

<meta name=”keywords” content=”bassett” />

Now you’ve got the misspelling on your page in a “legal” means that will be read by Yahoo and Ask. You’re still out of luck for Google and Live.com, but two out four ain’t bad.

But I Want To Rank!

What about ranking better with the tag. I mentioned already that many experienced SEOs don’t find it useful. Believe me, if just putting a single word into that tag was going to rank your page better, everyone would be doing it. Instead, search for anything on Yahoo or Ask. You’ll see plenty of pages ranking well for words without those words appearing in the meta keywords tag. And if you do see the words in the tag, it’s more due to coincidence — the words also appear in the body copy, in the title tag and often in links pointing at the page. The words in the meta keywords tag aren’t the primary reason the page is ranking well. Promise.

Back to our Basset Hound example. Sure, you can add the correct spelling to your meta keywords tag. Go ahead, if you want. Just understand that it is not likely to make you rank any better than if you didn’t include it at all. Moreover, beginners are especially likely to spend far too long worrying about getting the “right” words in the meta keywords tag rather than just writing good body copy.

Comma Conundrum

One of the most common questions I used to get way back in the old days was over using commas in the meta keywords tag. Consider these options:

1. <meta name=”keywords” content=”bassett, hound, hounds, basset” />
2. <meta name=”keywords” content=”bassett,hound,hounds,basset” />
3. <meta name=”keywords” content=”bassett hound, bassett hounds, basset hound, basset hound” />
4. <meta name=”keywords” content=”bassett hound,bassett hounds,basset hound,basset hound” />
5. <meta name=”keywords” content=”bassett hound bassett hounds basset hound basset hound” />
6. <meta name=”keywords” content=”bassett hound basset hounds” />

Sigh. See why I hate this tag so much, when I’ve had to deal with people wondering about commas and spaces and variations like this. Let’s take it from the top, as to the motivations behind these versions:

1. This is someone who thinks that each word should be on its own, separated by a comma and with a space in front of the next word.
2. This is someone who thinks that getting rid of the spaces means they can squeeze in more words.
3. This is someone who thinks that if there are particular phrases they want to be found for, those phrases should be together and set off by commas.
4. As with three, but losing the spaces to squeeze in more words.
5. Similar to three but thinking you don’t need commas at all.
6. This is Mr. or Ms. Paranoid. They’re concerned about saying any word too often. So they lose the commas, restrict repetition and hope that proximity will help (IE, put “basset” behind “hound” rather than in front and maybe you’ll still show up for “basset hound.”

Which way should you go? I’d suggest number three, for these reasons:

• Yahoo has long recommended using commas and in particular supported them as a way to separate out distinct terms for those in their paid inclusion programs. I’ll update this page with the latest advice, but commas still seem to make sense.
• Spaces just make things look nicer, and you shouldn’t be shoving a ton of terms in the tag anyway. How long is too long? No idea! In the past, the search engines just wouldn’t index content beyond around 250 to 1,000 characters. Maybe I’ll test this in the future.
• You do want phrases kept together. “bassett, hound” is probably going to be seen as “bassett hound” anyway, but why risk it?

Other Uses

I mentioned that misspellings were a key use for the tag. You could also use it for synonyms. For example, if you have a page all about shoes and you never say “footwear,” you could put that word in your tag. However, it’s far better if you just find a way to make use of the word in the body copy itself. That text is retrieved by all the major search engines, not just some.

Aside from synonyms, perhaps you have a page that’s all Flash or all images. Use the meta keywords tag to describe the page. Just remember that you’re still not likely to rank better than other pages that have textual information. Search engines are textual creatures. Give them what they want.

Some Official Guidelines

The W3C has guidelines (and here) in HTML 4.0 about meta data and search engines, while the XHTML specs don’t get into it at all. Ignore the specs. YES, IGNORE THE SPECS. Some of them are wrong; some are outdated. The only thing I can see that they explain is the difference between these:

• <meta name=”keywords” content=”bassett”>
• <meta name=”keywords” content=”bassett” />

See how the second tag ends /> rather than > in the first? As best I can tell, this is because a meta tag is an “empty element” in XHTML, where there’s not a “start” and a “finish” (as with a paragraph element: <p> is the beginning, with </p> the end). Empty elements in XHTML need that /> format.

I haven’t tested things without the />, but there are so many (so very, very many) pages out there not following that syntax that it is virtually certain Yahoo and Ask will read the tag either way. Doing it fresh? Do it /> style. But don’t go back and start changing things.

Aside from that, if you want to know how a search engine deals with meta data officially, you go to the search engine itself. Ask’s webmaster guidelines don’t mention the meta keywords tag, so that leaves Yahoo:

• Yahoo Quality Guidelines: “Metadata (including title and description) that accurately describes the contents of a web page.” This is telling you don’t lie with your keywords. Don’t insert words that aren’t somehow related to the topic of your page.
• How do I improve the ranking of my web site in the search results?: “Use a ‘keyword’ meta-tag to list key words for the document. Use a distinct list of keywords that relate to the specific page on your site instead of using one broad set of keywords for every page.” Note that it doesn’t say you’ll automatically rank better by doing this. Also, unique words for each page would be my advice, as well — but do NOT worry if you decide to use the same set of key terms on each of your pages. It isn’t that big of a deal.

Looking for the exact format that you should use for the meta keywords tag from Yahoo? You know, commas, spaces and all that. Sorry — they don’t provide it, which is another sign you’re probably worrying too much about it.

Freaked? Skip It

Overall, here’s the best advice I can offer anyone dealing with this tag. If you begin to feel confused, concern, tired or uncertain when pondering it, SKIP THE TAG ENTIRELY. It’s not going to hurt you to not have it, and it’s not worth the time fretting about it.