Understanding search experince from an SEO viewpoint

The  experience of an end user of your information at a search engine is determined by many factors This article helps  us to put some of them into the picture more clearly.

What an end user is  expecting when he / she uses a search engine is often forgotten by the web master and those involved in designing a web page, as is clearly pointed out in the article. So what is your responsibility as an SEO specialist when you discuss the make up and contents of a web page?

Which words an end user will type into the search engine is difficult to determine, but what your end users perceive your website to be about  is very helpful, and your marketing team should fill you in on this as they are the ones who determine your target market, and give you a brief on the aims, objectives and purpose of a page.

The term "aboutness" is used in the article discussed and this is very often neglected by the design team. How to ensure that this is taken seriously by the marketing people in your design team is often a problem,  as they are concerned about the marketing issues and loose sight of the fact that  the rest of the team must be following their instructions, as all online materials which are not directly sales pages are about marketing different aspects of your company / organisation in some shape manner or form.

The aboutness of your pages is often a subject that is attributed to the web site as a whole and not a single page. This is an important aspect of the search experience as the words that the end user (Searcher) uses to find your information is defined by his ideas of the aboutness of your information. It thus follows that each page needs some attention of its own aboutness as a stand alone page.

As a seasoned internet user you know and take many things for granted which most end users are totally ignorant about. This often leads to the aboutness of a page being lost or misplaced and thus not included from an SEO point of view in the page makeup instructions in a manner that the copy writer clearly understands.  When your work force is small and there are less than 5 people working on your pages these things become more critical as there are less eyes to pick up these small errors that lead to the aboutness of your page being misinterpreted by search engines.

Now we all hear about KEY word META TAGS being irrelevant for SERP's (Search Engine Results Positions) and how they are a waste of time and effort, but what do they do for the ABOUTNESS of your page?  Did you ever think of the aboutness of your page from a key word meta tag perspective?

To ensure that the aboutness of you page is interpreted better by both search engines and end users ensure you page has the following.

1) a page description  (meta tags in head)
2) a page title (meta tags in head)
3) a key words list (meta tags in head)
4) good well worded content
5) out bound links to related material (internal)
6) inbound links (internal links) from other relevant pages within your web site 
7) out bound links to related material (external)
8) Inbound links from
                                 a) your social media platforms
                                 b)  external sources (other webs sites)
If you have all eight of these essential parts of your SEO in place the end user will find your site closer to the top of the SERP's and thus have a better search experience when searching for your info..

Search experience is determined by the search engine, and you (SEO / SEM staff)  play a small but very significant role by ensuring that your pages are search engine friendly. read this article for more on understanding search experience

What words to use and why from an SEO perspective

First things first, content is king, and the most vital part of any SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) strategy.

Linking your content to your target markets vocabulary is step 2. Defining your target market is the real trick that needs to be mastered, as you don't want people coming to your site then leaving in a hurry because they are not interested in your subject matter, and feel that they have been deceived by your marketing tricks.

Understanding your target market and their vocabulary is vital as you need to understand what words they would use to search for your information and optimize your page with these words in mind. Mis-spellings, foreign language words, and local slang are important, and all major search engines are beginning to use these concepts to establish the intent of a searcher from the words he / she has used in the search box.

all past searches are stored and evaluated by search engines on an ongoing basis to determine trends and search patterns within their user base. These results are factored into the SEA (Search Engine Algorithm) to determine a users intent, and search engines are beginning to get quite good at this.

This implies that your content must be well written and match up to your META TAG info, especially the keywords meta tags and any categories you may have listed in the head section of your page. Connecting the intent of an end user to your page is not a simple task, and a host of  variables will be factored into this section of the Search Engine Algorithm, with MANY OF THESE FACTORS BEING WAY OUT OF YOUR CONTROL.

Things like past searches done by others and current trending topics will be at the top of this list used to determine the end users intent at the search engine. Read this post for a deeper understanding of how search engines are using user intent factors.
http://searchengineland.com/is-googles-synonym-matching-increasing-how-searchers-and-brands-can-be-both-helped-and-hurt-131504

Bottom line is GOOD CONTENT using your intended target markets vocabulary and words that you believe your intended target market will use in search boxes when looking for your information, in well worded copy.........

Something about title tags and their value

Title tags are used in many places not just in the <HEAD> section of your page.


So what is the value of a title tag and why should it be used ? Read more and discover some truths that will help you understand who has trust in walking fish with demonstration placards

direction switching pointers and the truth about META TAGS

in this post http://4ubrand.blogspot.com/2012/07/value-of-out-bound-links-for-your-seo.html we talk of direction switching pointers. This is a term used to describe what happens when a page is over optimised or has used BLACK HAT SEO (Search Engine Otimisation techniques deemed to be banned or illegal by Search Engines)

What this means is that a positive score suddenly becomes a negative score of equal value, distracting vast amounts of points from the score you would have had had you not been foolish or used trickery. This can cause your pages to disappear right out of all search listings in any one search engine. Other search engines notice this, then investigate why, and if they manage to pick up why follow suit, leaving you out in the cold with no visitors from any search engine.

I got a phone call asking me to explain this from a mate who received a draft copy, so I thought I had best advise everybody what is meant by this term "DIRECTION SWITCHING" . Us guys in the extreme end of SEO often forget that there are many non technical people who do SEO to the best of their ability, and we talk over their heads. I will need to remember this, and if you need any thing explained ask in my twitter page at twitter.com/info4u2use

I have been out in the cold for too long, and am seriously considering stepping back into the drivers seat, but miss the bush and the quite times excessively. I would rather be fishing than at a keyboard typing and scratching my head as to how best to do a simple task. ignorant people who don't care make my blood boil, and I am afraid of committing murder or some other atrocity, especially when I hear guys saying things like "META TAGS ARE REDUNDANT OR NOT USED BY SEARCH ENGINES"

If you believe that statement then you will believe that fish are walking down the high street in London asking for better pollution control. If you are told by a SEO technician that meta tags don't work then look for the fish walking down the road with banners asking for better pollution control, if you see the walking fish believe what you are told, else ask the SEO specialist where the walking fish can be found!!!!!

Meta tag confusion

I have just watched this video again and was really shocked when listening very closely with the idea that META TAGS are not used and this will clearly show that is BS (BULL SHIT in simple truthful English)

Meta tags may not be used in page ranking as Matt says in the video, but clearly he says that they have great value when applied correctly.

what Matt forgets to tell people is that when these are misused, by placing words in your META TAG  <KEY WORD> that are not relevant to the content of your pages they attach a negative value to the whole key word tag and your page does not do as well as you thought it would.

If you do this on more than one page, you get punished even further, and each instance of this contravention of their basic rules adds more negative points to your score, so you slip up even further.

This does not mean that mis-spelt words in the  key words meta tag get punished, as their algo is big enough and powerful enough to distinguish between mis-spelt words and irrelevant words.

listen clearly how much info Matt lets slip about which methods to use when applying the META TAGs for your page. Remember that different types of pages require different types of META TAGS and these need to be evaluated carefully for contravention. use your common sense and think white hat not black hat.

By different types of pages I mean is your page generated by a database system, is it a static page, is it optimised for video, is it optimised for audio, are there many images, is it a sales page, an info page, is it connected to social media, or is it a technical page? these all need careful evaluation during the design stages of your page, as the target market is the key factor, with your pages being written for your target market the optimised for Search engines, and not with Search engines in mind and optimised for your target market. 

White hat SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is rewarded well  and black hat SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is punished in strange and unpleasant ways that cause your pages to be lower down the SERP (Search Engine Results Position/ Page) lists than you would imagine. Listen to the video carefully then listen again and think carefully about what Matt is saying http://www.metatags.org/google_ignores_meta_tags_in_ranking

a quote from the page where the video is found:

Start Quote:

The meta tags, an easy way to advice the search engines how to read and index your website, are no longer used. An End to Metatags, Meta Tags no longer work & Death Of A Meta Tag is what the self-proclaimed experts wrote in 2002.

They are wrong ! People keep re-writing the 2002 story over and over again. Why does these experts want to make you believe the metatags are of no use ?
The so called expert did the following test: He added the bogus word qiskodslajdmnkd to his keywords and a few days later 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 the page had to start coming up. He searched for qiskodslajdmnkd and his home page didn’t come up. Conclusion: The meta keyword tag was not supported.

This test was way too simplistic to prove anything!

This test for the fake word qiskodslajdmnkd only proves that two engines don’t use it for SERP display if the keywords in a meta tag don’t appear on a page. Anything beyond that is conjecture as to cause-and-effect. Please search for these words in Google or Bing. Do you believe the copy-paste-13 year old Guru's or your own eyes?

End Quote

If the strange keyword is not in the page content, the page will be punished for "keyword stuffing" and similar issues. try it your self make 3 identical pages in the same directory, then once all three pages have been indexed by a search engine, and found in a search, add a strange  word to one page in the content leaving it out of the key word meta tag, just add the strange word to the meta tag of page 2 and in page 3 addd the word to the content and the key word meta tag. after a week or so go back and see which one gets a higher ranking for the specified word, as well as other key words that you used to find the pages earlier.

Seeing is believing, do this for your self, as who believes me anyway...

META TAGS and their purpose

We need to start somewhere, so lets jump in at the deep end and hold onto the side till we get comfortable before we start swimming in the soup of information about META TAGS and their purpose.
META TAGS are those small bits of information hidden in the <HEAD> section of the HTML code.  (Hypertext Markup Language - the code which makes your webpage understandable to all web browsers).
For those who have doubts about the value of meta tags read this if you are still convinced META TAGS have no value coz you are an expert, read this if you want to understand more read further