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To Pipe Or Not To Pipe – That’s | In Meta Tags

Confused about using | in your meta tags?
Confused about using | in your meta tags?

What I am talking about here is whether you should use pipes or | to separate your keywords in your Meta title tag. Some SEO gurus swear by it and others blow it off. I have used pipes and not used pipes on websites and do not have a strong preference one way or the other but for my own website I do not pipe the Meta title tag.

That being said for mature sites where we have a narrow list of keywords I have used pipes and gotten excellent improvement in organic placement. The best tip I can offer is: if your site is new don’t pipe. If your site is mature and you have had good placement previously but have dropped lately, try pipes to get a boost that may help you organically.

The big key on whether to use pipes or not is the nature of your keywords. If you need a wildcard match or have a number of phrases and word combinations that you want to place on then I would stay away from pipes. You only have 80 characters or so in the title tag and so need to use every character well. If your phrases are only one to three words and you have only one or two try piping the title tag to see what happens.

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Robo Spam Can You Do Anything to Stop It?

You’ve seen it the gobbledy gook on the form that comes to your inbox from your website contact form. There is literally no way to stop this new generation of spam short of introducing a captcha field on your contact form. 

A captcha field is one of those auto generated boxes filled with a combination of letters jumbled together. Only people can read them not spam robots, so they defeat the use of your online contact form by robo spammers. One of the biggest issues that real users have with sites that use captcha is that sometimes the letters and numbers are not easily readable and can create problems especially for those that are visually disabled. Case in point is the captcha used on many Google pages. If you can read it let me know. Worse yet is the audio link that tells you what the captcha says. The speaker has a very heavy Indian accent which makes understanding what the letters and number are impossible.

The bottom line is this is you use a contact form on your website, you will probably get robo spam. It is not an issue of a poor web host or a problem with your spam filter, it is simply the new generation of spam that gets to you because it uses your website’s contact form script to send you the spam thereby getting past ISP filters.

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AdWords Starter Edition – When to Use It

Google AdWords is not for everyone and every product, but it can be an excellent way to promote your products on the Web. However AdWords set up and management by a professional is an expense and for an untested product or a new service you are thinking of promoting professional set up and management may be too costly for your initial testing.

Enter the Google AdWords Starter Edition! For unusual products never seen in the marketplace, e-books, or unusual services that you wonder is there a market for, there is no better way than to test online marketability than with the Google AdWords Starter Edition.

The Google AdWords Starter Edition is so simple and easy to set up that any business owner can do market testing themselves to find out if there is even interest for their product. Not sure if people will pay $5 for your e-book about your vacation to Paris with your wife? Test it on Google AdWords Starter Edition. Not sure if people will want to buy a magnetic scalp roller that grows new hair – test it!

If you generate clicks AND sales during your test, the next step is to find a professional Google AdWords account manager to set up an AdWords program that will build on your test and really work to market your product. The information that you have garnered in your two week to 30 day test on the Starter Edition will be considered valuable by your account manager and will help them to focus on what has been successful initially and to build on that success.

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Why Are Meta Tags Important?

First let’s review what exactly are meta tags. Meta tags are sentences arranged in a specific format that contain information that is crucial to search engines. This information provides specific criteria that search engine use to categorize your web pages.

Of all the Meta tags that can appear in the source code of a page the most important are the following:

  • Title Tag
  • Meta Description

We call these tags “hot property real estate” for your website. So what about the Meta Keyword tag? Is that one important? It used but is no longer used by any of the search engines.

The importance and use of Meta tags comes and goes. Several years ago, Google did not even use the Meta Description tag. Google instead either created it’s own from sentences grabbed from your page content or used the description found in the Open Directory Project. Now however Google uses the Meta Description tag that you embed in your source code.

Yahoo for many sites is not returning the Meta Title tag in their search results, they are instead supplying the first <h1> tag or header tag on the page in the content.

Personally I feel that the Title Tag and Meta Description Tag are some of the most important tags on your page. The first, Title Tag is typically crafted as a keyword dense string of keywords about 80 characters long. I never include the business name in this very small space as search engines will pick that up from the page content.

The Meta Description tag I usually craft as a keyword dense series of two or three sentences that are done with proper punctuation and grammar. I stick closely to the theme of the content on the page. Additionally I craft a different Meta Title and Meta Description for each page in the website when humanly possible.

I have seen sites move up in the search results based on changes in these two crucial areas alone, they are this important to organic placement on search engines.

You can review your own Meta tags very easily. First the Meta Title tag is visible at the very top of your browser screen just before the frame of your monitor starts and typically is just to the right of the IE icon above your browser buttons.

The Meta Description tag is visible by right clicking on your web page and by selecting view source. Your browser will most likely open the page’s code in Notepad. Scroll or use Find to locate this line <meta name=”description” content=” This is the lead in code syntax where your webmaster or web developer has placed your actual Meta Description. Some sites will not have this important Meta tag and we recommend correcting this for best search engine placement.

For more information on our search engine optimization services please visit our website.