Every webpage should have Meta Tags in 2014

The most important function of metadata is not the ability to influence rankings, but its ability to encourage your content to make the best first impression possible. The Big 3 social networks all allow marketers the ability to provide metadata specific to the channel and therein lies the opportunity to provided titles, descriptions and pictures that resonate directly with audience in a given channel.

Usual Searchspects

While Google keeps messing around with our tried and true understanding of the title and meta description they are still the most important meta tags for an SEO to prepare. Obviously, the on-page content is key, but if we can’t get them to click through then what is the point? In an upcoming post on the Poetry of SEO, we will talk about how to approach this copy so that it is engaging and elegant and mimics ad copy. For the time being let’s just dive into the usual searchspects.

Page Title –
Long regarded as the most important on-page factor, the title tag has recently taken a lot of scrutiny. A recent post has determined that page titles aren’t limited to 70 characters, but rather pixel-width. Also a little further back Cyrus Shepard tested titles longer than 70 characters to see what Google would do. In the wild I’ve seen extremely long titles are oftentimes chopped down or rewritten algorithmically to display the most relevant text to a query.
Unless you want to measure the pixel-width of your titles and hope that Google shows the right thing, your best bet is to make page titles as keyword-relevant as possible and up to 70 characters. I honestly can’t think of a case where I’ve left something up to Google and they did a better job than I thought I could.
Format:

<title>Up to 70 Characters of Keyword-relevant text here</title>
Meta Description – If your webpage were a commercial, this would be its slogan. In our upcoming search behavior study in cooperation with SurveyMonkey we’ve found that 43.2% of people click on a given result due to the meta description. Gone are the days of meta descriptions that listed keywords and just said the “Official site of…” and the main purpose of this text is to draw the user in, let them know what to expect if they click and convince them to do so with a strong call to action. The kicker is you get 155 characters to make it happen; think of it as like writing a tweet, but with 15 extra characters.
Format:

<meta name=”description” content=”155 characters of message matching text with a call to action goes here”>
Authorship Markup – As I predicted at SearchLove NYC in November 2011, and has been verified by Eric Schmidt, Google is going to rank content that is connected to authors that they deem to be reliable sources over content that is not. A cool visible incentive is that you get name and your pretty picture in the SERPs if you’re an author.

If you’re a publisher your posts start appearing in the right rail of the SERPs.

Now let’s look at the metatags that make the magic happen!

Rel-Author– This is a meta tag that can be implemented that specifies who the author of a piece of content is and uses Google+ to identify them. Initially Google rolled this out as just a tag that you place in the <head> of the code, but ultimately they would realize it’s not realistic that authors will have that type of control over the page and expanded to a more modular form.Format:For the version that goes in the <head> tag, you use the following:
<link rel=”author” href=”https://plus.google.com/[YOUR PERSONAL G+ PROFILE HERE]“/>

For the more modular version you would emulate XFN’s rel-me and place the link directly on the page. I’ve got to admit this is a great link building strategy.
<a href=”[profile_url]?rel=author”>Google</a>

If you use this method you will have to take the second step in verification by linking to your content from your Google+ profile. For more information see Google’s explanation.
Rel-Me – Rel-me is just the XFNversion of rel-author. You simply place the meta tag on a link back to your Google+ profile.Format:
<a href=”https://plus.google.com/[YOUR PERSONAL G+ PROFILE NUMBER]” rel=”me”>Me on Google+</a>
Rel-Publisher –Rel-publisher is for business entities to claim ownership of their content. This can be used in context with rel-author or in place of it, but you should be pointing to a business profile on Google+ rather than an individuals.Format:<link rel=”publisher” href=”https://plus.google.com/[YOUR BUSINESS G+ PROFILE HERE]“/>

Don’t be late to the authorship markup party as it would not be surprising to see Google wipe out the visibility of content simply because there are no verifiable authors connected to it.

Social Meta Tags

Social Media is obviously a great place for content discovery, but oftentimes the meta data created for Search is not enough to encourage people to click through therefore it is best to use the meta tags each social platform provides. These metatags are not about keyword stuffing at all, but rather grabbing people’s attention and getting them to click. We all know that the users of Google+ are primarily tech people, users on Facebook are busy stalking their ex-girlfriends and Twitter users are bombarded with timelines moving at the speed of thought. Let’s talk about the channel-specific metadata options.

OpenGraph tags

Facebook’s OpenGraph allows you to specify metadata to optimize how your content appears in a user’s timeline. The added benefit of using this data is that by creating an “Edge” in Facebook you can obtain some fantastic data about the users checking out your content via Facebook Insights. If you don’t use Open Graph tags Facebook will default to standard metadata.

og:title –This is the title of the piece of content. You should use this as a headline that will appeal to the Facebook audience. It is completely ok to use a different title than the one on the actual site as long as the message is ultimately the same. You have 95 characters to work with.Format:
<meta property=”og:title” content=”iAcquire’s awesome blog”/>
og:type – This is the type of object your piece of content is. For your purposes it will usually be blog, website or article, but if you want to get fancy Facebook provides a complete list.Format:
<meta property=”og:type” content=”article”/>
og:image -This is the image that Facebook will show in the screenshot of the content. Be sure to specify a square image to ensure the best visibility in a user’s timeline. If you don’t specify an image at all you are left to the mercy of the user to pick which image represents your content based on what Facebook can scrape. That is typically not the way to ensure the best first impression.Format:
<meta property=”og:image” content=”http://www.iacquire.com/some-thumbnail.jpg”/>
og:url– This is simply the URL of the page (or edge). You should specify this especially if you have duplicate content issues to make sure the value of the edge in Facebook is consolidated into one URL.Format:
<meta property=”og:url” content=”http://blog.iacquire.com”/>
og:description -This is the description Facebook will show in the screenshot of the piece of content. Just like the standard meta description it should be catchy and contain a call to action, but in this case you have nearly twice the number of characters to work with. Make sure this too speaks to the Facebook audience. You have to 297 characters to make it happen.Format:
<meta property=”og:description” content=”Stop hitting refresh on your ex-girlfriend’s Facebook page? You should check out the iAcquire blog and learn something instead”/>
fb:admins – This metatag is critical for getting access to the wealth of data made available via Facebook Insights. You simply have to specify the Facebook User IDs in the metadata of those users you want to have access. For more information on Facebook Insights see the documentation.Format:
<meta property=”fb:admins” content=”USER_ID”/>

Due to its overwhelming adoption, the other social networks will all default to Open Graph Meta tags if there are no other meta tags present. However, as I mentioned earlier in this discussion, to only prepare one set of metadata is to ignore the ability to speak to the different people in the different channels. Understanding that Google+ is mostly tech users, Facebook’s audience is far more varied and Twitter’s audience is often dealing with content flying by at the speed of thought – why not account for that with your metadata?
For more information see the Open Graph Protocol documentation.

Twitter Cards

Twitter Cards are simply Twitter’s answer to the Open Graph Protocol and you might have noticed them in the wild, but here’s a screenshot from Twitter’s documentation.

The added benefit is making your content stand out in the otherwise chaotic Twitter timeline and ultimately bringing back more people. Also, it has long been thought that many users will retweet an article without actually reading it, using Twitter Cards as advertisements will help facilitate resharing of content as well. Most of these tags mirror what you’ve just read about Facebook Open Graph so I’ll be brief.

twitter:card– This is the card type. Your options are summary, photo or player. Twitter will default to “summary” if it is not specified.Format:
<meta name=”twitter:card” content=”summary”>
twitter:url- This is the URL of the content.Format:
<meta name=”twitter:url” content=”http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/arts/music/amid-police-presence-fans-congregate-for-whitney-houstons-funeral-in-newark.html”>
twitter:title–This is the title of the content to be shared and should be limited to 70 characters after which Twitter will truncate. Again, go for headlines instead of keywords.Format:
<meta name=”twitter:title” content=”Parade of Fans for Houston’s Funeral”>
twitter:description– This is the description of the content to be shared and should be limited to 200 characters after which Twitter will truncate. Again, go for engaging text, you have more opportunity here than the actual tweet does.Format:
<meta name=”twitter:description” content=”NEWARK – The guest list and parade of limousines with celebrities emerging from them seemed more suited to a red carpet event in Hollywood or New York than than a gritty stretch of Sussex Avenue near the former site of the James M. Baxter Terrace public housing project here.”>
twitter:image – This is the image that will be displayed on the Twitter Card and it should be a square image no smaller than 60×60 pixels.
<meta name=”twitter:image” content=”http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2012/02/19/us/19whitney-span/19whitney-span-articleLarge.jpg”>

There are more optional twitter card meta tags such as site and creator which specify the twitter handles of the site and the author of responsible for the content, but they are not required for the content to make a good first impression so I have omitted them. For more information see the Twitter Card documentation.

Schema.Org (for Google+)

Until recently, I hadn’t realized that while Google+ will default to standard metadata or Facebook Open Graph tags, the platform also gives webmasters the ability to specify metadata specifically for Google+ using Schema.org. The beauty of it is since it’s Schema.org you can use it on nearly any HTML tag on content that is already on the page.

Itemscope=”[pageType]“ – where [pageType]is Article, Blog, Book, Event, LocalBusiness, Organization, Person, Product or Review.
itemprop=”name”– This acts as the title attribute of the rich snippet and should be limited to 140 characters.
itemprop=”description”– This is the description of the rich snippet and should be limited to 185 characters
itemprop=”image” This is the image of the rich snippet with an optimal size is 180 x 120. Google+ will shrink this image, but if it is too small it will not be displayed.

Format:

While all the other types of metadata go in the <head> section of the code, this code will potentially live in various places throughout the website. Here’s an example (from Google) of how it could be employed.

Google+ looks for metadata in the following order: Schema.org > Facebook OpenGraph > Standard Metadata > Best Guess from Scraping. See the Google+ Snippet Documentation for more information.

So…where’s the Meta Keywords?

I must admit that the discussion of meta keywords is a pet peeve of mine that I rank up there with people saying “SEO Optimization” or “ATM Machines,” but since it comes up so often with clients I figured that it’s worth mentioning here. The Meta Keywords is of no positive value to any major Search Engine especially not Google (check the link out, they said it officially in 2009). Bing uses them to determine if you are spamming or not, but beyond that the only reason a page should have meta keywords is if the internal search engine requires them. If that’s the case however I would suggest you either consider a new Content Management System or lean on Google’s custom search, after all it’s free.

…And Rel-canonical?

Sure rel-canonical is incredibly important, but is only needed when you have duplicate content issues or you’re looking to move the link equity from one page to another. Therefore it’s not needed on every page on the web and if you’re a small part of the population that cares about Bing, they don’t really believe in it.

Source : "iAcquire, LLC" Free URL Submission | DMOZ Submission

Best Search Engine Optimization Techniques – 2013

How to make a website SEO friendly

If your website is more attractive and professional design but that site are not ranking well in Google, It may be tough to generate potential customer for your business on the Internet. The website is the inter medium to build a relationship for business owner and customer. It is the key medium to reach your potential customers. Therefore, you have to be planning to create your online presence, especially for your website layout and content optimization. Here listed 5 tips for designing an SEO friendly website.

Quality Content:

Write unique and quality content of each page. The search engine crawls through your website and giving more importance to the quality content. Google ranking websites having quality content and higher than the other websites.

Keyword Rich URLs:

Keep your URL as your content relevant keyword means search engines can quickly analyze what a page is about. See some example of relevant keyword and irrelevant keyword URL.

Relevant Keyword URL
http://www.websitedesign.com/services/web-design
Or
http://www.websitedesign.com/services/creative-web-design

Irrelevant keyword URL
http://www.websitedesign.com/services?id=123
Or
http://www.websitedesign.com/services/123

Optimize Images:

How much importance you have to give content optimization gives the equal importance for image optimization. Image optimization generates a lot of traffic. You follow these three best practices for image optimization.

Use alt text for every image. Search engine spiders can easily understand images with alt text.
Reduce image file size. The large file size image takes more page loading time so make the image size as small as possible.
Use file name for every image it will help to find whether your image is searched on google or not.

Use Meta Tags:

In olden days use keywords in meta tags and easy to get better search results. Recently Google has been strict about the keyword abuse method. If you use the keyword meta tag on your website, it is not considered on Google because the search engine crawl does not consider keyword meta tag .
Meta description is more important to get lots of visitors from search engines . The search engine has been only displaying on website title and description in search result page. So the meta description is important to get more traffic. You attract in your short and sweet description in meta tag about that page . If you did not write meta description Google could display some other text from the web page.

Write Clean Title:

People search more results on search engine and use keyword for every search. In on result page the people first see on the title it is related to our entered keyword after they enter. So the title is clean and descriptive the eye-catching title increases the traffic to your website.
Use Primary Keyword – Secondary keyword | Brand Name
Or
Brand Name | Primary Keyword and Secondary Keyword

Source:- MINFOTECH

How to Build quality Backlinks

How to Build quality Back links

It is out of question that quality backlinks are crucial to SEO success. More, the question is how to get them. While with on-page content optimization it seems easier because everything is up to you to do and decide, with backlinks it looks like you have to rely on others to work for your success. Well, this is partially true because while backlinks are links that start on another site and point to yours, you can discuss with the Web master of the other site details like the anchor text, for example. Yes, it is not the same as administering your own sites – i.e. you do not have total control over backlinks – but still there are many aspects that can be negotiated.

Getting Backlinks the Natural Way

The idea behind including backlinks as part of the page rank algorithm is that if a page is good, people will start linking to it. And the more backlinks a page has, the better. But in practice it is not exactly like this. Or at least you cannot always rely on the fact that your contents is good and people will link to you. Yes, if your content is good and relevant you can get a lot of quality backlinks, including from sites with similar topic as yours (and these are the most valuable kind of backlinks, especially if the anchor text contains your keywords) but what you get without efforts could be less than what you need to successfully promote your site. So, you less than what you need to successfully promote your site. So, you will have to resort to other ways of acquiring quality backlinks as described next.

Ways to Build Backlinks

Even if plenty of backlinks come to your site the natural way, additional quality backlinks are always welcome and the time you spend building them is not wasted. Among the acceptable ways of link building are getting listed in directories, posting in forums, blogs and article directories. The unacceptable ways include inter-linking (linking from one site to another site, which is owned by the same owner or exists mainly for the purpose to be a link farm), linking to spam sites or sites that host any kind of illegal content, purchasing links in bulk, linking to link farms, etc.
The first step in building backlinks is to find the places from which you can get quality backlinks. A valuable assistant in this process is the Backlink Builder tool. When you enter the keywords of your choice, the Backlink Builder tool gives you a list of sites where you can post an article, message, posting, or simply a backlink to your site. After you have the list of potential backlink partners, it is up to you to visit each of the sites and post your content with the backlink to your site in it.
You might wonder why sites as those, listed by the Backlink Builder tool provide such a precious asset as backlinks for free. The answer is simple – they need content for their site. When you post an article, or submit a link to your site, you do not get paid for this. You provide them for free with something they need – content – and in return they also provide you for free with something you need – quality backlinks. It is a free trade, as long as the sites you post your content or links are respected and you don't post fake links or content.

Getting Listed in Directories

If you are serious about your Web presence, getting listed in directories like DMOZ, Yahoo, Jasmine Directory, XyLink Directory, DMOZ SEO and others quality directories is a must – not only because this is a way to get some quality backlinks for free, but also because this way you are easily noticed by both search engines and potential visitors. Generally inclusion in search directories is free but the drawback is that sometimes you have to wait a couple of months before you get listed in the categories of your choice.

Forums and Article Directories

Generally search engines index forums so posting in forums and blogs is also a way to get quality backlinks with the anchor text you want. If the forum or blog is a respected one, a backlink is valuable. However, in some cases the forum or blog administrator can edit your post, or even delete it if it does not fit into the forum or blog policy. Also, sometimes administrators do not allow links in posts, unless they are relevant ones. In some rare cases (which are more an exception than a rule) the owner of a forum or a blog would have banned search engines from indexing it and in this case posting backlinks there is pointless.
While forum postings can be short and do not require much effort, submitting articles to directories can be more time-consuming because generally articles are longer than posts and need careful thinking while writing them. But it is also worth and it is not so difficult to do.

Content Exchange and Affiliate Programs

Content exchange and affiliate programs are similar to the previous method of getting quality backlinks. For instance, you can offer to interested sites RSS feeds for free. When the other site publishes your RSS feed, you will get a backlink to your site and potentially a lot of visitors, who will come to your site for more details about the headline and the abstract they read on the other site.
Affiliate programs are also good for getting more visitors (and buyers) and for building quality backlinks but they tend to be an expensive way because generally the affiliate commission is in the range of 10 to 30 %. But if you have an affiliate program anyway, why not use it to get some more quality backlinks?

News Announcements and Press Releases

Although this is hardly an everyday way to build backlinks, it is an approach that gives good results, if handled properly. There are many sites (for instance, here is a list of some of them) that publish for free or for a fee news announcements and press releases. A professionally written press release about an important event can bring you many, many visitors and the backlink from a respected site to yours is a good boost to your SEO efforts. The tricky part is that you cannot release press releases if there is nothing newsworthy. That is why we say that news announcements and press releases are not a commodity way to build backlinks.

Backlink Building Practices to Avoid

One of the practices that is to be avoided is link exchange. There are many programs, which offer to barter links. The principle is simple – you put a link to a site, they put a backlink to your site. There are a couple of important things to consider with link exchange programs. First, take care about the ratio between outbound and inbound links. If your outbound links are times your inbound, this is bad. Second (and more important) is the risk that your link exchange partners are link farms. If this is the case, you could even be banned from search engines, so it is too risky to indulge in link exchange programs.
Linking to suspicious places is something else that you must avoid. While it is true that search engines do not punish you if you have backlinks from such places because it is supposed that you have no control over what bad guys link to, if you enter a link exchange program with the so called bad neighbors and you link to them, this can be disastrous to your SEO efforts. For more details about bad neighbors, check the Bad Neighborhood article. Also, beware of getting tons of links in a short period of time because this still looks artificial and suspicious.

Source : WebConfs.com

How to Get Premium Backlinks For Your Website Or Blog For Free!

Published on 28/11/2013 02:13

Backlinks helps search engines to rank a website or blog higher than the other. If you are not getting Enough Traffic, then it means that you don't have enough Backlinks. But the problem is that we can't backlinks easily, it can take you 3-5 years or even more to create tons of quality backlinks but today i am going to introduce with a trick through which you can get backlinks easily. The advantages of getting more backlinks are given below:

More Backlinks = High Ranking In Search Engines = More Website Traffic = High Alexa Ranking = Money and Money

Top Free Web Directory List

Directory name	PR	Type	Lang	TLD
XyLink Free Link Directory	1	Link Directory	en	.net
DMOZ SEO Directory	N/A	Link Directory	en	.net
Kohany SEO Directory	1	Link Directory	en	.uk
DirSEO Link Directory	3	Link Directory	en	.uk
SEOconfused	2	Article Directory	en	.com
YouLinks	2	Link Directory	en	.net
addurl.name	2	Link Directory	en	.name
Fablike	0	Link Directory	en	.com
Mapizen	2	Link Directory	en	.com
Business Directory	N/A	Link Directory	en	.eu
Directorybooks \| Complete web directory	0	Link Directory	en	.com
Seouplink - SEO Friendly Web Directory	N/A	Link Directory	en	.com
PRweblink - Worldwide Weblink Directory	N/A	Link Directory	en	.com
Business Web Resources UK Web Directory	N/A	Link Directory	en	.com
International Web Directory	N/A	Link Directory	en	.com
Imejo World Link Directory	2	Link Directory	en	.com
Feedup	8	Link Directory	en	.info
Royallinkup Online Web Directory	N/A	Link Directory	en	.com
Directorio Webs Gratuito	N/A	Link Directory	es	.com
PR6 Web Directory	5	Link Directory	en	.org
Ielexir Link Directory	8	Link Directory	en	.com
Web Apps Directory	2	Link Directory	en	.com
INV Directory	1	Link Directory	en	.com
Directory.com	3	Link Directory	en	.com
1 World Web Directory	N/A	Link Directory	en	.com
Arena Net	N/A	Link Directory	en	.ro
Lingua Business Web Directory	5	Link Directory	en	.se
Max Link Directory	0	Link Directory	en	.com
Viral Directory	0	Link Directory	en	.com
DirMoz.co.uk SEO Directory	0	Link Directory	en	.uk
SEObridge.co.uk Directory	0	Link Directory	en	.uk
SEOlike.co.uk Link Directory	0	Link Directory	en	.uk
SEOline.co.uk SEO Directory	0	Link Directory	en	.uk
SEOlook.co.uk Web Directory	0	Link Directory	en	.uk
Directorio de paginas	0	Article Directory	es	.com
iLink Katalog	1	Link Directory	pl	.pl
Kohany SEO Katalog	1	Link Directory	pl	.pl
Katalog LetMeKnow	1	Link Directory	pl	.pl
Yahoo Directory	8	Link Directory	en	.com
dmoz Open Directory	7	Link Directory	en	.org
Kiede Diretório de Sites	5	Link Directory	pt	.br
Sites do Brasil	4	Link Directory	pt	.com
Flud katalog	0	Link Directory	pl	.pl
Kabbee katalog stron	0	Link Directory	pl	.pl
Farmigo katalog stron	0	Link Directory	pl	.pl
Play Katalog	0	Link Directory	pl	.pl
Lotto Katalog	0	Link Directory	pl	.pl
Katalog Inteligo	0	Link Directory	pl	.pl
Katalog Allegro	0	Link Directory	pl	.pl
Brand Wall.it SEO Directory	0	Link Directory	en	.it
LinkLike.co.uk - directory for humans only.	0	Link Directory	en	.uk
cleverLINK.co.uk - clever SEO	0	Link Directory	en	.uk
betterLINK directory for you	0	Link Directory	en	.uk
SEOnook- best nook for SEO	0	Link Directory	en	.uk
Polspider.com Directory SEO	0	Link Directory	en	.com
Link5.pl SEO link directory	1	Link Directory	pl	.pl
SEO vest Directory	2	Link Directory	en	.com
BetterSERP.co.uk Link directory UK	0	Link Directory	en	.uk
Directory misterWalsh	0	Link Directory	en	.uk
GetLink UK Directory	0	Link Directory	en	.uk
o2 Directory	1	Link Directory	en	.uk
SEO Diretorio	0	Link Directory	pt	.com
John Lewis Directory	0	Link Directory	en	.com
Powerful SEO Link Directory Link5.co.uk	0	Link Directory	en	.uk
WestEDGE	1	Article Directory	en	.uk

List of Other Web Directories