Wordpress SEO Expert

Improve your Google ranking with Peter Mahoney, 20+ years SEO & Wordpress experience

A few ‘key words’ about keywords

by

A lot of SEO professionals are still selling their services based on a very outdated idea of how SEO works.

Anyone telling you they target a set number of keywords really isn’t doing SEO right.

Firstly, an important terminology definition. The term keywords has meant a few different things over the past 20+ years in the Search Engine Optimisation industry. As such I prefer not to use it and try to use other words that do a better job of explaining what I mean. So when it comes to describing the concept of ‘phrases you want to rank highly with in search results’ I use the term search queries. That does a much better job of conveying what we mean – the words people search for that your website gets found for.

Years ago SEO services would be sold based around (in part) a concept of how many search queries your site would be optimised for. But search doesn’t work like that anymore (and hasn’t for a number of years). It’s not as simple as having a list of a few terms we target – since Google brought their Rankbrain (artificial intelligence system) online for website indexing, everything is far more nuanced.

Technically a site can rank and be found for ANY of the words and terms on it.

I’ve blogged about a few of these issues before, so these articles might help give useful background:
https://peter.mahoneywebmarketing.com/googles-rankbrain-and-seo/
https://peter.mahoneywebmarketing.com/does-google-use-meta-keyword-tags/

SEO work is all about reinforcing your key content so it stand out for search engines. But anything within the content can (and often is) indexed by them. As an example if you ever get a chance to see the Google Search Console performance report you’ll often see hundreds of things a site is found for.

For example my site is clearly about being a WordPress SEO expert, and services around that. But in search results it comes up for over 1000 different searches, and a lot of those aren’t related to my core offerings. But they’re all related to words, brands or nouns I’ve used in the past. Google does a great job of working out the context of your site, but with good SEO you can be found for just about anything.

Google descriptions

by

I’m often asked about how to change the description Google shows in their search results. (This post applies in part to many search engines, but Google in particular.)

The answer is slightly more complicated than any of us might like. The old response (going back a decade or more) was to just change your meta description tag. Those used to be picked up verbatim.

But these days Google isn’t beholden to anything we provide (with the exception perhaps of your own domain name). They can pick and choose what they think will be most useful to their users. They don’t have to use the description we provide–they can choose to ignore it and create their own.

If we want to give our descriptions the best possible chance of being picked up, they need to conform to the following:
  • be between 150-159 characters*
  • be in sentence structure
  • not include too many commas or ands – basically avoid things that make it look like it could be a list of keywords
  • ideally, it would be a whole sentence or two taken directly from the text of the page
  • in fact, really ideally it would be the first sentence or two from the page

and on top of all that of course it needs to fit our own needs of being informative and enticing people to visit the site.

Enjoy.

* = Normally 130-160 (or some other variant within that range, but usually ending with 160) is touted as acceptable. Recent data suggests in fact 160 may be too long, many pages with 160 characters exactly are finding their descriptions are being truncated before the last word with a ellipses (…) added, making it look unfinished. So 159 seems the current practical maximum.

Google’s RankBrain and SEO

by

Google has a new update for us. Called “RankBrain”, in its most basic sense it’s an attempt by Google to run AI (Artificial Intelligence) as a way of working out how useful a site is to any given query.

One example Google has given for how it affects things, is this search query:

What’s the title of the consumer at the highest level of a food chain

Obviously that’s not the most well structured question, but a lot of searches aren’t that carefully thought out.

The point of the example is the word “consumer”. In different contexts it can mean different things, and RankBrain is intended to help match searches with the most relevant results; understanding the context.

It doesn’t have a huge effect on how I would structure a site and its contents for SEO though—fortunately because my advice for SEO has always fit in very nicely with Google’s overall ethos, changes to their algorithm usually strengthen my clients’ SEO.

But it is worth being aware that Google is definitively not just “pattern matching”; counting keywords in your content. They’re trying to read it like a human being would—so keep writing for a human audience when you’re adding content.

Does Google use meta keyword tags?

by

Here’s a brief history of keywords. There’s a lot of misunderstanding and misinformation out there.

When search engines first came out (pre-Google), the idea that they could read a whole website was out of reach. It would take too long, require they store too much data, and generally there needed to be a quick, simple approach to scanning a website. The simplest of the simplest techniques was “meta keywords”.

This was a small piece of code that lived behind the scenes of a site, that listed all the keywords a site owner wanted their site to rank with. The list was delineated by a comma, so looked something like this:

<meta name=”keywords” content=”SEO, search engine optimisation, WordPress” />

This method was open to huge amounts of abuse on the part of a website owner. There was nothing stopping someone using keywords which were known to rank well, but didn’t even appear in their website. We started seeing tens of thousands of search results which were really a bait and switch, and it was eroding from the quality of the internet.

Google came along, and was one of the first search engines to really have a strong ethos behind it, in that they wanted to find a way to keep the internet useful, and digitally clean & tidy.

The solution was to index every site’s entire contents, scanning all the text that a real human could actually read, and working out based on sentence structure, density of nouns etc what a website was really about.

The next step was to start overlooking the meta keyword tag entirely.

And that was about a decade ago. Other major search engines followed suit, and as a result that list of keywords has been defunct and totally ignored for the best part of a decade.

Unfortunately for a host of reasons (many SEO “experts” don’t actually keep ahead of best practice, or are too happy to just do whatever their clients ask without explaining the process, or just that keyword lists entered the collectively consciousness at a formative time in the internet’s history) people still think they’re going to be useful.

One of the most popular SEO plugins for WordPress actually says next to the “Use keywords?” field, “I can’t think why you’d want to know. The search engines don’t”.

Sadly a lot of people get caught up on these, and their focus disappears from what is important to something that absolutely is not.

It’s not helped by the number of places that lists of words and phrases ARE still used, like Google Adsense for example. We also track our website’s analytics based on what search queries people found us with, etc.

I prefer to call these things “search terms”, or occasionally “key terms”. I try to steer clear of the (possible) synonym “keywords”.

So what I do in this regard is to look at your site as Google et al try to, (pretty well) as a human being. I read your site to see what it’s really about. I then run tests just like they do to see what words and phrases you use most often, and check that those do a good job of describing what your site is actually about. Most of the time, as long as someone has written their website from their own knowledge and experience of their industry or topic, these match just fine.

Occasionally I find someone thinks they have a site about, say, “window fitting”, but really it comes across as being about “buy my product”. You can imagine how that might happen, but it’s not want the search companies want to see so it’s not what we want to give them.

If I come across a discrepancy like that, I let my clients know that they need to rethink their content asap.

As long as they do match, I make sure I reinforce those terms everywhere we know Google et al want to see them. In image tags, in the description tag, in the page titles.

So, the short answer to a long history is let me take care of that–if I need to alert you to an issue I’ll let you know, and please don’t be surprised if you look at your site’s code when I’ve done and there is no outdated “keywords” code.

Google update!

by

Yet another reason why keywords are dead, and genuine, organic content is King.

Google’s latest update, Hummingbird, rewrites the way search works from the ground on up.

We may at last, have arrived at the point where manipulating a page to pack it with keyword terms is pointless. If this is true, it means we can get back to crafting well-written, informative content. We can once again produce work to share and create value, and to communicate ideas.

Will hashtags replace keywords?

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO): Blogging

by

Continuing this series of posts, I want to say this very clearly. Blogging is the very best thing you can do for your search engine optimisation. If you are not blogging, you are ignoring the biggest factor in improving your placement in their listings.

Quite simply, if you put all the other tips and tricks aside, the real key to SEO is regular, original content.

It’s really simple. Google et al want to see content written by humans, for humans. So write some.

1. Regular
Search engines work out how often to scan your website and specific pages within that based on how often it has seen those change in the past.

If your pages are all fairly static (meaning there aren’t any elements on them that change regularly, like text or images) the search giants (Google, Bing, Yahoo!) will stop coming. Google might only index your site every few months.

There’s some massive missed opportunities there. Not only will your site be deemed to have a low Page Rank (not very important in the search results) but even if you do update with some new amazing, original content—it might not be noticed until it’s well out of date.

2. Original
Search Engines are clever. Google is adept at scanning text and knowing if it’s the sort of thing a human would read, rather than a bunch of words strung together to try to fool it. They also know very easily if your work is a copy and paste from somewhere else.

Apart from simply making money, search engines all have an ethos behind them. Google for example wants to see a helpful, information rich Internet that answers users’ queries quickly and efficiently. So they rank sites they believe fit into that plan more highly than those that don’t.

If your site has too much content pasted from elsewhere, you do not fit into this ideal.

What does is original content. Something you’ve written (or someone else has written exclusively on your behalf).

It’s not as hard as it sounds. Pick a subject that relates to your business. I do this with my blog all the time—and then in your head explain it as you would to one of your customers. Type out your side of the conversation, and you’re basically done.

3. Keywords
Before you even ask the question, the answer is yes. You do want to target keywords in your blogging. Bear in mind that as long as you’re writing on topic, they’ll come out anyway. You want people to find you because of the sort of products and services you offer, so as long as you’re writing about the subject you sell, they’ll flow naturally.

Rather than ensuring I type specific words, I do my best to hit a variety of terms.

The sentence you just read is a case in point—it would have seemed normal to use “words” in there twice; where I did and then again at the end of the sentence. By using “terms” the second time, I’m improving my SEO because I’ll be indexed for both “words” and “terms”, rather than just one of them.

I do this all the time. Synonyms are are important but often overlooked aspect of SEO. A potential client might enter either “social media” or “social networking” for instance, and if that’s your industry you want them to find you regardless of the phrase they’re most familiar with.

Search engine optimisation is all about people—people finding you. Make sure you’re giving them what they need to do precisely that.

Prices are quoted exclusive of VAT unless expressly stated.

RSS

Peter Mahoney, WordPress SEO expert blog