First of all, the meta title tag has no weight in search engines. The title tag does. The meta tag doesn't.

Second, John never once said that putting keywords on a page didn't help. What he suggested was the notion that there is a specific range within which keywords should be used for maximum benefit. Write with the keywords for users, and keyword density doesn't even become a factor, as you pick up the kinds of backlinks that are useful.

The "alt" ATTRIBUTE is also useful. It isn't a tag. It is an attribute often used with tags such as <img>. This is also seen as valid text by search engines and should be descriptive of the image being displayed.

That is exactly what he has said on more than one occasion. When you see people call it an alt tag day after day after day after day, sometimes you need to smack them in the fact to get them to wake up.

If you're going to go after a mod, John's not the one to go after. He understands things on a far deeper level than he ever lets on.

Originally Posted by alhefner

However, if you have a website about used cars and never use the words "used cars" in the text of the site, you will never show in a search for "used cars". Keywords count!

Not always true. For example do a search for my name in google: James Lewitzke
http://www.google.com/search?num=50&...ke&btnG=Search

My homepage comes up first in my results, and yet absolutely no keywords in that page (nor good content, design, etc.) whatsoever.

Originally Posted by alhefner

META TAGS do have some weight with search engines

Yes, and Adam pointed out, no "main" SE's use them.

Title Tag: very important. Not technically a meta tag, but for some reason seems to get grouped with meta a lot. I think I'm safe saying everyone here agrees that title tags are important.

Meta Keywords Tag: Doubtful as to any impact on ranking. Google and MSN don't even seem to record your meta keywords. Probably not worth the time it takes to write the tag, but if you might want to place misspellings of your keywords in the tag since you probably don't want to include them on the page.

One downside of using meta keywords is it makes it very easy for your competition to know what keywords you want to rank for.

Meta Description Tag: Probably not all that effective in influencing ranking, but can be highly useful in getting someone to click on your link. Yes do include a unique meta description on every page of your site.

Keyword Density: You can have a keyword density of 0% and still rank #1 for the phrase. As an example search Google for 'click here' and count how many times the phrase appears on the Adobe page that ranks first. You should count exactly 0 occurrences of the phrase 'click here' in the content or in the source code.

Is there an ideal keyword density? Probably not. Will an extra keyword or two on your page help the page rank better for the keyword? Maybe.

Sure add keywords where it makes sense to add them. As long as your page still reads well to a real person. Pretend for a minute that a very high keyword density was very important so you stuff your page full of keywords and you rank well. Do you honestly think the people landing on the page are going to stick around? They won't. Write your pages for human beings. If you can write well it's not that hard to use keywords and still create a very readable page.

Also if you use words that aren't specifically your keyword phrases you'll likely be able to rank for a variety of long tail queries that you might not rank for otherwise.

VG just gave the answer. Notice the last 2 paragraphs in particular. People might tell you don't go over 15 % with the keyword density. So then you pull it into Word and count keywords then count total words and do the math. Is that a good use of anyone's time?

Google won't punish you for keywords stuffing until you get to the point no human reader will stick around. Does it matter to any site on the web - if it can't make money is Google search referral traffic worth anything?

Elements versus attributes is important. Here we're all making educated guesses (some more educated than others) about how an algorithm works. Title is a great example. Is a page title important, or is an <img> title property what's important? Are we even talking about Google's general web search, or Google Images in particular? What about links - they have a title attribute, too. If you set the <a title="something"> like WordPress defaults to asking you to do, does that title apply to the page it's on, or the one it's pointing at? Or not at all? How can we even try to answer questions like that if we can't know when someone says "the title tag" if they mean a tag or an attribute on another tag?

First, make no mistake of calling alt as tag as its not a tag rather an attibute usually attached on image tag wherein we can put text or a description that best describes the image itself. Meta Tags are still advisable is some S.E but certainly not in google. Yahoo added a LITTLE weight on this tags and since meta tags can't harm your site, I don't see anything wrong on still having this in your tag Anyway in terms of S.E its my meta title and description which was showed on the result not my title tag,.

Originally Posted by gringo

Alt attributes are used to give a description of the image to people who can't see the image (for whatever reason) - so you need to use them for just that purpose. They have a small value in ranking.

Alt attribute is not just for the users who can't see the image but also for the Search Engine itself since S.E can't read images

Search engines might use the alt attribute to understand an image better, but alt attributes are to help people who can't see the image. They don't exist for search engines, but they can be used to help search engines better understand the image.

Ultimately alt attributes are designed to aide in the understanding of an image when that image can't be seen.

i think you have got lots of suggestions form lot of experienced people

so some from me also

1)try to keep minimum html in your page
2)use h1 tag for your main keyword on your page
3)never put outgoing links on your page mainly on your homepage even links of your sites also.try to use link 'sitemap' on your homepage to keep minimum links of your own site on your home page also.
4)Do not put links page on your site .so try to have 3 way linking for your site
for 3 way linking you can buy pr sites from godaddy.com
5)Do not have duplicate content on your site and if you want duplicate content on your site for just to provide information to visit so put it in to your robots.txt file so it can't be crawled by any search engine.

if you are intersted in some more guidance u can reply me

regards
domainguide

Just to save on the duplicate content a littel

1 to 5 All Wrong.

6/ why would we do that?

At one time, my blog was on page one of a google search for nevada nature photos. That of course changed as the content displayed on the first page also changed with new articles.


In making my most recent entry, I decided to make heavy use of the "alt" attribute for my images. This is my personal experiment to see if they make much difference in rearch results.

This entire thread is full of great advice and opinions. Every one reading through should come away with one great constant in SEO:

Content is king! Since search engines can't interpret images that means text in some form on the page(s). Image heavy sites have to do something to get people to their site. I have told several local site owners to use the "alt" attribute for every image, name the images, and add text above, below, or around the images.

Originally Posted by alhefner

Content is king! Since search engines can't interpret images that means text in some form on the page(s). Image heavy sites have to do something to get people to their site. I have told several local site owners to use the "alt" attribute for every image, name the images, and add text above, below, or around the images.

I don't want to sound contrary, but there are two points to clarify

1. alt is a required attribute in modern markup languages. Your pages will still validate if all you have is <img src="x.jpg" alt="" /> but not if you don't include some alt attribute. I guess that only applies to people who care about valid markup (which translates to cross browser compatibility and general accessibility) but if you have to provide an alt anyway, you might as well make it a good one.
2. Everybody wants traffic to their site, but please don't rely on Google alone - or even make search engines a very big slide of your pie. Remember, Google will really only keep you in their index if you have links from other sites, and if you have those, people should be clicking them. Search traffic should be the icing on the cake, not the main dish.

That said, let us know the results of your experiment!

Originally Posted by Learning Newbie

1. Everybody wants traffic to their site, but please don't rely on Google alone - or even make search engines a very big slide of your pie. Remember, Google will really only keep you in their index if you have links from other sites, and if you have those, people should be clicking them. Search traffic should be the icing on the cake, not the main dish.

Couldn't have said it better myself

SEO Encompasses several factors which are hard to scribble on this forum. However some of the basic on-page optimization factors are as given below :-

a) Selecting right keyword density for your web pages

b) Selecting right Web Page Title

c) Content of your Web Page /Web Site

d) Choose your Meta Tags wisely

These basic on-page optimization techniques will help you score higher rankings on search engines. However I would like to make it clear that search engines do not pay heed to over-optimization or spamming.

Sometimes I think people just don't read the threads prior to posting, If they did, people like SEO_Specialist would realize what they posted was utter gibberish & already talked about in great detail!!!!

Though, I'm a bit disappointed seeing that they are a Specialist in the SEO field & all.

A.) After running my own tests in this area, this does not hold much weight at all (Unless you are only competing with other pages that have No Off-Page or other various on-page techniques)
B.) Just saying Title is just too vague (Not to mention already repeated in detail several times)
C.) Just saying Content is just too vague (Not to mention already repeated in detail several times)
D.) Meta Tags? Are you optimizing for altavista? (Not to mention already repeated in detail several times as to why they have become useless in the major engines)

Originally Posted by scorpionagency

Sometimes I think people just don't read the threads prior to posting, If they did, people like SEO_Specialist would realize what they posted was utter gibberish & already talked about in great detail!!!!

Though, I'm a bit disappointed seeing that they are a Specialist in the SEO field & all.

A.) After running my own tests in this area, this does not hold much weight at all (Unless you are only competing with other pages that have No Off-Page or other various on-page techniques)
B.) Just saying Title is just too vague (Not to mention already repeated in detail several times)
C.) Just saying Content is just too vague (Not to mention already repeated in detail several times)
D.) Meta Tags? Are you optimizing for altavista? (Not to mention already repeated in detail several times as to why they have become useless in the major engines)

I am sorry to say, but you could be wrong there a) keyword denstity of your entire website does play importnt role in SEO. if you are having 1000 back links saying web design, and one single on page text &quot;web design&quot;, and it will not help you.b) Meta tags - meta tags are gaining popularity again. A person who is from seo firld knows very well that seo rules change very often . Meta tags is not a thing of 2005, but it is very well alive in 2008.I think You need to do a detailed study regarding importance of meta tags along with SEO optimization.

by scorpionagency A.) After running my own tests in this area, this does not hold much weight at all (Unless you are only competing with other pages that have No Off-Page or other various on-page techniques)

You can start with some basics of SEO and importance of meta tags at http://www.awardsites.com/articles/w..._meta_tags.htm http://www.seologic.com/faq/meta-tags-importance.php I am sure it will help you grasp seom "BASICS" of seo