Video: How to Reach Physicians Online

November 10, 2009

Each profession has different way that it uses the internet to research information. Physicians are not only looking for different information than a lawyer, the ways in which they use the web is different as well.

Google did a nice 15 minute webinar & video on reaching physicians. If you are in the medicinal marketing field, wish to put a message in front of doctors, or just want to see some good research, the video is worth you time.

Posted by Brad Geddes aka eWhisper | Filed Under PPC Marketing Blog, Search Engines, Video | 3 Comments

Meta Tags Are Not Dead

July 28, 2009

Once again the discussion has come up that meta tags are dead and most seo is boondoggle.

Do not believe the hype!

Meta tags live.

Title tags are incredibly important.

While the effectiveness of metas might be a decent discussion for those who follow SEO closely and engage in SEO regularly, it is very misleading for those new to the arena.

I recently talked to a company who has a PR6 website (and I’m using Page Rank just to show it’s an authority domain, not to use PR for ranking purposes) who had the exact same title, meta description, and meta keywords on every page of their site. Naturally, they didn’t rank for anything outside of their company name.

They thought it didn’t matter that all the metas & title tags were the same, because the SEO community has been saying metas are dead for a while now.

I talked to another company who was about to remove all their metas & title tags because metas no longer matter.

What do you think would have happened to their rankings?

Unique title tags are one of the most important things you can have on your site.

Period. End of story. Let me repeat, if you have the same title tag on all your pages, it’s the same as naming every single chapter, headline, and page the exact same in a book and expecting a reader to be able to find information. In this case, the reader is a search engine spider – but the analogy stands.

What about meta description tags?

The meta description tag when talking ranking factors is of small importance. However, that does not mean it’s useless. If a snippet is not shown on a search page, the meta description is. Think of your meta description as the body of your ad copy. The body is what someone reads and decides to click on your natural rankings to arrive at your website.

Therefore, a good meta description tag can bring in more traffic.

If you subscribe to the theory that the sites that get the clicks from a search result can move up in the rankings (i.e. natural SERP CTR), then a good meta description can also raise your rankings because it gathers more clicks (not everyone agrees with this – and I’m not going to debate this one on either side at the moment).

Come on, the meta keyword tag – does that really matter?

On Google, not really. On Yahoo, its a small factor – but great for misspellings.

When you get into the other meta tags, such as author, they are useless.

Most CMS systems automatically create meta keyword tags; hence, it’s little work, little rewards and while you shouldn’t spend you time writing meta keywords tags. However, if the system generates an OK list (a few keywords, not thousands) then its not worth your time adding or removing this metatag from your system.

The SEO Discussion Should Be: What a good SEO company should do for you

Most of these discussions arise because SEO companies are still writing meta tags and submitting links to engines. Submitting links to search engines is a waste of time – completely agreed.

However – if all the pages of a site have the same title tag – then the SEO company should be rewriting title tags.

If all the description tags are the same – again – rewrite them.

Every time an article or SEO blog post comes out that says you don’t need meta tags – you are misleading those who are just getting started with SEO.

<updated>What I’ve found after talking with many companies about SEO is that they all think title tags and metas are the same. While the advanced SEO community is saying metas and not titles, most businesses lump metas and titles together, pretty much all the tags that end up in the <head> of a website.</updated>

While a large part of SEO is link building – having links does not mean much if you don’t have the on page factors correct.

Therefore, first fix your on page factors – then worry about link building.

Meta tags are an on page factor. They matter.

Not all meta tags are dead.

For those new to SEO:

Here’s some information to help you out:

Got the basics from those two pages? Now, here are some good resources to read:

Posted by Brad Geddes aka eWhisper | Filed Under PPC Marketing Blog, Search Engines | 3 Comments

Nice Video on Google Product Search (Similar to Google Base)

June 19, 2009

If you want to learn more about how to get your products into Google Base and the Google product search engine, this is a nice intro video to learn more about those two Google services.

Posted by Brad Geddes aka eWhisper | Filed Under PPC Marketing Blog, Search Engines | 2 Comments

Google Plus Box Coming to Financial Queries

March 7, 2007

The Google Plus box has received a lot of attention lately in local queries. The new expanded results for financial data will be rolling out soon for financial queries.

Right now, if one searches for a stock symbol, it’s pretty straightforward that one is looking for financial data, so Google shows the information directly in the search result.

However, for ambiguous queries where one might be looking for financial data, or might be looking for something different, Google is adding the Plus Box to the results.

Here’s a screenshot of the plus box for ‘General Electric’:

Google has done a nice job of allowing for more information to be found in a search result without cluttering the initial results.

My question is: Is adding all of this additional information directly into the search results lowering the amount of traffic Google sends to websites?

When Google launched, their goal was for someone to spend as few seconds as possible on their search results. If they delivered the perfect search result, then one could go from a result to a webpage in moments.

Now, with additional information being added to the search page itself, does this keep more users just on the search page, and not going to additional places for information in some instances?

Posted by Brad Geddes aka eWhisper | Filed Under PPC Marketing Blog, Search Engines | Leave a Comment