How many times have you cursed the major search engines because they show your site’s listing with its DMOZ title and description? Most of these DMOZ listings are years old and more often than not don’t describe your site the way you want it. This generally leads to your site losing out on quite a lot of clicks.

To counter this issue Google & MSN introduced a tag -
META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOODP”

Having this tag in the HEAD section of your page meant that the search engines will not use the DMOZ titles and description when displaying your site in their search results.

Now Yahoo has announced that they will start using this tag. Having
META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOODP” or META NAME=”Slurp” CONTENT=”NOODP” in the HEAD section will now ensure that the DMOZ attributes are not displayed in the yahoo results.

Personally, I would like yahoo to introduce a similar tag that would inform Yahoo not to display the Yahoo Directory Description for the site’s listing. I guess we’ll need to wait before that becomes a reality…

The title or the first line of a Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Ad is very important. Wouldn’t it be nice to get the keyword, which is typed by the user to be displayed as the title of your Ad? Google offers you this feature by applying the Dynamic Keyword Insertion.

Dynamic Keyword Insertion is a little known function of Google Adwords PPC service that automatically displays a searcher’s keyword as the title of your Ad.

Syntax of Dynamic Keyword Insertion

{keyword: seo india}

Here “seo india” is the default keyword which will appear in the first line of the Ad if the keyword entered by the user contains more than 25 characters. (The limit of the first line of the Ad is 25 characters)

Consider the following Ad

Let us assume the keyword list consists of:
                                           seo
                                           web marketing
                                           search engine optimization in india
                                           outsource seo

Now if a searcher types “seo” the Ad will be displayed as

Also, if a searcher types “outsource seo” then the Ad will be displayed as

But if a user types “search engine optimization in india” the Ad will be displayed as

Capitalization

Google allows you to improve the capitalization of the dynamically inserted keywords. Your use of capitalization inside the curly brackets will affect the capitalization of the keyword inserted by the searcher.

For example let the keyword under consideration be “web marketing” then

{keyword: seo india}   will display web marketing
{Keyword: seo india}   will display Web marketing
{KeyWord: seo india}   will display Web Marketing

Finally, a word of caution if you want to use Dynamic Keyword Insertion. Make sure that you check your keyword list and the Ad text thoroughly. Incase you don’t you can get Googled by Google. 

Google has just launched a Google Blog Search Pinging Service. According to the Google Blogsearch FAQs - This service is a way to inform Google Blog Search of weblog updates. These updates are then published and shared with other search engines to allow them to discover changes to your weblogs. The FAQs also mention that Google currently monitors other pinging services and will continue to do that. However pinging Google directly will potentially reduce latency when crawling your blogs.

The Google Blog search service should ideally be pinged each time your blog changes or is updated. This can be done manually at http://blogsearch.google.com/ping or automatically using their API. Google also mentions that a lot of commercial blogging providers may already be pinging Google Blog Search.

Lastly they have re-assured the blogging community that they will continue to monitor other pinging services like before.

As a SEO consultant, one often gets asked whether it is better to aim for a select few primary high-volume keywords or aim to get higher search engine ranking for a wide range of secondary keywords.

Well, my answer generally is that, while you have to aim to get primary keywords up in the search engine results pages, it would be unwise to restrict your search engine optimization efforts to a select number of keywords. Along with each primary keyword, there should always be a bunch of variations that may individually not amount to much traffic, but together will result in sizeable amount of good traffic. Further, the lower competition for these secondary keywords will ensure faster results.

While, generic keywords tend to bring in much more traffic than specific keywords, it is often the specific keywords that amount to better return on investment.

Not convinced? Read on…

A travel site gets 40% of its traffic from very generic keywords. And by generic I mean really generic… couple of million competing pages types. These were the keywords that we specifically wanted to improve search engine ranking of the site for. But along with these keywords, we worked on creating content that targeted a couple of 100 secondary keywords. Once ranking on search engines, each of these secondary keywords, individually amount to hardly any traffic, but together they now contribute to over 60% of the search engine traffic of the site.

Further, since these keywords are highly specific, the users tend to know what they want and this results in much better conversions compared to generic high volume terms.

Had we, like many search engine optimization companies, worked on only the top 20/30/50 keywords, this site would have lost valuable traffic.

So now are you convinced that ignoring low traffic low competition keywords in an SEO campaign can result in you missing a lot of good quality traffic???