Search Engine Optimization – Title and Meta Tags
Now that you have a better idea how to pick your keywords for your custom storefront pages it’s time to take a look at Meta tags and how you can use them to achieve higher rankings in search engines. Again, I called in our resident expert, Mikkel. Here’s what he has to say about Meta tags…..
Traditionally, Title and Meta HTML tags – parts of your Web pages’ underlying source code – have been centerpieces of any successful search engine optimization campaign. In the early days of the search engines, a top ranking often could be secured by simply building the right Title and
Ideally, all of your site’s main pages should be equipped with individual Title and
The Title Tag
The Title tag defines the text displayed in a Web browser’s top bar. The Title tag should mirror its page's contents, provide an appealing lead-in, and help boost the page's search engine ranking — all in a few, easily-read words and phrases. A Title tag should be readable as a headline and include two or three carefully selected keywords. Descriptive, appealing and keyword-optimized Title tags will attract visitors, as well as search engines.
Title tags shouldn’t be more than 80 characters long, including spaces. They also should not repeat a word or phrase excessively as that might be construed as search engine spamming, which could cause your search engine rankings to plummet.
The Description
The only
The Description tag decides what some search engines will display for your site on their search results pages. (The top search engines, Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and Ask.com usually will display a snippet of body text that includes the keyword(s), instead.)
Many search engines pay particular attention to keywords found inside the Description Meta tag. This means that a Description Meta tag should inspire the search engine user to click through the link and access your site. As well, the tag should include at least one occurrence of the applicable Web page’s top two or three keywords.
Description
The Keywords
In addition to listing keywords without having to worry about textual coherence, the Keywords Meta tag is the one Web site element that allows you to cover common mis- and alternate spellings of your main keywords. If you are aware of any such alternatives, be sure to list them in the Keywords Meta tag. Generally, the Keywords Meta tag content should not exceed 1024 characters, including spaces.
The Keywords Meta tag once provided one of the easiest ways to optimize a Web page for the Internet search engines. However, as the Keywords Meta tag provided an all-too-obvious means of spamming the search engines with excessive keyword repetitions, many of the engines have gradually decreased the influence of the Keywords Meta tag on a Web page’s ranking. Today, heavyweights Google (and thus AOL Search), MSN Search and Ask.com (formerly Ask Jeeves) simply ignore the Keywords Meta tag. Of the major search engines, only Yahoo! actually indexes a Web page's Keywords Meta tag content, yet the search engine acknowledges that this element plays a rather insignificant role in the overall ranking calculations for indexed Web pages.
About Search Engine Spamming
Search engine spamming continues to taint the purity of algorithmic search results produced by search engines. As is often the case, spammers act, and search engines react. Consequently, search engines are acutely aware of the threat of existing and new methods of search engine spamming and might come down hard on perceived spamming. Because Title and
As you build Title, Description and Keywords Meta tags for your reseller site, you must ensure that the tags are rich on keywords and closely reflect the actual Web page content. Do not use keywords and phrases that are obviously unrelated to your site. And do not sacrifice coherence in order to squeeze in more keywords. Your focus should be on composing polished, appealing and keyword-rich content that provides an honest reflection of your Web site’s content and theme. And pleases search engines and search engine users alike.
I hope you this gives you a jump start on building your own
Stace
I was wondering what other resellers think about organic search and sales generation. Do you generate a lot of sales originating from organic searches?
I always thought that since the domain and hosting market are so busy it is difficult to drive organic search traffic to your site, so I have not been focuing too much on SEO.
An exception may be if you drive traffic to your site for other topics, like the horse site that Stacey has. And then you convert customers from there. But if you do not focus on any niche it may be difficult to differentiate yourself.
What are other reseller's thoughts?
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Hi there
Not sure if this is the right place to mention this, but I wish to take the opportunity to clarify something.
I have not been receiving about %50 of my transaction email notification, and support constantly blaming it on my filtering or ISP in spite of the fact that I contacted my ISP and they told me that there is no way that they can block these emails, and in spite of the fact that I tried another email accounts to make sure.
I find it HARD to believe, but they tell me that I'm the ONLY one on the planet who is having this problem!
It would appreciated if some of you reseller out there can help shed some light on this sensitive matter.
I also wonder why there is no forum dedicated for the reseller program?
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Sign up an email account at gmail.com and setup your transaction notification email to point to this email. See what happens for a while.
As far as the forum, well, I was also wondering if we should open a forum with our own store, but finally gave up the idea. Customers will always tend to use this place for support requests... Forum is not meant to be a support desk and the owner / moderator of the forum should not be an intermediary between customer and Support Team!
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There is now. go to the Reseller home page and you will see a new entry for Forum!
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Hi Shareef,
I can relate to your issue, but before I do that, let me point out that you will only receive order confirmations on non-automated puchases. You will not receive e-mail comfirmations on automated renewal orders. If the customer manually renews you get an order confirmation. If the system automatically renews, only the customer gets an e-mail confirmation, but not the reseller.
I actually had a very similar problem about 3 months ago. I stopped getting confirmation e-mails altogether and then noticed that I would only get a confirmation if I maintained an e-mail address that was not purchased through my reseller account.
I brought this up to customer support and had a pretty bad experience. I got suggestions such as e-mail filters, spam filters, ISP problems, etc. In the end one agent simply said there is nothing they can do.
So I gave up and just used e-mail addresses that would work (i.e. not purchased through my reseller account). A while later I switched back and noticed that apparently the problem had been resolved and right now I have no isses.
I hope this helps!
Karl
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Hi Pavel, Karl, and all
That goes to prove that the support was not straightforward about this matter and they have the attitude of take it or leave kind of deal... in another word, we report and function according to the way we do and there is NOT much anyone can do about it!
They don't seem to care much about how hard people try to succeed in this business and how much time, money, and effort they spend, not mentioning the yearly fee!
- I did try using gmail, but it did not work.
- Support never mentioned that the notifications are restricted to manual, so I assume that it is not the case.
- I use a company email account, so it is not from my reseller.
- I wonder how long it normally takes for a purchase to show in the report? Just today, I had someone register a domain and few hours latter, No notification and not showing in the report!?
- I was referring to the company forum for support and transparency.
I just hope that someone responsible would address these issues in a responsible way for the best of all.
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Hi all
I found out that the domain transaction did not go through the first time, but eventually it did go through and showed in my report, but although it was a new customer, there was NO notification!
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I am finding it difficult to insert my meta tags for my reseller website. It is the standard website we get, not the website tonight site. Do we insert them in traffic blazer. Also I know this blog isn't for ssl certificates, but with my original reseller site I have a ssl certificate that reads "netpaynet.net" which isn't my "okeidokei.com" domain name. So I have to forward and mask my "okeidokei.com" domain name. Any suggestions are appreciated. questions@okeidokei.com
Raphael
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You can't insert meta tags into your template storefront. You actually don't want spiders to search your storefront templates because the content is mostly the same for all resellers and search engines rank on unique content. Spidering your storefront could actually hurt your rankings in search engines. That's why I recommend you create a custom home page and optimize that for search engines.
Sorry - can't help you with your SSL issue. Please contact support@securepaynet.net and they should be able to help you.
Stace
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Besides running Bluemen and being a reseller, I'm currently doing a masters on the Semantic Web at Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal. I suggest implementing ontologies in the form of custom meta tags to boost keyword relevance. The W3 has links to common ontologies. The most popular one is Dublin-Core and is a document ontology. By using Semantic Web ready terms as custom metatags, you're not only preparing for the semantic web but you're also making your current web pages more rich. Good-luck!
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