GOOGLE SEO part6 ~ 24helpzone

Robots Meta Tag

Thus far I’ve theorised about the Title Element, the Meta Description Tag and Meta Keywords Tag. Next:
The Robots Meta Tag;

<meta name="robots" content="index, nofollow" />

I could use the above meta tag to tell Google to index the page but not to follow any links on the page, if for some reason, I did not want the page to appear in Google search results.

By default, Googlebot will index a page and follow links to it. So there’s no need to tag pages with content values of INDEX or FOLLOW. GOOGLE

There are various instructions you can make use of in your Robots Meta Tag, but remember Google by default WILL index and follow links, so you have NO need to include that as a command – you can leave the robots meta out completely – and probably should if you don’t have a clue.

Googlebot understands any combination of lowercase and uppercase. GOOGLE.

Valid values for Robots Meta Tag ”CONTENT” attribute are: “INDEX“, “NOINDEX“, “FOLLOW“, “NOFOLLOW“. Pretty self explanatory.
Examples:

META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOINDEX, FOLLOW”
META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”INDEX, NOFOLLOW”
META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW”
META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOARCHIVE”
META NAME=”GOOGLEBOT” CONTENT=”NOSNIPPET”

Google will understand the following and interprets the following robots meta tag values:

NOINDEX – prevents the page from being included in the index.

NOFOLLOW – prevents Googlebot from following any links on the page. (Note that this is different from the link-level NOFOLLOW attribute, which prevents Googlebot from following an individual link.)

NOARCHIVE – prevents a cached copy of this page from being available in the search results.

NOSNIPPET – prevents a description from appearing below the page in the search results, as well as prevents caching of the page.

NOODP – blocks the Open Directory Project description of the page from being used in the description that appears below the page in the search results.

NONE – equivalent to “NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW”.

Robots META Tag Quick Reference

Terms	Googlebot	Slurp	BingBot	Teoma
NoIndex	YES	YES	YES	YES
NoFollow	YES	YES	YES	YES
NoArchive	YES	YES	YES	YES
NoSnippet	YES	NO	NO	NO
NoODP	YES	YES	YES	NO
NoYDIR	NO	YES	NO	NO
NoImageIndex	YES	NO	NO	NO
NoTranslate	YES	NO	NO	NO
Unavailable_After	YES	NO	NO	NO

I’ve included the robots meta tag in my tutorial as this IS one of only a few meta tags / html head elements I focus on when it comes to managing Googlebot and Bingbot. At a page level – it is a powerful way to control if your pages are returned in search results pages.
These meta tags go in the [HEAD] section of a [HTML] page and represent the only tags for Google I care about. Just about everything else you can put in the [HEAD] of your HTML document is quite unnecessary and maybe even pointless (for Google optimisation, anyway).
If you are interested in using methods like on-page robots instructions and the robots.txt file to control which pages get indexed by Google and how Google treats them, Sebastian knows a lot more than me.

External Links

H1-H6: Headers

I can’t find any definitive proof online that says you need to use Heading Tags (H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, H6) or that they improve rankings in Google, and I have seen pages do well in Google without them – but I do use them, especially the H1 tag on the page.
For me it’s another piece of a ‘perfect’ page, in the traditional sense, and I try to build a site for Google and humans.

<h1>This is a page title</h1>

I still generally only use one <h1> heading tag in my keyword targeted pages – I believe this is the way the W3C intended it be used in HTML4 – and I ensure they appear at the top of a page above relevant page text and written with my main keywords or keyword phrases incorporated.
I have never experienced any problems using CSS to control the appearance of the heading tags making them larger or smaller.
You can use multiple H1s in HTML5, but most sites I find I work on still use HTML4.
I use as many H2 – H6 as is necessary depending on the size of the page, but generally I use H1, H2 & H3. You can see here how to use header tags properly (although basically just be consistent, whatever you do, to give your users the best user experience).
How many words in the H1 Tag? As many as I think is sensible – as short and snappy as possible usually.
Aaron Wall at SEOBook recommends not making your h1 tags the exact same as your page titles, although I personally have never seen a problem with this on a quality site. I also discovered Google will use your Header tags as page titles at some level if your title element is malformed.
As always be sure to make your heading tags highly relevant to the content on that page and not too spammy, either.

How Many Words & Keywords?

I get asked this all the time –

how much text do you put on a page to rank for a certain keyword?

The answer is there is no optimal amount of text per page, but how much text you’ll ‘need’ will be based on your DOMAIN AUTHORITY, your TOPICAL RELEVANCE and how much COMPETITION there is for that term, and HOW COMPETITIVE that competition actually is.
Instead of thinking about the quantity of the text, you should think more about the quality of the content on the page. Optimise this with searcher intent in mind. Well, that’s how I do it.
I don’t find that you need a minimum amount of words or text to rank in Google. I have seen pages with 50 words out rank pages with 100, 250, 500 or 1000 words. Then again I have seen pages with no text rank on nothing but inbound links or other ‘strategy’. In 2015, Google is a lot better at hiding away those pages, though.
At the moment, I prefer long form pages with a lot of text although although I still rely heavily on keyword analysis to make my pages. The benefits of longer pages are that they are great for long tail key phrases. Creating deep,information rich pages really focuses the mind when it comes to producing authoritative, useful content.
Every site is different. Some pages, for example, can get away with 50 words because of a good link profile and the domain it is hosted on. For me, the important thing is to make a page relevant to a user’s search query.
I don’t care how many words I achieve this with and often I need to experiment on a site I am unfamiliar with. After a while, you get an idea how much text you need to use to get a page on a certain domain into Google.
One thing to note – the more text you add to the page, as long as it is unique, keyword rich and relevant, the more that page will be rewarded with more visitors from Google.
There is no optimal number of words on a page for placement in Google. Every website – every page – is different from what I can see. Don’t worry too much about word count if your content is original and informative. Google will probably reward you on some level – at some point – if there is lots of unique text on all your pages.
TIP: The ‘inverted pyramid‘ – pictured above – is useful when creating pages for the web too – very useful.

Character Counter Tool

Keyword Density?

The short answer to this is – no. There is no one-size-fits-all keyword density, no optimal percentage. Most web optimisation professionals agree there is no ideal percent of keywords in text to get a page to number 1 in Google. Search engines are not that easy, although the key to success in many fields doing simple things well (or at least better than the competition). I write natural page copy where possible always focused on the key terms – I never calculate density in order to identify the best % – there are way too many other things to work on. I have looked into this. If it looks natural, it’s ok with me. Normally I will try and get related terms in the page, and if I have 5 paragraphs, I might have the keyword in 4 or 5 of those as long as it doesn’t look like I stuffed them in there.
Optimal keyword density is a myth, although there are many who disagree. Crazy stuff. (I think the page I just linked to is the longest page on the internet debunking keyword density!)