SEO in Manhattan, NYC

If you are lucky enough to get into the DMOZ directory, aka the Open Directory Project or ODP - it takes forever to get included in the directory - you may find that your description in Google search is the same as the one you submitted to DMOZ. In the past webmasters and SEOs submitted their site to DMOZ in order to control what is displayed in Google search. Even the description meta tag was overlooked and the DMOZ description given priority. The problem was that some descriptions in DMOZ were outdated and webmasters and SEOs would have to update the description in DMOZ. Now, think about it, if it takes forever to get included in the directory, how long do you think it took to get your description to get updated? To make matters even worse you had to abide by the rules in DMOZ for description - you had to keep it short, concise, and bland. How could you control your description once DMOZ has accepted your URL submission?

So Google came up with a way for webmasters to tell the Google robot crawlers that you prefer not to use the description in DMOZ but rather the one in the description meta tag. The solution they came up with was a command you can include in your Robots meta tag. (continue reading…)

View Source - Meta Tag View

A meta tag, also known as an HTML tag, is a bit of code between the two header tags in your source code that tells search engines what your site is all about. In our opinion meta tags are very important. While we have seen some sites rank high in search engines without the use of meta tags, we believe that they “can” play a role in your search engine optimization efforts.

Many SEOs have different opinions about the effectiveness of meta tags in search engine optimization. I have seen many websites without meta tags rank higher in search engine results due to other factors such as high PageRank and site/domain age. However, if you want to use best practices, you should definitely consider using meta tags. And, in many cases it works - I have seen pages sky rocket to the first page of search engines after meta tags were effectively optimized. (continue reading…)