Am I doing Bad Practice in SEO?

[SEO Lady]

I love blunt conversations, and I've just had one with a very techie web designer who told me that my SEO requests were against good practice..

... Can I have your opinion?

1. Verifying in Bing is pointless
2. Verifying in Alexa is a ruse to enable Spyware to access the site when you install the meta verification
3. Keywords are irrelevant for Google*
4. Using an auto generator to provide meta tags is frowned upon as someone somewhere will be using the data I input

Here's my opinion

1. Verifying in Bing may not be essential but as Yahoo and Bing are now combined I would prefer to add any weight (however little) to validating a website in these search engines
2. Completely no idea about the bad points of Alexa
3. *I know keywords are ignored by Google, but back to point 1 - Bing and Yahoo do consider these, so coupled with verification, surely that's a good thing?
4. I use free meta tag generator which was recommended to me by another SEO - there is no site info on here, so how can this information be used in the future by an anonymous 3rd party?

Thank you


- Nina

 

[cmcp]

Some thoughts to consider,

Verifying in Bing is pointless

No less pointless than in any other search engine I'd imagine. Is this recommended on Bing help pages? If so, batter in.

Verifying in Alexa is a ruse to enable Spyware to access the site when you install the meta verification

Does the verification involve a toolbar or local download of something? If so I'd avoid.

Keywords are irrelevant for Google*

Maybe so. Taking SEO out the picture I don't see a use for these unless they're utilised by an internal search system.

Using an auto generator to provide meta tags is frowned upon as someone somewhere will be using the data I input

It's not impossible, but seems like a stupid argument. Anyone can access any info in front end web through view source.

 

[terryuk]

Hmm in my eyes verifying in any search engine is pointless - it's as if you can't get their attention with out it and reminds me of search engine submission services which are junk.

Auto generators are rubbish especially if you are using for meta descriptions?? I don't even know why you need to use a generator??

Verifying in Alexa is rubbish.. and so is Alexa

However keywords and the use of them are probably one of the most important factors in Google (not meta keywords?)

 

[Ali-v-8]

Meta generator require the content to determine the meta created - not really good as they wont really create the best terms - much better to do them manually.

 

[cmcp]

It looks to me as though the HTML tags are being generated, not the content.

I'm assuming that keywords refers to meta keywords.

 

[SEO Lady]

Meta generator require the content to determine the meta created - not really good as they wont really create the best terms - much better to do them manually.

I sort of do them manually, it's just the open and closing code that's generated saving me time hand coding. I input everything personally.

The original point to my post was that I was told I am doing bad practice.

Whether or not these tasks are pointless is not the question, it's the effect of me implementing them. Will these have a detrimental effect? I don't think so. Bad practice? Personally I don't think so. A waste of a few minutes? Debatable..

 

[webgeek]

That was a very clued up webmaster.

Bing - you'll get the 1% traffic whether you do or don't.

Alexa - hasn't mattered for years, so why should it now. Serps -> traffic -> sales (not much else matters really)

Google doesn't look at meta-keywords and hasn't for ages.

Commit to some content and meta and stick with it. Dynamic generation based on inbound query? You might as well use hidden divs with white on white text!

 

[SEO Lady]

That was a very clued up webmaster.

The most clued up I have ever spoken to.

Bing - you'll get the 1% traffic whether you do or don't.

But it's traffic you can't ignore? I got slated on this forum when I said it's pointless optimising a website for Bing or Yahoo and Google is the only one and it's the most important. BTW - I would say that the 1% figure you said is more like 5%+. Even so, why ignore the potential of highly targeted traffic? If it takes 3 minutes to verify for life, what harm is that?

Alexa - hasn't mattered for years, so why should it now. Serps -> traffic -> sales (not much else matters really)

I only use Alexa for competitor research / link analysis, nothing else. If it wasn't important how come the most popular SEO plugins in Wordpress have the field to validate?

Google doesn't look at meta-keywords and hasn't for ages.

Yup, I know that, which is why I *asterisk'd the original post, but again, refer to the previous Bing/Yahoo point, other search engines will still use them. For a few seconds worth of effort, setup for ever.

Commit to some content and meta and stick with it. Dynamic generation based on inbound query? You might as well use hidden divs with white on white text!

That's totally not what I said that I was doing. Please take time to read my posts carefully.

 

[RevaxMedia]

Hmm in my eyes verifying in any search engine is pointless - it's as if you can't get their attention with out it and reminds me of search engine submission services which are junk.

Verifying websites in search engines has helped me find errors pretty much instantly for instance we had a client who had a tracking cookie who found the location of a visitor then showed them a particular version of the website (language) the crawler was always directed to the same version of the website which had nofollow attribute - pretty bad move on our clients part (fetch as Googlebot) also HTML suggestions is great as we have found some websites generate dynamic URL's with exact meta data and content, Crawl errors - great for optimising robots.txt and website structure. Sitemap linking and troubleshooting and geographic targeting just to name a few features.

I would do Google for every website and Bing for a select few.

 

[webgeek]

Doing any type of verifying on Bing is not going to change your traffic from 1% Bing to 5% Bing any more than it will change your site from 0 to hero thanks to Bing. If you're popular, and have built a good inbound link footprint, you'll rank.

Alexa for competitor research? Try SEMRush, OpenSiteExplorer, Market Samurai, or any of the tools showing ranking, serps, keyword volumes, and ad profiles. Throw Alexa in the bin where it belongs.

Show me a case study, from the past 12 months, where inserting meta-keywords did anything for SERPs. I'm a doubting Thomas on this one, having several sites doing quite nicely without meta-keywords, and having done enough on-page optimization to go blue in the face talking about it. That 2 minutes per page, times 500 pages, could be spent generating some quality content or links that would actually matter.

You said using an automatic meta generator. Sounds like automation jiggery pokery to manipulate SERPs. Perhaps I confused static with dynamic, my bad. If you're doing it once to make life easier, then great. If it dynamically changes, automatically, then you're sticking that head in the lions mouth.

 

[cmcp]

lol @ reading skills