Search-Engine Optimization (SEO) is a hot topic in online publishing, and has been for some time. This is because you can greatly improve the reach of your content and your traffic numbers by following simple rules that make content easily understood by search engines.
At this point, many web publishers have mastered the basics of SEO . most already understand the importance of clean URLs and page title
But what about lesser-known tricks of the trade?
Here is a little secret: the way you tag your content can have significant impact on the search-engine visibility and ranking of your website. Drupal is especially well-positioned in this regard, since it has advanced tagging and tag visualization features (e.g. tag clouds). Every tag attached to a content item leads to a “Tag Page” that is a natural “landing page” for keywords. Since these tags are links, they are eagerly followed by search crawler bots. And the tag landing pages are indexed frequently.
Ok but, where’s this secret formula?
Here: always try to use specific, two- or three-word tags!. Let me repeat this: avoid generic, single-word tags!
The human brain tends to be parsimonious. As such, when we think of information we unconsciously try to describe it with several one-word keywords. Well we are beginning to see that is not particularly effective for search engines.
If you have managed Google AdWords campaigns, you know that buying single-word keywords is a waste of money. They are too generic, expensive and cost-per-conversion is much higher than if you buy well-targeted two- or three-word keyword phrases. For instance, it’s much better to use something like “driver safety” than just “cars” as a keyword. You never want to buy a single-word keyword like “cars” for your Google campaign.
Well, then – why do you tag you content with single-word term “cars”? Tag pages are natural landing pages for search engines, so the optimization rules that apply to search keywords are directly transferable to rules for tags in your tag cloud.
In some of the other content-management systems, publishers have to manually create “landing pages” for the search keywords they run campaigns for. In Drupal we get those out-of-the-box in the form of tag pages… only we need to treat these tags as the target search keywords for search engines. If you do, you will see the difference in a short time.
Happy hunting.
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What other Drupal tagging modules would you advise, other than the tagadelic module?
http://drupal.org/project/opencalais
Very cool – I run a Visual Basic Source site that I do tagging on. I’ve never added free tagging though. Do you know if theres any tutorials or anything on how to force 3 word tagging phrases? This would be great for user submitted code or tutorials.
Cool – Drupal Rules
Lists of content are often not well suited as landing pages. Users who search for something do not want to click through your site too. If they are not satisfied with the result, they go to the next result listed by the search engine. If you use user tracking software, you will notice that the bounce rate of such pages is quite high.
You raise a valid point here. What we have found in our purely empirical and totally non-scientific research, though, is that the bounce-rate from a listing page is vastly impacted by the presentation of the page.
If you present a user a dry listing of links, they are much more likely to leave the page than if you style the list so that it becomes a content page.
Thankfully, Drupal has very flexible theming capabilities that allow for advanced styling. For instance, you can include “teasers” (short annotations of content) alongside the links or even list entire content items in some creative way.
With panels, you can override a typical taxonomy term listing page to make it more visually appealing. How has this affected landing page bounce rates in your experience?
You are right that the presentation of such a page can have a very positive impact on the bounce rate. Your idea to use phrases instead of keywords is actually quite smart. This way you are less likely to run into duplicate content issues that may arise when tagging many pieces of content with the same single-word tags.