I was puzzled why Google ignored www.ideas-smart.com when returning search results for “smart ideas” (without quotes). The URL contains those keywords. The site name contains those keywords too. The title on the front page contains “smart ideas” as well. Yahoo!, on the other hand, listed www.ideas-smart.com as #3 for quite some time when searching for “smart ideas”.
The pages with articles contain description and keywords meta tags. This can be configured rather easily using Drupal Integrated Metatags module (this Web site is powered by Drupal). However, the front page is different from the article pages and I did not setup those meta tags there. It did not seem important to have them on the front page as overall sentiment on the Web regarding SEO is that search engines these days do not care much about description and keywords meta tags.
I looked for a Web site that would give me SEO tips for www.ideas-smart.com. In the end I decided to use RankingToday.com. It is a suite of various SEO tools capable of doing multiple types of checks, analysis, comparisons, recommendations, etc. regarding other Web sites.
The first run showed that RankingToday.com cares about description and keywords meta tags. It pointed out that these meta tags are not present. It also calculated keyword density. Keywords “more”, “comments” and “reads” were on the top. “ideas” and “smart” were present, but with less than 2% density. So I started to play with the front page in order to satisfy the criteria of RankingToday.com as much as possible.
The lower part of the main content area currently contains 10 recent articles. Previously the same area consisted of two tabs(same as on the Articles page). One with recent articles (shown by default) and another one with most read (popular) articles. These two tabs together added 20 occurrences of “more”, “comments” and “reads”. I decided to remove the tab with popular articles (it was not viewed often anyway) in order to reduce the occurrences of the above words by 10. It also improved the loading time of the front page since the database query that finds the most read articles is a join over two tables and therefore is not incredibly fast.
I added keywords meta tag with keywords: "smart ideas, smart idea, idea, ideas, smart". I added description that is a copy of the introduction text on the top of the page. I also changed some formulations to add more “smart ideas”.
This tweaking took several iterations. In the end RankingToday.com was pretty happy. “smart” and “ideas” have distribution between 2% and 5% on the front page. They are present in title, description and keywords meta tags. I was curious about the impact on Google.
First time I searched on Google for “smart ideas” 2 days after these changes. www.ideas-smart.com was listed on the second page. This was already a huge improvement. Couple of days later, www.ideas-smart.com was on #4. I also checked the impact on Yahoo! Surprisingly, www.ideas-smart.com dropped from #3 to #9. Anyway, this is good news that these two search engines with combined market share of 90% (Google approximately 80% and Yahoo! 10%) both display www.ideas-smart.com on the first pages for search terms “smart ideas”.
Conclusion. Fixing the basics on the front page certainly helped to get much higher in Google’s search results. It is unclear though what improvement contributed the most: keyword density, the added meta tags, or higher keyword density due to their presence also in meta tags. Free tools on RankingToday.com proved to give correct advice targeted on Google.
Note. The above mentioned positions in the search results are the positions at the day of writing this blog post. The may change any day in the future. The "competing" Web sites are expected to work on their SEO as well to score better in the future. The search engines may change their ranking algorithms as well and thus change the order of search results.