A: Correct. While some reports have shown that Yahoo! may still read it, this is only when the META Keyword tag contains a word that is not included on a page, such as a misspelling.

Not long ago (a few years – that’s a long time in the SEO world), the META Keyword tag was a place where we would stuff tons of relevant, misspelled or synonymous keywords for search engines to relate our site to. Heck, some people even would place competitor names and brand names in there as well (ummmm, no, not us!). Those tactics are now obsolete for SEO purposes.

The META Keyword tag is not worth the time and effort on your brain for each page of your site anymore so forget it.

A: Yes, to an extent. The recent advances in technology and the totally awesome free tools (built by masterminds) allow you to gain a very useful insight as to what your competitors are doing online. While I will not divulge all of the secrets in our toolbox (we are available for hire at affordable prices), I will give a few away. We have spent a lot of time over the years to hone in on our techniques, only to find out that some people think it’s impossible, while others believe it’s relativity easy.

Grab a pen and paper. Ready?

There are many tools and two of my favorites (which are free) are WMTools.com and WMTips.com. The data they provide will gather enough necessary information to show the technology and marketing behind a competitors site:

• Backlinks in Google and Yahoo!
• # of pages indexed in major search engines
• Backlinks in Google blogsearch
• Backlinks on Digg and Delicious
• Indexed images on Google image search
• Current top rankings
• History of the site with historical data and cache versions
• Site load speed
• Robots.txt information

Tons of great information at your fingertips. Can you image the knowledge that you will gain by looking at this data?

A: Actually, you don’t need to all the time. Unless you are operating a news site or a blog, fresh content is not the be-all to end-all for search engines to notice you. Many e-commerce or corporate sites do well with old content. As long as it is accurate and relevant, you will be fine.

Here is another answer to the same question:

Yes, you should.  Especially if you are operating a blog or news site,  maybe it is a site for a specific breed of dogs. Then yes, you would want to add fresh content on a regular basis. The most important reason is to engage your readers. Focus on creating high-quality content that your visitors will appreciate. If you write one great page of relevant content per month, that is better than two template pieces of content per week.

While these “sales” were tagged a cute name to get people in the door, I wanted to key the phrase again for online retailers. Let’s call it “SEO in July.” No matter your product or target audience you should be deep into the planning stages of your SEO campaign for the holiday season, which is only six short months from now. This campaign should be solidified and be in the first stages of execution by August, if not the end of July.

Why you ask?

Remember, results from your SEO efforts take time.  Your competitors know this (the good ones) and are making the same plans to attack or push their major product in November and December. It is imperative to include social media tactics also for your holiday season campaign. If you can determine a game plan now you can build the headway to use social media by directing users to your target site.

If you are interested in discussing your online holiday event or other specific date in the foreseen future please give us a call. We’d love to talk. Remember another age-old saying is that “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” This saying holds true for the SEO and social media community as well.

Check it out below – you can see the little “soccer” ball button next to the fit to window button in the gray bar. Pretty cool feature in the spirit of the World Cup!

Watch The World’s Reaction to Landon Donovan’s Game Winning Goal

A: Yes. Some of the quickest ways to determine this is to:

• Determine your top 10 keywords your trying to achieve high rankings for
• Notice the competition and look to see who is out-ranking you
• Note the links that are pointing to your competitors site (check weekly if not more often to see how they are building them)
• Which page are the keywords pointing to in your competitors website?
• How long ago did that page originate (use WayBackMachine)
• Do they have a DMOZ listing?
• Any Digg or other posts?
• Do they have good on-page factors like title, content, meta, etc.?

Doing these side-by-side comparisons on a monthly basis will show you all the changes and factors that are involved with ranking changes in search engines.

Ouch, don’t bet on England.

A: Even when you have tested and refined ad variations in the past it is important that you keep testing. The online landscape changes, along with your competitors and opportunities. Your competition will keep testing themselves and how you are marketing as well.

Stay on top of what your competition is doing, their bids and campaign changes. Keep working on your keyword relevance and working to increase your CTR. This will increase your quality score, lower costs and push up your ad placement position in search results.

A: FALSE – This used to be the way to go, but it’s just not true anymore. However, if it is direct traffic that you may benefit from then this could be a good possibility. This used to be a great tactic until Google started putting up flags in their algorithm to detect expiration and renewal dates of a domain. You could privatize your name but Google will know, since they are a registrar. Google resets a dropped domain for rankings and link value.

Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land discussed this with Google’s own Matt Cutts last year: “There are some domain transfers ( e.g. genuine purchases of companies) where it can make perfect sense for links to transfer. But at the same time it wouldn’t make sense to transfer the links from an expired or effectively expired domain, for example. Google (and probably all search engines) tries to handle links appropriately for domain transfers. The sort of stuff our systems would be designed to detect would be things like someone trying to buy expired domains or buying domains just for links.”

BP has a dirty mess on their hands and a fake online Twitter account that is contributing to it. Their answer: aggressively advertise online in every search engine for the word “oil” and take consumers to the main BP corporate site. Over $10,000 is reported to being spent daily. Ouch.

If you are not utilizing social media, mobile marketing and the internet to grow your exposure and sales then please step aside. There is never a more important time than now to invest in your online presence and it has never been so affordable.

The summer months are a great time to sit and examine your efforts and we are happy to help. We can help by outlining an effective, aggressive or modest strategy for your online presence. Contact us online, on Facebook, on Twitter, or use traditional methods like an office phone to find out how our staff can increase your bottom line.