C Shaffstall

There are many ways to affect how a page ranks in search engines, but regardless what school of thought you attend, all SEO specialists agree: use your important phrases often on your site. If you have a specialty, such as optimized professional visibility, be sure to add this phrase to your web pages at every possible opportunity.

If you have attended Meta Tags 101 during your educational pursuits, be sure add meta tags to each page that also use this key phrase.

On the topic of search phrases and meta tags…

In my efforts to promote a client recently I stumbled across two very worthwhile tidbits that I had either known and then forgotten or that I simply never knew. I thought they were worth sharing.

The first is that search engines return different results when you search on a word that you have typed in all caps than they do when you type the same word in upper and lower case or in all lower case. Does this seem as odd to you as it does to me? After all, this is a computer program, should it really be second guessing my intent?

On one hand I understand the need to differentiate between a common acronym and its matching word, but on the other hand, I don’t think that the average search-engine user is putting that much thought into whether or not their caps lock is affecting their search results.

If we take this one step further, and given that caps and lower case do make a difference, does that mean we should also use meta tags in upper and lower case and caps… I have to guess that it does mean exactly that.

Search engine spiders are a finicky bunch, but they are also very smart. Each time that some hacker develops a method to cheat the system, the search-engine manufacturers release the next iteration of modified search-spider applications. Build a better mouse trap and the mice just get smarter.

On to my second lesson.

While working on changing the optimization of Mike Donner’s site, I noticed that a competing Mike Donner was ranking better than our client; we were both competing for the top slots on page one of Google. Using both Mike Donner and Michael Donner, we made it to page one, but couldn’t get above the bottom half of the page. In an effort to improve the rankings, I made a modification to all of his pages changing the occurrences of his name from Mike Donner to Michael (Mike) Donner.

After making this change, I lost all of my search-engine optimization work and slid back to page four and five of Google. Drat.

Lesson learned. Apparently the proximity rules don’t apply here.

I’ve just gone in and randomly used Michael Donner (Mike Donner) and Mike Donner (Michael Donner) instead. I’ll keep you posted as the results roll in; or you can keep an eye on it yourself at Mike Donner’s web site.