Keyword Trends Indicate Lack of SEO Know-How
By Anna Johnson on December 8th, 2009Search engine optimization (SEO) expert, Jill Whalen, recently wrote a blog post noting what visitors to her High Rankings website were looking for and reading during 2009. In particular, the ‘trends’ indicated by what keywords drove visitors to Jill’s site provides key insights into where SEO education is needed.
Focusing on her visitors deriving from Google, Jill Whalen found, among other things, substantial increases in searches related to meta keywords (up 32.04 percent since 2008), title tags (up 19.84 percent), meta descriptions (up 34.94 percent), SEO training (up 62.40 percent) and SEO classes (up 121.35 percent).
Meanwhile, searches had declined in relation to ‘keyword density’ (down 32.91 percent) and ‘site audits’ (down 31.01 percent).
Jill Whalen’s take on the relative increases in searches relating to meta keywords, title tags and meta descriptions indicates a general lack of understanding about how important (or not) these elements are for SEO.
After all, the search engines pretty much pay no attention to meta keywords, and pay much less attention to meta descriptions than they do the actual content of a given web page, while the title tags are much, much more important than either!
Jill points out, however, that the decline in searches relating to keyword density is a positive sign:
“My hope is that this means people are finally getting away from seeking out that secret-super-duper-all-encompassing keyword density formula or percentage that will magically put all their pages in the #1 spot.”
Meanwhile, Jill Whalen’s interpretation of the increase in searches related to training and classes, and the decline in audit related searches, is that more people may be looking to do their own SEO rather than outsource it to others.
It’s probable that the trends noted by Jill reflect misconceptions about SEO held in the wider Internet marketing and ecommerce community.
At least those who found their way to Jill’s site were likely to have been set straight on the importance (or otherwise) of meta keywords, meta descriptions, title tags, keyword density and the like.
Source: Jill Whalen, “SEO Trends,” High Rankings, December 2, 2009
