I was speaking with an acquaintance of mine the other day about website design and search engine optimization. This person has been working on websites for years and is freelancing for some websites. One of the sites that this acquaintance works for recently hired a, so called, SEO specialist to help with one of the sites.
This person that I was speaking with was explaining that this “experts” suggestion was to make sure that each product listing contained at least 400 words. This was very difficult to execute because of the nature of the products. This word mandate would require garbage verbiage just to meet the word count requirement.
Based on all the knowledge that I’ve acquired over the past 10 years of working on websites and having recently watched the SEOmoz Advanced SEO Training DVDs this didn’t add up for me. I thought that I would check out this website. Here are a few conclusions why the word count is bunk and why this company should look for a different search engine optimization consultant.
- There was no meta-description tag on any of the pages of the website.
- The meta-title tags were exactly the same throughout the site.
- Most of the images had no alt tag.
- Most of the text links had no title tag.
- The shopping links were through paypal and all had alt tags that was promoting Ebay and had no product or company keywords in them.
- The site contained little to no H1 tags.
- The site contained little or no bold or stong markup for product and industry keywords in the pages.
This is SEO 101! Don’t even think about telling a writer to change product descriptions if the basics are not covered.
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