Are meta tags really dead?

There are multiple openions and school of thoughts whether to add meta tags on your web page since major search engines have changed the algorithm for ranking websites. The reason being, the title and other meta tags have been misused by webmasters as avenues of stuffing the keywords in order to get higher ranking is search engines.


Now since ranking critiea of major search engines have changed but still title and meta tags have relevance in search engine ranking.

Please be informed that Title tag is actually not the meta tag and holds a lot of weight with Google and other engines.

While Google no longer consider description tag for ranking purposes, it is still an important element to include on every page.  Don’t make the mistake of thinking that, just because this tag no longer holds ranking value, it shouldn’t contain keyphrases.  By all means, it should.

The keyword tag hasn’t been used since the mid-1990s.  It doesn’t hurt to put a few phrases in this tag, including perhaps some common misspellings, but it won’t help your rankings one bit.

Google simplifies multiple owners verification in webmaster

Google has simpliied the owership of the verified site in webmaster tool.
Now there is new Add a user tool on the site verification page, which on filling will provide complete access of the website and webmaster tool previleges to the new owner.

Dont ignore your videos, optimize them to rank in SERP

Blended search is getting popular day by day and you can see videos, news, maps and other related content are now displayed along the standard search results.

Thus if you are not optimizing your videos, start it now -

• Insert keywords into your video filenames.
• Host your videos on YouTube, and embed these YouTube videos into your website pages. The context provided by the text on those pages (which is hopefully already optimized for search as well) will help the search engines figure out what your videos are about. 
• Optimize your YouTube videos by inserting important key-phrases into the videos' titles, descriptions, and tags.
• Creating a video library on your site is a good idea. Write keyword-rich annotations for each video in the library.

Please share your experiences with me. If you have optimized your videos, which tactics did you use and which have worked best for you?

Long tail Vs Short Search Queries: Which is best

This topic is actually in the debate from a long time and still bothering the advertizer to decide which search queries to target, long tail or short tail.

By the way, there is a difference between keywords & search queires - While keywords are the inventory any advertiser buys, search queries are the actual key-phrases people type into a search engine.

Based on the analysis of the google adwords accounts, researchers have come to a conclusion that long tail search queries drives more targetted clicks  than the short tail. Also long tail queires consume more PPC budget and generate more conversions with less cost per click (CPC).

Thus its important to note that:

• long tail search queries have enormous value
• to achieve high ROI, it’s important to aggressively mine negative keywords and to effectively target more specific search queries.

 So, always keep this thumb rule in mind, "Broad Match Keywods + Negative Keywords = Profitable Long Tail"