Question: Blunt question that you can hopefully answer very briefly: Is website optimization still productive? I heard from one of my partners’ website designers that you’re not supposed to put in keywords any more because the current browsers like Google use spiders that only look at actual content rather than a list of keywords. If that is the case, are there still other things you can do besides paying for it, to get good placement? Don’t tell me what, just tell me IF this is still a valuable service! Or is that not strictly true?

Answer: Yes, optimization is still very important. …

I received this question from a friend today about directory registrations and their worth or lack of it:

QuestionHi Jere

… I just wonder whether you can give me any advice on this. I am looking at a quick way to get some of my sites listed in on-line directories to increase incoming links and I wonder whether you use any tools for doing this…

Basically I have looked at a few tools but in the end there still seems to be a substantial amount of manual inputting involved - so I’m not sure if there is any great benefit …

Question from Todd: Will keywords in the table summary help boost rankings? An analysis of one competitor’s code suggests that it is helping them boost SEP.

Answer: You know, that’s a good question. For several years I routinely put in a table summary tag and put the keywords for the page in it — and it didn’t seem to make much difference. It didn’t hurt, either.

So it’s optional. Let me know if you have any success using it.

If you’re going to use tables, however, then I recommend you also use the “table trick” described here: http://www.wordsinarow.com/tabletrick.html

Best,

Jeré Matlock
http://www.wordsinarow.com …

Question:

Thanks so much for your prompt reply. I will input keywords for the PDF files.

I do have one last question: …. I read on your site and came across you saying that it’s better to have phrases than singular words for the keywords.

This seems to contradict what I have been reading about keywords on other sites. There was no mention about phrases being more effective. And when I check my competitors’ sites which rank high on Google search results, I noticed that they all use singular words.

So I am now a bit confused as to which approach …

Question: Hi, do any of the search engines search PDF files? Reason for asking is that the Adobe Acrobat has a Keywords field under the function Document Properties. So I’m just wondering if these keywords would be searchable by search engines? Else, I won’t waste time populating my PDF files with keywords! Thanks for your advice. I really like your site. It’s easy to understand and very useful for newbies like me. I used your html validators to clean up my html files.

Answer: Thanks for your kind words about our website.

The search engines (especially Google) are definitely indexing …