Have you got a question on SEO?

Did you know that you can ask your SEO related questions to me through this contact form or by emailing me?

We have an interesting question today from Prashant P. Prashant is a newbie blogger and is looking for answers to the following SEO related questions.

1) How do I get a site listed on top of a search engine. This sounds really silly, I know. But, will it be of any use if I use meta-tag? I have heard, search engine crawlers ignore whats given in meta tag.

Answer: It indeed sounds silly asking that question Prashant. Getting to the top of Google SERP’s is not impossible. A clever mix of strategies that suits you best, can ensure you top ranks on Google. It differs from each site to site. Many of the times, SEO techniques employed are unique optimized content generation, on site optimization, link building and overdoing your competition.

Regarding metatags, Yes it will help you to some extent. But meta tags alone can’t help you straight up the SERPs. Search Engines do not cimpletely ignore Metatags, but it’s no longer a factor that will give you edge over others. Like I mentioned in an earlier post, meta tags improves your blogs quality and increases it’s chance of being clicked from the SERPs by a user. But in the first place you blog has to appear in the SERPS, for that you should rely more on other onsite SEO factors.

2) Will a site get listed higher, if I fill in junk text and hide it? For example, if I have a site on ayurveda can i fill it with random text related to ayurveda and then hiding it?

Answer:This is black-hat-seo. Meaning, it will kill your site or blog if implemented. Google have clearly stated in it’s guidelines that such sorts of back-hat methods can straight take your site down and even banned on Google. Please refrain from the following back hat methods.

- Creating doorwawy pages

- Buying links

- Creating hidden texts

- Loading pages with irrelevant keywords

3) Does every search engine work the same way?

Answer:Yes they work almost the same way. Though they have differences in displaying data (on the SERPs), they collect data more or less the same way.
Example: Submitting a single sitemap through your robots.txt file will ensure that all search engines pick up the same sitemap from your site. But they may take into other consideration other factors and treat them differently before displaying your site on their search results page. Which is why, for the same keyword, you get different rankings on different search engines.

Further reading recommendations: What is Search Engine Optimization?

Hope I’ve answered your questions. Readers who’d like to ask me a question can either ask it through the contact form or email me.

UPDATE - You an ask questions here as well.