If you own a website and are serious about selling anything from it, you’ve probably come across search engine optimisation (or SEO for short).

There are several experts now in this field in New Zealand, charging clients an arm and a leg to get their websites ranked near the top of Google.

Now, I want to stress I endorse the concept of SEO and acknowledge there are many honest and sincere practitioners of this art (or is it a science?) But I got angry recently when one of my clients approached me after having their website assessed by an SEO company.

The client pushed the results in my face as if to say: “Look at all these things that are wrong with my website from an SEO viewpoint – and you built it!”

When I looked at the SEO company’s assessment, I found some of the comments laughable. For example, they noted the web pages had no ‘keywords’ meta tag. For the last two or three years I have been omitting to the ‘keywords’ tag – for this reason…

Keywords meta tags are totally ignored by Google

A few years ago, filling up the meta keywords tag with keywords/terms (known as keyword stuffing) was an effective way to improve a web page’s rankings in the search engines. But this tactic became abused by web designers and spammers. Search engines started to ignore (or at least de-emphasise) the importance of the keywords tag in making their rankings.

On September 21, 2009, Google made an announcement through a blog post that seemed to confirm that the keywaords tag now has has no influence in their search results.

To quote from Google’s blog:

“Our web search (the well-known search at Google.com that hundreds of millions of people use each day) disregards keyword metatags completely. They simply don’t have any effect in our search ranking at present.”

There it is in black and white. And yet SEO experts are still charging people money to tell them their websites are lacking keywords tags.

What Google is starting to look at, which will increasingly affect a website’s ranking in the search results, is the speed with which the web page loads.

Google’s Matt Cutts has stated that web page load time can definitely influence rankings. In other words, the slower a page loads, the lower it will be ranked, and vice versa.

This is something I am going to focus on more in future. I’ve been guilty of building slow-loading web pages, without realising they could have a negative impact on my client’s rankings in Google. By optimising the images, so they load faster, and minimising the amount of superfluous code on the page, I hope to help my clients gain an extra edge in the search engines.