Entries for month: “March 2010”
Are acronyms hurting your SEO rank?
Anyone that knows me, understands that I am not a big fan of acronyms. I think they breakdown the lines of communication, and confuse people quickly. Earlier this week I attended a marketing luncheon with a topic on SEO, where I became acutely aware of this issue and wanted to write about it. I don't claim to know much about SEO, so you experts out there can set me straight if I am missing the point.
Basically the presentation sounded like this: "keywords in your name, keywords in your url, keywords in your username, keywords in categories, keywords in your tweets, keywords, keywords, keywords." Sounds reasonable right? Well it does until I started noticing all these acronyms appearing in the presentation materials, in the conversation, on the web, etc.
All this got me to thinking. Why spend all this time creating a keyword rich business name, username, url, etc., if your going to refer to them with acronyms? The same is true for valuable keywords or trigger words within the content of your site as well. Using acronyms seem like missed opportunities to add valuable keyword content to your website.
A perfect example of this would be the title of my blog post. "Are acronyms hurting your SEO rank?" If I was an SEO expert, I just missed an excellent opportunity to gain "search engine optimization" as three additional keywords. The problem with using acronyms are that people looking for your content may not be familiar with your specific acronyms and therefore search for the longer more verbose phrase or only part of the phrase.
Acronyms are a big part of our language—for better to for worse—we are stuck with them. We should think carefully about the usage of acronyms within our page content. Properly defining an acronym the first time it's used on the page with the <acronym> tag is the first thing I would recommend.
However I would be remiss if I didn't caution against the overuse of the <acronym> tag. I still believe that once a term has been defined on the page it does not need to be defined again. Optimizing for a search engine is one thing, but user experience should be your top priority. Unless of course your customers are search engines and not people.
→ Respond NowTags: Opinions & Rants · SEO
