One of the most popular wordpress plugins is the all in one seo pack.  I have been using it for a while but noticed that the meta descriptions I created were being ignored by Google.  Usually an indexed page is represented by Google as a snippet.  The snippet is a combinaiton of the meta title and meta description.  The meta description should be no more than 155 characters long and is your opportunity to include sales message to encourage a user to click on your link.  A good meta description is essential if you are going to succeed with Build a Niche Store.

Rather than showing my meta description Google was displaying a random selection of menu items and page text making the snippet look spammy and imo discouraging a potential visitor from clicking my link.  For this reason I had reservations about using wordpress in combination with BANS.

I searched long and hard for a solution to this problem posting requests for help on several forums.  I also asked fellow BANS bloggers and also contacted the plugin author but no one had any suggestions.  Frustrated, I started experimenting with the plugin settings and after two or three weeks of experimentation I have found the solution.

If you use this plugin, and every wordpress user should, and want full control over the Google snippet then you simply turn off the autogenerate descriptions option.  Doing this requires that you enter a meta title and meta description manually but the result of having a meaningful meta description makes the effort worthwhile.  The biggest advantage though is that you make more sales!

When I started to learn search engine optimization one of the suggestions was that you should identify keywords with high KEI.  Is this something you do?  Well perhaps you should reconsider.  KEI is supposed to be a useful indicator of our potential to rank in the serps for a given keyword or keyword phrase yet it has many inherent disadvantages.

Consider this example from my research today “baby”.  Do you think you could rank no. 1 in google for the keyword “baby”?  Not likely, in fact, never in a million years if you’re a one man band yet guess what?  The KEI is 27.98.  I’ve read on many forums that a KEI of more than 1.0 makes a keyword attractive so by those standards this looks a no brainer.

Let’s delve a little deeper though.  If we look at the number of searches we see that there are 159,000 searches a month for the term baby (nice) and the competition is a paltry 901 million!!!!.

So we can see the need to exercise some common sense here.  The competition is way to fierce regardless of the KEI to target this keyword.  What we want is a high number of searches with as low a competition number as we can find.

Take a term like “cat stroller” KEI 27.59, searches 2000 per month, competition 159,000.  In theory this is the kind of term you should be targeting.  From this it is easy to conclude that we need to take all three variables into account when choosing keywords to target.  But there is another problem.

KEI varies according to the data center, keyword program and search engine you obtain the information from – massively.  I targeted a phrase recently where the competition was shown to range from just 400,000 to 7 million, the KEI varied from 0.25 to 75 and the search volume from 2300 per month to 27000 per month depending on where I pulled the data from.

This is the reason KEI sucks and why a good dose of common sense is also needed when evaluating data.  Just try to get the same results I did for the word “Baby” and you’ll see what I mean – you’ve got no chance.

Now I’d love to offer a silver bullet to solve this mess but it simply doesn’t exist.  There is no current solution to this problem and until something comes along we have to rely on common sense and gut feel.  Hardly scientific, but hey, that’s part of the challenge.

In summary then KEI is a useful indicator but no more than that.  You still need to take account of search volume and competition, take the figures with a pinch of salt and test your results.

In my post US Hosting UK Sites I discussed my realisation that my .com and .net domains targeting the UK were not being indexed in the UK and the plans I had to turn things around. I am pleased to say that these have been successful. The solution was similar to that outlined in my post on .info domains.

If you read that post you will know I use HostGator because of the exceptional value for money they provide compared to the cost of UK hosting. The disadvantage of this is that any domain with the exception of a .co.uk will not easily (if ever) find it’s way into the google.co.uk index. With Googles webmaster tools also failing to sort this out their are only two solutions.

Host country specific sites in the country you are targeting (not as easy as it sounds because in the UK the leading hosting company’s servers are located in Germany) and often expensive e.g. £9.95 per month per domain.

A much better and much cheaper solution is to use HostGator and just buy country specific domains. I bought .co.uk for my UK stores via Godaddy. Moved my existing stores and redirected the old domains as outlined in my previous post and low and behold they appeared between 2-5 days later in the google.co.uk index where they need to be.