Overview

SEO is Critical to the Success of Your Website

If your website is going to do you any good, it needs to be seen by the right people.

• Most people who are looking for a product, service or company, start their inquiry either by asking their social network for a referral or using a search engine.
• By far the most popular search engine is Google. But Bing and Yahoo represent a sizable, growing share of the market.
• Your SEO strategy should also include search through services like social media and YouTube.

The configuration of your website affects how easily search engine can find and index your web pages. Most search engines use an automated “robot” to collect information about your website which is then stored in vast databases.

• Your competitors are pursuing the same strategies and are optimizing their web pages, so you need to work hard to keep ahead of them.
• When a prospect searches for your website, they get a simple list of results. There is only 1 slot at the top of this list.

It makes a lot of sense to hire a company to help you optimize your website for search engines. Don’t assume your web designer or webmaster took care of this on their own. Some don’t know how; some provide it as a separate service. Regardless, it takes time and needs to be reviewed in the light of traffic through your web pages over months.

• Include the SEO early in your web planning by developing a set of keywords and phrases you know your prospects will use to find your company.

What is a Keyword?

Keywords are the words and phrases  that your prospects are likely to use when referring to the products or services you provide. I cannot emphasize enough that you must be practical about choosing keywords. Most of your customers know less about your product or service than you do. Why else would they be looking for a company like yours? Since they aren’t knowledgeable, they are unlikely to use jargon and industry-specific terms to describe their needs. They may be harried and impatient, working in a second language, and/or unsure of what they want. All they know is that they have a problem. What they hope is that there is a doo-hickey out there that will solve their problem.

Your keywords should reflect the problems that your product solves. For example, Tylenol keywords include: Feel better, TYLENOL®, acetaminophen, pain relief, headache relief, pain, headache, muscle pain, back pain, arthritis pain, flu, cold, allergy, sinus, sleeplessness, cough cold, muscle back, muscle back pain. Note that they don’t use aspirin.

Being precise also helps people find your website through search. For example: “machines” matches 8.9 million sites. “CMC, machines” matches 1.2million websites. “CMC, machines, 5-axis” matches 688 sites and if you add in your location, there are probably less than a dozen results on the page. Just remember that many of your clients are looking for “companies that can turn a mockup into steel.”

There are applications that can help you generate better keywords. Nothing however, beats doing your own research, working with clients and potential clients. Talk to people in your business circles and ask them to describe your business. Listen for the terms they use.

Where Do Keywords Go?

Keywords need to be inserted into your website in 3 areas: the metatags that are hidden from view but searched by robots; the titles and headings, the “alt” tags attached to images, and throughout the content. If you are running an online ad campaign, the keywords should be used there as well.

NOTE: Separating your keywords with a pipe | instead of a comma in your metatags, can change the results.

How People Search

With over a billion websites online, most people realize they need to be specific to get good search results. So most people type in 3 or 4 words to narrow their search. These are not always phrases, simply a series of related words one might associate with a need. For example, to find pain relief, one might type in “headache, muscle pain.” You won’t find tylenol’s website. Give it a try.

Plan Your SEO Strategy

Your first concern is whether or not to spend the time and money on SEO. If your website is designed to support your current client-base, or to answer questions from people to whom you gave your business card, it may not be important that your website ranks #1002 in Google. If your product is a household name, you may decide the name is the only keyword worth using.

If you are running an ecommerce site, or trying to brand or promote your product/service beyond your personal reach, then where your site ranks becomes important.

If you have decided that SEO is vital to your marketing, set your goals and expect to spend about 3 hours a week fighting for top billing. As soon as your competitors realize that you are working on moving up the lists, they will shift their strategy as well to out-rank you.

Know What Is Involved

Google uses an ever-changing matrix to describe and rank web pages. Some of the essential features are alt tags, meta tags, links in and out, headings, and site maps. There are optimal page lengths and keyword usages. Google likes to see lots of intelligent information. They hate duplicity and replicas. They really despise link farms.

Since the matrix changes frequently as Google tries to counter cheating and provide real users with valuable options, your tactics may sometimes win you points and sometimes lose them. You could rank as a 5 one day and a 4 the next because the basis of ranking sites has changed.

You can check the status of your site with simple webmaster tools like Seoquake.

Remember that Google is not the only search engine out there and your site should be optimized for other engines and ways of searching the internet.

 

Plan

Planning Begins by Stating Goals

The one thing you can do right now to improve your search engine rank is to make a plan that sets out your goals. Most people equate higher rank with more traffic and improved business. But the association is not straight forward.   There are many reasons for owning a website. The goals you set for improving search should be based on the overall goals for your website. For example:

• Goal: Sites that make money from advertising to the masses want lots of traffic.
  One solution: Make your site easy for search engine robots by removing dead links and improving the underlying structure of the site.
  
• Goal: Sites that sell to a target market want to rank high on specific key phrases.
  One solution: Re-write and re-organize your content and create landing pages that interest your visitors and lead them through a series of steps to a destination.
• Goal: Get 30% more traffic.
  One solution: Choose popular keywords that draw attention, build links.
• Goal: Get 15% more conversions.
  One solution: Choose key phrases that targeted audiences would use, build links with targeted sites. Find and occupy a niche.

With your goals in mind, you will

• re-write text
• add alt tags to all of your images
• place key phrases in prominent places
• test different styles of presentation to see which one out-performs the others
• verify your keywords and phrases are popular choices
• find words that differentiate you from competitors, but which your clients use
• do it all again next week.

How to Choose Strong Keywords

Think about how people search online.

1. Something has triggered an interest in a topic. It could be a TV show, a conversation, a need, a comment in an email or on a webpage.
2. Your mind is filled with questions
3. You go online hoping to find a website with answers. Your search has a context.
4. You string together a bunch of words trying to narrow down the results to 3 or 4 websites that give accurate, interesting information.
5. You read the descriptions to choose which one you visit first. If you aren’t completely satisfied, you go back and try another site.

As the owner of a website, you believe you can answer some of the questions people are asking. One of the nifty things about search is that it is democratic. If you have good answers, search engines will lead people to your web pages. The key is in providing solid, relevant content.

• Create a list of targeted prospects
• Discover where they go on the web and what they do there. What are their questions?
• Underline the most powerful benefit your product or service delivers. What are your answers?
• Discover which keywords your audience, in that context, uses to search for products and services like yours.
• Provide oodles of relevent content around those keywords

How Does Traffic Find Your Website?

All of the search engines use complex criteria to rank websites in order, with the aim to send people to the site that best answers their questions.  This makes SEO complex, but you can simplify the task by remembering one thing:

The goal of any search engine is to provide relevant answers.
If your site provides lots of relevant, unique information around a targeted keyword, your rank will rise.

This makes content critical. You need lots of it and it should be first-rate; the type of information that makes a reader sit up and get interested; that makes them look around your website, spend a bit of time there and maybe refer to it in a blog post. The search engines watch how people use your site and whether they refer to it later.

Creating Content

There are numerous ways to create more content. Some are quick; some are not. Blogging is generally considered quick because it is informal and easy to write. Nevertheless:

• A corporate blog needs a list of keywords that bloggers write about.
• Comments are often other people looking to draw your audience towards themselves.

Similar to blogs are social media sites where you worm your way into a community or build your own and start pitching, using your keywords.

If you can’t think of what to say in your blog, FAQs or social media venues, here are a few ideas:

• When you meet a new person and tell them what you do, do they ask questions about your line of work? Each question is a potential topic.
• Ask your customers if they have questions and answer those.
• Write an article about a new product line or service that you offer.
• What is the number one problem you face in helping your customers. Write about the problem and write about some solutions.
• What is the number one problem your customers face? How can you help them?
• Write about events, specials, holidays.
• Write about important people in your field or community.
• Write about community projects to which you contributed.
• Interview your customers about almost anything.
• Share a secret.

Plan Your Resources

Planning takes time, but putting a plan into action also takes energy. Before you waste time on needless SEO, make sure you understand your goals. SEO isn’t an end in itself. It should be the first step towards a long-term relationship.

 

Links In

Links to Your Website are Critical

Here are a few tips. Some of them are less important than they once were; others are more important now that the web is growing more personal and social. All of them deserve some consideration in your web plans.

• Use a service like Link Machine to discover who in your circle has a page rank of 4 or higher. Ask them to link to your site. Find Directories that your link to your competitors and ask or pay for a listing. Avoid Link farms  that contain no real content but simply link out to everyone.
• Check the value on all of the links on your site that point away from your site. Expand their value by adding a description and ask their owners to return the favour with a link. If they refuse, consider dropping them from your site.
• Join social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us which has been approved by Google. When a person clicks your de.licios link, it is regarded as a vote for your site.
• Write reviews on a book bought from Amazon. It gives you a quality link. Consider a book that is relevant to your industry or to your clients.
• Put something on YouTube.
• Add tutorials to affiliate sites
• Comment on blogs.
• Make sure your online profiles all contain a link to your website.

The Value of Paid-for Links

There are various ways to pay for traffic to your website. One of the most common in Pay Per Click.

About 5% of all clicks go to paid links. If you’re happy with your current results and they are improving, focus on the organic links. If your search results are poor, paid links can boost traffic. Traffic is something Google tracks so it can also improve your overall rank over time.

Paying for links is also valuable if an important keyword is prized by your competitors. There are 1000s of “plumbers” so the only way to get to the top of the list may be to buy the word. Before you initiate a buying spree, decide how much you are willing to spend to be at the top of page. Perhaps it is enough to aim for lower on the page with a really good sell-line. Or perhaps you can add a second keyword that will boost your rank.

Most people search using 3-4 keywords so consider the value of bidding on a word like “plumber” to get to the top of the list globally, when most of your customers will combine the word with the name of your city or a problem. “Kitchener plumber leaky pipe” will place you at or near the top of the list if you have information on your site about the service requested and a match on the location.

Monitor both the cost and results of your ads. Many paid links, like GoogleAds, are priced by bidding. A competitor with deep pockets, or someone trying to drive you out of business by blowing your ad budget, can out-flank you by turning this into a war. You need to watch the average price per link and how many hits you get, then check if the hits are converting to profits. Note the operative word is profits, not revenues. Spending $50 on adwords to win a $40 contract is a sure fire way to go bankrupt.

Unfortunately, you may be forced into the bidding war by a cometitor who chooses to buy your name as a keyword, using it to direct customers to his own site. The only way to find out is to monitor your traffic.

Industry Benchmarks for Clickrates

Benchmarks vary by industry, search engine, and type of keyword.  Prices vary from a few pennies to over $10 per click based on the competition. Some of your competitors have deep pockets and can drive the cost of a keyword out of your budget. If that is true for you, consider narrowing the term so that you still attract your market. One option is to turn the keyword into a keyword phrase.

Only you can decide how much a customer is worth based and really, why wouldn’t you treat this the same as any other marketing strategy? X people come to my site by clicking an adword and from them I earn $y for a profit of $z. $z is acceptable.

Write Articles to Link to Promotions and to Build Link Quality

Review every article you or anyone in your company has ever written. Re-write it for the web and post it on an ezine. If it gets picked up, your article, with links to your site, will get distributed globally.

To generate new articles, think of 10 questions customers need answered.

• Turn articles into blogs, white papers and online articles ready for pickup by RSS feeds and ezine sites in all appropriate categories.
• Make articles wide interest.
• Articles should have at least 500-750 words (numbers vary with the distributor)  and 5% of the words should be your key phrases.
• Begin the article with a question about the keyword phrase and answer it. Make the title strong using key words and build curiosity.
• Include a pen name and a link to your promotion (landing page) or website.
• Use articlepostrobot to find ezine sites with a rank of 3 or more. Register with these article sites.
• Remember that human editors are involved on most ezine and blog sites. Don’t sell anything here or promote yourself. The goal is to build link popularity and reputation.
• While you shouldn’t promote yourself in the article, you can appropriately add a bio with links to your website or blog. Who doesn’t want to know more about the person whose article they just read?
• Consider re-writing the article for other audiences. Change the title and some of the text. While some SEO experts simply re-submit the article, you are better served by thinking about the new audience, their interests and skillset. Modify the article to interest them.

Ezine Articles is one of the largest distributors of articles and an easy way to begin posting articles across the Internet. They also provide a daily newsletter with tips. Here are a few handy ideas they shared:

• Readers shun articles with an expiry date, presumably because they think it is out of date
• Write your draft article with the intention of being clear and accurate. Once you have it together, rewrite it to be more punchy
• Write for audiences that you know, about topics that interest them. Incorporate familiar experiences they would recognize.
• Keep your language clean and comprehensible; avoiding jargon.
• Set goals for writing articles to make sure you maintain momentum with your audience.
• Use old articles as a launch pad to new ones.
• Readers skim articles to see if they are really new and about the topic they claim to discuss. Make sure yours delivers on your title.
• Don’t be coy with your titles. Make them clear and use keywords so readers can search for them easily.
• Be credible.
• Keep a light heart. Even serious articles benefit from a touch of humour to ease the mood.
• Readers don’t object if your ultimate goal is to gain publicity but they don’t want to read sales copy. If you write a good article, they will recognize you as an expert and look for you when they need your service.
• For greater credibility, proof-read what you wrote before you publish it. Use a spell-checker or ask a friend to read your work. The best proof-reader misses mistakes in their own work because they are too close to it.
• Check out the top authors in your category and see what they are writing about.
• Publish your articles in categories that match their content.
• If you aren’t sure of your facts, do the research. People are looking for information, not editorial content.
• Follow the rules for the online ezine software that distributes your articles. Avoid spamming, too many keywords, javascript, HTML that they don’t accept, etc.

Note: people like to read articles and books that they can agree with, so if you are being contentious, back up your claims, keep the tone friendly, and feed in enough familiar material that your audience feels comfortable.

Note1: Google updates its search criteria frequently. Early in 2011 they added the “Farmer” update which was designed to lower the rank on content farms. Content farms don’t produce content, they consolidate it from a variety of sources and re-package it for distribution.   Done right, they allow content creators to distribute their stories through one central point; for buyers they can search for stories they want to post without scouring the internet. However, the result is that the same article often appears in multiple websites. The web swells with junk. Search engines find it harder to crawl. People who do a search get a list of websites all of which point to the same article. The information in the article gains undue credibility without necessarily being verified.

Similarly, when you add keywords to your pages, they should reflect the content of the article, not your website, and answer the questions people are inherently asking when they search.

One recommendation is to set the same goals as the search engines as you develop your content: the goal is not to get more traffic, but to help people. If you stick to what you know and write competently about it, the search engines should recognize that your website is a valid source of information on that niche topic, and reward you by sending traffic to your site. The bonus is that the visitors are people truly interested in your expertise and therefore, your product or service.

Landing Pages

Not All Visitors Enter via the Front Page

Everyone who enters your site starts with one page. This is their landing page. For years we assumed that the homepage should be the gateway to your site and there were many articles on how to guide your visitors from the homepage to the page offering your promotions.

These days at least 60% of the traffic on your site will come to you from a search engine where they typed in a keyword or keyword phrase that referred them to your site. Obviously, the most effective strategy is to take this visitor to the page that speaks about the topic they searched on.

Imagine that you run a promotion offering a discount to qualified customers. You write a Google ad (Pay-per-click). Everyone who clicks the ad lands at a page that explains the offer, answering what it takes to qualify, how to get the discount, what they get, why it’s a great deal, and when the offer expires.  Finish it off by asking them to take the first step by filling in a form, downloading a coupon, or calling a 1-800 number.

Landing Pages

For every promotion you run, for every keyword you select, you should have a separate landing page specifically aimed at visitors looking for that product or service. It saves them time and it lets you tell them why you are the answer to their problems.

This has 2 ramifications, both stemming from the fact that these pages must be self-contained.

First, the design of each page must enhance your offer.

• Each page should contain your logo and navigation to information that validates your company.
• Include a title at the top of the page that uses the keywords.
• Place the contact information where it can be easily found such as the top right corner and in the body of the text wherever you say “call me!”

Secondly, answer the question. Don’t turn landing pages into gateways intending to entice customers down a mysterious trail to buried treasure. Your visitor has asked a question – true they asked it at Google, but Google has referred them to you. Make an offer.

SEO Advantages from Landing Pages

If your SEO strategy aims to bring visitors to your generic homepage, it will target a wide range of people with a wide range of interests. Using landing pages, you can aggressively use Search Engine Optimization techniques to direct targeted audiences to specific offers.

• Write a related article and submit it to online ezines to soft sell your promotion. Include a link to your landing page. Be careful not to send the same article to every ezine, it could end up tagged as spam. Every article should be significantly different.
• Send out a newsletter with a link to the product.
• Run a Pay-per-click ad on Google or Facebook that sends visitors to the page.
• If you sell downloadable software, hype it on Giveaway of the Day.
• Ask affiliates to include your offer in their newsletters or on their websites.
• Add a prominent link to the landing page on your most popular web pages  and on your home page.
• If you wrote an article to soft sell the product,  link to it from your website.

Use landing pages to generate passive income

A variant of the landing pages is a mini-site off your main site, devoted to specific offers or promotions that can be purchased and downloaded online. Link to the first page on the subsite where the initial pitch is made.

BTW:The landing page or mini site that contains an ecommerce option can be a great source of passive income as well as leads.  Some of the things you can easily sell or giveaway online are

• whitepapers
• software including games
• webinars
• coupons
• invitations
• 30 day trials of a service
• stock photos and graphics, and
• e-cards.

To develop more ideas, brainstorm with your staff about the qualities that make your company unique and what kinds of things best reflect those values. For example, if you are an engineering firm, whitepapers probably reflect the image you want to portray, but a game might be a fun alternative. If your company caters to women, a coupon for a nearby spa might make a great offer.

Whatever you offer, the contact form that visitors fill in should reflect only the information you need to fulfill the offer. There is no reason why a visitor should give you a mailing address to download a whitepaper, but they obviously need to supply it if you are going to ship them a CD. If you want more information you must explain why your are collecting the data and what you are going to do with it including how you will protect it from hackers or whether you intend to share it with third parties.

Use landing pages to collect leads

Consider the value of the word FREE! FREE coffee cup to the first 20 people who call! or FREE 30 day trial!

In this case the product is free but only to visitors who give you a legitimate email address or phone number. Follow up to ensure they got the giveaway, then follow up again to find out if they thought it was useful.  Start a conversation. Use the landing page as a forum where visitors can leave comments and “speak” to each other.

• Provide a 30 day trial of your service
• Hold a free webinar
• Offer to send the visitor a workbook or whitepaper.

Use landing pages to invite people to visit your office

• Let people download an invitation to a barbeque or a coupon redeemable in person  only
• Hold a seminar.

SEO Tools

Tools to Help You Improve and Analyze SEO

Analytics tools

To help you track your results so you can modify your SEO plan, you can turn to Analytics. Although there are some fine, expensive options available, most small companies will get what they need from free alternatives like Google Analytics.

For more information on web analytics, see Avinash Kaushik’s blog, Occam’s Razor.

• Google Analytics are fairly easy to use and they are FREE. Google constantly expands its toolkit with new capabilities. The core information is what most people look at: traffic, sources, etc. But it is posisble to create SEO campaigns, link it to adwords, and  view your results by target market. Google collects a huge amount of data on the people who surf their site (almost everyone), and keeps it for a long time which means they can help you analyze your visitors by gender, age and other characteristics.
• Google Website Optimizer lets you test and optimize your content so you can tweak it to improve performance
• Piwik: Open source web analytics
• Webalizer: Free web server log file analyzer
• Alexaranking.com – traffic analyzer
• WeBuildPages.com – backlink checker
• Sitening.com – site analyzer
• Hubspot – has a number of tools and ideas
• compete.com – looks at your competition
• webconfs.com – a useful set of tools for reviewing how your site looks to a search engine

Keyword research tools

These tools help you locate the most relevent keywords for your website. They can tell you how many requests the search engines received for a keyword and what other terms were searched instead of, or alongside.

• seochat.com – keyword density
  
• nichebot.com – keyword data
  

Usability testing will also give you insight into keywords that real people use when thinking about your product or service. For an easy if approximate result, ask a few friends what words they would use to find your product.

Ask your clients what words they use when looking for you or your competitors.

Look in the Yellow Pages and in trade magazines and the Thesaurus to find alternative words your customers might use.

The difficulty that most website owners have with keywords is that they are deeply embedded in their business. They use technical terms to describe their products and services and forget that many people refer to the doo-hickey that guy on Ottawa sells. You need to find keywords that tired people coming from other businesses might use.

• Wordtracker Free Keywords: Generates up to 100 related keywords and get an estimate of their daily search volume.
• Google AdWords Keyword Suggestion Tool: Generates keywords based on your keyword/URL input
• Keyword Discovery: This free search term suggestion tool generates the top 100 keywords
• Microsoft adCenter Keyword Forecast: Gives impression count and predicts demographic distributions of keywords

Competitive research tools look at your competitors’ traffic and which keywords they use.  The following are a list of free tools, but you probably know who your your competitors are. To find out what keywords they use, visit their websites and read their pages. What words do they re-use frequently. What words do they use in their titles. Look at the page source code in your browser. You will see keywords in use in the “alt” and “meta” tags.

• Alexa: traffic trends for competing websites
• Compete.com: free site metrics for the top 1,000,000 web domains
• Google Search Insights: compares search volume patterns across specific regions, categories, and time frames
• Xinu: provides PageRank, backlinks, site age, social bookmarking and link data
• SEOQuake has a downloadable application that attaches itself to your browser. As you search pages, it provides rank, Alexa ratings, whois information and the option of looking at keywords used (click the density link).

Link analysis tools

Link analysis is used to find broken links on your site, compare your link strategy to your competitors, and help you find new sites where you can add a link to your site, building your credibility.

• Xenu Link Sleuth: FREE but limited to finding broken links.
• SEO Book Hub Finder: FREE tool identifies hub sites/pages that link to related resources
• SEO Book Link Popularity Tool: FREE tool compares your link profile to leading competitors
• SEOQuake includes a list of links to outside sources on any website you visit. By visiting your competition’s site, you can see who links to them. Check the listing. Perhaps you can arrange your own link.

Search engine rank checks

These check keywords against competing sites and your own earlier rankings to gauge SEO effectiveness. The measure of success for these products is search engine rank only.

• SEO Book Google Rank Checker: Free tool searches Google with 100 results per page to show you where your site ranks for a particular term
• DigitalPoint Search Engine Keyword Tracker & Keyword Ranking Tool: Free tool checks Google Yahoo and MSN for search engine rankings and tracks those rankings historically

Google Local

Get listed in Google Maps via Google’s Local Business Center, where you can create a free listing with a Google account. First, check to see if you are listed, and if so, ensure your listing is accurate. If not, list your company name, address, phone/FAX, toll-free number, contact personnel, email address, website address and hours of operation.

Follow Google’s Business Listing Quality Guidelines and use Google’s Reinclusion Request form if your listing gets pulled.

Yahoo Local

Get a free local listing in Yahoo Local Basic, which consists of a profile listing with your address, phone/FAX number, website and email addresses, business category, hours of operation, accepted payment methods and a description of your products and services. Add or update information any time. Adding your address and phone information in a footer on all your pages can get your inner pages listed.

Citysearch

This online city guide provides local information on restaurants, entertainment, retail, travel, and professional services in major cities in the U.S., including contact information, maps, driving directions, editorial and user reviews. You can get a free listing on Citysearch, but the “List Your Business” link only provides paid listings. To get a free listing, go to the “Enter Missing Listing Information” page and enter all the business information requested on the form. Note: this same form is used to make changes to existing listings. Search for your business first, check your profile page for accuracy and then either make changes or start from scratch when you fill out the form.

Niche search engines

It’s important to get a free listing in all the directories relevant to your business. Some directories are free and others are worth the listing fee. Look for appropriate directories for your business in DMOZ and the Yahoo Directory by typing “directories” into the search box or by using your industry’s keyword (e.g., “pharmaceutical directories.”). Google also has an industry-specific directory, and you can find a list of industry-specific directories at NYPL.org. Once you’ve gathered a list of directories for submission, read each submission guide carefully and provide requested information accurately. Directories are a good source of traffic and help increase link popularity.

Add video with video site maps and submit to Submit to Google Video, Blinkx and YouTube.

• Search industry conferences: SMX Search Marketing Expo, Search Engine Strategies Conference and Expo, Webmaster World Pubcon and Search Insider Summit.
• Search marketing news and information sites: Search Engine Land, SearchEngineWatch, iMedia Connection, MediaPost Publications, ClickZ, Search Marketing Standard and Website Magazine.
• The Top SEO Blogs are listed on the Online Marketing Blog. Subscribe by RSS or email for the latest information on optimization tactics and search engine rules.
• SEO training courses:  DMA Search Engine Optimization Certification Program, SEOToolSet Training, Search Engine Workshops, SEOClass, Search Engine College and SEO Book.

 

Google’s “Share of Voice”

Share of voice refers to the the number of times your ad airs against all the possible times it could be shown. If you want 100% exposure, paying a lot per word will get you displayed every time someone uses the keyword. But that is probably more than you need. Again, the solution is to consider what you are willing to pay and how much exposure you realistically need. One option is to go for a high share of voice in small bursts: a week long run that coincides with a special offer.

What Does Google Demand?

Google checks for two files: robots.txt file and sitemap.xml. Make sure your site has both, Google has sitemap tools to help you build them.

Experiment with Google AdWords. Some people find the quality links add to their rank and bring leads. Others do not. Google claims that there are no bonus points for buying words from them. It doesn’t improve your organic ranks directly, but there are more online links to your site, and that counts. Your Adwords should be linked into a campaign and should go to relevant pages, not the homepage.

Google is always adding new tools to promote websites with the aim to improve the results visitors get when they search for a term. As of July 2008, they added AdPlanner, putting them in competition with companies like comScore, Nielsen Online and Hitwise. Each applies their own methodologies and business models to analyze common metrics like traffic. AdPlanner catches information from the Google toolbar, so you might say they haven’t used a random sample to define demographic categories, but they supplement the data with 3rd-party information and what they lack in statistical accuracy they make up for in quantity.

• Sign up for Google Analytics and study your traffic. How do people find your site, using which key words? How do they use your site? What patterns do they follow as they travel through your information?
• Use Google Trends to find words and phrases, or websites, that people are searching on now.
• Ask questions of Google (and on social networks like Linked-in). Don’t forget to link to your site to get those links up.
• Add your company to Google Maps.

Checklist

A Checklist of Concerns

• Page size
• Long URLs and non-specific URLs made of numbers rather than words
• Include site maps and xml site maps
• Robot blockers and robot.txt
• Flash and other non-readable formats, although this is improving and Adobe is trying to provide software to the search engines that make Flash readable. You can help by adding tagging around the flash elements.
• Return errors, dead links, redirects should be [R=301] to indicate that they are permanent.
• Session IDs in the URLs
• Dynamic parameters in URLs
• Keyword density
• Keyword emphasis
• Title tags
• Meta descriptions
• Meta keywords
• Header tags
• Body tags
• Use of keywords in the URL
• Number of links in and out
• Links from non-commercial sites (educational, government, network)
• Technorati and Deli.cio.us
• Traffic: not just the numbers, but who they are
• Image alt tags
• Number of images
• Quality of the content
• Use of Web 2.0, blogs, video, and pdfs
• Currency: how recently was the site updates
• Whether any of your actions are “black hat” no-no’s.

NOTE: You must have a sense of what you want to measure before you begin comprehensive analytics. Among other things, it may determine which SEO tools you use (and the cost). Many sites rely on Google Analytics but you must understand a few terms. Web standards define a visitor as a person who reads more than one page on your site. If they don’t go past the homepage, it is a “bounce.” A bounce doesn’t mean the site wasn’t effective, they may have entered the site looking for you contact information.

NOTE 2: The only measure of how long someone spends on your site is a log that says when they called the page from the server and when they moved to the next site. Some browsers, like Firefox, allow users to open a number of tabs. I do this routinely. I go through my email and open all the articles that I want to read today and leave them open until I get to them. The time between when I loaded the page and when I read / exited it, may be hours and is no indication of whether I read or acted on the article.

Yahoo is less interested in the technical structure of the site than Google or MSN. It responded to changes in content. Google was very sensitive to changes in links. (Covario study, reported on iMedia Connection, May 23, 2008)

Finally, remember that the search engins are looking for fresh, original content. Try to make sure each of your pages has its own title and meta tags, variety in the keywords that focus on the page content, variability in the content itself, which means, yes, writing new content for each page rather than re-purposing the same block of text in different contexts.

Q&A

Q:  Should I hire an expert?

SEO isn’t rocket science. There is a lot of information online that you can read and implement. But a good SEO campaign takes a lot of time to monitor and analyze. You will need to think about what you can change on the page or the website, to improve your rank, and know enough web design to build and manipulate webpages in response to your theories.

While the initial SEO happens when you build the site, constant updates are important to maintain your rank. You will want to re-write elements to optimize the pages more accurately. Add fresh content every few days. Try new and alternative keywords (listen to the words your clients use to describe your product or service). Blog and write articles that lead people back to your site.

What to look for in an SEO consultant

Here are some of the services an SEO expert might offer

1. Web site audit - This is a review of your current site, including some files that are not visible to users, to see how easily it can be indexed by the different search engines.
2. Review of goals – the company should be willing to discuss your goals in terms of SEO. Are you focused on traffic or conversions, what are the best keywords, etc.
3. Manual Submission - Many SEO companies will manually submit each website to each search engine for indexing. This is a very time intensive operation that many other companies regard as unnecessary, since the robots are very sophisticated. But years ago, it was the only way to be included.
4. Link Building – This includes placing your website on various directories and building links to relevent outside companies. Getting a link from an educational or government site is especially valuable.
5. Keyword Research - This is an ongoing process that can be partially automated through software. Ultimately, the only way to find the right keywords is to test various combinations and ask your clients.
6. Copy writing and image optimization - There are specific ways to write copy so that a webpage ranks well for the keyword search. It’s not just a question of loading the page with keywords, position, bolding and use of headings are important.
7. Tracking and Maintenance - You might compare SEO to a race where your competitors are constantly catching up and overtaking you. Meanwhile the audience is getting bored and the track officials have changed the rules and rebuilt the course.

Q: How much will it cost?

Most companies should expect to spend 6-10% of revenues on advertising but this includes offline as well as online. There are companies out there, including your competitors, who are spending $25,000 to $100,000/month. Ow! You will have to look at your own budget and align it with reasonable expectations of success to determine what percentage of your overall marketing should go into online promotion, and what percentage of that goes into the SEO campaign itself.

It won’t be cheap. Either it will cost you time or money (or both) A half-hearted campaign is unlikely to be successful and you will be left believing SEO is bogus.

1. Start with a review of your site and make sure your webmaster has done everything possible to optimize the site both in terms of keywords, content and customer satisfaction.
2. Know that the sky is the limit in terms of budget and there are no guarantees. Decide what you want to achieve and what you can cope with.
3. If money is an issue, look for strategies you can competently do yourself. For those who love to write, blogs and articles are cheap, if time-consuming strategies. For those of an analytic, poker-playing mind, monitoring keywords will be interesting.

In among the analytics, there are unexpected finds that MAY BE pure gold. They could be validation of a theory or statistic surrounding a KPI. But it could be the basis for new ideas about how the website can be used. It might even lead you into new areas of engagement with clients, new products or markets.

1. Decide if you have time to look for the unexpected.
2. Look for patterns and aberrations, traffic from odd places or a result that is out of line with other websites (like: all your traffic uses Firefox).
3. Generate some theories about why these patterns/anomalies exist.
4. Figure out ways to test your theories. (like: research events happening off-site or make a change to the site that would push the aberration further askew or clarify the pattern.)
5. Make sure you have a base line measure and put the test into action.
6. Review the result.
7. Do it again.
8. Ponder. What else might be affecting the results?
9. Decide if the aberration or pattern is useful and work it to your advantage.
10. Add a new KPI to your current workload.

Q: After I reach the top of the list, what comes next?

Being first is only part of SEO. As mentioned above, your SEO campaign is failing if you are not converting clicks into profits or meeting some other measure of success.

Other issues are at play:

• Competitors are fighting for top billing and will upstage you if you don’t keep at it.
• All your keywords may not be performing equally well.
• Once the prospect clicks on the keyword, does your site meet their expectations?

Q: What else should we do?

Optimize your site obviously. Some people will say that means re-qriting elements to capture the search engines. But as mentioned previously, you must meet the expecations of the people who click into your site to complete the social transaction you initiated by placing the ad in front of them. So optimize your site for customer satisfaction as well as search engine robots.

If you can afford a paid-search campaign, go for it.

Starting in 2008 you should have initiated a social media campaign. Google and the others look for you on Facebook, LinkedIn and other online networks. They pay attention to what you do for your customers: looking for video, rich content, deep information, blogs, and links from credible directories.

Use newsletters and email campaigns to drive traffic to your site. The more traffic you receive, the more relevant you appear to be.

Q: And the results from all this?

Marketing Sherpa found that most websites increased 38% in search traffic within 6 months of the SEO campaign depending on industry and other competitive factors, .

Q: Should you blog?

Oh yes. Blogs create new content. But make sure it is good content that uses your keywords and generates traffic. If it is not on your main site, make sure it links back to your site. Make relevent comments on other people’s blogs. Use blogs to promote special offers. Twitter, join online networks, promote yourself, carefully, on Facebook…..

Q: How well does Flash fit into an SEO campaign?

Lots of people recognize that a bit of Flash makes their website more attractive. Many search engines have difficulty accessing the content of Flash files but there are workarounds. Also, Adobe recently provided the major search engine companies with tools that allow them to index Flash content. These tools improved toward the end of 2009 as Adobe purchased software that handles analytics.

One solution has always been to make Flash part of the page, not the entire page, and add your keywords to the metatags, text and alt elements. You can also create an XML file to index the file if it is in .flv format.

Tips

Tips for optimization

• Get a good domain name. In fact you may want 2 or 3 but point them all to the same webpage. Duplicating content will lose you points.
• Include links in profile pages wherever possible. First decide where you want to drive the traffic from your channel/profile page, and then include links to those pages as much as possible. Ideally, you will be linking to other social media profiles like Facebook and Twitter in order to extend the social media experience, but you also might want to drive clicks to a customized landing page. There are many more opportunities to place clickable links than there appear to be at first glance.
• Submit your website and blog to the search engines. While many of them will automatically crawl your site eventually, sending the link may speed up the process. Plus there are a handful of worthy search engines that require a formal submission.
• Use the checklist provided in an earlier tab to make sure your website is well made and has all the attributes search engines need to easily search your site.
• If people send you comments, respond within 5-48 hours.
• Add analytics and use them to monitor your keywords. What words to your current visitors use to find you.
• Find relevant directories in your field and add your name. Even paid listings can be helpful. However, be cautious with paid listings. Some of them provide little promotion and no traffic to your website and if you are dissatisfied, they are unlikely to rip up your contract. Use your keywords in the descriptions you add to your listings.
• If you can, create link exchanges, but only with people relevant to your field. In the link you place on their site, use your keywords.
• Use keywords in your URLs
• Run a contest or get involved in a community activity that draws publicity.
• Become an expert on one of the Answer sites like Quora or Wikipedia, or add comments to others’ blogs.
• Create a list of top 10 or top 25 (fill in the blank) and post it on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn
• Buy Google Adwords

Video

• Create video and submit it to YouTube. YouTube is one of the most popular search engines in the world. You can add a profile where you will of course, include your keywords and a link to your website.
• Include appropriate keywords in the name of the video, and use the word “video” when appropriate. The title is the most important piece of information that the search engines have about your video, and considering that most searchers include the word “video” when searching for a video, this inclusion boosts the relevance of your page as a search result.
• For each video, write a unique, keyword-rich description that includes a URL. Put the URL at the beginning. This way, even when the “more info” option is collapsed, the user will still see the link. Also, a video’s description is the next-best indicator to search engines of the video’s content, right behind the title. Use this space to place relevant keywords when appropriate.
• Provide video transcripts if possible. Until the technology improves, YouTube and other online videos are practically invisible to most search engines. Therefore, the search engines are only guessing about the content of your video based on the information they parse from the title, description, and tags. But if you have a full transcript of your video placed in the description, the search engines will fully understand the video.
• Take advantage of YouTube’s captions and annotation features. You can add notes, subtitles, descriptions, and links directly over the top of the video. Currently only links to other YouTube pages are clickable, but try this: You remembered to add a link at the top of your description, right? Place a call to action over the video that says, “Click here to become a fan of our Facebook page.”
• Tag your videos with keywords. Along with the title and the description, tags help the search engines identify the video’s content. If you have relevant keywords, place them here.
• Encourage participation. For each video, there are options for “Broadcasting and Sharing.” It’s best to open commenting and embedding as much as possible, but remember that you will need to monitor your videos for spam and naughty comments. Also consider posting your videos as responses to other popular videos. This is a good way to piggyback on the success of someone else’s video and divert some of those eyes to your own content.
• Watermark your videos. It’s easy with most video editing software to place a small translucent logo in a corner of the video. It’s your video after all, so take ownership.
• YouTube pulls thumbnails from the one quarter, half, and three quarters marks of every video. You can then choose which thumbnail is displayed. If it’s not disruptive to do so, try to manipulate your video so that a compelling image appears at one of these points. Thumbnails have a large impact in a video’s click-through.
• Take advantage of YouTube Insights. This analytics feature of YouTube is robust compared to other video sites and can provide information such as demographics and when people abandoned viewing specific videos. This data can help you improve future submissions.

Tech Tips

Meta Tags

No longer as vital as they once were, the meta tags are still read by some search engines and more importantly, they provide visitors with information about your site before they visit.  In my experience, not including keywords and descriptions in your files will have a negative impact on how well you rank.

Keywords

Many companies take care to include pertinent keywords or phrases to their websites, then forget to include their company name or the location they serve.

Google prefers to match people with companies that are nearby.

In the increasingly social world of online media, if you don’t treat your company name as a keyword, you risk having directories, affiliates and complaints rank higher in search results for your name than your own website.

Alt Tags

Alt tags are the alternative texts that replace images if the image doesn’t load. They are considered essential to usable sites and are critical for visually impaired people working online.  Google ranks the contents of alt tags highly yet many web developers forget to include them.

Make your code W3 compliant.

Validate it using software like Dreamweaver’s internal validator before you go online and after you post the site, run it through the validators at http://validator.w3.org/.

Before you do either, check the header file. You should be using an XHTML transitional or strict, or XML doctype at this stage. And tables, which I love for their consistency, are going back to their original purpose of displaying data, so while you may have avoided positioning with div tags because they were unreliable, the opposite is now true. Although you need to create CSS workarounds for Internet Explorer 5, 6, or 7, the new version 8 is up-to-date.

Redirects

If you use redirects, you should know that 302 indicates a temporary move and 301 says it is permanent. If you want the value of the page to transfer, use 302 [R=302].

Javascript based navigation

We all know that text links are easier to crawl than graphics or javascript links, but js is still a common way to build a navigation bar. The problem is that many developers / designers simply cut and paste code and don’t understand it. If your drop-down menus are hidden when the page loads, the webcrawlers will ignore them. Here is the code Brian Easter of iMedia recommends.

<script type=”javascript”>
function toggleScript(element) {
var div=document.getElembentByid(element);
if (div.style.display ==”block”)
div.style.display=’none’;
} else {
div.style.display=’block’; }}
</script>
…..
< body onload=”toggleScript(‘div_to_toggle’);>
<a onlclick=”toggleScript(‘div>to_toggle’);return false” href=’#div_to_toggle’> Click to show</a>
<div style=’displayblock;’ id=’di_to_toggle’> Content to toggle</div>

The hidden information shows when the header loads and turns off as the body tag loads, once the robots have already crawled the content.