Search Engine Optimization Archive

Lately, I’ve been working on a number of local small business websites that are trying to optimize their websites.  Some of these companies have existing websites, others are starting from scratch looking to build the best website platform that will scale to meet their needs.

In order to have a well rounded optimization strategy that can guide you in what you should do for your website, I always recommend taking a step back and looking at the ‘big picture’ – more specifically, where you are at in what I call the website optimization life-cycle.  Optimization really breaks down to the lifetime cost per visitor to convert (what does it mean to convert?).  During different stages of your website’s life, it’s more valuable to invest in different online strategies and to target different visitors.

Before discussing each optimization aspect, I’d like to take a minute to define what each one is:

• Organic Search – This is a visitor that comes to your website via any search engine or other un-paid link.  In this phase, the goal is optimize your website to get the most organic traffic naturally.
• Paid Traffic - These visitors get to your website through paid channels: banner ads, paid ads, paid links, etc.  The goal here is, again, just to get more visitors but this time you are paying for them.
• Testing - Once a healthy stream of qualified and relevant visitors gets to your website, the goal is help them convert into customers more effectively. At this point you may be buying traffic or you may not be, but in order for proper testing to occur, you need a steady stream of visitors.

Note: Each one of these optimization methods should be measured through a fully implemented web analytics tool (Omniture, WebTrends, Google Analytics, etc).

I’ve illustrated the following optimization methods in different stages with the below graphic:

Website Optimization Lifecycle

Step 1: Website Analytics

Any website optimization process must have a clearly identifiable measure of success.  An Analytics tool is needed to provide an unbiased and clear look into which efforts are most valuable based on a measurable standard (cost/visitor, etc) as well as provide data articulating which optimization efforts were most effective and profitable.  Before this information can be fully trusted, the tool must be properly configured to remove extraneous data.  In order for any optimization to take place, specific website activities must be defined as Conversions (or Goals) so that decisions can be made to effectively maximize Conversions. This is crucial. Without clearly defined goals to associate value, no measurable action can be justified against another.

This step is articulated by the Orange Stripe at the bottom of the above graphic. It should take place during website development and will provide the measurement for each subsequent optimization.

Step 2: Organic Search Optimizations

Organic optimizations require the most investment and take the longest to produce results, but the returns provided by organic search optimizations will not only pay out over time for organic search, but will ultimately lead to lower paid search prices as well when a website owner decides to purchase advertisements in paid search (more below).  When optimizing a website for organic search engines, three key aspects of a website must be considered in order to get the highest return on investment.

Is my website robot friendly?

Because search engines rely on robots (or spiders) to scan all text and automatically catalog each page, a website needs to be reachable and indexible.  Certain technologies like flash greatly reduce the ease by which search engines can crawl your website.  If a search engine spider can’t reach your website then any/all optimizations are wasted.

Is my website talking about the right topics in the right areas?

Because search engines initially based their algorithms on early HTML, the highest ROI is going to come from optimizing the simple HTML tags in your page using the most relevant and popular key terms.  Note that it is exponentially better to focus a little on each element than to try to work on just one.  Did you catch that? Hitting each of the 5 Main HTML Optimization Areas a little bit dramatically improves the effectiveness of your combined page relevancy.

What are other websites in my community saying about my site?

Because search engines rely heavily on your online reputation, its important to keep in mind what other industry based websites are linking to you and what terms they use to tell others about your site. If possible, email your partners and encourage them to use more descriptive text to link to your website (vs. your company or brand name).

Step 3: Paid Advertising Campaigns

Once organic efforts have been maximized and a website is looking to attract additional, qualified visitors, the next step is to begin looking at paid advertising.  Organic optimizations will provide a website with a lower cost per visitor over time, but eventually the return on that effort will decrease to a point where it’s more valuable to tap into the paid advertising market.

Well targeted ads – using paid search for example – can provide qualified traffic to a website for reasonable cost.  In order to effectively understand how valuable a visitor is, a website owner must first decide how much a conversion is worth.  This is where defining a goal value on your site comes in handy. Once that goal value is defined, a webmaster can retro-actively figure out how much to spend trying to acquire that visitor. Using cost-per-acquisition will help you decide how much you should spend online (for example, if purchasing a visitor still provides a decent amount of profit then the smart webmaster would begin purchasing qualified traffic).

It’s also worthwhile to note that most paid search advertisers (Google, Bing, Yahoo!) use what’s called a “Quality Score”.  This quality score rates how well your ad corresponds to the landing page (and offer).  The better the correlation between the text on your landing page and the keywords you are purchasing the lower the price you pay for the ad.  This is a safeguard that search engines hope will provide relevance to the user so that visitors continue to use their search engine.  No one would enjoy clicking on an ad for soft puppies only to find out they are going to a promotional site for knives that cut through tin cans. Having a strong organic strategy in place (and executed) first will first guarantee strong organic rankings but then provide lower advertising costs for all relevant advertisements. A gift that keeps on giving.

Step 4: Ongoing Testing & Optimizations

No optimization plan would be complete without regular testing and user experience optimizations.  Free tools make entry into this phase easy, profitable, and effective.  Once you’ve been able to attract as many visitors to your site naturally (organic search) and adverting – both push and pull methods – its time to focus on the user experience on the site.

Keep in mind that when implementing paid methods it is even more important to make sure that any money you are spending on a visitor helps that visitor through the purchase path (or what ever your goal funnel is) as seamlessly as possible.

There are two primary forms of Testing:

1. A/B Testing – This testing involves testing two primary layouts of a page and should only be done between two different layout designs.  All content and on-page imagery should be held constant while the layout (or overall design) should be noticeably different.
2. Multivariate Testing – This testing involves keeping the layout of the page the same but alternating each of the elements with multiple creative options.  For example, changing the heading, alternating between two different graphics, having different sell text, and/or using bullets instead of paragraph content.

A website in the testing phase should begin with A/B Testing in order to confirm what type of layout/design a potential client is more attracted to, then follow up with ongoing multivariate testing to make sure that each element is fully optimized to reach their target clients.

When combining multivariate testing with paid traffic, its always best to pull out a significant sample size from entire campaign, run a multivariate test, then use the winning combination on the full advertising spend.  This will ensure that the greatest amount of people have the greatest chance of completing a desired action (conversion).

Once you have your website built from the ground up for search engines – that is, you are using standard website mark-up for titles, links, headings, etc. – then you it is time to begin thinking about your website’s content.  And by content, I mean a lot of things including your style of prose (language, voice, keywords, etc.) as well as the type of digital information you keep on your websites (imagery, video, links, etc.).

Below are my quick and dirty, simple website content optimizations that any novice search engine optimizer can begin using on their website.

Use your audience’s language

Know how your audience speaks and what your target market is saying.  An “SEO” way of saying this is target the right keywords!

If your website is chalk full of the word “motorcycle” but your audience is searching for “hog” or “motor bike” as well, then there is a big disconnect between you and your audience.  Since you are strictly using one type of language and your audience a wide variety, try to incorporate those other keywords by enriching the sites vocabulary.

Stay cutting edge – and write about it

Try to keep up to speed in your industry or at least your favorite topics – and write about them.  Most search engine spiders value new and relevant information.  Especially around new topics.

So as your industry, company, or even blogging-topic-of-choice grows and develops a new product or service, develop and opinion about it and share it with the world.  You’ll not only begin to add that new up-and-coming keyword to your websites collection of keyword assets, but you’ll communicate to your audience that you’re knowledgeable and active in your space.

Think Multimedia

Don’t forget to incorporate video, imagery, and other multimedia into your posts.  With the ease of YouTube you can make videos and upload them to your site.  And with Twixtr you can take photos from your phone and upload them to the web.  It’s not only the keywords that are going to make your content valuable, but as search engine bots become more and more sophisticated, they will be able to crawl the other multimedia items you have and index audio content along with textual information.

Widgets & Gadgets

Adding extra widgets and gadgets to your website borders on the optimizing your website for popularity along with content.  I’m including it here because sometimes a branded widget or special tool can become a novelty in itself and can warrant topical content creation.   Thus, if you have the ability and ingenuity to create online widgets in your space, take the time and hammer one out.

As mentioned previously there are simple Search Engine Optimization Updates you can make to your website that simply enable a search engine robot to more effectively index your site.  I mean really, why not?  Some times it’s as simple as using standard markup and at other times it’s as simple as taking a look at what you can communicate to search engines and leveraging that information (like unique page titles). What I tell clients is that search engines are just really big, dynamic, automated librarians.  A search engine’s only goal is to catalog the web, then help you find the results you need based on your query.   That’s all.

The more you can help a search engine catalog your website effectively – the better.  And one of the primary ways is good markup.  Play by the rules, use good mark up, and search engines (librarians) will know who you are and where you belong in results pages. Here’s a collection of some simple website optimizations that enable search engines to better catalog your site for the vast majority of internet users who start their website visit via a search engine.

Use <H1>, <H2>, & <H3> tags

Resist the urge to use spans for all of your formatting.  Basic html was built on the old heading tags.  Search engines use headings to effectively catalog what your page is about. Also, search engines need to catalog each page based on one primary topic.  Your primary topic should be in your Heading 1 tag – and there should only be one.  Having more than one heading 1 tag essentially divides that value between two separate on-page titles.  To make sure you get the most bang for your buck, use one heading that encompasses one unique topic per page.  Use your secondary and tertiary headings for the rest.

Use your <title> tag

The next most important way to help search engines (and visitors) better catalog your website is to include unique title tags for every page.  Again, a search engine wants to index and catalog unique content.  Each web page should be about one specific topical item and your title should be a unique identifier for that page. Imagine you search for “nalgene” and you get the following results: You’ll notice that the titles of both of the links don’t tell us anything about the page content for to each link.  This is a bad user experience that doesn’t help you with 1) usability or 2) search.

Know what Bots Can & Can’t Do

Think like a search engine bot.  They can only do one thing (at this point in time) – click a link … then click another link.  Bots can’t write cookies to their machines.  Bots can’t click on a drop down list to select a specific piece of content.  Bots can’t crawl flash effectively. Find your valuable content areas on your site and make sure they are accessible for a search engine bot.  In fact this sounds like a good post to put together in the future – trouble shooting your website for robots. 

Save your Link Equity & Redirect!

Making changes to your website content?  Changing urls?  Each page you have on your website has been gaining value since the day you published it.  Over time this “link equity” builds up.  Search engines like to give older websites more equity because they’ve been around longer. Don’t loose that equity instead make sure to set up a proper 301 redirect.  Not sure how to do that?  Here’s a link that has the most popular ways to set up a proper 301 redirect. Okay, so this was just a start.  Let me know if you’ve found this useful.  I’ll be putting together a few more optimization posts that cover more issues! Stay Tuned.

Last night I had the pleasure of speaking to a social networking class at the University of Washington. One of my co-workers at POP referred me to help teach a segment on search engine optimization. Through the course of the presentation, it occurred to me that it has been far too long since I’ve actively engaged in my own social marketing efforts so I thought I’d share some of the information I presented on basic website optimization (with a focus on organic search results).

Main Point: There are three different aspects that any web developer should consider when trying rank well for search engines.

1. The first aspect to consider is creating a website that is crawlable for search engine bots. Search engine spiders don’t behave the same was a regular human visitors so optimizing your website from a technical perspective is very important.
2. The second aspect is to create content and tools on your website that are relevant to your audience. The goal being to become an authority on a particular topic, subject or category. A search engines goal is to crawl the web, index information, catalog that information, then serve the most relevant piece of information to an individual based on their unique query. The more relevant and thorough you are around a specific niche topic – an expert, if you will – the more likely search engines will serve your content to your specific audience.
3. The third aspect is working on your popularity through effective online marketing mediums. Search engines aren’t going to just take you on your word that you are valuable – they are going to look at the community around your topic (category) and see how many other websites are linking to you and what they ares saying about you to their visitors.  So, you’ve got to monitor which sites are linking to you as well as how you are promoting yourself through all of your online marketing efforts.

By creating a specific strategy around these three aspects you can effectively increase your usability and your organic search rankings. In general, what’s good for the user is good for the search.  If you are novice web developer looking to ‘do the right thing’ for both search engines and your visitors, stay tuned as I will address each of these website strategies in separate posts shortly.

So my friend showed me his made in Malaysia website last night, knowing full well that I am an SEO Strategist in my other life. It was like he lit the fuse of a nice stick of dynamite, by asking me the loaded question, then sat back to hear me rant about all the search un-friendly coding his Malaysian free-lancer did.

That got me to thinking about all the search engine optimization efforts I’ve worked on as of late and I thought I’d put together a list of my Top 4 Content Optimization Recommendations. Of course, before you even begin to optimize your content, you’ll need to have done some keyword research to know what keyword and keyword phrases to infuse – but let’s assume you’ve done all that already because I’m going to reference this mythical keyword list.

Tip #1 – Use Your Top 5 Keywords

As you develop your content, optimize it by judiciously using your top five descriptive keywords as throughout your page titles & headings.

For example, instead of a page heading that says “Products & Services” use your top keywords and say “Internet Marketing Products & Website Services“. Now you have just respectfully included some great descriptive, keyword rich text that Google, MSN, and Yahoo can index and provide better rankings.

I can’t tell you how many sites I see with generic heading text that does absolutely nothing for your organic search efforts.

Tip #2 – Key-phrase Building

I don’t know if there is a real word for it, but I call it “key-phrase building” and it’s the practice of stringing three or more descriptive words together for a great string of rich content that is often searched.

I read the other day that of all search keyword query length (one word, two word, three word, four word, etc) – keyword searches done with three words of text were most popular. This tells us, the search engine optimizers, that searchers are now searching for more specific results – and need to, to get the content they seek.

Tip #3 – Content Formula Guideline

In order to get great search results you need to have content. And as the old web adage goes “Content is King”. Every 3rd or 4th level page you have – deep-dive pages – should have at least 250 words on them and at least one sub heading. And this content should include at least two hyper links that are relevant to the content – either to other pages on your website or to other websites with great content.

Make sure you’ve got some good content. If not, hire someone for cheap that will write some. Without content, you really have no SEO.

Tip #4 – Use Keyword Anchor Text

Let me say this loud and clear the “Learn more” link is dead. Try not to use it. Or use it, but understand that it does absolutely nothing for your search engine ranking.

The SERPs (Search Engine Results Page – Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc.) use anchor text to help decipher what content is on that page. The assumption being that you are not going to use the text phrase “my yellow dog” to link to your brown cat – you are going to use the phrase “my brown cat”. Because it’s true, relevant, and makes sense.

There you have it – my top 4 content optimization tips. If you happen to come across any other big seo content optimizations strategies, let me know because I’d love to hear them!