Jeremy Hutton

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!