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.

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!

For those of you unfamiliar with the web analytics industry, never fear, because this really has nothing to do with web analytics. This is more web advertising.

So let’s say you want to advertise on the web (because everyone’s doing it and you need a piece of the pie).  If your maxed out search engine efforts don’t land you on the first page of google or yahoo, there is always sponsored search (also referred to as paid search and search engine marketing).

 Thus you can pay to be at the top of the search results. Granted, this does put that “sponsored link” title above your ad and usually give your result a nice light yellow background but you get that sought after visibility and possible click through that could eventually lead to a sale or conversion.

Google, Yahoo, and MSN are a great place to start because you can begin with smaller denominations to test how profitable a sponsored search campaign will be.

In fact I rough plan to help decipher when a website should be focusing on organic search engine optimization and when they should focus on paid search engine marketing for the best ROI. 

Pre-Launch: Spend lots on SEO development before you launch the site – Metadata standards, H1/H2/H3 Heirarchies, friendly urls, xml sitemap, 301 redirects, internal content rich urls, etc.  Build a solid foundation for good organic search crawling so that a year down the road you won’t need to uproot all your existing

SEO Phase 1: Confirm your indexation for major search engines, get search referring data from analytics tool, make sure those keywords are in your meta, content, and H1, start blogging regularly (weekly), sign up for Webmaster Tools so you can tell what search queries your site is showing up for (prepare to be surprised).

SEO Phase 2: Confirm that SEO practices for meta, H1, content, friendly urls, press releases, blog schedules, etc.  These should be checked as you develop your ongoing publishing process to ensure quality.

SEM Phase 1: With what you know from referring organic search data in your analytics tool, build paid search engine marketing campaigns on successful keyword searches and other keywords that should’ve been successful on search.  Make sure to use unique and relevant landing pages for each keyword group.

SEM Phase 2: Analyze and SEM Campaigns and looking deeper into competing campaigns and websites.  What are they doing that you could learn from?  Do this too, where neccessary.

MVT Phase 1: Use results of paid search campaigns and abandonment data (from analytics tool) to begin planning some multivariate testing options for your main landing pages.  

MVT Phase 2: Continue with your paid search campaigns while implementing your different landing page variations.  Use your results to optimize the effectiveness of your campaigns.  Don’t forget to continue following best SEO practices.

Well, there you have it.  My ultimate plan for overall website performance optimization.  Feel free to comment and let me know what you think.

Here’s our first pic of the new house. When we moved in, we there were lots of trees blocking the front yard - some diseased and others damaging the foundation. I haven’t yet had a chance to take any more daytime pictures, so this will have to suffice until the sun comes out again.

Here’s another picture of me painting our bedroom.  We decided to go with a light shade of forest green on two walls paired with an even lighter shade of the same color. We found some great paint colors at this local Parker’s Paint shop near out house.  If you click on the link, check out the greenish color called “Lawn” - our walls are a lighter shade of that.

And finally, here is the Study.  We actually had to paint this room4 times!  Let me tell you folks, red is probably the most difficult color to paint - for some reasons it just doesn’t coat very easily.  Think twice before you decide on this striking color.  If you have that link open to the color wheel, this room is a lot like the “Excelsior” red color.

I know these pictures are a little lame, but I’ll do another round of photos once we finish all the remodeling and landscaping (probably around 2012)!  Let me just tell you that our2nd home is officially the nearest Home Depot.

And for all of you out there who heard that we moved - we did, in fact, get a nice little Christmas Tree! Special thanks goes out to Jerry and Tina for their small contribution to the season!

Pictures of the new place to follow.

Update: Okay, i’m having trouble updating Wordpess to include pictures because of my server permissions. Yes, this is the problem that forever plagues my life… server issues. I will be working on this over my Christmas break and have some lovely updates for you shortly.

The site’s actually pretty well designed and user friendly - if you are looking for some great prayer ideas or just to open the discussion about prayer (or maybe you saw the PBS Prayer In America Documentary) check out the site.  They have some great multimedia interviews as well as an selection of interfaith prayers you can read through - i think the prayers of famous people was pretty interesting.

While you are there check out my post on Thanksgiving Prayers and Traditions!

We spent the first evening making it to Sitges via an over-priced taxi cab.  The hotel/apartment was pretty nice - located right on the beach next to the boardwalk.  It was so nice it almost convinced us against going to Barcelona.   But we met Joel there and got hear all about host family and the life of a traveling student.

Tomorrow we meet Julee and the her boyfriend Jim in Malaga!

We’ll be travelling around, checking out Sevilla, Granada, Barcelona, and Madrid to name a few.  I’ll keep you all posted on the details. 

Then, flew over to DC for eMetrics 2007 where I got more than my fair share of web analytics info sessions. I got to hear the one-and-only Avinash Kaushik speak and, yeah, I’d say he’s just about everything he’s cracked up to be. I also got to hear Jim Novo speak about behavioral targeting which was all the rage this year - seemed like every other speaker was talking more about it. If you haven’t heard, demographics are out, personas are in. I’m hoping to have a blog post about this soon - hopefully at Pop but we’ll see how fast those boys can get a blog up …. no, really.