Interactive Improvements

I love SEO and have been doing it since 1995. It’s a blast when a site I’m working on goes from oblivion to a top-5 ranking! As I see it, there are three steps to truly effective Search Engine Optimization; the Fundamentals, Lots of Rich and Relevant Content, and a solid Link Building Strategy.

Step 1: THE FUNDAMENTALS
Discovery: Figure out who your customers are. What are their needs and goals? What methods and search phrases do they use to find you? If you have web analytics reports available, review them to learn your visitors’ navigation paths and look for things you didn’t know/assume about them that you can expand upon. (If you’re pursuing all three steps, this is when you’d also create personas of your typical customers.)

Basic Keyword Research: Once you generally know what search phrases your customers are using to find your website, take that information and research to find other related search phrases that are equally or more popular. Overture and Google Adwords keyword finding tools are a pretty good start.

Meta Tags - Page Title and Description hold a lot of weight with the major search engines. Make sure that every one of your pages has a unique Title and Meta Description. If they are all the same the search engine is just going to say “Hey, these are all the same, so I’m just going to index one”. If your pages are generated by a database, use the database fields to make sure all pages are unique. Here’s one of those things that doesn’t matter (hardly) anymore: Meta Keywords. The Meta keyword tag has been so abused that the major SE’s don’t even bother to read it anymore.

SPAM Check: Review your code to make sure there’s no search engine spam or blacklisting potential. Google does a nice job saying what it doesn’t like. Here are some things that used to be very popular in the old days that will surely get you in trouble today:

Cloaking: Displaying different content to search engines than you display to users
Keyword Stuffing: Saying a word or phrase an abnormal number of times anywhere on the page or in your code.
Hidden Links or Text: Making text or links the same color, or nearly the same color as the background. This is a big no-no and will get you penalized very quickly.

There are a 100 other things that can get you trouble too. Just create pages for users, not for search engines. If something exists only for the search engine and it’s no value to your visitors, don’t do it.

Copy Up Top: Text / Copy is the most important thing to the search engines. Make sure that they can read it by making sure it’s at the top most of your code. The most common mistake I see webmasters do is bury the copy below lines and lines of java script. Put that script below the text or even better, offload it to its own file and make a call to it.

Internal Linking: The most important thing to be sure of is that a search engine can access and index all of your public content. Search engines won’t fill out a form. They won’t perform a query for red sweaters. Get your content out there and findable using text links.

File Structure: What you name a page is not the most important thing that you do, but in highly competitive environments, it may give you that needed edge. As a rule of thumb, it’s good to have key words in the file name. Also, the less directories between the root and the page file the better.

Basic Linking: You gotta get at least a few inbound links from other websites. Read my Link Building article for more details.

Step 2: LOTS OF RICH CONTENT
To be truly successful in reaching top rankings you need rich content and lots of it. This is especially true in highly competitive markets such as online dating, mortgages, travel, etc. For a search engine to “recommend” your site, a search engine needs to know that your site, more than any other, has what the searcher is looking for. Having lots of copy describing your product is the only way a search engine will know how good and how unique your stuff is.

The other reason to have deep content is to give other website owners a reason to link to you (see Phase 3). You don’t get something for nothing and links are no different. At the least, what you have to “give” is great information to the people that other websites refer to you.

The wonderful thing about adding content is that not only will you gain rankings and links; you’ll have more sales per visitor by helping people decide what to buy. When I first performed Phase 2 to just a portion of the RegionalHelpWanted.com websites, sales instantly went up 35% and pre-sale question calls went down 50%.

Lean more about why content is so important.
Learn more about converting more visitors into customers.

Step 3: LINK BUILDING STRATAGY
Good content is only half the picture. In highly competitive markets, if you don’t have a bunch of “important” and relevant websites linking to your site the search engines will just ignore it. Heck, if no one else is “recommending” you, why should engines recommend you?

Learn more about the importance of a good linking strategy.

I could go on for another hundred pages - and that’s just for The Fundamentals! The goal of this article is to establish a foundation for future articles and, more importantly, to illustrate all the components it takes to get real optimization results. The fundamentals will get you top rankings in very non-competitive areas like “corn husking in Oshkosh.” but, if you’re in a competitive arena, you’ve got to do all three steps to pop to the top!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 16th, 2006 at 1:23 pm and is filed under SEO best practices. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.