SEO Tips

Learning Search Engine Optimization
Search engines typically show only 10 results on each page (not counting sponsored links or for local searches when local 3 pak or 10 pak maps also appear). The majority of searchers are most likely to click on the top few returned results. So if you rank at or near the top on the first page for your targeted keyword – business tends to be very good. If you happen to rank on the second page (or worse) you are fighting for the remaining 9% of all search traffic (page one gets roughly 90% of all clicks).

Search Engine Optimization (or SEO) is considered by many to be part art and part science. But boiled down to its rawest form SEO is really just marketing your business so that it ranks well for your most valuable keywords in the major search engines – Google, Yahoo and Bing. So because of this SEO should be done with the mindset of a marketer and not a techy.

What SEO is not about is tricking Google, Yahoo or Bing (this tends to end in disaster). It is about understanding what info the search scientists at major search engines require to rank pages. Look at SEO as supplying them with the information that they need in the format they require while also fulfilling the intent of specific information that the search engine visitor is looking for – whether that is to buy or to find more information.

This makes search the most sophisticated marketing tool we’ve ever had and gives small business the chance to compete against large businesses. Ultimate success in the search game comes from top notch, original content and links to and from quality websites. Unfortunately with SEO there are no guarantees and it can often take months to see results.

Look at creating a good SEO program like you are building a four story building. You must begin with a solid foundation and then carefully build each layer. While SEO isn’t complicated you need to be sure to address each of these building blocks in order to enhance your chances of long term success.

Search Engine Optimization consists of these 17 building blocks

1. Define Goals
2. Commitment/ Planning
3. Education
4. Patience
5. Market Research
6. Site Structure
7. Analytics
8. Keyword Research
9. Original Content Creation
10. On Page Optimization
11. Quality Link Building
12. Brand Building
13. Measuring Results
14. Adding Fresh Content
15. Social Building
16. Reputation Management
17. Establishing Trust

Define Goals
The undoing of many company’s efforts is having a solid overall marketing effort and for internet businesses SEO is a basic fundamental. Without a clearly defined strategy practically ever marketing initiative will fail. Defining your goals can easily be confused with tactics. Your goals can be as simple and improving site traffic, conversions or sales by x%. Or maybe a bigger picture commitment such as achieving a top three position in total traffic (if for instance you are currently 9^th or 10^th in market share).

Commitment/Planning
The most important element of defining goals is getting a total commitment from the key decision markers – be it the owner or high ranking stakeholders. If these major players are not on board your SEO efforts will fail. Once total commitment is in place then you can begin the crucial step of planning all that needs to be done in order to achieve these goals.

Education
If you’ve made the decision to go it alone (DIY SEO) then this is of the upmost importance. Don’t expect instant results but continue to learn a little bit more about SEO each day. Visit the various blogs, consider going to a conference (like SMX or SES). But continue to search out more knowledge. If you are having somebody else put your SAE into place you should have a thorough knowledge about what they are doing – this is your business and it’s that important.

Patience
You can only gain so much knowledge in a short amount of time but should instead be looking for continuous improvement. By gaining a bit more knowledge each day your site will keep moving forward and evolving. You’ll gain SEO efficiencies and you’ll soon see slowly improving results on the search engines.

SEO is not something that happens instantaneously, the search engines are geared to present the most accurate information from trusted sources and your site can not become an overnight trusted source. Do anything black hat and when discovered you will receive substantial penalties from the search engines including getting your site banned.

For an established SEO expert going into a new venture (whether a site launch or an existing one) it can take 3 – 9 months to achieve results depending on how competitive the particular niche is.

Market Research
Now it is time to really start to get into the meat of SEO. You must have a thorough understanding of the particular niche you are looking to compete in. Who are the major players for the primary keyword phrases that you are initially looking to target? If they are large corporations, colleges or government agencies you will find it very difficult to bust through. But if the competition is smaller, appear unfocused and do not have a strong brand then this market is ripe for quick penetration and gives you a chance to be a dominant player.

You can get a quick snapshot of your competition by using the SEOBook Toolbar. I have tested a variety of competitive research tools but this is the one I rely on.

You’ll get quick competitive info on:

• Google page rank
• Inbound links
• Key directory listings
• Site age
• Total number of unique monthly visitors
• Competitive keyword terms

As you do your market research you will be looking for deeper analysis into the keyword terms they use, how well they keep their visitors engaged, how often do they update content, how deep is their product offering, what are they featuring throughout their site and where they are getting links into their site from.

To see what keywords they are ranking for you can use SEM Rush or Compete. Neither of these is free and some of the information is a bit dated but they all will sharpen your focus by providing useful insight.

Site Structure
What are the key ingredients to a solid site structure? They way that the information is parsed and categorized is critically important. You can look at this from the top down (categories, sub-categories, individual pages, keywords) or from the bottom up (keywords, individual pages, sub-categories and categories).

As you’ve gone through your competitive research how do the top performers in your niche have their sites structured. What areas of their sites should you copy? Which areas do you want to expand on? What are the gaps that you can exploit? Are there logical marketplace segmentations?

We typically approach the site structure from a logical approach (usually an excel spreadsheet) showing all the categories, all of the sub-categories in each category and all of the pages within each subcategory. This becomes a working document that we continuously go back to and add info as needed. This more of an organizational thing and is very useful to the programmers.

We also look at site structure from a wireframe perspective. We have found that many stakeholders are more visual and this helps them get a better grasp of some of the elements that are common to each page and those that change depending on where the visitor is within the site hierarchy.

Some of the key SEO elements to keep in mind as you are going through this are:

• Your most important pages should be accessed throughout the site from the top navigation
• Diversify your internal anchor text
• But keep your internal anchor text structure consistent throughout the site
• Not all sections with the site are equal – your most valuable category and sub-category pages should have more content (more per page and a larger variety of pages)
• Ideally every single page should be linked to from another page within the site
• If you have a larger retail site use the directory structure
  Category > Sub-Category > Product

Analytics
Now while this doesn’t need to be in place until later in the game (for a site launch) I want to touch on it here because if you are revamping an existing website then you need to start gathering this key information as soon as possible. Where are we at now and how does each change (within a specific time period) change our traffic patterns and conversions.

We have used very expensive analytics packages that are considered top-of-the-line (also very, very expensive) and we have used the free Google Analytics. Google Analytics gave us much of the necessary info we needed to make good solid marketing decisions.

Keyword Research
Next to market research this is considered to be one of the most important aspects of SEO. Without building your site around the correct keywords you are doomed to mediocrity at best and failure at the worse.

What are the keywords that your potential business clients or customers are searching for? You should use several keyword research tools to get a good idea of the overall search universe, as none of these is perfect or exactly dead on every time. By using several you can get a better idea of what is actually being searched on. Two of our favorite keyword research tools are the Google Keyword Tool (shows estimated monthly searches) and the SEOBook Keyword Suggestion Tool that shows estimated daily traffic from Google, Yahoo and Bing.

You can also get good keyword ideas if you have an existing website and have Google Analytics in place. Here you can easily see the keywords (by search engine or in total) that are currently driving traffic to your site. You should also go through your competitor’s website by page and see if you can determine what keywords they are targeting.

Group similar or related keywords together, this will help when you get to content creation and will help you maximize the all important long tail searches Another valuable trick is to start you research with the broadest search term possible (for example – dog). This will give you the most popular phrases related around these short head terms. This allows you to quickly expand your universe of some of important related keyword phrases that potential customers are actively searching on.

The downside of keyword research is that most of these keywords or keyword phrases are estimates and you really don’t know if they will drive substantial traffic. This makes investing a great deal of time (or money) into later content creation a bit risky. We have minimized this risk by doing some PPC testing for targeted keyword phrases. This allows you to get a better feel for the total number of searches in a shorter time period and leads to a better comfort level in content creation.

Original Content Creation
You’ve done your market research and your important keyword research. Now it is time to start developing high quality content for your site.

Original content is content that is written specifically for your site, it can be written by the site owner or somebody on your staff. This content shouldn’t be duplicated anywhere else on the internet as it is very rare that duplicated content ranks higher than the original piece.

While it is relatively easy to find technical SEO information or somebody to help with the basic on page optimization, the most successful SEO programs really shine because they are able to turn out consistent amounts of high quality content.

Don’t fall into the trap of turning out crap content! While it may get indexed if it doesn’t speak to the visitor it is a wasted opportunity that you may never get back again. Content creation isn’t about gaming the search engines it is about speaking to potential customers.

Top notch content is most important in these areas:

• Product or services copy
• Articles
• Blogs

You want to use your most valuable search terms and phrases that you gathered during your keyword research phase in your content. You also want to build these documents of information around like terms and variations of the primary keywords so that you expand your opportunities for long tail searches.

We have found great value to use inline text links to related products, sub-categories and categories throughout your content and also to also link to outside authoritative sources.

On Page Optimization
When we talk about on page optimization we are not talking specifically about content. Content is such a significant part of the overall SEO strategy that we dedicate a category to this.

Here we are primarily talking about for on page optimization:

• Title Tags
• Meta Descriptions
• <h1> Tags
• Internal Linking Strategy

Title Tags – informative page titles are one of the most important factors in indexing a page and getting a high ranking. This tells the search engine what the page is about. It should have the most important keyword phrase in it so that it is bolded when someone is searching for that primary keyword phrase on the SERPs. This shows relevance to the searcher and lets them know what the page is about.

The easiest way to describe the title tag is that it is like the ad copy headline of a very short story. Be relevant, capture attention and market for the click. Here are some things to be aware of:

• The search engines will only show the first 70 characters of the title tag and will truncate anything greater
• Place your primary keyword as close to the front of the tag as it makes sense
• Don’t use your primary keyword more than twice
• It is not uncommon for other websites to use these as the anchor text on links into your site
• Keep each title tag unique (do not duplicate these with other pages within your site)
• We have found it to be beneficial using call to actions (when appropriate) – buy…, more info on… we’ve found an improved click thru rate in many cases with this tactic

Meta descriptions work hand in hand with title tags. If the title tag is the ad copy headline then the meta description is the copy block. You have character limits here of 160. You want to reinforce what this page is about to both the search engines as well as the searcher so using the primary keyword phrase or a variation of it can be very helpful.

There is some debate as to how much attention the search engines pay to meta descriptions and the common belief is it at best helps to determine page relevance. Again write these for your potential visitors, targeted to what they are looking for – it is your hook to get them into your site.

<h1> Tags. We have no hard evidence that these give a substantial boost to your SEO efforts in the eyes of the search engines but we do add these as part of our Content SOP (standard operating procedures). These help break up the content on the page for the visitor and allowing for quicker skimming.

Those that believe that <h> tags are an SEO benefit believe that it is because they give added weight to particular sections of the site – i.e. an <h1> tag is more important than an <h2> which is more important than an <h3>… These same folks believe that the page title or an important keyword phrase be at the top of the page, be bolded and be given an <h1> Tag. We believe this to be a content best practice for the user and do recommend it as it certainly doesn’t hurt.

Having a solid internal linking strategy is an excellent way for serving information to both the search engines as they crawl your site and your visitors to access related information. In the ideal world every single page of your site can be accessed through a link from at least one other page on the site. Now for very large sites this is not really practical and XML Sitemaps come into play.

There are three primary areas where internal linking comes into play:

1. Link Navigation
2. Footers
3. Inline text links

Link navigation is most common to the left hand navigation. Here you want to use your most on topic keyword phrases without appearing spammy. This has to be done correctly or it not only looks bad to your visitor but it becomes “over optimized” and penalties are sure to follow.

Footers are an excellent area for additional information but are also one of the most abused areas of internal linking. Don’t load every single possible keyword into this area (I’ve seen this area be 20 to 30 lines long). Keep it simple (we prefer two lines max) and be sure to show your customer service type of links, your html sitemap and maybe a couple of your most important categories. On the html sitemap this is where you can add all of your pages. This makes for a much better experience for your visitors.

Inline text links are found within the content and these should point to categories, sub-categories or specific product pages within your site. This allows you to mention the most important pages more frequently (helping the search engines understand that these are your key pages) while also improving your visitors experience by helping guide them through the site. There has been some debate as to their value but I have found tremendous success with this method when applied correctly.

Quality Link Building
Search engines views inbound links as votes so the key to high rankings is getting lots of links from a diverse universe.

What is a quality link? These are links from trusted sites that have a high authority score. The best way to think of this is these are sites that have a wide variety of their own incoming links and these sites have been around for quite some time (typically 5 or more years). Links from deeper pages in these authoritative sites, which have a diverse variety of links pointing to them, is like getting secondary recommendations from these other sites (think six degrees of separation).

What are the best sources for quality links?

• Submission to general directories such as Yahoo Directory, DMOZ, BOTW, Business.com and Joe Ant
• Each niche has their own relevant directories (find these)
• Create high value content that others would want to link to
• Review sites
• Blog sites with do follow comments (these are getting rarer)
• Forums (only from high authority forums)
• Partner sites (these can be sister sites, manufactures or suppliers)

You should be aware of the flip side to quality links and that is junk. Stay away from junk links as these will often have a very negative impact on your link quality score in the eyes of the search engine algorithms’. What is junk?

• Social media signatures
• Mass link pages
• Link farms
• Article links
• Site wide links
• Reciprocal links have fallen out of favor

Buying links is incredibly controversial. Many will say don’t buy links but do make sure that you submit to directories. Well to get into the most valuable directories (other than DMOZ) you have to pay for inclusion so in reality you are buying these base links. Google in particular frowns on buying links from other sites to “game them”. While they don’t penalize you for links from these main directories they do not give as much credence to them as they did several years ago.

The best links, whether 100% natural or discovered through a variety of creative marketing practices, come from neighborhoods that are similar in content to your site (not direct competitors but complimentary sites). We have seen some companies over the years have some success with buying links, but as with any good diverse profile these should be a very small percentage of your overall link portfolio (less than 5-10%) and should be from sites that are on topic.

As mentioned previously be very careful with over optimization of your site and this relates to links as well. You want to vary your incoming links to go to a wide variety of your pages (everything should not point to the home page). These should go to category, sub-category and individual product pages. These links should also have a varied anchor text strategy. Using our example of dog supplies – dog crates, dog kennels, dog cages. They all mean practically the same thing. So have links with these as anchor test all going to the same page would be ideal.

The last point on links is as a member of a good neighborhood you should also look for opportunities to link to other highly trusted sources in your complimentary niche. To the search engines this helps show your relevancy within your niche. If you are linking only to good quality sources then you are more likely to be a quality source (link mostly to spammers and poorly trusted sites and…). The best places for these types of links are as inline text links within your content areas.

Brand Building
You are continuously building your brand formula each day you are in existence. This is done by meeting or exceeding your customer’s expectations each and every time they come in contact with you. This often begins with your acquisition marketing approach (organic search, ppc, email, website) to the buying (or call to action) experience — the “email sign up”, “contact us for more information” or the “shopping cart” experiences, then on to the delivery of the product or service sold. This is what your customers come to expect of your brand.

As it relates to SEO basics, once you have become successful your brand becomes the way that many potential or existing customers will search for you — US Airways, Zappos shoes, Pet Smart dog collar. We have found a dramatically higher conversion rate from customers who search in this manner. This is also an area where competitors will bid on your brand terms in PPC advertising and will try to siphon off some of those that are searching of you. If this is the only Pay Per Click advertising you do – protect your brand by getting the top spot on paid searches.

Brand is enhanced even more online by what other websites have to say about you. These may be review sites (that potential customers put a tremendous amount of stock in), a favorable mention from a well trusted authority blogger or a link from a highly trafficked, complimentary site.

This also becomes part of your reputation management plan – what are others saying about your brand.

Measuring Results
This can be everything from operational measurements to marketing measurements but you can’t make improvements on things that you don’t measure. A strong analytics package helps tremendously whether you’re a national or small local operation.

Some of our favorite measurements with Google Analytics:

• Which search engines are driving the most traffic
• Which keywords or phrases
• Which keywords are converting
• Are we getting traffic from our content building efforts
• Which other sites are sending traffic to you

This is all very valuable info that will allow you to keep tweaking what isn’t working and enhancing what is. Your competitors aren’t resting and your site is always evolving – it is either improving or getting worse and losing traction. Measure, test and repeat.

Adding Fresh Content
This is an extension of creating original content and is so important that it needed its own section. The search engines are constantly looking for the most targeted information to serve to their visitors and what these visitors are searching for continues to evolve.

This gives you the opportunity to expand your expertise into a wider range of topics within your niche. You can also expand on some of your original content that didn’t go into tremendous depth. We have found great success with this with both internal articles for some sites and blogs for others.

Continuing to do keyword research works especially well here and is a very useful tool to expand the long tail searches into your site. We have also found that the more frequently you add fresh content the more frequent that the robots crawl and index your site.

Remember the key is high quality content not crap. Give the searchers the info they are looking for and show your expertise, rankings and sales will follow.

Social Building
We look at this as being a bit different than what many think of when they think of social media marketing. While we see some benefit in building fan pages on Facebook we have not seen enough widespread evidence of effective ROI on advertising on social media sites (Facebook, MySpace, Twitter or LinkedIn).

Our social building is really more about link baiting. This is where you are able to take a subject and put a unique spin on it. This may be as simple as a blog post or a bit more complicated like an app or a widget. We have seen one simple widget drive enough traffic to a relatively unimpressive recipe site that it led to the sale of that site.

As your site matures you are looking to continue to drive as much high quality traffic as possible to it. Here your in depth knowledge of your niche can shoot your site past your competition by thinking outside the status quo (or the box). This is why we look at blogging as being a tremendous opportunity for you to easily add high value, link baiting content to your site and even better gain user generated feedback – creating a dialog. Getting recognized as the leading expert in your niche by your target demographic is priceless.

Reputation Management
As you advance through the basic SEO building blocks and have established your brand it becomes more important to monitor what others are saying about you and your brand. This has become critical even for the smallest of companies because of the explosion of user generated media.

Small businesses need to monitor this as it can have a bigger impact on them as there is less overall information on your small business any feedback will stand a greater chance off ranking highly.

This is especially true for local review sites like Insider Pages, Yelp, City Search and Google Maps. The classic rule of “one bad customer experience and they’ll tell ten people” has been blown out of the water with the internet. One bad experience can led to multiple potential customers seeing one or two bad reviews that rise to the top of a search.

What can you do? Watch what is being said and encourage customers to review your products and services. More positive reviews will keep your overall “score” up and potential customers are very good at knowing that there are bound to be some bad reviews sprinkled in (as long as the overall reviews are very good). The key is lots of reviews. Engage your current customers and make them part of the conversation.

Establishing Trust
These are the building blocks that need to be put into place, while some where more important than others they are all needed in order to have a well constructed SEO program. Each layer is important in its own right. The end result is your site is established as a trusted domain with great authority.

This is not something that a new site can quickly achieve and depending on how competitive a particular niche is it may take several years or more to get to this level. Now you have no control over one of the most important aspects of establishing trust and that is the age of your site. But you should do everything in your power to influence the other critical elements.

Establishing a trusted site is really relatively simple but it is certainly not easy. Make a strong commitment to fully developing a content program that turns out high quality work in a timely and consistent matter. This will help you immensely in two of the most instrumental aspects of building trust – who links to you and who you link to. Remember that you are building your site and the information for the end user and not for the search engines.

Like any good house building project – follow the blueprint, use quality materials, don’t take short cuts and you will build something that will last a long time.