Organic Search

Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft all announced this morning that they’re supporting an addition to the Sitemaps protocol that makes it easier for site owners with multiple subdomains to manage sitemap files.

In the past, you were forced to maintain an XML sitemap in the same domain as the domain which it referred to. i.e. www.hallme.com would have a sitemap for this domain, and blog.hallme.com would also need its own sitemap hosted on its own domain. There was no way to specify that we wanted blog.hallme.com to have a sitemap hosted on www.hallme.com, nor could we for www.hallblog.com.

For most site owners, this isn’t much of an issue, but if your business consists of multiple web properties, or many subdomains, the management of the sitemaps protocol could be quite a chore! (Imagine a scalable CMS such as wordpress.com).

The update makes life a lot easier for webmasters in these situations. Now, you can host all of your sitemaps for multiple domains at a single domain, and then use your robots.txt file to point search engines to the location of the correct sitemap.

So let’s say we want www.masterdomain.com to have the sitemap for subdomain.masterdomain.com. All you need to do is add the following line to the robots.txt file on subdomain.masterdomain.com:

Sitemap: http://www.masterdomain.com/sitemaps/subdomain.masterdomain.xml

On the same token, www.masterdomainblog.com could have this line added to the robots.txt:

Sitemap: http://www.masterdomain.com/sitemaps/masterdomainblog.xml

For the average small business, this is an interesting, if useless feature, but for businesses spanning multiple web properties, with subdomains, or for businesses like ourselves who manage sitemaps for hundreds of clients, the new update is welcome news indeed!

By now you’ve already hear that Microsoft has made an incredible bid of $45 billion to pick up Yahoo. Some call it an offer Yahoo can’t refuse, but what does it mean for your business online?

While in general monopolies have never proven to be great for the little guys, a combined Yahoo-Microsoft effort would either produce a viable competitor to the Goog or continue a tailspin of diminishing relevance, leaving Google the #1 search engine by default, not choice. With Google already enforcing strict policies about paid links and essentially defining how thousands of webmasters develop their sites, the latter situation would create a hazardous environment for business owners who have desires for their sites that at odds with Google’s policies.

Now to Google’s credit, their standards for websites are generally pretty good ones — build sites for users, avoid using duplicate content, have a reliable site, etc. However, what checks and balances will there be if the organic search world is a one-company show? Especially as Google stretches its fingers into acquiring information and media properties, the neutrality of this web behemoth is going to become ever more a subject of scrutiny… and legitimate concern.

On the other hand, even a more influential Google will have to contend with the emerging power of social networks, which is exactly where a Microsoft-Yahoo would be strong. The savvy website owner — that is, you — will be wise to keep working on a site which drives in diverse sources of traffic, and answers all of the questions your customers typically have. Though it’s also not a bad idea to make an appearance in social media circles!

Well all know that technology changes will abruptly alter how we approach web marketing, and though the tactics will differ depending on how organic search companies butt heads, the bottom line will always be reaching your customers. Keep speaking the message your customers want to hear — no matter the medium — and success will follow you.

While Google may be blind, the text you put around images can help the robots see a little bit about what they’re missing. This helps broaden the search terms present on your pages, while building accessibility and popularity through Google’s image search tool.

First, of course, is the ever popular ALT attribute for images. Making sure you have relevant alt information is useful for several reasons. Obviously you can sneak in a few descriptive words (a few — not spam now!), as well as presenting some text while an image is loading or for those who prefer to keep their images turned off while browsing. It’s not necessary to give attributes to every single structural element on the entire page, but for any image that has interesting content — photos, logos, product box shots, etc. — alts should be a given.

You also want to make sure the directory you use for images is crawlable, and that all images have descriptive names. Google recently gave the example of the default naming schema of most digital cameras versus the ideal descriptive names of photos. Given the choice of the two, do you think IMG_0001.jpg or hr-conference-customers.jpg is more search-friendly?

As a quick photo-editing tip, it helps to keep a separate directory for raw, unedited, archivable photos, and another for those you have resized, formatted and named for use on the web. Make sure to back up the originals on CD or DVD!

If you follow these practices, you’ll be making sure that your images are properly indexed and as descriptive as possible for both users and search engines. As a final word of wisdom, don’t forget the sacred rule of image use on web pages — use images to enhance your content, not to replace it. This includes things like image-based navigation as well. While a picture may say a thousand words, it’s not going to do you much good if the blind and unbending search robots never get it in front of a human to judge.

Own a website long enough, and it’s bound to happen — maybe Google alters their search algorithm, the links you’ve gained take a hit in authority, or a beefy competitor comes along — your sunny days of ranking at the top of search results drastically turn gray. Now you’re suddenly bailing the ship as rapidly as possible, trying to keep from darker days ahead. What’s an honest website owner to do?

While thunder and lightning showering down on your web rankings will definitely put clouds in your day, the sky’s not falling. These proven, white-hat SEO techniques will help you weather the storm, and prepare you for sunnier days ahead.

1. Take a hard look at your website. Does your website have a leaky roof? Take a look at all the core SEO elements of your site and be sure they are properly implemented and use target key phrases, without tipping the scales towards spam (what makes it spam? well, you should “know it when you see it“)

In particular, make sure:

• All pages have unique content! No hard rules here but 400 words is a good minimum for a homepage and key supporting pages, and at least 250 for most everywhere else. Thinner pages can be acceptable, but don’t expect lots of rankings for them.
• All pages have unique titles reinforcing targeted keywords related to their content
• All pages have unique META descriptions reflecting their content and pitching the website. Though Google has said they don’t use META tags to directly influence rankings, they are sometimes used as the description of your site in search rankings and may be used to differentiate your pages from each other.
• Maximize your use of semantic markup. It’s hard to tell how much, but search experts will agree that heading tags are indicators of content structure and importance. The best guide I’ve come across is this one by Pearsonified — it’s written with blogs in mind, but is equally valid for standard web sites.
• Your images have suitable ALT attributes. Again, be careful not to spam, but put descriptive alternate text in image tags to reinforce your site’s content while boosting your site’s accessibility.

2. Take control of your site’s linking. Use the Yahoo Site Explorer to see the backlink profile for your site, and maybe compare it to competitors in your sector. Do you have as many or fewer links? Who links to you? Are they from reputable and related sites? Links play a major part in your site’s performance, and a poor link profile can pour misery down on a site, even one with bountiful content.

Link building is a discipline in and of itself, but some of the things you can do are:

• Swap links with businesses you partner with or with which you have a good rapport. This can also apply to client’s sites.
• Make sure you’re in reputable directories like Yahoo! and Aviva. Free and paid directories should be just the beginning of your strategy, but they provide a good foundation.
• Write a genuinely informative press release and market it on a reputable service like PRWeb.
• Build linkable worthy content and market it. Use Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, relevant forums, your MySpace account, and anything else at your disposal to promote your site once you get juicy things worth going to it on there! How do you come up with those ideas? Well, keep reading…

3. Fight back! The best defense to a rainy day is to be proactive. If your roof’s solid, no rain should get in! And even your site’s close to the high water mark, the proactive measures you should have taken will help turn the tide. What should you do? In a word: content.

Many businesses struggle with writer’s block, frustration with the task of writing, and coming to grips with what web users expect to get out of their website. While no blog post will destroy this cloud, we do have some ideas for you:

• Take advantage of offline content. Newsletters? Magazine articles? Newspaper stories? Get them, or links to them, or links from them, on your website!
• Put yourself in your customer’s shoes. What are the questions you get all the time? Do you address them or answer them on your site? If not, you’re missing out on a rich opportunity for content that simultaneously qualifies your company as the solution to your customer’s biggest problems.
• Keep up to date. This may be the hardest of all, but no one wants to see “news” from last July or a blog updated every quarter. Even if your updates are cursory — new employees, tradeshows you’re going to attend, updates to the software that you carry — it’s worth making note of that on your site to keep things a little fresh. As a caveat, things like your new favorite tv show, pet and appearance at 80’s night are not newsworthy.

While storms are inevitable, and frustrating, what you do in response is even more important. A proactive, measured, strategic approach is always, best, and will likely keep you drier next time the search world shakes up. And remember, it can’t rain all the time.