Organic Search

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.

While the SEO world is abuzz with the latest gossip from SES San Jose and revelations such as Google’s roll-out of overlay ads on select YouTube video channels, the article that really caught my eye today was BlogStorm’s rather direly titled “Are Webmaster Forums Killing SEO?” Basically, Patrick poses the argument that the disinformation and signal/noise ratio of webmaster forums is degrading the quality of SEO advice on the ‘net and leading some webmasters to do “marketing like its 2003.” His solution? Steer away from forums and stick to the blogs when researching SEO tactics.

While we all should know on a gut-level what we read on the internet should be taken with a grain of salt, many of us still seem to have an innate trust to what we read, especially when it’s from an ostensible “expert” who is able to back up their claims with what at least appears to be some pretty solid results. Despite the reality that the tactics have long fallen out of favor, there’s no shortage of places that will suggest reciprocal linking, low quality directories, and keyword stuffing as the key steps to an effective internet marketing strategy.

I’d have to argue that there’s a fair amount of trash to be found on SEO blogs, as well, though. There’s certainly no shortage of high-level dialogue and engaging discussion — from SEOmoz to Copyblogger, Lorelle to Aaron Wall and John Battelle, and of course “the horse’s mouth” with Matt Cutts — but equally so, there are droves of low-quality, spammy, misleading blogs that are more interested in the traffic you bring to their AdSense ads than the misinformation you leave with. If you’re serious about your business succeeding on the web, then don’t trust what you read on the internet!

Even when experts share what they believe is the truth based on their professional experience, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it is “the” Truth. After all, there are just too many factors involved in search engine rankings for anyone (even the Google engineers) to pretend they know everything, and anyone that makes out that they do is either crazy, lying, or both. The best bet is to read it all, discard it all, try some things, and make up your own mind. And while it’s fine to test the waters with some experimental sites to see what works (we do it all the time), don’t do it with your company site! You wouldn’t read a couple comments from the internet, muck about on your car a bit, and then take off driving down the road — so why would you do the same for a critical aspect of your business?

When it comes to developing a comprehensive, effective strategy for marketing your business, it makes sense to hire internet marketing experts. The corollary of this is, when you do hire internet marketing experts, don’t spend ten minutes reading whatever you can find on the internet and use that information to discount everything those experts have ever told you. After all, that guy on the internet has no vested interest in your success, online or offline.

While there’s much debate about the value of just about every on-page factor of SEO, the going knowledge is that cumulatively, all elements of your content make some difference in how your site is finally ranked, and careful attention to webmaster guidelines and accepted industry standards is key to maximizing the performance of your site… At least, the factors that you have control over.

And so, today I’d like to remark on page headings. Semantically, H1, H2, H3, etc. are all meant to structure a page, with main headings followed by subheadings, etc. Speculation is that text encapsulated by a heading tag is given special emphasis, and thus greater weight, in the search engines. This isn’t to say that you should stuff “Mortgage Cars Mortgage Real estate Broker New York” between your headings and expect top rankings, but that as a key element of design, you should have a strategy for how headings are to be integrated on your site’s pages and use them accordingly.

Many documents, for example, use a bolded paragraph tag rather than a subheading, say an <h3>, to point out the main subject of a new paragraph. In fact, many sites have their main headlines (which ought to be to-the-point and keyword dense!) as plain paragraph tags! While putting that same headline in an <h1> won’t rocket you to the top of the most competitive SERPs, it is a good standards-friendly practice, makes your page more readable without a stylesheet and heck, it can’t hurt your SEO.

Blogs especially have a long ways to go in having perfect semantic markup, explained at great length in an excellent detail at Pearsonified. In general, though CSS may make it tempting, don’t abuse unsuspecting HTML elements to get a desired effect without considering what the effects of your actions will have on your site’s overall SEO and usability.

Well today I finally caught up with the hype, controversy, and promise about Sphinn, and have to say… even if it’s a popularity contest, it’s a great little resource for all things social media and search marketing related. I’ve got nothing against great link-baited content and insider voting dominating a search marketing professional-geared site, because for the most part, everything I’ve read there has been good. If anything, I must applaud all the effort on behalf of the SEO community to get the site as lively as it is after only two weeks.

One of the first great resources Sphinn turned me on to today was Sebastian’s Pamphlets, in particular, his post about determining the value of search engine rankings based on human traffic which ultimately led me to another great post, using Google’s webmaster tools to determine how well your SERPs convert users. Though he also shares a link to a clean way to check Google search engine rankings, he stresses that it is far more important to focus on how people use search engines, rather than raw search rankings alone.

While this should really inspire a “Well, duh” moment, the reality is that the SEO world is often a positions-focused one, with a site’s position for particular search results the sole determinant of the success of a website (how many SEOs have you heard guarantee “top 10 in Google” as the sole benefit of their service?).

In reality, user conversion, usability, and clickthrough optimization of a page is as important, if not moreso, than the actual search engine positions that a page will get. It’s easy to write a page and stuff keywords in the title tag and content. But to make a page that really is relevant to a user’s search, answers their need, and moves them through the buy process seamlessly while encouraging trust? Much harder.

Take a look at your homepage. What does it say? Does it give you a clear sense of personality… say, clean-cut professional, serious business or funky casual? Does the site tell you what it’s about and where to go? Does it appeal to you in a way you can’t really explain, but just say, “I like it” ? If not, then you might not be addressing the underappreciated human element of the internet, which influences the decisions of the search engines more than you might expect.

Thanks, Sebastian, for being forthcoming with a fascinating spin off the regular analytics process and Sphinn, for trying something different in the opinionated, bullish, and information (but not always knowledge) saturated search marketing community.