SEO Tips

Alright, so many many people are out their saying it. But we won’t. Nuh-uh. Not the “R” word.

But, say, hypothetically speaking of course, that such an unnameable thing WAS happening to the economy. How would this affect your web strategy?

If you’re smart, you’d say not at all. Even better, you’d say, I’d put more money towards my web campaigns.

Why’s that? Because dollar-for-dollar, web marketing is far more cost effective than traditional advertising. You can look at analytics, site data, SERPs and your bottom line and see tangible benefit for top organic search rankings, good social media exposure and effective paid search campaigns.

SEO is also a low cost-of-entry service. We’re just one of thousands of SEO and marketing blogs out there providing tips on how to make your site work for you. We certainly don’t advocate going at it alone (reading a book on mechanics doesn’t mean you’re ready to rebuild an engine) but your good understanding with our seasoned experience combines for brutally effective marketing strategies for your business, even during tough times.

It also provides the ability to adapt quickly, identify opportunity, and go with what works while shucking what doesn’t. A television or radio campaign may cost thousands to set up, and changing the message mid-stream is nearly impossible. Changing your Google AdWords keywords, ad, landing page, target market and spend takes seconds. Far-reaching sweeps in organic rankings take more time, but keeping any eye on Analytics allows for a hawk-eye view of the future.

Let’s face it. Even if spending money is short, the internet’s not going anywhere. Of all the places to invest in your business, making sure you’ve got a solid future on the internet — from its organic face to its reputation via links and social networks — is the most effective way to stay stable even if the ground should wash out.

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.

We thought this one was already a closed case, but apparently the question of META tags still gets asked to Google engineers frequently. So today on the Google Webmaster blog, there’s a nice article on what META tags Google uses and which they do not. The META keywords is quite notably omitted, with love going to the often neglected META description tag and the SEO’s favorite tool, the Title tag.

Again, no thunder bolts of lightning here, but nice to hear that Google’s hands know what the others are doing. And another nail in the coffin for META keywords, MSN notwithstanding…