SEO Tips

photo credit: Mess of Pottage

It runs roughly. It’s hard to get started, or quits abruptly after it’s running for a while for no clear reason. You put off some basic maintenance months and months ago, and when the problem’s so bad you finally face it, the cost is four times what it would have been to prevent it from happening. Now you’re frustrated.

If this sounds like car trouble, you’re wrong. I’m describing web site trouble.

Just like an automobile, a website requires due diligence and regular maintenance in order to keep working for you. Search engines don’t put your web site through the same wear and tear as the road does your car, but they do expect a web site to be continually refined with expanded text, growing numbers of links and more web traffic. Underperforming, plateauing or ignoring the web environment could mean to your website what running on low motor oil means to your car.

It’s a frustrating issue for many website owners to tackle, and for understandable reasons — you put a good chunk of change down for your website, shouldn’t it just work? Unfortunately, the web’s not that simple — it needs more and more fuel (content) to continue running, and if you don’t have a good mechanic (developer) who knows the history of your vehicle, and the nature of the environment it’s running in, you’re likely to end up stranded somewhere with a very expensive problem on your hands.

That said, there are plenty of ways you can ease the burden of managing your website and make it a satisfying part of your business process, not a chore. One thing that’s appropriate for nearly every client we work with is a content management system that modifies a distinct area of their site — press releases or news, for example. A simple log in allows you to update your website as easily as writing an email, and practically anything can be news. New employee? New office? New product? New client? New service? There’s plenty to write about, and even if you’re not aspiring to be Hemingway, some solid content with good keywords in it should be enough to keep your site looking fresh.

What else can you do? Make sure that any businesses you partner with link to you from their website (and vice-versa, if appropriate), come up with a series of articles on your industry that would interest your potential customers, and contemplate getting your own blog.

Finally — don’t go it alone! While we can appreciate being cost-conscious, understand that your web site is a de facto marketing medium that needs attention and frequent maintenance in order to get you where you need to go — whether that’s across the country, the world, or to the most qualified customers in your local area.

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.

Despite the murky water that surrounds it, the kind of work we do is still often called SEO. The trouble with this moniker is its history and association with scam artists, out-of-their-league designers and fast-talking but clueless “SEOs” who all promise the world (and charge accordingly) but fail to deliver solid results. Making this more frustrating for the consumer is the inability to compare apples to apples in the industry, often a combination of dubious or secretive business practices and their own limited understanding of the complexity of the Internet and its ever-changing nature.

Of course, getting business owners past this technological hurdle is the goal of this blog, so in today’s episode, I’d like to illustrate a few things you can look for to determine if your site has been optimized or not. If you’ve never had someone do SEO work before, it also might help you understand why your website isn’t coming up for the terms you want it to!

1. Are keywords in the Title of the webpage? Go to your site and look to that blue bar at the top of your web browser window — what does it say? If it reads something like “John’s Electric” rather than “Sometown, Indiana Electrician, Electrical Service” then your site is missing out on probably the most important (and easiest) area to gain search rankings. Your business name is rarely the best phrase to use in the title.
2. Are your keywords elsewhere in your content? Of course, if you use the keywords in the above example, and then write an article about roller coasters, you’re unlikely to get rankings for either. A good rule of thumb is that your keywords should appear at the beginning, middle, and ends of your content, and appear in different variations throughout.
3. Is your site navigation plain text, not graphic or flash-based? Google doesn’t have eyes, and any site that relies on graphics or Adobe Flash (as cool as it is) for site navigation is doomed in search. This may be a little more difficult to spot unless you have a basic understanding of HTML, but if you ever have to wait to see your navigation load before your page appears, it’s a good chance it’s built from graphics.
4. Do you have enough content on your pages? If your pages are too short, you leave both search engines and users wondering what your website is about. If there’s one rule to follow, it’s that your site needs good quality, original content to stand out on today’s web. We know most businesses don’t have an on-staff professional writer, but unless one works on your website, you’re likely to face challenges other than just getting ranked in search engines. Good SEO writers can also thread your keywords in the content as it’s written, leading to more organic, readable content that also happens to be loved by search engines.
5. Do you link? In the content of each page, is there a link to the next place you should go… For example, does your products page lead to your support or training page, and vice-versa? Does your index page have links (other than the navigation) to the most important areas of your site, with links that read “Blue Widgets” vs. “Click here”? Google learns a lot about you by how you link, and improving the navigation experience should be one of the major tasks of a competent SEO.

Hopefully running through this list will give you an idea in what ways your site could be improved, and if it ostensibly has been, it will give you an idea of what to tell whoever took your money! And if you’d like a more thorough professional analysis of your page paired with some web strategy suggestions, try our free site analysis.

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.