SEO Tips

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.

This week on the Entireweb Newsletter, there’s an article on Web Design and SEO that talks about how these two elements often clash, with business owners having to make tough decisions between usability, aesthetics, and search engine readiness. I appreciate their taking the time to highlight the importance of SEO for business owners (if there are any left out there who truly don’t understand the seriousness of search!), and especially the section on choosing a company that has a mastery of both disciplines. There are plenty of web designers out there who still don’t seem to get what SEO is (and trust me, we’ve worked on these kinds of sites), and developers who place all of the elements for SEO — h1/h2 tags, meta descriptions, alt tags and such — but don’t seem to grasp how to use keywords in these areas for maximum search value. Of course, the corollary is that there are plenty of SEO-only companies out there that know how to stuff keywords into a page of minimal value which provide good traffic numbers but hardly any user conversions. Either approach will leave your site hugely incomplete, and you wondering where your good money went to. At Hall, we have an integrated development/optimization process that I think results in a much more cohesive site. As an internet marketer and content writer, I’m continually in dialogue with the development team, who know as much about SEO as I do. In fact, we’re already thinking about optimized content, heading elements, and key user conversion areas while we sketch out the initial designs. When the site launches, and my job really kicks in, I know that I have a solid foundation to work with. And trust me, you can tell the difference. Of course, knowing how we do things differently doesn’t necessarily help you if you already have a site where the design and SEO clash. Here are my suggestions on what you can do about that:

• Design: Look at your site as if you were visiting it for the first time. What attracts your eye? What does the site want you to do, and what do you want to do? If lots of people arrive at your web site and then leave immediately, then it’s likely you have too much or too little information.
• SEO: What keywords are in the titles of your site? On the pages? Do you have a headline that talks about your company, or mentions the key phrases your customers are likely to search for? Even fairly good marketing copy can completely overlook the need to include search phrases in the content.
• Design: What impression does the site give you? That of a white-collar business environment? A casual “get your hands dirty” kind of company? Down home and personal? Hip and funky? Smart but not too serious? Most pure designers will focus the most on this aspect of site design, and for good reason. Your site’s look and feel will be the first impression for thousands of potential customers.
• SEO: Get behind the hood. Does your code pass W3C validation? Does you have an XML-compatible sitemap? A robots.txt file? Are your filenames named with a logical, keyword-dense methodology? How about your links — do you use keyword-dense anchor text, a consistent naming structure? Paying attention to the technical details will make search engine spiders feel much more welcome at your site.

Do you have your own SEO/Design questions you’d like answered? Send us an email and I’ll make sure to address it. Also, if you’re looking for some more specific information on what you can do with your website, try our free web site analysis and strategy consultation.

There are no quick fixes to winning on the web, but a little bit of know-how and strategy can go a long ways. Culling on our seven years of producing sites with excellent rankings in organic search, we’ve begun work on a new guide: Six Steps to Web Success. The guide offers a mixture of philosophy and concrete tips that’s applicable to about any business looking to get serious about their web strategy, and may even have a couple of things interesting to the pros. Hope you enjoy, and let us know if you find it helpful!

Friday’s SEO tips day, and I realize that I never really started with the basics here. So, at the risk of alienating the quick-studies, I’m going to touch on what’s widely agreed as the most important on-page element to a web site’s search engine optimization — the Title tag.

If you’re like most people, you hardly notice the title of the web page you’re viewing, at least until you’re trying to create a bookmark and are frustrated when you see “Widgets company: blue widgets: widgets that I’m looking at: specific attributes of the widget” trying to clog up your otherwise tidy bookmarks folder. Yet, this second-class piece of content is vital to a page’s search indexing and likelihood it gets clicked on in the SERPs.

Why? Because that’s the text of the link that appears in the search results. If your homepage tag reads, well, “home,” you’re in trouble. It’s also not great if your Title tag is something very vague, like “Brown and Sons” if your actual business is concrete pouring and excavation. “Cement, Concrete Pouring & Excavation, Hillsboro, North Carolina” is much preferable (albeit a bit of a mouthful). Chances are, on a page that has barely any other information at all, this page will be at the very top of the search results.

Google also sees the Title tag at the top of the hierarchy of information about what a page is about. They assume that this tag describes most succinctly the content of the site, and that heading elements (H1, H2, H3, etc) will support this topic, as will the content. Naming a page per the last example and then having a entire page about Frank & Johnny’s Pizza is likely to have some unintended and perhaps bizarre effects, as Google will assume that the page is about one or the other and rank you somewhere in between rather than at the top of anything.

By this same logic, it’s important to keep Title tags concise and focused. Pages that emphasize more than 4 or 5 terms are unlikely to get good rankings for any of them, especially if the phrases aren’t thematically related. You obviously want to include as much as possible on your home page, but if your goal is diverse keyword rankings, you’re better off custom-tailoring pages targeted for those key phrases rather than stuffing them all into the same page.

This all ties in to the idiom “content is king” and another favorite of mine — “less is more.” Keep your content focused, though don’t be afraid to “brand” your Title (Blue Cars in Maine - Joe’s Car Dealership). You should strive to keep your Title tags as short as possible, 6-8 words tops, but any text that extends beyond that limit simply isn’t calculated in the search engine equation (or at least, we don’t think it is… this week).

So, just to recap:

“Joe’s Pizza - Home”

would be better as

“Jacksonville, Mississippi Pizza Parlor & Restaurant - Joe’s Pizza”

while

“Candy bars chocolate bars snickers delicious candy yummy treats confections lollipops sugar store”

is not as good as

“Fine chocolate and Confections - Little Falls, Minnesota - Jim’s Candy Store”

and may even serve you well as

“Jim’s Little Falls Minnesota Chocolate & Candy Store”

Use keywords prudently, keep it short, describe effectively and make what you say count. Here’s to the haiku of SEO!