Search Engine Optimization Tips

"SEO is the practice of organizing and publishing web content so that the content can be effectively discovered and recommended by search engines."

Everyone can agree on the importance of search engine optimization (SEO) in driving traffic to your site. However, a recent study of internet surfing habits revealed a surprising trend. Users are not only using Google and other search engines to find web sites, they are also using Google to find content within them. To clarify, if a user is on a specific site they are now more likely to go back to Google and perform a search to find content within that site than they are to try and navigate the site menus or use the search functions on that site.

When you think about it, this is hardly surprising. The search engines on most sites are unusable. They rarely handle even simple search features such as fuzzy matching, word stemming, and basic ranking algorithms. Most sites also have poor content taxonomy and the mechanisms for actually navigating sites are cumbersome and confusing.

Google and other search engines on the other hand are very good at finding content and handling spelling mistakes by both searcher and site. So while this new trend is surprising, it makes sense when you actually give it some thought. As a result, SEO is even more critical for organizations.

I also feel the need to mention what SEO is not. I’ve had several people mention that they had Ad Words on Google or were working with an advertiser when I asked if they had an SEO strategy. SEO is the practice of organizing and publishing web content so that the content can be effectively discovered and recommended by search engines. The following list of recommendations is provided with the most important aspects of SEO first.

Page/Site Discovery

All of the SEO optimization techniques in the world won’t help if Google, Yahoo, Bing and others cannot find the page. Search engines typically find pages through spidering though you can submit URLs directly to search engines. Spidering is the term used for the process of reading a page, finding outbound links within that page, and then reading those pages as well. It is important that any new areas of a web site are accessible by other top level pages via a hyperlink. Many sites make the mistake of creating a set of product pages that can only be discovered by conducting a product search. Search engines will often miss such content so it is important to create taxonomy of content that is navigable through menus or hyperlinks. Some sites try to make this content accessible through drop down menus powered by JavaScript or AJAX. Search Engines will ignore those. It is critical that links to your content are represented as simple, age old hyperlinks. Sites often use site maps to direct search engines to their content. These are XML files or web pages that have links to all of your content. Sites such as www.xml-sitemaps.com will generate these for you by spidering your site for free. Some search engines will also ignore pages that require HTTP parameters in their URL. We will discuss this more under Site URLs but try to avoid URLs that look like this… http://www.somesite.com/showProduct?prodId=123 If you don’t know much about URLs and HTTP parameters, just remember that if there is a question mark in the URL then it is probably bad.

Site URLs

The best way to get to the top of a Google search is to have the URL of your site match the keywords people are looking for. There are actually four components to the URL which are important. We will assume for our examples that the user is going to type in financial freedom into a search engine.

Page Titles

The title for a page is defined in the HEAD/TITLE section of your page. Each page can have only one title so search engines know that this gives a good overall description of the content of your page. Some sites use generic titles for all of the pages and miss out on an opportunity to tell search engines what the page is all about. Make sure your titles match the contents. If you have an e-commerce site then this title needs to contain the name of product presented on the page.

Markup

Web pages are built using HTML and HTML uses tags to tell the browser how to display content. Those tags are also interesting to search engines because some tags exist to put emphasis on certain content. Just as the page TITLE tag tells the engines something about the page, so do the H1, H2, H3, H4 tags. These are heading tags and I’m using them on this page to identify the sections you are reading. Search engines will give these additional weight over plain text.

Page Content

A lot of SEO recommendations talk a lot about META tags but they were abused so heavily that the search engines all but overlook them. The content that you have on the page is critical for search engines. After all, it’s the stuff that the search engine user is ultimately seeking. It is important that the information that should be indexed by the search engine is returned in the initial page when the web browser requests it from the web server. Many sites are now using AJAX or IFRAMEs, or JavaScript that builds the page from within the browser. These are rarely necessary and hurt SEO performance. If these technologies are used, there should be an adequate business reason to support the corresponding loss in SEO.

Inbound Linking

Hopefully you are starting to get a sense for what you can do within your page to help your search engine rankings. The good news so far is that updating page titles and URLs is easy…now for the hard part. Google and other search engines make certain assumptions about the value of your page based on how many other sites link to it. Imagine two different articles about Marshall Amplifiers are on the internet. The first one has 500 inbound links from other sites, the second has 5. All other things being equal, it is probably safe to assume that the first article in more interesting. Search engines give tremendous weight to sites that have inbound links. Getting people to link to your site is tough. The best thing you can do out of the gate is to have all of the sites you own link to one another. Many sites also have what is called reciprocal links. They link to you if you link to them. If you have good content people will naturally link to it but it might be time to get out into the world and network a little bit. The quality of the inbound links is also very important. If CNN links to your site you score a lot more points with Google than if Bill’s blog is linking to you. With the dawn of social media, Facebook, Twitter, Linked In etc., organizations publish content through channels outside of traditional web sites. Widgets developed by your organization can and should provide links back to related content on your web site.

Outbound Linking

Believe it or not, search engines also look at what you are linking to. They really try to get a sense of what your page is all about by looking at the pages you are linking to. If your site is about finance and you have outbound links to other finance sites then search engines feel more confident that they know what your page is about.

Keep it fresh

All things being equal, an article or page that was published today is probably more relevant than one published a year ago. Keep your content fresh. Search engines visit your site often and they know if it’s stale. User generated content is great because you are not the one stuck with doing all the updates. Content management systems that make it easy for business owners to update content can really create some SEO velocity.

Uniqueness

Some sites will actually copy and paste content from other sites to get hits. This will actually cause search engines to ding the replicator. You should be very careful about doing this because it can have a negative effect on rankings. Also try not to publish the same page on your site twice under two different URLs.

Minimize Use of Flash

This section is more a less a rehash of many of the other sections that pertain to Flash. I include it here because gratuitous use of Flash in a web site will lead to violations of most of the preceding principles. Flash is a great technology, especially for games and animations. Many agencies unfortunately use it to build entire web sites. This is because many agencies only know Flash so they just stick to what they know. The web is based around open standards that search engines rely on for indexing and because Flash is a proprietary format, building web sites with Flash will cause a lot of headaches including problems with bookmarks, SEO, and navigation. The best way to use Flash is to embed it on individual pages. Do not create a user experience consisting of many steps and pages with Flash unless you are willing to live with the pitfalls. Mix Flash with HTML on single pages and you will get the best of both worlds. I’ve seen countless web sites where the entire site was a single page with a massive Flash experience where there was no hope of proper SEO.

Common mistakes

If your site uses JavaScript or AJAX to publish content, it probably won’t be indexed. Google is not going to run all the scripts on your page before building the index. Try to keep your pages simple and limit the use of JavaScript and AJAX for interesting user interactions or form validation. JavaScript and AJAX can be SEO killers. Don’t put text in images. I’ve seen countless sites publish their address in an image. Google doesn’t read the text in images so when someone searches for an attorney in Atlanta Georgia they won’t find you if your address is part of an image. Make sure every page in your site has a link to it that search engines can find. If a search engine can’t find the link to one of your pages on your home page then it may never know the page exists. JavaScript based navigation can also be a killer here.

Tips for organizations

If you are in an organization of any size, you probably need an SEO strategy. This will help define organization standards, site reviews, audits, and other tools that exist at an organizational level to help SEO for your business. Most of my Fortune 50 clients have hundreds of sites under their control yet fail to do basic things like cross linking the sites. Business processes and general awareness of SEO and how it can help your organization are at least as important as the mechanisms described here.

Search Engine Optimization Checklist

The following is an easy to read checklist that summarizes the tips provided in this recommendation. Agencies or internal teams that building sites should review this checklist before development in order to help create a strategy and after development to certify that the strategies were put in place.