12 Strategies for Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
by
Jeff Finkelstein
SMASHWORDS EDITION
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PUBLISHED BY:
Jeff Finkelstein on Smashwords
12 Strategies for Search Engine Optimization
Copyright © 2010 by Jeff Finkelstein
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
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Thanks to the whole Customer Paradigm team for helping me hone these strategies into working principles..
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12 Strategies for Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
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introduction
Did you know that 50-70% of consumer and business purchasers start with a search engine like Google? If your website doesn't appear at the top of a search engine results page (sponsored ads or organic search results), you're losing potential customers to companies that rank higher.
What can you do? In twelve easy steps, I'll share with you my top strategies and tactics that can help you acquire new customers via search engine optimization and advertising.
# 1: Local Search Engine Listings
For businesses that serve specific geographic regions (i.e. Denver, Colorado), you can create search engine ads in Google and Yahoo that only appear to people in your area.
How does this work? A search engine like Google uses a computer's IP address and other information to discover where someone is searching (including city and state).
Why does Google care where a person is located? Google's mission is to give their end users the best search results possible. So, if I need someone to walk my dog in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, it does me little good to receive a paid search result from Arizona. This is a real example — my brother has a petsitting business, and I've used local Google search engine advertising to drive new clients to his organization.
Thus Google (and the others) tries to match search results to the geographic location of the person searching.
How does Google make money? Google gives businesses and organizations the ability to display paid advertisements (sponsored results) on search results pages. These ads are triggered by keywords you choose (more on this in a different strategy).
You don't have to pay for your ad to display; you pay Google only when someone clicks on your ad. The technical term is Cost Per Click (CPC) advertising. The more relevant your ad (more on this later), the less you have to pay for specific keywords, and the higher up you will appear in the sponsored advertising results.
Local Search CPC Ads. In Google Adwords, you can create an advertising campaign that will target someone in a specific city or state. You can even specify a 5, 10 or 25 mile radius from a specific location (like your retail showroom or office). Below your local ad, Google will place the name of your local area (i.e. Denver, Colorado)... making it more likely that someone searching in your area will choose your organization vs. an out-of-town competitor.
Local CPC Ads are usually a more cost effective option than a national search engine advertising campaign. As a general rule of thumb, the more geographically targeted and specific you can be, the less money you'll need to pay to acquire new customers. And make sure you have conversion tracking code placed on your site, so you can measure and track how much you're paying for each new customer via local search engine advertising.
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# 2: Don't Confuse The Search Engines With Graphics
Search engines are really good at reading text. But they're very easily confused. And if Google gets confused when it crawls through your site, you won't rank very high in search results.
Search engines, for example, can't read words that are contained in graphics or flash animation. So if your company's name is only contained in a graphic on your site, this content is ‘invisible' to a search engine. Same thing goes for product or service names.
The root of the problem lies with graphic designers. Graphic designers are really good at building graphics. Don't take this to mean I don't like graphic designers (I employ a bunch of them), but they sometimes don't know how to create SEO-friendly design.
Most websites, however, are designed by graphic designers who are really good at building graphics, and less interested in Search Engine Optimization (SEO). It takes a bit more time to have content placed in text, and use a stylesheet to format it so that a search engine can read it. Especially when it's so easy to create a good looking graphic in Photoshop.
Here's an example of a graphic:
Here's how it could be formatted, instead, using text and a cascading stylesheet (CSS): See the title of this section (above) for a live example.
Some sites use all flash (and are thus invisible to search engines). While the sites may look pretty to humans, to Google the content is completely invisible. If you look at Google’s cache (go to www.Google.com and type in the site’s name, click on the “cached” results), you can see that there is no text or content that appears.
Even if you're not worried about organic search positioning, but are doing paid search engine marketing (like Google Adwords), it's important that the content on your site is easily digested by a search engine.
Why? Google Adwords ranks the pages on your website, and compares it to your keywords and ad copy. The more relevant Google ranks the text on your site, the less you'll have to pay for a sponsored ad on Google (and the higher your position).
In Summary: Don't confuse search engines by keeping your content ‘locked up' in graphics. It's a small little detail in the web design process, but one that will pay dividends for a long, long time with increased search results.
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# 3: title Tags & Why They Matter
When you search in Google, the search results on the next page each start with a blue underlined link.
Here's an example:
What displays in this blue link is usually what is contained in the title tag of a web page. The keywords you placed in the search box are usually boldfaced in the search results.
So, just what is a title tag, and why does it matter for search engine positioning?
According to the World Wide Web Consortium, the Title tag was designed to help people "identify the contents of a document." When people view individual web pages out of context (often via search), context-rich page titles help tell the visitor a summary of the page.
Instead of a title like "Introduction", which doesn't provide much contextual background, web designers should supply a title such as "Introduction to Medieval Bee-Keeping" instead.
Google and other search engines use these rich contextual clues as a way to hone its search results.
On a web page, the title tag is part of the HTML code. Here's what the code looks like on Customer Paradigm's site:
Customer Paradigm: Website Design, Development, Email Marketing, Content Management, PHP programming
Most end users won't see the title tag. But if you remember back to my email tip about subject lines, the title tag is what a subject line is to an email campaign: It entices the end user to pay attention and open the page to read more.
Top Five Most Common Mistakes for Title Tags:
1. Untitled: When many of the popular programs create a new HTML page, it puts 'Untitled' into the title tag. It's up to the Web designer to change this... and since most users don't see it, sometimes they forget to change it.
2. No Title Tag: Like the "Untitled" tag, another key mistake is simply leaving out the title tag. If you do a view source (Internet Explorer: View —> Source), and the title tag appears like:
... then you don't have a title tag.
3. “About” Tag: Another common mistake for title tags is to have the title tag refer to a section of your website. But a title tag that reads, "About" doesn't tell me much about what the company or website is "About." Instead, have it read:
Customer Paradigm - About the Company: Website Development & Marketing, Email Deployment, and PHP programming
This is sure to get more keywords into the title tag, and if you're searching for a company, you instantly know what they do.
4. No Company Name In Title Tag: We recommend putting your company name at the beginning of the title tag, so that people can quickly see your company's name when they search.
5. Same Title Tag on Multiple Pages: You should have a unique title tag for each page of the site. Why? As each page is unique, you should have a title tag that describes it's unique content. If your messaging is not relevant, however, you’re quickly going to find that your messages are filed in the "I’ll get to these later" pile.
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# 4: What does a search engine look for?
At the end of the day, a search engine is in business to help you find the most relevant results possible when you conduct a search. Search engines make their money by selling relevant advertising to supplement the natural, organic search results.
Because a top ranking in Google or another search engine can translate into a great deal of business, it's important to know how search engines determine who gets placed at the top of the list.
The two biggest ways search engines rank you are based on:
Relevant Content: Search engines are really good at reading text. The more relevant copy you have on your site, the better chance you have getting your page indexed. Search engines love pages that have more than 500 words of text on them.
Why? A page with a lot of content is usually more beneficial to the end user. (Though for every rule like this one, there are many exceptions.)
Adding articles, press releases, detailed information about your products and services all can help quickly increase the amount of relevant content that you have on your site.
Inbound Links: The more sites that link to you, the more important your site becomes to search engines. If sites that link to you are very relevant and/or important, those inbound links worth more. And domains that end with .gov, .edu often perform better than .com for inbound links.
It's kind of like a high schoul popularity contest. If the most popular kids all point to you and say that your website is better than anyone elses, in the eyes of the community, your ranking is elevated.
There are many other things as well that affect search engine ranking. I can't go into great detail for the entire list, but even small changes can translate into higher rankings.
Title Tags: See rule #3.
Page Names: Keywords in page names in crease the relevance of the search and are displayed in a Google search result.
Image Names: Putting relevant keywords into image names helps your ranking.
Alt Text for Images: If you hover over an image, this is the text that appears; also used by the blind to understand what an image represents.
Keyword Density: How often specific keywords appear on a page as a percentage of all of the words on a page.
Section Headings: In the HTML code, section headings like H1 or H2 are treated as more important content than the information on the rest of the page.
Words contained in links: A link like: "Customer Paradigm offers Web Marketing and Search Engine Optimization Services" can help boost rankings.
Clean HTML code: Search engines are easily confused if your websites' code is a mess.
How often pages are updated: Search engines like new conent, but also have a bias toward pages that have been up on the web for a long time.
Site Map: If you have a site map (and an XML site map as well), it's easier for search engines to crawl through all of the pages of your site.
Keywords in your domain name.
The age of your domain name: Older domain names are perceived as more relevant than something registered last week.
Keywords in subdomains (i.e. http://email.customerparadigm.com)
Keywords in file directory structures (i.e. http://www.customerparadigm.com/email)
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# 5: Why Sitemaps are Baby Food For Search Engines
Just a few years ago, the philosophy about sitemaps went something like this: If your customers need to use a sitemap to find their way around your website, you haven't done your job organizing your content and creating a navigational system that is easy to understand.
But sitemaps are now back in favor. Why? It's less about human visitors and more about search engines.
What is a sitemap? A sitemap is page that lists all of the other pages on your site, usually in a bulleted list.
Here's an example of a sitemap:
As I've discussed before, search engines are easily confused. Many pages of a website are often 'hidden' behind tricky menus or drop-down lists. Or, the links to reach a specific page are too deep (i.e. more than a couple of pages down from the home page).
A sitemap, linked from the home page of the site, will list every page of your site in one convenient place.
When a search engine visits your site map, it's very easy for them to then get a list of every page on your site, and then crawl, digest and include all of your content in their system.
We generally recommend having the link to your sitemap on the bottom footer navigation of your site.
But you need to make sure that as your site changes, your sitemap is updated. Otherwise, Google and others may not index the latest pages placed on your site. Our Content Management System, for example, automatically updates the sitemap each time a page is added, or the name of a page is changed.
And even better than an HTML sitemap is an XML sitemap. An XML sitemap is a sitemap that is specifically formatted for search engines like Google. It's a machine-readable version that allows you to specify all of the pages of the site.
Adding an XML sitemap ensures that a site will get indexed much more quickly and more rapidly than not using this method at all.
For the new site, www.GodintheWilderness.com, (a site devoted to my wife's book that will be published by Random House's DoubleDay Religion on April 8, 2008), the XML sitemap allowed the site to be indexed in 3-4 days vs. the usual 3-4 months. (But then again, it's my wife... so of course she gets all of the top-shelf website development stuff.)
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# 6: It’s All About Keyword Density
What is keyword density? It's a percentage, calculated this way:
Number of times keyword appears on a page / Total word count on page = Keyword Density
Keyword density is usually displayed as a percentage. So, if you have a page that has 100 words on it, and you have a keyword appear 5 times on the page, your page would have a keyword density of 5%.
(5 / 100 = 5%)
In a real life example, the search term "personalized URL" has an overall keyword density on this page of 3.05%:
(15 instances of the keywords / 981 total words on the site = 3.05%)
However, not all keywords on a page are treated the same. Keywords in the title tags, page name and section headings are often given higher weight than keywords that appear in the regular content area of the page.
Here's how the keywords break down in the different areas of the site:
Title Tag: 1 Keyword, 8 total times, Keyword Density: 25.00%
Page Name: 1 Keyword, 3 total words, Keyword Density: 66.00%
Linked Text: 1 Keywords, 61 total words, Keyword Density: 3.27%
URLs in Links: 2 Keywords, 237 total words, Keyword Density: 1.68%
Visible Text: 7 Keywords, 627 total words, Keyword Density: 2.23%
Total: 15 Keywords, 981 total words, Keyword Density: 3.05%
This keyword term currently has a ranking of #2 in Google:
So, how much keyword density is too much? It depends on which study you read, but it's generally best to keep your keyword density between 3-6%. Anything more, and you'll be penalized for trying to spam the search engines.
As a general rule of thumb, if the copy of the site makes sense to a human reading it, you should be fine. But if you repeat the same keyword five times in a row (Personalized URL, Personalized URL, etc), then you can be banned from search engines or penalized.
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# 7: Naming Your Images for SEO Success
Even though search engines can't read words inside graphics, they do use the name of the file and other contextual information to increase your rankings. One of the biggest missed opportunities is not naming images with search engine optimization in mind.
I can't tell you how many times I see a site that has the logo named: logo.jpg
While that's sufficient to display the logo in a browser, it's much better to name the logo with descriptive keywords, such as: customer-paradigm-logo.jpg
Another way to look at this is to look at this image name out of context: pass-med-425.jpg
The image name, pass-med-435.jpg doesn't tell you much about what is in the image.
However, this image does seem to give a search engine a bit more information: passover-in-moab-utah-2008.jpg
If you search for "passover in moab" in Google, see what comes up first.
If you want to further increase the relevancy, you can create a folder (also with keywords) that can help you increase keyword density on a page.
For example, placing an image in a directory like this will give you more relevancy than in a more non-descriptive folder: /search-engine-optimization-services/seo-services-header-logo.jpg
Yes, it takes a little bit more time and effort for someone to type out a longer image name and keep it organized into different folders on your website.
But our research has found that increasing the relevant keywords in your images is a sure fire way to increase your search engine rankings.
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# 8: Age & Experience Matter
Google's continuing mission is to deliver the best search results possible to its end users. So how can a search engine like Google differentiate between a company that is brand new (and might be a fly-by-night operation) versus an organization that has years of experience in the field?
The answer: Google looks at the age of your domain name (along with several other varibles). If your domain name was registered last week, chances are good that your site won't even appear in Google's rankings for several months. (This is called the Google Sandbox.)
But if your domain name was registered eight years ago, Google uses this information as a clue that you've been around for a little bit.
In a nutshell, Google looks at the month and year when your domain was registered — and uses this to give more weight to companies that have been around for several years versus several weeks.
Google also looks forward to see how long you have registered your domain; if you have registered your domain for five or ten years in the future, you've made a subtle, yet important economic decision that you're still going to be around and in business in 2018. Here's an instance where being frugal with domain name registration can actually hurt your rankings.
That said, Google does place more weight on the past versus the future. I have one domain that's been continously registered for 14 years (since 1994). Along with many other factors, this site, www.rmiug.org, has a very high Google Page Rank of 6/10.
So, what can you do to increase your rankings?
First, make sure that your company's domain name is registered for at least a few years from the present date.
Second, make sure you know who is the contact person for your domain name. We've recently seen several instances where the person in charge of the domain name moves to a different organization, goes on vacation, or even passes away. And then, if the domain name comes up for renewal, it can be a mad scramble to keep your website and corporate email up and running.
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# 9: Reverse Archeology
Archeology, of course, is the systematic method to uncover artifacts from the past that have been buried or forgotten.
One of our more famous clients is an archeologist who has been labeled a "real life Indiana Jones." He's author of a new book, Ten Discoveries that Rewrote History.
What he and other archeologists do is examine artifacts that were lost and buried, and draw conclusions about how life was lived hundreds or thousands of years ago.
When people search online, it's a lot like sifting through thousands of years of junk and broken pieces of pottery in order to find the one intact tablet that solves your mystery.
If you’re like me, you often see a lot of non-relevant results returned when you do a web search. Google, as good as it is, isn't perfect. You scan down the page, looking for the answer to your question. And then you suddenly see a link to a site that matches exactly what you’re looking for.
Reverse archeology, applied to the Web, is a process that allows you to plant key information for people to find and discover.
A great example was a recent New York Times article about Boulder, Colorado. The reporter was looking for fun, cool, hip and trendy information about Boulder. I'm not very hip, but my wife is. So when the reporter did a search for something like, "spiritual skiing" in Google, her site came up first in the list.
I tagged along for the hike and interview, squeezed my way into the article, and gained the new label "Web site Guru" by the New York Times.
How does the process of reverse archeology work? Essentially you come up with keywords that your target audience is likely to use in a keyword search, and then you create relevant content on your site. When prospective customers or the press "digs" through the mass of web pages in a Web search, they can find your site quickly and easily.
Reverse archeology is a different type of mindset for generating website content, but one that can be extremely successful.
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# 10: Customize Your Website with Visitor's Search Keywords
Have you ever had the experience of using a search engine, like Google, clicked on a search result page, and then couldn't figure out where what you were searching for was on the page or on the site?
Our research has shown that this very reason - not being able to find what they're searching for when they come to a website - is one of the top reason both consumers and business users abandon a search result (and your site), never to return.
I've also had this experience in the past. And I'm sure you have too. The typical page that people land on creates cognitive dissonance (confusion), and if a person can't find what they're looking for quickly and easily, they give up and try another search result. It's a zero-sum game (you lose, someone else wins).
A great example is that if you search in Google for Car Stereos, you will likely see the Crutchfield site toward the top of the search results (both natural and paid CPC advertising results). But then, you have to hunt and peck around the site's navigation to figure out where the information about Car Stereos is located. Their site isn't so bad, but it still isn't personalized to your search results.
A Quick Demonstration. Search in Google for the term, Personalized URL. This is a search term that we appear at the top of Google, and is for one of the services we offer for helping people enhance their direct mail campaigns.
Next, click on the listing for Customer Paradigm to visit our site:
When you come back to the Customer Paradigm site, you'll see a large flash banner at the top of the page that reads:
Welcome, would you like to talk to a real person about personalized urls?
Click here or call us: 888.772.0777 or 303.499.9318
It's rare in business today that someone can talk to a real person about a product or service. Many companies "hide" their contact information because it "costs" money to have people answer the phone. We've found, however, that giving people an easy way to contact us (or for us to contact them -- a lower-involvement, lower-committment activity) makes it more likely they will choose us vs. another company that doesn't make it possible. Just last week I received a phone call from one of the largest advertising agencies in the world, asking about our Personalized URL service and software. She was very impressed by the site and how easy it was to reach someone.
Please note that this is just a very basic example of how the site can be personalized based on their search engine query. We have created more complicated scenarios that can read the inbound queries, and display custom messages in flash or HTML.
We have used this system to create rules that say that if someone is visiting the site from a search query (for example, Personalized URLs), then we can display a site that mostly focuses on Personalized URLs, including the navigation and content on the site. This isn't something that will trick Google into better indexing your site -- Google and the other search engines don't crawl and index your site the way a human does (one search result at a time). This is mostly designed to make the human experience as relevant and easy as possible.
Does it work? We've measured a 30% increase in people filling out a contact form or calling us since we implemented this on the site a few years ago.
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# 11: Avoid Industry Jargon
One of our clients, NewStripe, makes the machines that paint the lines on football and baseball fields.
Within the industry, the machines are known as wet line markers (or dry line markers).
But customers don't often use these terms. Instead, a typical customer might search for:
"Machines to put stripes down on athletic field"
(Newstripe.com is the #2 search result.)
Or, they might search for: "painting stripes on your athletic field"
(Newstripe.com is the #1 search result.)
Does your site copy and content reflect the language a potential customer will use in a search? If not, a prospective customer will either (a) have to learn the industry lingo in order to find you, or (b) visit your competitor's site. Option B is a lot more likely.
So how can you tell if your site is using too much industry jargon?
First, ask your current customers to take a look at your marketing materials and website. It's a great way to engage satisfied customers without trying to sell them anything. Most people are flattered when you ask them for their opinion.
Second, ask someone who knows very little about your industry to read through your site, and see if they can figure out what your company does for a living. If they are confused, then it's likely your potential customers will be confused as well.
Third, pay attention to how the press covers your industry. Reporters try to communicate broad ideas, and try to cut through esoteric terminology.
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# 12: Measure & Track Your SEO Efforts
How do you know if your search engine optimization is working?
The quick answer is this: You need to measure and track how people come to your site. If someone makes a purchase from the site, or fills out a contact form, you should be keeping track of the search engine queries that they used to get there.
This is information that your website is probably already collecting, but you're likely not using on an individual basis for each person.
When someone comes through our website and fills out a contact form, we are able to track exactly what search terms they used.
We then can do roll-up reporting on our search engine optimization efforts, to know what new leads came in from SEO.
If you're doing Google Adwords or other CPC advertising, it's easy to measure and track the conversions. Google's tracking system makes it easy, as you are paying on a cost per click basis each time someone clicks on your keywords.
However, with a natural search engine program, it can be a little more difficult. What we like to do is track 10-15 top keywords, and see how they change in the search results each month. Then we track and measure what's working (new pages, added content, new inbound links), and try to enhance the results even more.
The issue is that SEO is a zero sum game. If you're not at the top of the rankings, but one of your competitors is instead, you're going to lose out. SEO is a constantly shifting game. What worked last year or last month won't necessarily work next week, as other sites add content and better optimize their sites.
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about the author
Jeff Finkelstein is the founder of Boulder-based, Customer Paradigm, an interactive marketing firm that has helped clients achieve top rankings through search engine optimization and web marketing. Finkelstein is an adjunct professor for Colorado State University, and has lead workshops around the country teaching companies how to better optimize their websites and get found. Finkelstein has written syndicated columns on web marketing, and reaches tens of thousands of people each week through Customer Paradigm's eLearning Series newsletter.
Finkelstein also helps his wife, Rabbi Jamie Korngold, run the Adventure Rabbi program. Through search engine optimization, reporters from Good Morning America, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, CBS News and Ski Magazine found out about the organization and ran articles and TV segments. This intense media interest sparked a book offer from Doubleday Religion, who published Rabbi Korngold's best-selling book, God in the Wilderness, in April 2008.
Finkelstein has been featured in The New York Times as a Web Guru, and his company has received numerous awards, including the prestigious 2008 Rocky Mountain Direct Marketing Association Supplier of the Year Award.
Finkelstein is also a professional photographer, and his images have been published in hundreds of publications throughout the US, Canada and Japan, and has received paid contracts for his images by the National Geographic organization. Two of his images were recently placed on permanent display in a Daniel Libeskind-designed museum in San Francisco. He’s a member of the National Association of Press Photographers.
Finkelstein lives in Boulder, Colorado with his wife and two daughters.
Find Jeff Finkelstein on the Web:
Blog: http://blog.customerparadigm.com
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/finkelstein.jeff
Linked In: http://www.linkedin.com/in/finkelsteinjeff
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/BoulderJeff/