Archive for the 'SEO Basics' Category

Recently, I was contacted by an ecommerce website that told me they’ve had an SEO Consultant optimize their website, but they still aren’t seeing their site in the Keyword rankings. They want to know “Why?”. “Did the previous SEO Consultant do a good job? Did they do something wrong? Why aren’t we ranking?”.

I did a quick analysis o heir site. The site was certainly “optimized”. In the sense that it is crawlable, and search engine friendly. Additionally, the site had a good amount of unique content on category & product pages. URL structures were clean & appeared static, the website navigation was okay, H1 tags were in place, Title tags were written properly. And, all the other on-page factors looked okay. The site was indexed in all the search engines. So, why isn’t it ranking? Hmm. Perplexing, right?

The answer is contained in an earlier post I wrote on the Importance of Internal Linking.

Using your keywords as textlinks within your website is very important. Choose a specific destination page for the textlink. That’s called your Target URL. And, embedd that textlink within page content. This is one way to strengthen a content silo. So, when Google (or any of the search engines) crawl your site, they understand that’s what this section is about (the textlink).

In short, building content silos, and increasing the internal link percent of target url’s is a powerful seo technique.

In the case above, the SEO Consultant was good at making a site search engine friendly, but just didn’t have the expertise to really provide a boost in the keyword rankings.

Linking is powerful. Both using internal links, and properly structuring an inbound link campaign.

Well, it’s happened. And, I’m feeling the affects of Google Caffeine. That’s the name of most recent Google Update. The update started this month. So, if you’re monitoring keyword ranking, then it’s likely you’ve noticed movement on rank for many keywords.

SEO is evolving. Social Media is evolving. The Web is evolving (eg: Web 1.0, Web 2.0, Web 3.0, etc). Google is evolving. These evolutions are algorithm changes.

Speaking on what I’m currently observing, it appears to me that the shift of “importance” has once again swung in favor of content. Not links. In the past, if your website was search engine friendly, then buying links has always helped give a boost in the rankings.

Strong Caution. Don’t just think that just buying links can help you. Link Buying can help. But it needs to be in a much more sophisticated link campaign structure. Just buying links can be a huge waste of money if not done correctly. This is especially the case now, with Google Caffeine.

The winners of this update have been the ecommerce sites which were content optimized, AND “link heavy”. Content optimization includes more than just adding more webpages to your website. It’s a much comprehensive approach for a Web 3.0 world. And, the same is true with link development. Content Optimization now must be thought of as an integral way to build links. Links & Content are bound up more tightly together. Content Optimization is Link Building. Link Building is Content Building.

Here’s another way to classify websites in terms of SEO. Think about these combinations:

• Content light/Link light
• Content light/Link heavy
• Content heavy/Link light
• Content heavy/Link heavy

The losers in this update have been the websites which were “content light”, and “link light”.

The key with this new update is to build reputation and authority. There is a NEED to be consistant building content & links. This may take time. Perhaps, the link building you are lacking is in Social Media.

Ongoing SEO tactics:
1) Continually build content silos.
2) Continually participate in social media.
3) Continually build links using a complex link structure optimized for the social web. Don’t just “buy links”.

Wanna increase your website traffic? Build more content to increase your chances to be found. Build an online social media presence, and diversify your link portfolio.

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Additional Reading:
Google Caffeine: Google’s New Search Engine Index.
Google Releases Public Search Update: “Caffeine” Update.
More info on the Caffeine Update.

I was contacted by a local small business wanting their site to get more traffic and high keyword rankings that would ultimately result in their selling more product. Of course, everyone wants that.

When, I looked at their site. It was very nice. But, very small. These guys are a factory operation that sells direct to the public. Nationwide. And, they are all trustworthy businessmen well respected in their community. I know this firsthand. But, any visitor to their site wouldn’t.

Before looking at the site any deeper, it was obvious to me that they needed more content. All types of content. And a whole lot more pages. This is what motivated me to tweet this morning on Twitter an SEO tip:

SEO tip: Build more content. Google & people want to see more resource-rich webpages (text, video, images).

Here I’m emphasizing content. In a previous post I wrote on the importance of a properly structured link optimization and how it can provide a boost in keyword rankings. So, which is it? Is it content or links. Ah, the ole debate. Well, it’s really a combination of those two things that’ll do it. Don’t ignore either. It’s a combination of the right type of links, and good content.

Content silos specifically. That’s what’s really gonna do it. And, the larger you can make your content silo the better. Stuff it with content. All types of quality content. And, don’t be afraid to use outbound links that go off your site. But, I’ll caution on the use of “weak” outbound links.

With Universal search (press releases, video, images, shopping results, news, etc), placing more types of content on your site is becoming increasingly more important to be found. You never know if your competitor’s video or image will appear above all the natural results. So, it’s best you have a ton of content that’s properly indexed in all the engines, so you stand a shot at getting your content in the search results.

Wanna Drive Traffic? Build Content. Regardless of the type of business you have, keyword & resource-rich content is good for every site. Keep building content.

There are several metrics to measure an SEO campaign. It’s important to identify your KPI’s (key performance indicators) before you start working on a client site. Sometimes, the only metric that’s important to the client is keyword rankings. But clients are becoming more and more sophisticated. They want to see multiple metrics measured to determine the value of SEO.

It’s important as an SEO Consultant to be able to measure the results of all your analysis and recommendations that get implemented. I find that regardless of the type of client, they success metrics are usually three things.

1) Increasing overall website visitor traffic.
2) Better Keyword Rankings.
3) Increasing Revenue generated (and ROI).

Hopefully, your client already has web analytics installed on their website. If they use Google Analytics, make sure it is configured correctly so you can see the conversion funnel. Here is a previous post on Google Analytics configuring goals and funnels.

Baseline Reporting:
First thing you’ll need to do is take Baseline Reports to see the current level of visitor traffic from search engines. Export the reports for 30 days, 90 days, 6 months, and 1 year.

Baseline metrics should also be taken for the Keyword Rankings, so that you can measure improvement over time.

Measuring Visitor Traffic:
Using web analytics, run a report that is broken down by, Visitors by Keyword by Search Engine. This is fairly straightforward.

If “engagement” is important, then include Page Views. But, engagement cant really be a success metric of SEO. We can drive traffic to the site all day long. But, if there is an unually high bounce rate, or low conversion rates, that could be indicative of a deeper problem, such as the website usability.

Measuring Keyword Ranking:
Next measurement you need to take is for the keywords. I suggest you choose a list of keywords that are especially important to your client. These keywords should all be on your Keyword Analysis. Perhaps specify 20 keywords that your objective is to “champion” the keyword rankings.

When I say “champion” a keyword, I mean get in the top 1st through 3rd positions. Sometimes getting into the 1st position is especially difficult. An example of this would be for a reseller trying to optimize for the brand term of the manufacturer that they resell. Pretty tough indeed. But, getting into the #2 spot could be championing that term.

There are several SEO tools that can measure and track keyword rankings. The one that I like to use is WebPosition.

Measuring ROI:
The third success metric is increasing revenue. Once again, you’ll need to take baseline reporting. This could all be on one report. Or, seperate reports. It depends on how you want to present it to the client. If you want a consolidated report, then just export Visitors by Keyword by Search Engine with Revenue from your web analytics.

Additional Reading:
Branding Strategy for Search
Metrics to Measure SEO Success
Stop Paying Google! SEO vs PPC
Turn to SEO to help beat a bad economy.

Photo credit: sweetcaroline♥♥♥’s

URL structure is one of the factors in determining how “search engine friendly” a website is. Search engines like clean, static URL’s. They don’t like messy dynamic url’s. They’ve gotten better at crawling and indexing URL’s over the years, but the bottomline is, that they still have issues doing it. Especially, if there are more than 3 dynamic parameters in the URL.

Ideally, the URL structures should be static, and reveal what the page is about. A simple and clear URL structure is much easier for both search engine spiders and human beings.

Static URL’s that contain keywords will often rank better than dynamic URL’s that don’t contain any keywords. Additionally, the keywords in URL can enhance CTR, and will be bolded in SERPs.

Another problem with dynamic pages is load time. A dynamically generated URL comes from web pages that are generated from scripts, which put together page content from a database or multiple files “on the fly” by a server, when a user asks to see a webpage.

Dynamic URLs contain search engine unfriendly parameters like question mark (”?”), &, $, =, +, and % etc. In case you’re wondering what a static URL looks like, below are 2 examples. One is of a static url & the other is a dynamic url:

Static URL: www.domain.com/videos/video-name.html
Dynamic URL: http://www.domain.com/videos/html/topic.asp?BV_UseBVCookie=Yes&articletID=r000450&parentCat=vid7

If you are in the process of comparing content management systems, this is definitely something to keep in mind.

Some search engine crawlers, such as Google’s, will index dynamically-generated pages, but others will not index pages when they see those symbols, especially the question mark. Some search engines will only index a dynamically-generated page that is linked from a static page. Which means, the search engine will not follow links from dynamically-generated pages.

If you are going to have dynamic pages on your web site, it is important NOT to have session ID’s presented to the search engines.

Session IDs:
Session IDs are another big issue when it comes to URL structure. Session variables are unique strings of text in a URL that are generated each time a user visits a site. This means that every time a search engine crawlers visits the site, it gets a new session ID.

Session variables cause the same page to appear with constantly changing URLs. This runs the risk of getting pages flagged or penalized for duplicate content since the same content appears on different URLs.

A URL rewrite can change the dynamic URLs to make them more search engine and user readable. This means that a webserver can be configured to have a dynamic URL appear as a static HTML page.

Additional issues that dynamic pages create, even if they appear in the URLs as static pages, is that they are often slower-loading than plain HTML pages. This is because of the data processing required by the server to put them together on the fly. The slow “page-load” time can affect keyword ranking and possibly even indexing. Especially, if the spider decides to move on because the page took too long to load.

Reasons Why Session IDs are bad for SEO:
1) The Spider always finds a different URL. It can’t find the URL with the original session id. This new url which contains a different session id, appears as a duplicate page, and Google assigns zero importance. Then, the Googlebot goes looking to crawl the original page, and gets an error message.

2) Everyone linking to your page will be linking to a different URL. All the Inbound links will be different because everyone has separate session id’s. This is undesirable. You need links to get a page to rank.

The solution to those messy dynamic URL’s is to use a URL Rewrite, and search engine friendly 301 Redirects.

URL Directory structure:
Directory structure refers to how directories are set up on servers. “Directory depth” is the number of directories in a URL. When your website content and files are grouped into a directory structure, your URL will reflect this structure.

For example:
www.MyDomain.com has a directory depth of 0
www.MyDomain.com/category has a directory depth of 1 (category is a directory)
www.MyDomain.com/category/product has a directory depth of 2 (category is a directory, and product is a subdirectory)

Regarding “Directory depth”, there typically aren’t any indexing issues. But, some algorithms could discount the weight given to pages that are multiple levels down in a Web site’s directory structure. Some search engines consider the pages closest to the root directory the more important pages on your site.

Relevant directory names are helpful for both search engines and human users since they provide an idea about the content of the URL. It’s a best practice to use keywords in the URL structure in the form of directory names and subdirectories to optimize your website.

Additional Reading:
Why Session ID’s And Search Engines Don’t Get Along
SEO Best Practices for URL Structure
A Better URL Structure for SEO
Supercharge Your URLs For Maximum SEO Impact
User and Search Friendly URL Design for Multi-Language Websites
Dynamic URLs In The Eyes Of A Search Engine
URL Rewriting: Increase Organic Traffic By Using Dynamic URLs That Look Static

Photo Credit: schill

The blocking & tackling of SEO is Content & Links. I’ve discussed a Link Optimization and why advertisers should stop paying Google. But, Links are just half of the equation to champion keyword rankings. The other half of the equation is Content. Quality & Quantity.

Once you’ve made your site search engine friendly through a technical SEO analysis, it’s time to build content on to what you have. Google likes content-heavy sites vs content-light sites. Think about the 7 page brochure site vs the 500,000 pages on a news site.

Generally speaking, the more pages of content, the better. Better for keyword ranking. Better for users. A Content-rich site is a good thing. Especially, in combination with a properly structured link campaign. The ole’ 1-2 punch.

As you buildout content, you should create Content Silos. Just like a farmer has a silo of corn, wheat, or whatever, so should your website have tightly grouped themed categories of content.

Page Structure:
1) Title tag
2) Description meta
3) Keyword Meta
4) H1 tag
5) A few paragraphs of crawlable, text content.

Using these 5 areas on a webpage, you can buildout multiple pages and create content silos. The navigation, sidebars, and advertisements can all stay the same on each page, as long as the 5 things listed above are unique. The few paragraphs of crawlable text should be optimized by SEO Copywriting.

Google is looking for the subject matter expert to rank #1. The more webpages you have on your site about a particular subject will make your website resource-rich, and appear as the subject matter expert.

Content Building should be an ongoing investment which adds value for your site visitors, will help you champion keyword rankings, and will drive more traffic to your site.

I get frequent enquiries about my SEO Consultant services. Today, some guy contacted me, showed me his site, which looked like a 6th grader built. I tried to help him by briefly discussing my SEO Methodology, and he told me, “You probably say that speech to everyone”. I actually don’t! I wasn’t pitching him. But, I must admit it sounded very good. One of those times I wish I was recorded. I was spot on. It’s like in sports. You know when you’re playing good. So, here’s a recap of my SEO methodology:

1. Keyword Analysis and Competitive Analysis: Involves researching the actual amount of searches for thousands of relevant keywords. The goal is to identify the keywords we want to champion. When I say “champion”, I’m talking about getting a #1 ranking position.

We also analyze the keyword competitiveness of each of those terms. Because, it might not be realistic to try to rank for a term that is too competitive…especially with heavyweight websites already ranking in the top 10 Google results. Also, we don’t want to waste money on keywords that are not competitive enough. So, we find keywords to champion that can provide a good ROI for both the short-term and long-term.

2. Technical Site-Analysis: This is the stage where we make sure the website is Search Engine friendly. We look at information architecture, tags, html coding, javascript, etc. We want to make sure there aren’t any spider traps on the site either.

3. Content Analysis: We analyze the crawlable content. Content can mean many things. Eg: video, images, etc. But we look at the crawlable content and how well the structure is internally linked together. We create Content Silos of themed content, and make sure there is enough of it in each silo. If there is not, then we create additional webpages that are full of keyword-rich content optimized for Search.

4. Continuous Link Building: This component of the SEO Methodology is to increase Link Popularity and Link Relevancy. Link Building should be a continuous process for any serious web business. Specifically, we go through a discovery process of related websites, and contact the site owners, and negotiate a price for a link or banner ad. There are many factors we analyze for each linking website such as:
- Age of Site.
- Inbound link profile.
- Link placement on page.
- Relevant text around link.
- Relevant content on overall website.
- Co-citation (related topical neighborhood).
- Authority of the outbound links on page.
- PageRank.
- Alexa rating.
- Homepage vs Subpage (which is more relevant/powerful?).
- Avoidance of Link traps like nofollows, redirects, etc.

Let me ask you a question….Why does Google rank one website at position #1 on the first page of the SERP’s, and another on page 5? I’ll tell you. It’s because Google considers them an authority. Or, better yet…Google considers them the subject matter expert…not just the subject matter expert, but the subject matter expert in their own topical neighborhood.

And, that’s the goal of our optimization initiative. To make a website the subject matter expert in their topical neighborhood.