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.

Related posts:

1. Importance of Internal Linking
2. First Text Link on a Page
3. Best Practices for Optimizing URL Structure

Creative companies are the worst offenders when it comes to demanding splash screens. If you’re doing SEO consulting for a site related to the entertainment industry, for example, you’re probably dealing with someone who places a lot of value on the “Wow!” factor. They think that just because you’re a fan of Adam Lambert, you’ll be more than happy to sit around for 30 seconds watching celestial bodies swooshing through the universe as the artist’s name is slowly revealed. They couldn’t be more wrong.

The main effect of a splash screen is to cause valuable visitors to leave your site. A bounce rate of 20% or more on splash screen pages is typical, which may cause you to say, “Well, heck, that’s a lot better than the 50% bounce rate on the home page!” But if your splash page is the default entrance to your site, it’s probably getting 3x to 5x more traffic than your home page. So maybe 100,000 people enter your site every month through the splash screen, while only 30,000 enter directly through the home page. If you’ve got a 20% bounce rate on your splash screen, that means you’re losing 20,000 visitors every month before they even see your home page! Wouldn’t you rather drive that traffic to the home page instead of losing it while your users stare at some stupid Flash animation?

You want users to get “inside” your site ASAP. Don’t leave them waiting for someone to “open the door”!

Here are some of the main reasons why you don’t want your user experience to start with a splash:

Hurts Search Rankings
Having a splash screen usually complicates your website’s structure. Search engines rank top-level URLs first, so having your home page under /us/wpcontent/home/ (or any other nested directory structure) can really hurt your rankings. Why waste your top-level URL on unimportant splash content?

Splash pages are not optimized for search engine indexing. The content of a splash screen is typically Flash or graphics heavy. This lack of text makes the page nearly invisible to text-based web crawlers… that is, all search engines.

No Keywords, No Links
Online search results are based on keywords. Splash pages typically contain no text except for the “skip intro” or “enter site” link. These keywords are obviously useless in terms of SEO.

Online search results are based on links. But the only link on your splash page goes to your home page. And what are the chances that anyone else will ever link back to your splash page? I’d say slim to none.

In terms of SEO, splash pages are a complete waste of your best online real estate.

Base-level URL Redirection is Bad
Splash pages often redirect to the home page. Search engines like Google and Yahoo! want to deliver people directly to the information they are seeking. When they see that your base-level URL is redirecting to another page (after the splash “performance” is done), your site’s ranking will be affected negatively.

You almost HAVE to redirect from a splash screen. There’s no good reason to redirect from your base-level URL (e.g. www.site.com/), but having a splash screen sit there pretty much forces your hand. Either you redirect the user to make sure he actually makes it to your content, or you risk losing him to splash frustration.

User Frustration
Even user-friendly splash pages include a “skip intro” link. This tells the user this page is less important than your other content, i.e. not worth viewing.

Most splash pages waste time. You’re asking the user to wait for content to download. Then they have to sit through an unwanted presentation. And you wonder why they’re leaving? Many sites even force users to see the splash page each time the site is loaded.

Reduced Credibilty
Your home page is the most important page on your site. Splash pages are a wasted opportunity to make a good first impression.

No matter how someone reaches your site, eventually they will visit the home page. Users want quick access to information. Splash pages are a speed bump, hindering access to your site’s content.

Poor Site Performance
Splash screens are graphically intensive and slow to download. Users with slower connections (mobile, dial-up, foreign countries, etc.) will get stuck with a “loading” message, and may never even make it to the home page. If your site is getting heavy traffic, the bandwidth used by the splash page will reduce your entire site’s performance.

Page load time is a now a major factor in search rankings. If your site loads slowly, your search ranking will suffer. Get your users to the home page as quickly as possible!

There’s a good quote floating around from Jared Spool of User Interface Engineering on how to convince your clients that splash pages are bad:

“When we have clients who are thinking about Flash splash pages, we tell them to go to their local supermarket and bring a mime with them. Have the mime stand in front of the supermarket, and, as each customer tries to enter, do a little show that lasts two minutes….

“Then stand back and count how many people watch the mime, how many people get past the mime as quickly as possible, and how many people punch the mime out.

“That should give them a good idea as to how well their splash page will be received. That’s the crux of it.”

Lightboxes: A Better Splash Option?
If you’ve explained everything above but your client still insists on having something “splashy” upfront, you may consider recommending a lightbox. At the very least, lightboxes have a better reputation among users than splash screens. And when your users click on the “CLOSE” or “X” button, you won’t be losing them into the ether… in fact, they’ll be looking right at the content you want them to see.

Lightboxes may not be as Flash-y (pun intended) as a splash page, but they give your site a chance to project some sort of welcoming message or offer without such a high risk of losing visitors.

They’re also much more friendly for SEO purposes. Lightboxes don’t dilute the strength of your site because your home page sits at the base-level URL, and the content inside a lightbox – images and/or text, rather than Flash – is typically more friendly to indexing by search engines.

Anybody out there have a positive or negative experience of using a lightbox as a splash screen to share? How about any other ideas on replacing splash screens when the client absolutely insists?

Related posts:

1. How to Optimize 5 Types of Website Navigation
2. Finding Duplicate Content with Free Tools
3. How Much Work Should You Giveaway in a SEO Proposal

Within an RFP for SEO Consulting is usually a section where the prospective client asks about a Site Analysis.

A full-blown Technical Site Analysis consists of:

• Analysis of information architecture.
• Analysis of source code, and page layout.
• Site Navigation.
• Analysis of Flash & Javascript.
• Keyword usage.
• URL structure.
• Content siloing.
• Internal linking structure.
• Dynamic strategy.
• Robots.txt exclusions.
• Sitemaps (website & XML).

Once you land the consulting gig, there should be a deep dive into each of the Analysis factors above, and a detailed SEO recommendation and implementation.

But, for the purpose of an RFP, it’s certainly okay to provide an overview, or a brief abridged Site Analysis to demonstrate that you put in the time to understand their site & their needs. It also shows you know what you’re doing, and instills confidence in your ability.

The “abridged” Site Analysis can consist of a summarized statement for each of these:

• Sitewide TITLE tags.
• Sitewide META tags.
• Navigation.
• Site Architecture.
• Flash usage.
• Overview of Department, Category, Sub-category, and Product pages.
• Indexibility.
• Is there duplicate content?
• Canonicalization.

Remember, you’re just doing a quick analysis, and providing a summary statement on each of the above factors for the abridged site analysis.

It’s often helpful to also do an abridged Keyword Analysis consisting of:

• Keywords to be Targeted
• Keyword ranking.
• Keyword traffic.
• keyword revenue.

You will also want to examine their inbound link profile, and their internal linking structure.

As you can see, you don’t need to give away the milk for free. This is just part of the work involved to win the business.

Photo credit: sugadeaux

Related posts:

1. How to Optimize 5 Types of Website Navigation
2. Splash Pages: Bad for Usability, Bad for SEO
3. The Future of the SEO Consultant

The big question is “How can I get my video there?” Now it behooves advertisers & publishers to conduct a Video Optimization for specific keywords related to the video. In many cases it’s worth the time & money invested to get your video to the top of the search results page.

Without showing any of my client work, I’ll show a personal video that is ranking. Search for the term, AFX race cars.

10 Tactics for Video Optimization:
1. Use the Keyword in the Title. Make the Title sound interesting.
2. Write approx 2 paragraphs of text for the Description.
3. Tag each video with keywords.
4. Choose proper category for each video.
5. It’s best to put a hyperlink to the target page within the Description, but before the user needs to click (more info) to see the hyperlink.
6. Upload all videos to multiple video sites (Youtube, Viddler, etc)
7. Comments help by showing interest, and by additional user-generated content (more words on the page).
8. Video responses show interest/activity.
9. Rating. Try to get as many 5 star ratings as you can
10. Views, views, and more views.

Treat the video as you would any other webpage, and begin a Link building optimization to increase the amount of Inbound links. Ideally, your objective is to increase Link popularity and Link relevancy. While building links for your off-site optimization, try to mix up textlinks and the number of Embeds. All these are Video Ranking Factors.

A great productivity tool to upload videos to multiple video sharing sites is TubeMogul .

Related posts:

1. Finding Duplicate Content with Free Tools
2. Splash Pages: Bad for Usability, Bad for SEO

Organizing your content in content silos is a powerful SEO technique, and combined with proper internal linking can be all that your site needs to rank for your primary keywords.

Links are important both internal and external. Internal links should use keyword-rich anchor text that point to your internal pages within the website. External links are the one-way inbound links from other web properties that point to your webpages.

Although, I can’t overemphasize the importance of lots & lots of content, that has hyperlinks embedded within the content that contain the keyword which you want to rank. Keyword-rich content is important. Don’t get hung up on keyword density. Just make sure you use a few primary keywords on the webpage. SEO Copywriting along with internal linking can be the secret sauce that’s needed to boost your position in the Search Engines to a top spot.

Now, come the links. The internal links should be directed to a “target URL”. The target url is the webpage you want to appear in the search results. The idea is to increase the internal link percent. In short, the internal link percent is the percentage of pages on the domain that link to the Target URL. Pick the page you want to rank, and start internal linking to that webpage using the chosen keyword. If it makes sense for usability, take advantage of the sidebar and footer for internal linking.

Fill your target url with keyword-rich content. It’s okay to link away from your site. Make use of keywords in anchor text, and make sure the outbound links are to “authoritative” sites within your topical neighborhood.

Create content silos that are tightly knitted together by keyword-rich internal linking. Ideally, ecommerce sites should use internal linking to knit together pages within a department, category, sub-category, sub-sub category, and product pages.

Bottomline, the internal linking affects keyword ranking, and contributes to strong content silos. Combined with a properly structured inbound-link campaign are extremely powerful SEO tactics.

Photo credit: bkwdayton

Related posts:

1. How To Optimize Using Internal Linking
2. First Text Link on a Page
3. Link Building to Fine Tune Powerful Websites

The link campaign structure needs to be optimized with a social slant, especially with the newest algorithm update from Google, called Google Caffeine.

Overall “link power” is important. Assuming you have that already, your site might just need some fine-tuning using link building. By having an already existing large inbound link portfolio, this new campaign for link acquisition will look natural. Assuming there is already a ton of linkjuice coming from across a wide variety of websites, different countries, ISP’s, IP’s, etc, the small targeted link campaign will look natural, and is a small percentage of the total number of inbound links.

Since the overall “linkpower” of the site is very strong, we just need a small targeted campaign for fine tuning. That should provide a good “lift” for your keywords. Many of which can attain the top positions.

Budget:
Budgets will vary based on your keywords, and how competitive the search results are. Smaller budgets can accomplish the same goals, but will just take a little longer. What can be done with $7500 in 4 weeks, can also be done with $2000 over a few months. Pacing the steady placement of links over time is also important to give a natural appearance to the search engines (Google). Ideally, an ongoing monthly budget for link building should be established.

Targeting:
Stay very focused by targeting aprroximately 5 to 10 keywords.

Forecasts:
There are traffic forecasts, ranking forecasts, and revenue forecasts.

The forecasts are based on the Keyword Demand Matrix. Basically, we look at the current monthly search volume of the keywords, and then look at what your website is currently receiving in search traffic from those same keywords. The increase in percentage of “share of Traffic” could be 100% or more. Meaning, if you have 5% share of traffic, it could increase to 20% of traffic. Obviously, this has to be evaluated on a case-by-case scenario.

Trying to nail down a real number increase can be difficult. So, every site should be analyzed on it’s own. For example, in the music business, there are a whole lot more searches for Metallica than Sean Paul. So, it might be best to forecast based on percentage increases rather than real number increases. And, of course a Keyword Demand Matrix should be generated for each website/campaign.

Photo credit: Dougs2007

Related posts:

1. Importance of Internal Linking
2. How To Optimize Using Internal Linking
3. First Text Link on a Page

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.

Related posts:

1. Driving Organic Traffic from Search Engines