Search engine optimization is not an exact science. Search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN) are constantly evolving and adjusting their algorithms in order to stay ahead of the SEO professionals that doggedly strive to find the perfect SEO solution for their clients. There really is no way to know 100% for sure what will work and what won’t.

What about all those SEO companies guaranteeing results, you ask? Consider them either tragically misguided or scam artists. Whatever the reason, there are no absolute guarantees in SEO and anyone promising otherwise is probably not the best bet to hire.

While we SEO experts may not have the answers in stone, we’re a clever sort and there are a number of techniques that can be applied to a website to improve search engine rankings and increase site traffic.  We also know some of the mistakes that can be made resulting in an ineffective SEO campaign.

Focus – A successful SEO campaign needs a specific focus. Depending on the size of the campaign, the number of keywords should be limited to between approximately 8 and 20 phrases. Any more than that and you’ll have too much going on. One of my favorite phrases is keyword cannibalism, which is what occurs when the keyword focus is split on a page and the search engines don’t know how to index the page so they end up splitting the page value. You don’t want this because both keywords end up devalued and the page probably won’t rank well.

Duplication – One of the cardinal rules of SEO is no duplicate content. This includes titles and tags, multiple domains, having the same paragraph of text on every page, or copying and pasting your content from someone else (aka plagiarism).  Having duplicate content on your site, no matter how innocent your intentions may be, is considered spamming by search engines and will not help your rankings.

Antisocial Behavior – If you want more people to know about your website and to increase website visibility in the search engines, get out there and spread the word! Social media and linking have two distinct benefits you’ll be missing out on if you don’t join in. First, you have access to millions of people, allowing you opportunities to promote brand recognition. Social media sites were created for users to share cool websites. It’s always possible that your site will be discovered and become the next big thing (Hampster Dance, anyone?). Second, the number of links pointing to your site are monitored by the engine and are seen as a virtual thumbs up, making your site appear more attractive. More attractive = more likely to rank well.

The Big Picture – The last common reason (for today’s blog post at least) as to why SEO campaigns fail is called “forgetting the big picture.” What’s the big picture? The audience! The user, net surfer, web geek, online shopper, client, gamer, whoever. Above all else, if you want a successful website, you want a user-friendly website. It’s easy to become so caught up in search engine optimization and rankings that the big picture is forgotten. So, the next time you make a change to your website, pause for a moment first to contemplate your audience’s perspective.

-Rachel

Yahoo is currently working on a new application that may automate SEO for the search engine. A patent was filed in January explaining the new system for automated SEO. This system would analyze search terms queried by users and whittle searches down to popular keyword sets that are long-tailed and more specific. The search engine would then automatically update the Meta titles, tags and headings of a webpage to reflect a more user-relevant keyword set. 

What does this mean for SEO companies and website managers? Basically, the keyword focus could shift to optimizing for a set of highly specific keywords that would be searched for on a second or third query if the more general attempts were unsuccessful. So, instead of optimizing for “new shoes”, websites will be more successful optimizing for “new blue basketball shoes”.  

This new search engine technology will allow the engines to recognize the actual content of a webpage and compare it to user browsing habits. Hopefully, this will improve search results, benefiting both the users and the websites/SEO companies trying to get their sites to rank for the relevant terms. 

For more information on the new Yahoo automated SEO technology, check out some of these other blogs:

• SEO by the Sea
• SEOtops
• SearchEngineWatch.com

After you have gone through the process of carefully selecting your keywords and optimizing your content, you can sit back and watch your rankings shoot through the roof, right? Not necessarily. Your content is optimized, but do the search engines have the proper tools to find and index your content? The following are some of the oft-overlooked items that prepare your site for optimal indexing by the search engines.

Optimized Internal Linking

This process is sometimes referred to as siloing and is one of the most important aspects of search engine optimization.  Optimized internal linking is important, not only from a search engine standpoint, but from a usability standpoint.  Internal linking is an important way of directing the search engines to your most important pages.  The pages that are linked to the most, the search engines deem as the most important.  Also, linking to relevant pages from within your content allows users to easily find the content that should naturally progress them through your site.

Make Unique Titles and Descriptions

The search engines are all about unique content.  They attempt to weed out duplicate pages in order to provide unique and relevant results.  As a result, if a search engine comes across two pages that have the same page title or META description, there is a good chance that one of the pages will get passed over by the search engines, despite the content that actually appears on the page.  Writing good HTML titles and META tags can not only improve your search engine rankings, but it can also increase the amount of clicks that your search result gets by enticing the potential visitor.  Making sure that your pages have unique titles and descriptions is a great way to improve your chances of getting all of your relevant pages indexed into the search engines.

Write Unique Page Content

As mentioned earlier, the search engines don’t like copied or duplicated content.  If there is a discrepancy between duplicate content, the search engines will almost always use the original source as their top result.  If your site uses product feeds for its descriptions or if you copied your content from another site, it will be extremely difficult to get that page indexed by the search engines, much less achieve a high ranking for that page.  The search engines understand that not every word or phrase is going to be unique, so they give a small amount of leeway, but not much.  As such, it is recommended that each page contain around 70% unique content.  This allows for a quote that appears elsewhere, or a list of product specs that cannot be changed or altered.  If these items must appear on your site, it is imperative that you balance the copied content out with around 70% unique content.

Clean up Your Site’s Coding

The content that the user sees visually is often entirely different than the content that the search engines see when they spider your site.  This means that the spiders must filter through all of the coding on your site including page styling, JavaScript, and image filenames.  Much of the information contained in your coding is irrelevant to the search engines and can serve as a major distraction to the spiders when they visit your site.  Fortunately, much of the coding that hinders the spiders can be referenced externally such as external JavaScript or containing your site’s styling in .CSS files.  This will allow the search engines to quickly access and index the keyword rich content that you really want them to find.

When using proper search engine optimization techniques in conjunction with preparing your site for the search engines, you will be able to see the maximum results for your effort.

Content is King.

Web content.  What is this “king” that search engines, web-savvy intellects and other industry gurus refer to?  According to Lou Rosenfeld and Peter Morville in Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, content is broadly defined as the “stuff in your Web site” (second edition, page 219).  While this may be a loose definition, web content can be further defined as the text, data, applications, images, video files, and audio – among other things – that make up your site.  In other words, anything that is textual, visual or audible in nature can be deemed web content. While each of these should be focused on, as far as optimization goes, in order to improve a website’s results within the search engine rankings, textual content is the most viable for optimization – and a primary focus for most SEO departments in an online marketing company.

Yet, when referring to “Content is King”, “content” is implied as the written HTML text, or a derivative thereof, that is easily index-able by the search engines.  So…how is this relevant to SEO?  It’s relevant for a couple reasons.  One being, that if a search engine can index the text available on a site quite easily, the search engines can then determine which categories, keywords, etc. that each page of a site is about.

Now, you may still inquire as to the relevancy that the content plays in optimizing for organic results…to which I continue to my second point.  So, how is content useful in gaining rankings within the search engines?  Easy.  Since search engines use the information that they have indexed to “match up” with what a searcher seeks when querying for a certain phrase or topic, the pages of a website that have the most relevant content on that particular phrase or term (topic) will be those delivered to the searcher in the order of most related sites to least related.  Therefore, the more a certain phrase is used within a page – or multiple pages – of a website, the more likely that those pages will appear in better positions of the Search Engine Results Page or SERP.

For example, I have a website that sells designer handbags.  I carry some of the following designers: Prada, Louis Vuitton and Chanel.  If I want to show up in the top spots for terms such as “Prada handbags”, “designer purses”, “Chanel hand bags”, etc., I better make sure that the content I place on my site includes these phrases.  Keep in mind that I will also want the page of my site that features the latest Prada bags to include relevant and optimized Titles and Meta Tags featuring these keywords as well.  I would not include terms that are irrelevant to the products I offer.  Some examples of keywords that I would refrain from using include:  snowboard equipment, dog collars, picture frames.  Why?  Well…hopefully it’s obvious, but none of these terms have anything to do with my site or the products I offer because I only sell designer purses and handbags.

Once you understand the important role that content plays in the scheme of website optimization, you should better understand the need for your site to update its content or improve its relevancy.  As one of the most important elements in reaching desirable rankings within the search engines, it is no wonder that content is king!

For further information on the do’s and don’ts of content strategy…stay tuned.

Brittany Passante

Every day, the number of consumers that use their cell phone for browsing the web grows by leaps and bounds. Research is showing that a growing amount of cell phone internet usage is dedicated to local search and is second only to searching for sports scores or sports news. While the technology is advancing, it is still, often times, impractical to browse the internet on your cell phone for any extended period of time. Pages take longer to load than on a laptop or desktop and as a result, cell phone users don’t dig as deep into search results as the casual user at home. What does all this mean for local search? It means that if your listing isn’t located on the first or second page, it might as well not exist to a mobile browser. To capture this growing market, you must work to improve your search engine ranking or risk losing thousands of dollars in potential revenue.

You might be asking yourself, “What can I do to optimize my website and increase traffic?” Search engine optimization is a big part of the equation. Just as you would optimize your website for regular search results, there are also website optimization practices that can help you improve your rankings in local search. Below are 3 questions you should ask yourself about your website and how it relates to your ranking in the local search engines.

1. How would a user get to my store? First and foremost, make sure that your store’s address clearly labeled on every page of your website to ensure that the local search engines index as many pages as possible. A good way to do this is to embed your address into your site’s header or footer. Also, including a “Map Page” or a page with driving directions will help the search engines accurately locate your business, increasing the chances of a top ranking in the search engines.

2. Would a user want to come to my store? Do not underestimate the power of a positive review, or even a review in general. Search engines like Google and Yahoo! have reputations on the line and they want the best possible matches at the top of their listings. If the local search engines see that customers are talking about your store in a positive way, they will be more likely to move your listing up to the top of the search results.

3. Do the Search Engines know that I exist? Make sure that you sign up for a Google business account or online yellow pages listings like Info USA or NavTeq, which is where Yahoo! gathers its information from. This is an excellent opportunity to basically knock on the door of the local search engines and say “Here I am!”

Answering these 3 questions and taking steps to optimize your website is the first step towards better local search engine rankings. There are also search engine optimization companies out there who can assist you with some of the finer points of website optimization. Do not take local search for granted, especially in this day and age with mobile browsing becoming increasingly popular.

The benefits of strategic linking to SEO are still alive and kicking. Though it’s not the only thing needed to make high rankings, in my experience it is the most effective way to gain authority. It’s amazing how much authority goes to a site with good quality links that point to it.

It’s important not to just take any link you can lasso in. The key is to get links from sites that have similar and supporting content. For example, a good reciprocal link for a food site, would be another site that is food related. The higher the page rank on their home page, the better for you.

You’ll also want to take advantage of your title and description. It’s important to do your research for terms that you want to show up for. When you find one you see as most appropriate, make sure you don’t already rank for it. Your goal is to rank high for a term you don’t already rank for. Your description should also be optimized and supportive towards your title.

If you want to take it a step further, find out what page you will be listed on on their site, and cater your title and description to the main theme of their site and page topic.

Jennifer Kaufman
Linking Strategist

The folks over at Axandra.com have published a new article today about “Mosaic Cloaking” and how search engine optimizers are now using it to “game” the search engines.

Mosaic Cloaking (the basics)
It’s not much different from regular cloaking, except that instead of serving completely different pages to the search engines, clever marketers are now just serving different parts of their pages via cloaking.

For instance, you might have an E-Commerce site selling bikes. To the average visitor, you’re going to present them with a great photo, bullet list of the bikes features & an easy way for them to purchase. For the search engines, you might swap out that entire product section and fill it with an optimized article about that particular bike.

While this new Mosaic Cloaking is certainly a twist on the original, I would be willing to bet that those of us reading about it now are months (if not years) behind the game, in terms of keeping up with other SEO professionals.

This new method may work for some sites, for an undetermined amount of time, but with it now out in the light and more people talking about it, you can bet that Google and the other search engines will be creating a way to detect it and penalize those sites that are using it.

I’ve never used cloaking personally and our company, MorePro Marketing, has never employed that practice either - something I’m rather proud of. We’ve been able to acquire top search engine rankings for our clients without resorting to that level of “black hat” optimization.

I was reading an SEO newsletter this morning and they had mentioned a number of important SEO strategies to consider when undertaking the optimization of your website on your own.

A number of the SEO tips were quite common and should be practiced by all SEO strategists, not only those working on their own sites, but also those working for agencies and an actual SEO company. Some of those tips include:

• Navigation and internal linking
• Titles & Meta tags
• Unique content
• Relevant backlinks & continuous linking programs

There were two other SEO tips that I feel are generally disregarded or not implemented on a frequent basis:

• Your site’s Value Proposition (Find out how to craft your site’s Value Proposition)
• Code bloat / Site download time

The Value Proposition (VP) issue isn’t always that easy to resolve quickly, because it takes a lot of constructive thinking in order to determine what sets your business apart from your competitors - especially how to communicate that to your potential customers. A good VP can make a world of difference on how your website converts visitors to sales (or leads).

The other item was the “Code bloat / Site download time”, which I strongly feel is overlooked on a regular basis.

The concept is simple… reduce the size of your pages (code & images) and they’ll load faster, enabling better usability from your site visitors, as well as allowing the search engines to spider your pages more quickly. There are a number of rather easy ways to reduce your code bloat & increase your website’s download speed:

• Convert all inline JavaScript to external files and call them as separate files
• Convert embedded font styles & formatting to an external CSS file and reference it as a separate file
• Optimize the size of the images on your pages - For some industries/markets, having crystal clear images is important and those visitors should be willing to wait a few more seconds. For most industries, however, they’re not going to wait, so your fancy, slow loading image is actual a friction point that will hurt your chances of converting that visitor.

There’s nothing that I’ve mentioned here that’s “new” - it’s common knowledge. Use these SEO tips on your website and you’ll see improved results.

In an article published in the SEO-News newsletter this morning, Kanga Internet’s Chris Diprose details 10 of the most common SEO mistakes that you’re bound to make on your website. Whether or not the mistakes are done on purpose, are done because of a lack of SEO knowledge, or you had someone else build your site - these SEO mistakes should be avoided. Some of the mistakes that Chris mentions were covered back in January, when we published our “Common SEO Blunders… Must read for web designers” post.

If you find that you’re guilty of any of these mistakes, take the action now to correct them so you can start improving your search engine rankings.

Here are Chris’ Top 10 SEO Mistakes:

1. Bad Titles
2. Filename of the Page
3. Duplicate or Bad Content
4. No Links
5. Incoming Link Anchor Text
6. Bad Internal Page Links
7. Live Links
8. Impatience
9. Keyword Selection
10. Keyword Spamming and Stuffing

I certainly don’t have any objections to the list that Chris prepared. I might rank Impatience (#8) higher on the list, only because becoming impatient with your SEO can lead to more problems down the road. You’re more likely to try an SEO tactic that’s untested or engage in some type of questionable SEO practice if you don’t plan out your strategy properly and if you don’t give it time to work.

1. Bad Titles
A survey of top SEO professonals on SEOMoz.org a couple months ago ranked the Title tag as the most important aspect of SEO, so it only makes sense that bad titles are probably the worst mistake you can make when optimizing your website.

2. Filename of Pages
This one is a little off-base, at least in naming the mistake. This should be URL structure or “dynamic URLs vs. static URLs”. Certainly, having a site with long, dynamic URLs is a problem. Use Mod_rewrite or the Windows equivalent to rewrite your URLs to be more friendly. This is not a necessity unless your URLs have more than 2-3 variables on the query string in my opinion. We’ve had plenty of experience and success w/ single variable query string URLs.

3. Duplicate Content
We’ve covered this topic several times in the past and it’s probably one of the hardest mistakes to effectively communicate to site owners and content managers. They just don’t see the value of writing unique content for their products or their stores, when they can get a completed data feed from the manufacturer and plop it right into the site… unfortunately, that just won’t yield any long-term results.

4. No Links
This is a no-brainer… a site cannot rank on content alone.  Every website should have an ongoing backlink strategy.

5. Incoming Anchor Link Text
See previous mistake… Just make sure your backlinks use keywords.  Many site owners and marketers will try to use the company’s name and/or just the domain name as the anchor text.  This is much less effective than using keyword-rich anchor text on all backlinks.  Be sure to vary the keywords also - your incoming links (backlinks) shouldn’t all be the same. 

6. Bad Internal Page Links
A site w/ poor navigation or linking structure will struggle to compete with sites who have good navigation and structure.  Be sure to categorize your pages properly and to use keywords in the anchor text.  Another common problem w/ internal page links is the use of images for navigation instead of text - always go w/ text unless you already have a full text menu elsewhere on the page.

7. Live Links
Broken links hurt… check your site frequently to make sure you’re links aren’t broken.  If you find broken links, fix them ASAP.  Setup a custom 404 error page if you have pages that no longer exist and if you can’t get the links changed (from backlinks for example).

8. Impatience
This can kill an SEO campaign.  Do the work and use the methods that have been proven to work over time.  Allow sufficient time for all the work you’ve done to take affect (several months).

9. Keyword Selection
Selecting the wrong keywords is almost as bad as not selecting keywords at all.  Be sure that you’re optimizing for the keywords your target audience is using, not the keywords you think they are (yes, there is usually a difference).  Use keyword research tools like Keyword Discovery, Wordtracker or Google Trends to find out what your visitors are using, what’s most popular, and what keywords are slowly fading into oblivion.

10. Keyword Spamming and Stuffing
This is just plain dumb… Your website shouldn’t be stuffed with keywords you are targeting, let alone keywords you’re not (that’s a whole other story).  Common keyword stuffing takes place in site footers, comment tags, meta tags or other typically hidden areas of the site and/or the HTML coding itself.

Interview snippets from Vanessa Fox, Product Manager for Google Webmaster Tools. Full video interview w/ Rand Fishkin

I’ve tried to get the important points from the interview, so several of these items are very short and/or are specific statements made by Google’s Vanessa Fox.

Sitemaps.org initiatives

• Sitemaps.org content to be included in 18 different languages.
• New method of notification - specify in robots.txt file via:
  sitemap:filepath

  View the robots.txt sitemap inclusion discussion over at WebmasterWorld for more specifics

Webmaster Tools & Sitemaps

• Yahoo Site Explorer out of Beta.
• URL removal tool in Google (out fo 6 yrs now). Could make it’s way into Webmaster Tools.
• Real-time Google PageRank coming soon? Doesn’t sound like it (too many privacy issues).
• Google Supplemental Results - could start providing more information on why pages are in the Supplemental Index, but likely wouldn’t provide a full list of everything in the index. Not considered such a bad thing anymore - many supplemental results still rank well for specific phrases.
• Considering offering data on who’s linking to your 404 error pages and/or where your broken links are being linked from. Always try to redirect to the most relevant page on the site vs. using a 404.
• Could submitting an orphan page through Sitemaps get a page indexed?
  Yes… (but) it probably wouldn’t rank well. That means that all of the pages on a site should be submitted through Sitemaps.
• Google Link Reporting - Link sorting (currently alphabetized).
  Could make other options available in the future.
• Sounds like they could be adding features to allow you to verify more than one domain within your account (ie: multiple domains).
• Moving your website to another domain - Take pages from old site, move to new site (as is). Don’t restructure or re-design the website until after you’re sure the engines see the new domain & pages well. “Do things in stages” or “one step at a time”.

Pre-Sell Pages (ie: .edu hosted content)

• They’re aware of what’s going on and could devalue some of the trust that certain domains have (ie: .edu, .gov). “Always looking for ways to do things better.” Hoping to get some changes in the hopper and to see some changes soon.One example given was searching for “viagra” in Google - several of the Top 10 results are .edu sites that appear to have had content hosted on them. Several of the pages have custom 404 error pages coming up, so they must have figured out what was going on. Another appears to be forum/comment spam that’s somehow ranked well (???).

Buying Links (watch out!)

• Might make webmasters aware of detection of paid links (ouch!!!). The more information the better, including problems regarding ranking issues. No definitive answer though….

Sites Displaying Search Results (scrapers, shopping sites, etc.)

• She mentioned that the engines, in some cases, wouldn’t want visitors searching in Google to click a result, only to find another page of search results. I guess some filters could be expected.

Google Base

• Submit structured data (ie: feeds).
• Separate searching system from Google.com.
• Good for experimenting - “get in early”.

Google News

• Can submit News sitemap through Webmaster Tools.
• Send email to get included (for review) - English only.

In case you missed our last Vanessa Fox posting, you can view her December 2006 interview here.