Modern Search Engine Optimization Practices
Among the many evolving technologies and tools for web professionals that is also the most neglected is search engine optimization. Popular search engines such as Google and Yahoo! are constantly changing the algorithms that bring consumers the most relevant search results because the technology is still fairly new and evolving. Consumers have been relying on search engines for only a few years, so it makes sense that the technology behind it will only get better and more advanced, unlike the soon-to-be-extinct phonebook. The phonebooks that are still in existence evolved into what they are today…over a period of many years. Each year, the phonebook companies made changes based on advertising trends, advancements in graphic design, and the ever expanding business and housing market(s).
However, with search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing (Microsoft’s horrible attempt at gaining market share), the rate of search engine evolution is much, much faster. Since there is nothing to print, they are able to make changes and restructure every aspect of the search engine’s experience with consumers whenever they want. And believe me, that’s what they do.
That’s good news for consumers because it means there is and will continue to be more powerful tools to find what they are looking for in the course of every day life. But for web design professionals, it means something entirely different.
The web design firms that I have personally seen go out of business over the years ignored search engine optimization and current SEO practices on the websites that they built to ensure that those websites performed well in the search engines. I don’t find it a coincidence that these failing companies all had this one thing in common. I’m not saying that’s why they are no longer in business, but I am saying that many web designers/developers do not consider SEO to be part of a website project. They somehow just leave that part out of their checklist of things to do. The work doesn’t take tons of time to do, but it does require a tedious effort to stay on top of the ever-changing industry of SEO. We look at it this way: building a website without a plan for SEO on any level is like designing a nice foldout brochure with pop out pictures, having it printed, and then never giving them to a single person; it’s just a waste of money with an empty promise.
We are constantly asked by our clients what aspects of on-site SEO that we focus on, and the answer is never the same because each industry and website has different needs, and SEO goals are easier to reach on some websites than others. There are, however, a list of important things that every web designer and SEO expert should be aware of when doing SEO work.
Content Development
Content is king with any SEO campaign. For service related company websites such as plumbers, lawn care, churches, house cleaning, roofers, attorneys, etc., that do not sell actual products on their website(s), a unique opportunity presents itself. Each of these industries comes with a level of knowledge that must be applied to execute those services. Why not share that information on a blog? Not only will it be useful for consumers to read and benefit from, but the more content that you have on your website for the search engines to find, the better chance you are giving your website to show up in search results. A basic 8-page website isn’t going to cut it with Google like it did a few years ago, so adding content to your website regularly is paramount. Your website must be an evolving and ever-changing source of well-optimized information if you want it to perform well in the search engines organically — especially Google.
There’s no corner to cut on this one; good old fashioned original content that engages the reader and assists the search engines to help consumers find your website is hard work, and takes research for the keywords and phrases that you want your site to be found for.
Clients ask us all the time, “Where does this content come from?” Content for your website can come right out of the daily situations that you encounter in your organization. Example: not long ago, a new client emailed and asked us, “How do I brand my company?” My response to her was rather lengthy, so I posted my response to her about “How to Brand your Company” on our blog. The content wasn’t copied from another blog — I actually sat down and wrote out the answer in the form of an article and posted it on our blog. Now, if someone else asks that question, I can send him or her a link to the article I wrote as well as benefit from any traffic from the search engines that display the article in search results. When you factor in the amount of time spent on creating the article for the blog compared to the additional search engine exposure and traffic that our website will receive, it is well worth it. It sure beats shelling out additional advertising dollars every month to get the same traffic to come to your website.
Many people take other blog posts and articles from other websites and post them on their blog. This is okay to do, but you’ll receive much better results when you write your own original content and other people copy YOUR article and post it on their website. Anyone can copy information and re-post it, but the ones that take the time to create original, engaging content will benefit the most. Don’t be lazy! It takes time and effort to have a great looking website, but it takes some sweat to develop it into something that makes an impact in search results and benefits your visitors.
Universal SEO
This is more of an approach than it is an action step. SEO is more than simply making changes to your website, although your website will remain the core of your SEO efforts because all other advertising channels should point back to your website.
Universal SEO means publishing your content across multiple channels, discussion forums, directories, social media, LinkedIn, and video websites like YouTube and Vimeo (to name a few).
Medium to large-size businesses should break apart the different pieces and leverage the entire organization’s content as a whole in every possible (and applicable) outlet. This means working together towards short and long-term marketing goals online. The biggest hurdle business owners will have to overcome and help his or her team to overcome is where to find the time for an already over-tasked staff to incorporate something like this. But, if you are serious about search engine optimization and marketing your service(s) and products online, it is absolutely necessary.
Online Video
Video has become a content asset that has a major presence in search results. As a result, it cannot be ignored in your SEO efforts. Greg Jarboe, author of YouTube and Video Marketing: An Hour a Day, states that if YouTube were classified as a search engine, it would be the second most-used search portal behind it’s parent company Google (you did know that Google owns YouTube, right?!). Including a good title and description for your video(s) on YouTube will increase their chances of showing up in search results.
So what type of videos can you use as part of your SEO campaign? Well, it’s important to produce unique content that you can or will eventually be known for. You can choose to make the videos purely informational, comedic in nature, or in a documentary fashion, to name a few. I would recommend keeping all or most of your video content in whatever method you choose. Some of the most successful video channels on YouTube keep their format consistent, sign on and off the same way every time, have the same intros and exits, etc. In other words, consistency is important. Even though your discussion points will be different, people will connect with something they are familiar with seeing.
Important to note: any time your organization appears on a news station, make sure to get the footage from the news station after the spot airs. Do not rely on the news station’s embed code to put on your website. I’ve seen news stations take down videos from their archive many times, which means the video is no longer available for viewing. So, if you are relying on them to host the video on their website indefinitely, stop. Purchase the footage from them and put the news story on your YouTube channel and your website.
What many people (even developers) fail to realize is that instead of using links to determine relevance, YouTube uses the number of video views to determine placement in searches. So for all of those people using their own Flash player to display their videos, you are losing out. By using YouTube’s video player to embed your videos on your website and other outlets, you are increasing the total number of views for your videos without having to rely solely on the traffic YouTube gets to their website. Moreover, if you have some good creative ideas for videos that you know will generate a high response quickly, don’t hold on to those ideas…execute them! It will make a difference in your website’s search results.
Using Keywords
Since your website still (should) provide the best possible opportunity to secure competitive search engine rankings (SERPs), you can’t ignore the role that keyword-driven content plays in your SEO efforts.
In 2010, Google went on record stating that they no longer use the META keyword tag to help determine a website’s ranking in their index. So, when I say that keywords are important, I’m talking about your content having them — not your META keyword tag in the header of your page.
Keywords found in the content of a page indicates relevance to the type of content that is on that page. It is highly unlikely that you’ll click on a search result and land on a page that doesn’t have the keywords that you used for your search in it. The factor of greatest on-site importance is the use of your keyword(s) in the TITLE tag of each page on your website. It is also important (although not as important) to include those same keywords in:
1. The first few words of each title on the page itself (H1, H2 respectively)
2. In the first few hundred words of the HTML (content)
3. Alternate image tags and image file names
4. Format tags such as bold and italics
5. The META description tag in the head of your page(s)
Considerable time should be put into keyword research. Don’t just guess at what keywords you think people will use. If you do this, you will likely miss the mark of what your website’s SERP could be. There are many keyword research tools out there, but each SEO expert will usually find one or two and stick to them. Using Google Analytics or another worthy reporting tool will also help you to see what keywords are actually being used by consumers to find your website, which takes the guesswork out of your on-site SEO.
Long Tail Keywords VS. Short Tail Keywords
Also important is the use of long-tail keywords to optimize your website for local search. I’ll give you an example. If I type in the word “web design” the search results will most likely include local and national websites optimized for that keyword. But if I am only looking for locally owned company to work with and I live in the Nashville area, my search results in Google will be more accurate if I make my search criteria more specific. “Nashville web design” will certainly remove the majority of listings that may not be located in my area. If my interest is to work with a company or firm rather than an individual or contractor I may modify my search results again to be “Nashville web design company.” This is what is known as a longtail keyword.
Achieving good search engine placement for your website is much easier to do on a local level than it is a national level, so it is in your best interest to optimize your website using long-tail keywords in the Title and Description tags of your header as well as in your content throughout the page itself. Read more about long tail keywords.
Keywords and Links
How many times have you seen this:
“For more information on Nashville web design services, click here.”
Well, that’s bad. Using your keywords with your links is called “anchor text,” and it is a key component to the way you develop your content and link strategy relating to SEO. Here is the SEO friendly way to day the same thing:
Get more information about our Nashville web design.
But don’t stop there. Anchor text links are important, but only when they link to a page with content containing the same keywords and phrases as the keyword or phrase contained in your anchor text link. Make sense? In other words, when you are linking your pages and blog posts together in the content of your pages and blog posts, you should carefully develop the content so that the anchor text links point to a page or blog post about the information related to the keyword or phrase that you used in your anchor text link (read that again). If you have the words, “click here” anywhere on your website, get rid of it and replace it with an anchor text link so that the reader knows before they click on “Nashville web design” that they will be taken to a page or blog post that specifically talks in depth about Nashville web design services.
Do not rely on your website’s navigation to get your visitors (and the search engines) where they need to go. Your website will benefit a few ways if you implement anchor text links in the content of your pages and posts:
1. You’ll get more traffic to the interior pages of your website.
2. Search engines will find more pages on your site to include in their indexes.
3. You’ll have a better chance at more than your home page showing up in search results.
Okay, here comes the slightly difficult part. Even more important than implementing anchor text links on your website is getting other websites to link to your website or blog using anchor text links. Inbound links to your website from other websites is still an important factor that determines your website’s SERP (search engine ranking), but not just from any website or blog. The inbound links to your website that come from other websites that contain the same or similar content are the ones that you want.
A gigantic plus would be if you can get a high-ranking website with similar content than your website to link to you and here’s why: Google has determined that a particular website should rank well in their search index because they (the website) has implemented all of the steps we are talking about in this article. In other words, someone spent some quality time on that website doing the necessary SEO work to achieve top rankings.
Should this well-SEO’d website link to your website using keyword anchor text that links to a page on your website containing the same keywords and phrases as the anchor text link, your website receives a portion/percentage of the ranking that the website linking to yours has been given based on the SEO work that they have done. Pretty cool, right? That’s why you’ll often find websites ranking for competitive keywords without a single reference of those keywords on-page – simply because of external anchor text links. When it is all said and done, keyword use in external link anchor text is one of the top SEO factors, overall. The tricky part is finding a creative way for those websites to link to yours!
An Example
As an example, you’ll notice that my above anchor text link to “Nashville web design” links to a company that we partner with on website projects, Made to Order Websites. By providing an anchor text link for one of their targeted keywords to their website from mine, the SEO efforts for their website will be affected (positively) as a result of having a link from a website that contains the same type of content that their website has.
Remember: it’s not the quantity of the inbound links to your website that make a significant difference. It’s the quality of the inbound links pointing to your website’s pages that come from other websites that rank well in the search engines that count. So, stop trying to get your sister to link to your website from her family photo blog; it won’t help.
Is that It?
The answer is no; not by a long shot! This can easily turn into a long laundry list of do’s and don’ts for SEO, but I wanted to keep it simple and focus on the most important aspects of SEO. When starting out, it can be overwhelming when you consider all of the little steps that need to be taken for an effective search engine optimization campaign.
Remember to always test your methods and watch the analytical data closely to determine what works the best on the websites that you manage and perform search engine optimization work on. One thing I have learned from experience is that some of these practices can be easily implemented and bring immediate results while others take more time and bring longer-lasting results. If you manage multiple websites like we do, it is almost impossible to perform all of these steps on every website; it’s just too much to do. My advice is to find a handful of clients that are interested in dedicating a portion of their advertising budget each year for on-page search engine optimization work to be done and use that as an opportunity to learn and grow with the ever-changing world of search engine marketing. Your clients will benefit directly as a result of your work, and you will become a more proficient developer which will only help you to offer more of your skills on future projects.
