A Brief Essay on Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization

Planning for SEO
Speak the Language of the customer
There’s a taxonomy of search – Informational, Navigational and Transitional – and behind each type of search is user intent, expressed through keywords, and optimizing accordingly will attract users at every stage of the buying cycle.

Decide the following

- What will the user Experience be, how will the SEO strategy fit in the overall corporate strategy.
- What are the Keywords to be used for the SEO Exercise
- KPIs (what is considered as a success in the SEO Efforts apart from Top Rankings. Number of searches, conversion etc). e.g if the aim is to drive more traffic to download a document, then the SEO effort should be focused on that instead of creating many goals.
- In house or outsource it to an agency?

Note: SEO should best be done as part of an overall web revamp and marketing strategy (from conceptualizing to design, testing and launching) instead of using it as tool to “Tinker the website to the top”

Getting Websites to be spidered and brief steps on SEO on different search engines

Optimize for Yahoo
1. More focused on Keyword Density
2. Better if the listing is placed on the Yahoo Directory
3. Higher weight age to keywords in URL and title tags

Optimize for MSN
1. Higher weightage on Meta Tags
2. Fresh Content matters

Optimize for Google
1. DMOZ Submitted webpages tends to rank better
2. Request Google to Crawl the Pages if page is not in DMOZ index
3. Acquire backlinks to boost pagerank
4. Use http://www.google.com/intl/en/webmasters (Webmaster Central) to check if page has been spidered.
5. Webmaster Central
6. keywords, links, meta tags

Register the URL for a long period or extend the contract of the targeted website

Create legitimacy for the website

Keyword Selection process

Keywords are the search terms that users will type into a search engine to find a website. Keywords are needed as guides to optimize websites for the SEO Exercise

Places to identify keywords
Google’s keyword tool
https://adwords.google.com/select/keywordsandbox

It looks at the best keywords in an Ad Group and recommends additional keywords. It can also look at a web page and recommend keywords for that page.

Wordtracker
Keyword suggestion tool. WordTracker.com

Competitor’s websites
Visit the top five competitors, open their HTML, and look at their tag. Then type link:www.yourcompetitior.com to find out who are linking to them

Log stats and Analytics tools
Log stats (web traffic statistics). This shows the traffic to the website. Reports from analytics software such as Clicktracks and Google Analytics can find which the common keywords which visitors use to find are.

Experience and Creativity
Enquire customers, use Thesaurus, go by gut feeling. Which keywords will customers use to look for the website?

If there are misspellings. What are they? Will customers use other languages or slangs?

Optimizing Website and Landing Page

Search Engine Spiders are not human, the range of information they are able to read are limited. Therefore the following steps are needed to remove roadblocks for the spider and to make the website more accessible.

Short and relevant URLs and use Keywords in URL
Using descriptive keywords in URL is preferable as it allows for better indexing and more informative as well. E.g www.abctoys.com/bears instead of www.abctoys.com/3432433_d33r432432 or if the website sells toys, having www.plasticjoys.com will not cause the website to be optimized well.

Put the main keyword at the beginning of the URL.
Gifts-Heaven.com is better than heaven-of-gifts.com

Creating search friendly Error 404 Page
Error 404 Pages are crawled as well as well and presents a good source of materials to be crawled by search engines.

Alt Texts for Pictures
Pictures cannot be read by search engines, but ALT Texts can.

Coding
- Avoid flash, and ajax if possible. Log in pages and Frames are discouraged
- Creative external stylesheets or CSS can be used in place of Flash and Ajax
- Javascript and DHTML menus should be discouraged

Content

Meta Text

Here is an example of a Website’s Metatext.

Flowers, Roses, Plants, Gift Basket Delivery – 1-800-FLOWERS.COM – Your Florist of Choice

The Title Tag
The title tag is in the HTML’s HEAD section.
This is most likely also what the user sees in the search engine results list.

Write a good TITLE
This will encourage visitors to come to the web page.
Use the keyword first and then the name of the web page.

For example, Flowers, Roses, Plants, Gift Basket Delivery – 1-800-FLOWERS.COM – Your Florist of Choice

Limit to 50 characters (this includes spaces).

The Meta-Description
The meta-description tag also goes in the HEAD section. Here’s an example:

Search engines display the content of the DESCRIPTION tag to the visitor in the search engine results page. However they can ignore it as well (Due to superlative words or spamming) and fetch from the body of the webpage.

Writing the description tag:
• Use the top two or three keywords and write a complete sentence.
• Put the keyword first, then the description, and finally the company name.
• Use up to 250 characters (including spaces).

The Meta-Keyword Tag
The meta-keyword tag tells the search engine what the web page’s main keywords are.
Here’s an example:

Meta-Keywords are not so important nowadays but has some value to search engines like MSN, so it is best keep it relevant and not ignore it altogether.

Body Text

Use an H1 heading on the front page.
Google notices it more than the other text on the body
Again use the main keyword

The Content
•Put the main keywords within the first 25 words.
• Write complete sentences
• Avoid superlative phrases such as Best in the World!
• Don’t stuff keywords into the text. Don’t repeat a keyword more than four times.

Links Building
Buying Links
- Adding the Site to Directories.
- Pay-for-Inclusion Services
- Robots, Spiders, and Crawlers
- SEO Spam

Directories to be Submitted to
- http://dir.yahoo.com
- http://dmoz.org
- http://botw.com

Back Links and Incoming Links
The goal is to be at the top of the search engine results page when the customer searches for the company’s products. Google ranks the pages according to their PageRank value.

Google assigns the PageRank (PR) value by looking at the number of links to the webpage (these are called backlinks). If there are lots of links to that page, other people consider it to be valuable. If there are few links, the web page will has a low value.

Do not link spam and place links in irrelevant directories, as most search engine considered it as link spam.

Get people in related categories to link to the website through writing of articles, press releases and community interaction.

To find the webpage’s PageRank Value, install the Google Toolbar. PR 3 is somewhat low. PR4 is better. PR 5 or 6 is very good.

Creating Link Bait
To link bait is to create interest in the website or article so that people will like to it. The emphasis is on relevancy and creativity as others will not like to a website which although interesting are not relevant to them.

- Create the interest via social networks such as facebook, bulletin board, blogs etc.
- Run contests
- Give something people want (e.g coupons)
- News story
- Humor
- Horoscope, Fortune Cookies
- Emphasis on creativity
- Adding Social Bookmarking Functionality (e.g Digg, Reddit…)

Is the page spidered? – Tracking Spiders under Google
- Website https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/dashboard?hl=en
- Log in with Google ID
- Verify Site
- Submit Sitemap
- Statistics can be tracked based on crawling frequency and keywords crawled
- Error messages can be generated

Black Hat SEO
Black Hat SEO are unscrupulous or deceptive optimization practices intended to spam users or compete unfairly for Search Engine rankings
- Invisible text (e.g White text on white back ground)
- Keyword stuffing (repeating keywords very regularly for the meta texts as well as for the website for the only purpose on getting the site ranked highly in search engine)
- Duplicate pages
- Domain cloaking: serving different content to search engine robots than to human visitors
- Link farms

Search Engine usually penalize Black Hat SEO optimized Websites.

SEO is a Tactic

SEO is a tactic not a strategy, there are other parts of website which matters and cannot be covered by the SEO exercise.
1. How easily can the customer make the purchase? (Usability)
2. Is search engine generating most of the sales? (Analytics) Maybe it is the e-mail marketing which creates the sales. (Good reason not to remove the E-mail subscription box.
3. Networks can be a good way of getting links (Social Media)
4. Slow loading pages and other issues which makes surfing the site a nightmare (Performance issues)
5. Crappy content and irrelevant texts (Content)
6. Poor marketing copy

Don’t read my prevous posts

Don’t read my previous posts. There is no value which can be derived from them…

Google vs Viacom

I am with Google on this one. We are all as naked as babies in the cyberworld, we need rock solid privacy laws to protect the individual as much as possible.

Having said that, on a social scale, there is no privacy on the internet. You stepped on someone’s foot, he blogged about it and named you in his post, a part of your life would thus be made public. Its thus essential to at least know how to manage reputations online should the need arises.

Why a website for reputation management

Today, someone mentioned to me that in a certain industry (I won’t name which one due to privacy reasons), a website is not needed because their kind of reputation management is not done on the internet. It common knowledge among the industry etc.

I respectfully disagree with the person. If you are telling me about referrals and selling to a niche market, alright fine, you may have your point. However every company would need to have some kind of web presence in the form of a corporate homepage.

The 5 points of reputation management online with websites
1. Would you be more likely going to the library to research about a company’s reputation and news or would you just search it online?
2. Someone slams you online, the world and his cat knows about it. Where would you defend yourself? In the declining media called the newspaper? What is your company’ control over it’s online information? If you do not have a website to launch your damage limitation exercise, good luck!
3. Surely it is not that expensive to have some kind of a website. Would your company want be seen as a cheapskate or out of date?
4. What are your company’s achievements? Your potential customers want to know.
5. You can only write that much with in your Linkedin profile, and you won’t want to look unprofessional with a blogspot domain.

Takeaway of the Day

A website only have three seconds to capture a visitor from a search engine or another website. Make sure he sees the right things before he pushes the back arrow.

Did you say Guarenteed?

No one can guarantee anything on search engine. When a company or an individual offer you consulting for a few thousand dollars, turn him down. Its a rip off. If they say they will optimize 3 out of 20 keywords on any search engine, kick him out of the door. An SEO course for many hundreds of dollars? Bullshite, just give me a call and I can teach you everything you need to know about SEO in 1-2 hour over a good meal. You can even open your own SEO company after that but please do good, don’t overcharge others and learn another skill set in case Google changes the rules of search.

Anyone who wants to ‘optimize’ his website should just follow a few basic rules. Content, content and more content. Relevant content, Optimize your meta tags, have a good viral campaign, link from relevant sites, have compelling webpages, get involved in social media, read my blog and don’t harm any cute dogs.

Do it consistently and the chances of you be ranked in the top 5 are as good as or even better than any ‘SEO Expert’ doing keyword spamming, directory submission and other sneaky stuffs. Quick fix SEO techniques usually damages the credibility of your homepage. Traffic coming to your website will be at best be irrelevant. Top positions with a butt ugly webpage is a phyrric victory.

I believe, there will be a day when ‘SEO enhanced page’ will be knock off Google in favour of content and relevance in favour of length of stay and analytics results. What that day comes, the SEO industry will be a dying occupation. Its not in Google’s interest to let SEO experts run the world. Search Engines want good websites to be ranked top.

This is the reason, I cringe whenever someone described me as an “SEO expert” or I am forced to write those words on my resume or profile. I cannot guarentee top rankings, but I will do my best. What I gurantee are coherant online marketing strategies and outcomes. “SEO: (man, I hate that name ) is just part of the process.

Google’s Cutts: Good directions drive traffic to your website

Matt Cutts shared some tips on how to get the big G to find your site and give you a good platform to rise up the rankings to the top positions for good keywords.

In Short

1. Spotlight your search term on the page.

2. Fill in your “tags.”

3. Get other sites to “link” back to you.

4. Create a blog and post often.

5. Register for free tools.

Don’t overdo it

Good tips for 1, 2 and 3. All those can be easily done (3 with some boredom!), but how many sites are actually investing time and money for 4 and 5?

Warning though, tips like these are just scratching the surface. No business can be ranked top few by just doing 1 to 5 unless the competition is really crappy at web optimization.

Its the content and the presentation!

I simply have no idea why do people insist strongly on getting their god damn horrible websites to the top of search engines. I had a few inquiries from some individuals who want me to do Search Engine Optimization magic as if I am the Larry Page or Jerry Yang and turned a deaf ear to such simple stuffs such as meta tags management, good content production and internet marketing.

Their sites have neither a clear and simple navigation structure nor any organized content and are usually not optimized not backlinked. Sites which look like the aftermath of a dog tearing up the Webster dictionary and pooing on it should not be on the first page of Google and thankfully they usually are not. If they are, they are there simply by default (e.g the best of a bad bunch).

Search Engine Marketing (including SEO) main purpose is not about over promising or doing magic, getting more clicks or being in top position (although it is desirable). It is simply helping clients creating better value traffic for the website and company and converting them to customers and loyal customers.

Blogging at Channel News Asia

It might be interesting to note that Channel News Asia recently started a few blogs for their staff especially those at the newsdesk using WordPress no less.

Some of the blog entries are quality staff and I quite enjoyed their candidness. Breaking out of the mold of being blend and gray? Seems like it. A few more feed on my RSS reader for them.

7 Banners is back

I am back. The past few days have been tremendously hectic. Ad Tec came to Singapore and I was part of the exhibitor manning one of the booth. The experience had been very useful to me and good luck to me trying to manage my contact list.

This Ad tech was not as big as the Ad Techs in US or Europe but some really important players are in town. The usual assortment of Yahoo and Google (Where was MSN?), Local Powerhouses like Singapore Press Holdings (erm, that’s it?), media agencies like Acronym and DMG and social network companies like Friendster which still have a fragile lead in daily traffic over Facebook (Facebook was not in the room).

In Singapore, online ad revenues are also expected to triple from US$91 million in 2004, to US$256 million in 2009. (Source) Its going to be big business and whatever developments will be covered in 7 Banners (along with other IT and media aspects of today’s world)