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

Instant Customer Feedback

Go to Google or Yahoo. Type in your company name followed by “sucks” and search

e.g “Widgets Inc sucks”

Opera and Its Marketing Reach

While Opera has a good Post about the way it does marketing, it does leave a question. Why does Opera have less than 5 percent share of the browser market? Make no mistake, I love Opera to bits and use it as my main browser of choice. Never mind the fact it makes my life a living hell on some websites, it has grown onto me ever since the bad old days of banner advertisements on its ad ware version.

 

I offer two answers

1. Its focus is on the mobile market and not the browser market, although those involved in it seems to be trying their darnest to make it popular. If the overall corporate focus isn’t there it won’t penetrate too deeply into the browser market.

2. Opera is a ‘nowhere’ Internet browser. It’s not built for the corporate users who fear change or the mainstream users among many whom fear change as well as download. No one really care about the zillion of security alerts with regards to Internet Explorer. Its there, its familiar, Just use it. Its sad but true, Microsoft has successfully used its monopoly position in OS to infect our PC with the incurable blue “e” program.

Plus, I cannot run feature rich websites such as those from Korea and Japan. Every multimedia app ends up stalling or not loading. That’s two big markets they’ve not gained. maybe a modified localized version is in order.

Opera is nowhere the brand that the IE is, it has somehow weakly chosen to go along the ‘geek’ path which is dominated by Firefox and its phalanxes of Extensions. Yes Opera has widgets, but somehow widgets don’t cut it among the Geek users. It sounds very uncool.

Until Opera decides what kind of browser it is and focus on being either a 1. Mass Market user tool or a 2. Geek Toy, it will go nowhere. IMO, its proberly easier to cut into the Internet Explorer Market since the Firefox market is more loyal to its FF. If Opera choose to target the common internet users, it should improves on its functions which are most helpful to them (Inline spell checks, a proper module for Google Calender might be great, a functioning PIM, etc) while maintaining the features which makes it popular among people who have known better. (Ease of use, Lightweight but feature rich, Notes, strong webdesign standards and free)

This only emphasize how much dependent Marketers are on the product and its purpose . A bad product can turn months of Marketing planning into bad PR. Opera browser isn’t bad, in fact, it works well for me and I am delighted with it.

However it isn’t enough for the two biggest demographic markets mentioned above. Opera needs to invent a new direction of expansion. Bittorrent is cool, but the geeks have dedicated torrent downloading programs such as BitComet.

PS. I love my Opera and I encourage others to download it and give it a spin.

I am sleepy…

Internet Marketing Metrics

I have 2 days to find out exactly how exactly does Internet Search Engine Ad Marketing Metrics works so I can actually sound knowledgeable before the seductive dark wizards of SEOs when they drop in to seduce our company to part with our money towards something which most people has very little clue about.

Time to hit the library again.

I must admit do have a head for internet marketing processes and ideas and read Webpronews daily but I am hopeless in the area of (Internet) Marketing Metrics. I can only hope they do not take our thousands and feed our website into their batch program and have coffee. They tried to take away our money for organic search (I stepped in and manage the optimization myself and found it rather easy to be highly ranked in Google), now they are reselling Adwords. Adwords seems like a different ball game, a marketing field in itself.

As a marketing manager of a small company I have to make sure we get our money’s worth and that doesn’t just mean the bottom line.