Search Engine Optimization [Part Three] - SEO Quick Strategy

The motive of search engine optimization and submission is to attract targeted traffic by attaining very high positions in the search results. This can be done by using the most appropriate keywords relevant to the content of a website.

The following six (6) steps are only a beginning guideline for increasing search engine rankings. All of these guidelines are absolutely crucial for developing the initial framework and eventually increasing search engine optimization.

1. Search Engine Optimization Strategy
2. Identifying Competition/Related Websites
3. Determining Target Keywords
4. Design for the Search Engines
5. Optimizing Page Content
6. Link Popularity Building

Step One: Planning/Creating Search Engine Optimization Strategy

Everything in the document is apart of step one. Individualized strategies should be created for each market and each interactive property. Every property should be looked at differently; broken down by its core sections and core user audiences. The goal is to understanding how users understand and find content on an industry specific website. Do not think about how you “want” users to understand and find content on your site, that is not how search engine optimization works; different mentality than site architecture planning. Our goal is not to change how users search based on a website, it is to change our website based on how users search.

Step Two: Identifying Competition/Related Websites

Use the search engines to identify competitors. Search with the keywords that you expect users to use to locate your web site. The web sites that are ranked in the top positions are the competitors whom you have to beat to reach the top.

This helps when trying to build links to your web site. Sometimes, you do not know whom to request a link. Suppose you search with your most desired keyword in a search engine and come across a few sites whose link popularity scores are very high. Find out how they have scored so high in the link analysis system. You can then implement these ideas in your site and improve your ranks. How do you know which site are linking to your competitors’ sites? Again, use the search engines. Analyze how and why they are linking to your competitors. You can also incorporate those strategies.

Sometimes you will find that your competitors have a number of informative articles. These are allowed to be republished in their web sites for free if they agree to put a link to their web site with the articles. At other times, you may find that the newsletter of your competitor is the main attraction, and others who do not have a newsletter section love to link to them.

This way you can take ideas from your competition. However, be sure that if they are doing something which can be termed as spam, do not implement it even by mistake. Forget about that competition right then, sooner or later the search engines will detect them and they will be penalized.

Step Three: Determining Target Keyword/Key Phrases

Effective keyword phrases are frequently searched for (high demand) but not being targeted by many other websites (low competition).

There are four tools out there that can help locate good keywords/phrases.

1. WorkTracker
   The best tool out there, Wordtracker is one of the most essential SEO tools. To use Wordtracker:
   • Go to the Wordtracker website and pay $8 for 24 hours’ access
   • Enter a keyword phrase you’re thinking about targeting
   • Wordtracker will suggest hundreds of related phrases
   • Click on all the phrases you like, run them through the program
   • Wordtracker will compile a score for each phrase, based on the number of users searching for it and the number of websites targeting it
   • The higher the score, the better the keyword phrase.
   • Wordtracker also offers a free service which works in the same way but only uses results generated from Altavista.
2. Overture
   Also useful, Overture’s search term suggestion tool, is free and much quicker to use than Wordtracker. It works in much the same way as Wordtracker but doesn’t tell you how many websites are targeting each keyword phrase.
3. Google
   Google AdWords Keyword Suggestions tell you which keyword phrases are being targeted by other websites.
4. Guidebeam
   Guidebeam is an interesting resource. Type in a phrase and it will suggest a large number of related searches. The numbers provided for each phrase are Guidebeam’s estimation of how relevant that phrase is.

Once the competition has been determined; knowing how to find appropriate keywords is really the beginning process of the research and analysis in the search engine optimization process. There are two effective steps in developing this process and attaining the most valuable results:

a) Base Keyword Group

Develop a solid list of forty (40) industry specific keywords (keywords can be single words or groups of words that form a phrase). The easiest method in determining what makes an effective keyword is to formulate words or phrases users might use within a search engine to find the type of content your website offers. Note: don’t use internal company jargon or very broad terms (think both like an avid user and a first time user or one who doesn’t frequent the site often). This process should be done internally based off of the knowledge already attained about the property, industry, user audience and content. This foundation of keywords will be used to construct a much more specific list of words that further research will prove to be important within search engine ranking.

b) Specific Keyword Group

Research the above mentioned keywords to determine which when searched produce the most links directly related to your specific market/industry (more specifically to your competitors and related websites). Using manual and third party sources, narrow your solid list of forty keywords in half, down to the most effective twenty (20). These will become our primary keywords used throughout our SEO strategy process. Further research these twenty keywords to develop the power five (5); the five most powerful, influential and effective words, phrases or combination of words that relate directly to your market, niche, industry and content. Our primary end goal is to have those primary five keywords when searched separate or in combination with one another result in a top five ranking on most popular search engines (assuming we originally picked the five right power keywords). Note, working with the wrong keywords from the beginning will leave every step going forward useless/ineffective.

Step Four: Design for the Search Engines

Search engines scour the Internet looking for web pages to index, following links from one web page to the next. To ensure a search engine ranking, all pages on a website must be accessible to search engines.

Some search engines have problems with:

• Links accessible solely through frames, image maps, or JavaScript
• Very long pages
• Very short pages
• Flash pages
• Long JavaScript (JavaScript should be placed in an external document)
• Dynamic URLs

Title Tag & Meta Tags

Pages with the keywords appearing in the title tag are often assumed to be more relevant to the search query than others. Remember, title tag is the most important location of a web page after the main content of the body tag. Almost all search engines give importance to this tag.

Some search engines also give importance to the presence of the keyword in the meta description and keyword tag.The headings of the web pages are also deemed as important locations by some search engines.

The other important locations are - the text in the alt tags of the images and the anchor tags of the hyperlinks.

Almost all the major search engines follow the above-mentioned location frequency algorithm to some extent. No two search engines do it the same way. Some search engines index more web pages than others. No search engine has the exact collection of web pages to search through. This is the reason why the same search conducted on different search engines produces different results. Pages with the keywords appearing in the title tag are often assumed to be more relevant to the search query than others. Remember, title tag is the most important location of a web page after the main content of the body tag. Almost all search engines give importance to this tag.

In the early days of the search engines, meta tags were assumed to be the secret to propel a web site to the top of the search engine results. But now, all search engines do not read meta tags. So meta tags can be part of the ranking algorithm, but they are no more the dominating factor for deciding relevance.

CSS for Layout

Search engines prefer CSS-based sites and are likely to score them higher in the search rankings because:

• The code is cleaner and therefore more accessible to search engines
• Important content can be placed at the top of the HTML document
• There is a greater density of content compared to coding

Using CSS for layout is also highly advantageous for usability, as it leads to significantly faster download times.

Headings and Sub-heads

Search engines assume that the text contained in heading tags is more important than the rest of the document text, as headings (in theory at least) summarize the content immediately below them. Search engines assign the most importance to h1, then h2, and so on.

Do be sure not to abuse heading tags though. The more text you have contained in heading tags within the page, the less importance search engines assign to them.

Alt Tags

Like screen readers, search engines can’t understand images either and won’t take any meaning from them. Many search engines can now index ALT text though, so by assigning ALT text search engines will be able to understand all your images.

Flash and JavaScript

Search engines can’t understand JavaScript either and will be unable to index any JavaScript-driven content. Perhaps more importantly, they’ll also be unable to follow JavaScript-driven links. You may really like the look of your dropdown menu but search engines won’t if they can’t access certain pages on your site because there aren’t any regular a href=”href” links pointing at them.

Flash, like JavaScript, isn’t accessible to many users, including those using screen readers. Equally, search engines can’t access Flash so be sure to provide equivalents.

Step Five: Optimizing Content

The foremost criteria for a website to be able to attain and retain top search engine ranks for a long period of time is to have a great Content. In the world of search engine optimization, content is king!

It’s really important to have a long-term strategy to build up incoming links to a sizeable level and continuously keep rankings high. A real long-term solution, and one that adds significant value to a website, is to create first-rate content and give related websites a reason to link to a site directly.

1. Develop two pieces of descriptive marketing material; this will help rankings on our sites and when linked to from other sites.
   • The first should be one page (three to four paragraphs); this is known as our property summary. This statement will clearly identify the purpose of the interactive property and what audience/need we serve. Many of the twenty primary keywords should be used within this statement; all of the power five must be used. Note: do not use words just to use them; no need to use all of the words, only those that are appropriate. Only use the word in an appropriate context; it is useful to have a combination of words grouped together in similar context. These keywords words are best used when describing the different markets, products, content, services or offerings we provide.
   • The second should be a one sentence blurb (ten to twenty words); this is known as our property description. This one sentence should have at least three of the power five within in it and quickly/briefly describe our purpose/mission. This will be used in conjunction with our URL and is the optimal verbiage of choice when being linked to from another website/directory.

   Note: do not over use these keywords simply to help search engine ranking. Overusing your primary keywords deceptively is very much frowned upon and easily noted by search engines; this will result in your website being blacklisted from the search engine. However, being cautious of how you use your keywords, you should try and use them whenever appropriate.

2. Be sure to use the property summary and property description externally whenever possible; use it very selectively within our own website. Our primary descriptive page (typically the ‘about us’ page) should contain the property summary. We should try and use our property description and/or an abridged version of our property summary in all press releases and other mass-publicly disseminated content/marketing material directly related to our interactive property.
   
   Note: being linked to from a related website just via our URL is good, but not ideal. Our best results (for ranking purposes) occur when we are linked to from a URL that is surrounded or in the context of a statement with our power five; much like our property description.
3. As previously mentioned, one must be very careful not to over-use the primary keywords and become blacklisted. With that in mind, it is crucial to try and utilize the primary keywords when developing section headers, directory structures and content sections. Linking to a section titled “read more” or even “management news” will not be as effective as linking to a section titled “aircraft technician management news” or even “security management news”. Some of your section titles may become redundant, but this method helps significantly when trying to optimize our websites.

Using Descriptive Copy

Consider explaining/expanding abbreviations, initials and acronyms more frequently. The term “AMT” might clearly mean “Aircraft Maintenance Technicians” to someone internal or even an avid user; but it will mean nothing to a spider and potential the same to a new users. This will have to be researched and examined case-by-case ; such situations like the more commonly known term “CPA” may more clearly be understood by a spider as “Certified Public Accountant” and many users might end up searching for the term “CPA” more so than “Certified Public Accountant”.

Keyword Phrases in Linking Text

Often simple things really matter. And the use of keywords in linking text is one of those simple things that turn out to be hugely important. Linking text, sometimes called anchor text, is the clickable text that takes people to another page or resource. You need to choose that text carefully.

Keyword Rich Linked Text

It’s important to place keyword phrases into linking text for two reasons:

• Keyword rich text is more attractive to humans. A casual reader may see ‘Latest article’ and say so what? By using the title ‘Keyword phrases in linking text’ I’ve told the visitor what the article is about and offered two hooks that they might be interested in - ‘keyword phrases’ and ‘linking text’. As a result the click through rate will be higher.
• The text that links to a particular page gives Google and other search engines clues as to what the page is about. ‘Latest article’ provides little information while the actual title of the newsletter contains at least two important keyword phrases.

In highly competitive situations the extra ‘points’ that Google gives can mean the difference from appearing on the first page of results and appearing nowhere.

Lack of Content can be Harmful

Quite simply, search engines love content - the more content there is on a page the easier it is for search engines to work out what the page is actually about. Search engines may struggle to work out the point of a web page with less than 200 words, ultimately penalizing that page in the search rankings.

Note: The objective is to think about our content from not only a human (visual) perspective but also from a search engine’s perspective and ensuring our content is clear and coherent to both very important audiences. This has to be done in a method that doesn’t irritate the visual user and doesn’t get us blacklisted with the search engine.

Opening Content Importance

We’ve already established that search engines love content, but they especially love the first 25 words on each page. By providing an opening paragraph that adequately describes the content of the rest of the page (or the site if it’s the homepage), you should be able to include your important keyword phrases in this crucial area.

Site Maps

Site maps are also great for search engines as search engines can instantly index your entire site when they arrive at the site map it. Next to each link you can also provide a short keyword-rich preview of the page.

Step Six: Link-ability/Popularity

Inbound links to a website play a significant part in determining its position in search engines. Note: it’s not just the quantity, but also the quality and click-through-rate of links to a website which is of importance.

The objective here is to get our descriptive links on as many relevant and highly trafficked sites as possible. This is first done by getting us on the large web directories (Yahoo!) and then the local industry specific directories. The next step is to identify and locate related websites (typically not direct competitors) to exchange links with.

Inbound links to a website play a significant part in determining its position in search engines. Note: it’s not just the quantity, but also the quality and click-through-rate of links to a website which is of importance.

The best place to start any linking strategy is with web directories (or industry specific forums). The two biggest by far are Yahoo! and the Open Directory, DMOZ, (used by Google). Being listed in these is an absolute must as they generate huge amounts of traffic.

There are plenty of other directories to get listed in as well. Global and industry-specific directories flourish on the Internet. To find them run a search for ‘web directory’ (or industry specific web directory). The directories that come up highest in the search rankings will probably generate the most traffic. Remember, SEO is a different mentality than interactive advertising. It is not important if anyone (human) clicks on or sees your link; what is important is that you are listed and listed on a highly trafficked website.

Getting links in directories (and forums) is really important, but obviously there’s only so much impact this tactic can have. It’s really important to have a long-term strategy to build up incoming links to a sizeable level. A real long-term solution, and one that adds significant value to a website, is to create first-rate content and give related websites a reason to link to a site directly.

There are three effective methods to getting another websites to support a descriptive link:

Type in and search some keywords related to your industry. Also, sift through the websites in directories such as Yahoo! or the Open Directory. Find out who’s currently linking to both you and the competitors, check who’s linking to them, and who’s linking to them, and so on (To see a list of the inbound links to a website go to Google and type in link:http://www.URL.com)

1. Ask these related websites to link to you. A quick phone call or e-mail could be effective. And remember, always mention that linking to your website will benefit their site users and therefore their website. You could also offer a link exchange, where by you both link to each other. If you’re going to do this, it’s wise to link to their website first, before getting in contact.
2. You can use search engines to find websites related to your industry that would welcome interesting articles and press releases. Include a short bio at the bottom of the release, including a link to your website.
3. You can deposit articles at one of the numerous article banks on the Internet, such as ‘Go Articles’. You can also use a press distribution service to issue press releases to journalists, such as ‘M2.com’ or ‘Pressbox’ (or now… even Newsvine.com).

Being linked for SEO purposes follows the most basic of marketing principles. You want your name out in the public as much as possible and the larger the audience that can get a hold of that the better.

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