Challenges of an Evolving Field The first two letters in SEO stand for “search engine,” and SEO is dependent on the search engines. Search engines evolve. Techniques of increasing traffic and raising your site’s position in the SERPs that were once considered legitimate can now get you penalized. Factors that search engines once considered important are now all but ignored, such as meta tags. So good SEOs must evolve right along with the search engines. That being the case, anyone doing SEO must spend a lot of time keeping up in the field. Finally, let’s look at browser compatibility issues. There was a time just after Microsoft won the first set of browser wars that this wasn’t quite as important; many web designers simply made sure their pages looked good in Internet Explorer and left it at that. You can’t do that anymore, if you ever really could. Most browsers have at least a few quirks, with Internet Explorer still a little quirkier than the rest. If you want to be comprehensive, you need to make sure your pages are compatible with the latest versions of Internet Explorer, Netscape, Opera, FireFox, Mosaic and Safari. Your visitors will be much happier, even if your web designers aren’t. There are ways to tell what browsers your visitors use when they arrive at your site; that should help guide you. Here at the Shed, we check our articles in both Internet Explorer and FireFox before they go live. One contributor to the SEO Chat forum suggests spending a lot of time in SEO forums, asking a lot of questions, then coming back several times a day and doing it all over again. He suggests this as a daily ritual. He goes on to tell newcomers to “Tick the box that says to notify you when one of your posts is answered, subscribe to your most important threads and actually read them,” and set up Google alerts for important SEO terms such as “Matt Cutts” and “SES Conference” for openers. “Learn about blogs, technorati, Diggs. Another important thing about your navigation is that you should always have text links so that your web site is search engine friendly, lest crawlers get to your site and cannot reach other pages. The arrangement of your site should also ensure that the page farthest from you home page through the link structure should not be more than three links away; this will ensure that all your pages have a chance to get indexed. How strong of a campaign should you conduct? Maximum Tadpole said that he personally requested 100 links per day for five days. Remember, this is just the beginning as far as SEO for your site goes; you’ll do more link requests later, after you’ve completed this first phase. Also, the focus of SEO is starting to change. While it is still important to score high in the SERPs, SEOs today should be able to attract traffic to a web site using a variety of methods. And it’s not just about the traffic anymore, either. Many clients are more concerned with ROI; because of this, they’ll not only want to measure traffic, but conversions. It’s more challenging to raise conversions than traffic. Do you have any broken links? If so, fix them. This is something that you’ll have to check on an ongoing basis, because the Internet is always changing. You’ll want to help your visitors and the search engines find their way around your site. To that end, you’ll want to have XML and HTML sitemaps. You’ll also want to have a robots.txt file. If you have flash or frames, you’ll want to offer alternative forms of navigation. Search engine spiders can’t handle flash or frames, and many human visitors have little or no patience for them. Some who have been in the field for a long time see even bigger changes coming. EGOL, a veteran SEO and well-respected moderator on SEO Chat, notes that search volume is going down for a lot of the terms in his fields. “If you think that search will always drive the traffic on the web you might be wrong,” he explains. “However, the thing that will remain – at least for the short term – is the need to develop and improve websites. So if you think you can make a life-long living by tweaking title tags and hunting links, I think that you have a bad model.” Some Final Details While you’re checking everything else, don’t lose track of the content. Do you have at least 250 words of content on every page? If you’re not sure how many words that is, it’s about as many as you see on one page of an average paperback novel. Check your key word density (again) while you’re at it; make sure it is between three and seven percent for each key word on each page. Future Outlook for SEO According to a report from Piper Jaffrey Investment Research titled “The User Revolution: The New Advertising Ecosystem and the Rise of the Internet as a Mass Medium,” search engine marketing is on the rise. The research company expects total search spend to rise from $15.6 billion in 2006 to $44.5 billion in 2011. That’s nearly triple the money in only five years. Writing about the 425-page report, Dave Pasternak observed that Piper’s growth estimate “is more than four times larger than earlier estimates published by other research organizations.” The report points to four drivers of SEM growth. Interestingly, at least one of those drivers is potentially at odds with EGOL’s observations, for Piper sees increased use of search engines. Indeed, the report notes that more people use search engines to navigate to web sites – nearly twice as many as those who use bookmarks. The numbers even edge out those who type the URL directly into the address bar. Another forum member mentioned a variety of other kinds of back links to check into. Try to get back links from universities, government sites, blogs, forums, and press releases (there are a number of web sites that accept press releases). You’ll also want to get links from blogs, and you might want to look into link exchanges. Another reason Piper sees the field expanding is that direct marketers are increasingly adopting search and SEM. These marketers used to rely almost exclusively on offline marketing methods. They’re beginning to “get it” that SEO and SEM is important. How well they actually understand what it can do for them is another question. While we’re on the subject of links, don’t leave out social bookmarking sites. You don’t want to spam these sites, but you do want to get them to link to you. Gary recommends getting listed in the following social sites: Digg, Technorati, Del.icio.us, NowPublic, StumbleUpon, BlinkList, Spurl, Furl, Slashdot, and Simply. Another SEO forum member added several more to that list: Reddit, Meneame (Spanish), SocialPorn (adult), Odeo (French), and Yigg (German). I’d add Searchles. But not every social bookmarking site is going to be appropriate for every web site. Large brand advertisers are also beginning to get SEM, which is a third factor Piper points to as driving SEM growth. The fourth one is growth in the use of local and vertical search properties. This growth means that SEMs can aim their advertising at specific targets – audiences that are truly interested in their messages. General search engines such as Google are working to make geo- and demographic targeting easier too. This added complexity means that SEOs and SEMs in the future will need to rely on automated tools even more than they do now. While we’re on the subject of redirects, do you have any 302 redirects on your site? If you do, change them to 301 redirects. Google will penalize you for 302 redirects if you leave them up too long. Gary also notes that you should have PDF optimized docs in your root file with a navigation page listing each document description and link. You should also have a separate XML sitemap for these. You can be certain that the SEO field won’t look the same in five years as it does now. Opportunities in the field will change (more companies are doing SEO in-house rather than working with SEO agencies), and even the kinds of things that are defined as SEO will almost certainly change. Looking further out – say 20 years – we may not even be using anything we’d recognize as a search engine anymore. As long as you are prepared for change, however, and treat learning about your field as a continuous process, you may find a career in SEO to be very rewarding. Check your RSS feeds. Do you have outward RSS feeds so your visitors can sign up for your content? Do you have inward RSS feeds to get fresh content on your page? Don’t neglect your 404 page. Just because users will only see that page if they don’t find your other pages is no reason to leave it generic. Optimize it for the search engines, and make it a little less intimidating for your visitors. 26.Organic SEO is Worth the Work By: Akinola Akintomide This article will look at organic optimization techniques for the search engines, basically ethical optimization without a paid placement program in place. I would say this is my favorite way of optimizing websites. You bring in traffic by using content that works, linking strategies, and adding value via interactivity and a great user experience, not paid search listings. Check Your Links! Check the back links to your site in the three major search engines: Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft. Google is known to not list all of them, so you really do need to check the other two as well. This is also a good time to double check that you have a DMOZ listing.
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