If you want, you can check out the thread where this list was introduced. You’ll also find others commenting on what he covers, and his replies to those comments. Feel free to add your own comments to the thread. Where possible, I’ve tried to include Gary’s comments and observations in both of these articles. If you want to be sure of rising in the SERPs, refresh your content weekly, MSN, Yahoo and even Google reward constant refreshing with higher rankings. So not only will you be offering your users more value, you will also be rewarded by the search engines for helping them do their jobs better. MSN especially awards higher rankings to web sites that are updated regularly. 23.Links and Other Details: Completing Your SEO Checklist By: Terri Wells Last week, I began discussing a list of items you should check when you are performing SEO on a web site. I don’t doubt that those of you new to the field (as well as some veterans!) welcomed the list as a way to avoid losing track of all the details that go into any good site optimization. Apart From Content Apart from content, other things that affect your web site's organic SEO campaign include linking, navigation, and information architecture. We will delve into the other aspects so that we can use them all to promote our sites. Does it work? Well, Maximum Tadpole used this strategy for his client, and Google search referrals went from an average of three per day to 164 per day in one month. That’s a nice increase. Your results may vary, of course, but it’s good to have a plan. Organic SEO is Worth the Work - Navigation Navigation helps your web site's usability. Usability improves your searcher's browsing experience. A good browsing experience makes the user comfortable with coming back to your site. To know the kind of navigation that keeps a user comfortable, you have to think like a user. The lay out of your navigation is not supposed to be written in stone, it should be comfortable and make it easy for the user to get around your site. So, after you have gone through all of these steps, now what do you do? You take the information you got from Google Analytics about your traffic, analyze it and assess what you need to do. Go through the various steps listed here as necessary. It’s worth noting that this strategy might not be the optimal one for your site, but it should at least give you an outline for thinking about what your site needs and how to tackle its optimization. A site with poor navigation results in poor interactivity, and if you lose your interactive features, you become no different from a static brochure or a catalog. Easy-to-use navigational tools make visiting your website an interesting experience (assuming you have great content). Also, your links should be replicated as many times as possible, to ensure that the user does not have to unduly strain him/herself to find a link. Watch and Take Notes The final stage is so important – and unexpected – that I’m going to quote Maximum Tadpole again: “You won’t believe me, but don’t do anything but look at traffic for a month. Check rankings every day and most importantly, the keywords that people are finding your site with. Use those to decide if you should create entirely new pages to target JUST those words or to write content targeting those keywords. As you move into top positions for the easier words, go after the hard ones.” That may perhaps sound strange; wouldn’t it make more sense to change the existing content by using the terms for which more people are searching rather than adding more pages? Not necessarily; it depends on what they’re searching for, and why they’re searching for it. As an example, Maximum Tadpole noticed 300 searches over one week on his site for a piece of equipment used in eye surgery. He’d mentioned it once in an article that actually had little to do with the equipment. A little more investigating revealed that people were searching Google for the equipment, finding his site, then searching his site for it. Obviously, this was an unfulfilled need just begging for help. So he dedicated an entire page of his site to that piece of equipment. It is now one of the best pages on his site. He focuses on competitive industries such as online gaming, banking and finance, insurance, travel and investments, so he knows what he’s talking about. The content must be organized before the design and programming is brought into place. Dumping loads of information on a web site designer who has zero interest in how the information is arranged, and who simply puts all the information in general segments for his own comfort's sake, will definitely defeat your SEO strategy. What I am saying is that the web designer should be the last person to be brought into a project which has search engine optimization as its primary aim. The information should be grouped and organized into categories, then the web designer simply builds the site around said information. If you have a site that lends itself well to using social networks to help promote, by all means do so. Here on SEO Chat, you’ll find a number of articles that explain how to use this web 2.0 method of building interest in your site. What is the worst that could happen in SEO? Would your web site survive if Google was no longer the number one search engine? What if all the search engines changed their algorithms? If you do not constantly evolve and constantly grow, then you are guaranteed to be on the next list of web sites ruined by the changing tides of SEO. Most web sites want to offer their visitors something of value. If you can show a site owner how a link to your site would help its users, you stand a good chance of getting a link from that site. You shouldn’t actually request a link so much as focus on the value your site offers so the site owner will think of linking to you himself. Maximum Tadpole said he has seen a favorable response rate of five to ten percent with a simple email that reads like so: “I have created a web site for nursing students called which could be very valuable to your graduating nurses. It is a free site with job opportunity listings and career advice for nurses. If you find time, please visit our site, and consider linking to it from your site, as it would certainly be a resource for your students. Any feedback would be much appreciated! Thanks for your time and have a nice day!” Start Linking Once you’ve completed the on page optimization, it’s time to start the off-page optimization of your web site. That means building links. You don’t want to go the route of doing reciprocal link trades or link farms. What you really want to do is think back to the very first steps you took to optimize the site. What value does the site offer? Who would find it most valuable? Where do these people “hang out” online, and how can you get them to come to you?This is great if you have an unusual type of site, or niche content. But there is a good chance that if you’ve thought of it, someone else has too. There is nothing wrong with guarantees like this, however: “We guarantee a x percentage increase in traffic by x date.” That is a far more reasonable guarantee to offer. Unfortunately, that kind of specific guarantee usually can’t be offered until the SEO firm has a good handle on what your site is doing in the SERPs and where its flaws might be. Sites that were built with millions of dollars of venture capital went belly up with the first dot-com bust, simply because they refused to change when faced with new challenges. The list of such sites goes on indefinitely; I won't bore us by reciting them here. But let me say that the churn rate for failed websites has increased.You must reinvent yourself. You will need to use constantly changing technology to keep your web site on the cutting edge and avoid looking like you just came off Noah's Ark. Organic SEO must be truly adaptive, able to change to accommodate changing needs. At this point you’re ready to do your on page optimization. Using your key words, place unique targeted title tags on each page. This is the title element. If you’re having a hard time coming up with a title for the page, Maximum Tadpole suggests a way to think about it: “If each page of your site is a book, what would you title it? Make sure your title matches the content of the page.” He also suggests trying to keep your title tag under five words. It’s very important to make sure that your title matches the content of your pages; if it doesn’t, change either the title or the content until they match. In general, we can see that most respondents are self-taught, followed by on-site training and formal classes. However, this graph breaks down responses by the type of company a respondant works for, and helps to answer questions like "If a respondent works at an SEM agency, how likely is it that he or she learned SEO and how does that compare to respondents at other types of companies?" The chart indicates that respondents from SEM agencies, and non-self-employed respondents in general, received on-site traning more often than, for instance, self employed consultants. As for other tags, you’ll want to use Meta and key word tags for your home page, but the jury’s out as to whether those are valuable for any other pages on your site. But there are other details you’ll want to tend to – doing a 301 redirect to send non-www pages to the www versions. You should also optimize every internal link on your site with relevant text, including alt tags for images.
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