Several years ago I wrote, “Gone are they days when SEO focused exclusively on top search engine rankings.” I wish I was right about that, but unfortunately, we still see a lot of SEOs doing just that today. Not the good ones, mind you, but still, far too many.

Today’s top-tier SEOs are getting out of the search engine ranking business entirely. Well, maybe not entirely, but they understand that there is so much more to online success than a top position for your keywords. Many clients still need convincing.

Rankings still matter to SEOs. At least they should matter. While local, personalized and historically based results are dramatically changing search results, there is still a base set of search results that all other results stem from. But SEOs that talk only in terms of getting you top rankings on the search engines should be avoided at all costs. #notjoking

SEO is one piece. It’s a big puzzle.

Achieving search engine rankings is only a small piece in to the total puzzle of online marketing. In fact, if top rankings are the only focus of the SEO, there is a significant chance that the work performed on your site will actually make things worse. Top rankings only mean so much if your visitors are fleeing your site in droves because of usability or conversion issues.

Most people don’t care if they get 100 sales from 10,000 visitors or 5,000 visitors. It’s the same 100 sales right?

Well, no, not really. The difference is that the 5,000 visitors provides a better conversion rate than the 10,000. What’s important about this is that if you are getting 100 sales out of 10,000 visitors, to then get 200 sales you must bring in an additional 10,000 visitors to your site, for a total of 20,000.

Or, you can improve your conversion rate.

Improving your conversion rate means you get more sales out of the traffic you’re already bringing in. If you improve your conversion rate to bring in 100 sales out of every 8,000 visitors, you’re now getting 125 sales from the same 10,000 visitors you were getting before! Improve it more, you might be able to get 100 sales from 5,000 visitors which equals 200 sales from the same 10,000 customers.

You see where this is going? A better conversion rate means more business. If every sale earned you just $15 in profit, you just added an additional $1500 in profit to your bottom line. Now if you were to double your traffic on top of that, your profits leap from $1,500 (from our starting numbers) to $6,000, instead of the $3,000 you would have gotten from improving traffic alone.

Top rankings add traffic. Improved usability and conversions multiply it!

Without usability, SEO Kung-Fu is SEO F-U!

SEOs must maintain a very interesting balancing act between the creative and technical. Most SEOs start on the more technical side of things. They learn code, algorithms, architecture and what makes good rankings; then they figure out how to apply these into websites. As SEOs got more and more technically advanced, the search engines did, too, in order to prevent manipulation.

Good SEOs began to realize that the battle for rankings is only a part of the struggle for business growth. While SEOs still fight for top search engine rankings, those that have invested into the marketing side of website improvement find they bring their clients far greater success.

The technical side is still hugely important, but the knowledge gained from the technical research must be implemented in an almost purely creative way. Once rankings are achieved, the site must still be able to sell to its audience.

Ranking success alone is an SEO failure

Sites that struggle only to get top rankings will ultimately fail. Maybe not in the bankruptcy sense, but in the sense that they are not maximizing their return on investment. They are spending more to get less!

The analogy I use most for this is its like trying to fill a bucket full of holes with water. You’ll be able to get water in the bucket and may even be able to get it in faster than it leaks out, but you’re consuming vast amounts of resources in order to fill it up. It’s far easier–and smarter–to patch the holes first and then start filling the bucket.

You may not be able to patch every hole right away, but patching some while working on others (all while increasing traffic) can allow you to bring in and convert more and more every day. The more traffic you bring in and the more usability issues fixed, the greater the impact your SEO campaign has.

There is so much more to SEO than just SEO. And if your SEO doesn’t know that they, IMHO, they don’t know what they are doing. Is it worth paying for top rankings if your visitors are leaving in absurdly huge numbers? Or would you be better off working with someone who can help you improve your site and get you top rankings that bring in more profits? It’s your call.

Any SEO that fails to improve usability is not really doing you any favors. At best, the usability and site conversions stay the same. At worst, they plummet due to a ranking-at-all-costs approach. There is nothing like an SEO flipping you the bird and saying it means “You’re #1!”

Follow me at @StoneyD, and @PolePositionMkg.

One of those tasks that often takes us away from our computer monitors and into the world of post-its, index cards, and cork boards has been when working on a site’s information architecture. This can be a big task, that often requires a lot of table or wall space.

Depending on the size of the site, there can be a lot of data to sift through, so you have to be able to make notes and move things around easily. Post-its, index cards, and cork boards make for great IA tools, as they allow for easy rearranging of your data at will. But, not everybody has boards large enough to handle the big jobs. And, some of us would rather do away with the paper all together.

There are a lot of different programs you can use to go paperless with your IA outline, but the three I use are: Xenu Link Sleuth, Microsoft Word, and Microsoft PowerPoint. Those are the only three tools I need to make a good road map for a site with all of it’s architectural pieces. Here’s how:

Step 1: Find all indexed URLs

When working on a site’s IA, the first thing you need is to get a bird’s eye view of the entire site. I’ll generally use Xenu’s Link Sleuth. This program is designed to find broken links, but, among other things, it will also give you a list of all the URLs that it found in the site.

When I get the Xenu report, I’ll copy the URLs into Microsoft Word. If the site is already somewhat organized, then it might be a good idea to import it into Excel, and order it alphabetically. This will ensure that pages in the same sub-folders all end up together.

This document becomes my reference point for pages that have been analyzed and mapped into the IA, versus the pages that haven’t. Generally, I start at the top and click on one URL at a time. As each page is analyzed, I highlight it some way in the URL document.

Using the document with all the URLs works better than clicking through the website page by page. That method can be confusing, as you are lead down multiple paths and have to remember each page you’ve visited already. By using the URLs as your base of reference, you never hit the same page twice (unless you do so deliberately) and you don’t miss any URLs accidentally.

Step 2: Visualize the Architecture

The next step is to set up your PowerPoint document. I might start with something that looks like this:

This will obviously require some manipulating, as you start filling in the pages and deciding what goes where. Until this is completed, it will be a fluid document.

Sometimes it’s a good idea to have a basic plan for the main navigation. However, be willing to adjust and change as you go. What you find as you assess each page may lend to changing your navigational strategy. As you find pages, directories, and sub-directories for each group, move things around in PowerPoint to accommodate.

If you don’t know where any given page should fit into the overall IA structure, either take a guess, or come back to it. Don’t be afraid to put something in the wrong place. As you build out your IA, you’re likely to be moving things around, adding or removing categories and sub-directories as needed.

When complete, your IA might look something like this:

Step 3: Provide Notes and Directions

Step 2 gives you a nice visual layout of how the site will be structured, but it also lacks important information that is crucial to those who will be implementing the new site architecture. As you explore the site page by page, you’ll often come across a number of different types of pages:

• Keepers (pages that will stay in the new site structure)
• Duplicates (pages that are duplicates of others)
• Redirected URLs (pages that are being moved or removed)
• Missing pages (pages that the site should have but doesn’t
• Junk (pages that will be deleted)

You’ll need to decide what to do with all of these, and make sure you provide instructions, so they each get handled properly.

In addition to the visual IA that we put together in PowerPoint, I also crate a second Word document that details all of our notes and instructions. This document will contain a bulleted list of all the categories, directories, and pages. Each bullet point will contain the following information:

• Name of the page (as referenced in the PowerPoint)
• The relation of that page in the NEW IA (where it will be found)
• The current URL of the page
• Special instructions for that page

The first three are there so the developers know exactly which page is being referenced, both from the current site standpoint and the new IA standpoint. The last one is critical because it let’s the developers know what changes need to be made to ensure this page is handled properly.

Notes that might be included for some pages are: “This page needs to link to…”, “new URL should be…”, “reformat this page to match…”, “Move this page to…”, “Delete and redirect to…”, “Merge this content with…”, “Remove all links to this URL…”.

This is just a sampling of some of the notes that may be necessary. Anything goes here. If it’s relevant to the usability and architecture of the site, you can throw it in.

Not every page has special instructions, so I like to highlight these instructions in red. This allows the developers to quickly scan through, without having to read the entire document word for word.

Don’t mistake this three-step process as being an “easy” process. The real work is in determining which pages go where. You want to create the most user- and search engine friendly format possible, being sure each page is in it’s “right” place.

Once completed, you have two documents (you can ditch the original URL document that you used as a reference) to show the higher ups and development team, which will allow them to both visualize your masterpiece and implement it without a hitch.

Question 6. Which provides the greatest benefit, on-page SEO or link building?

This is a tough question to answer because both can play a significant role in the success of a site trying to get to the top of the search results.

Here’s the basic rundown. A site that isn’t linked from any other site doesn’t stand a chance in the search results. It doesn’t matter how well-optimized it is, the links matter. At the same time, a site that is well-linked, but not optimized, CAN get good search engine rankings, but performance will always be sub-par.

Links are important to get on the map, but once there, the optimization plays a much more significant role in helping establishing good rankings. But, then there comes a point, again, where a site can only be so optimized, and the links are what is needed to tip the scales.

Got that? Links > SEO > Links!

7. How important is social media in relation to SEO?

Social media marketing is becoming increasingly important to the success of a website. Search engines are now considering many different social signals when determining relevance of a website, or even a particular web page.

The main issue isn’t whether or not to use social media, its how to leverage social media properly. Many businesses are using social media, trying to get that extra advantage. Unfortunately, they are not leveraging the social media channels in a way that maximizes their efforts into an effective marketing strategy.

When utilized properly, social media can be a strong link building strategy. A well-run social strategy can cover multiple aspects of the off-page link building efforts that search engines consider when determining the value of a website.

8. How does usability factor into SEO?

Search engines don’t have access to the usability data of every website. Though, as more people install Google Analytics or Adwords tracking code onto their websites, and surfers install the Google Toolbar into their browser, Google is able to get more and more of this information and can incorporate it into their ranking algorithms (though they claim they don’t and won’t.)

Short of using that data, search engines can see visitor bounce rates pretty well. Every visitor that clicks over to a site, then hits the browsers back button, sends a signal to the search engine that the visitor didn’t find what they were looking for.

Bounce rates can certainly be an important signal to the search engines. Making sure your visitors get the information they searched for, on the first, click is imperative.

Given access to enough data, I think the engines will look more closely at on-site usability issues. If few people make it to the conversion page, the engines may determine that your site isn’t a quality or trusted site, especially if it is compared to another site that does have better conversion rates.

9. My site is perfect and I don’t want to change anything? What can I do to get better rankings?

Well, in this case, the only thing you can do is to build links, employ social media, and build content. All of these are good strategies, but they also might not be enough. Sometimes you just have to come to the conclusion that your site isn’t as perfect as you want to believe it is.

If you want your site to be keyword optimized and have a significant chance of outpacing your competition in the search results, you have to be willing to make changes. I’m not talking about keyword stuffing or anything like that, but you do have to be willing to make tweaks and adjustments in order to ensure your content delivers for the searchers and provides enough signals to the engines for your targeted keywords.

10. I keep hearing about personalized results, local results, and blended results. How does this affect rankings?

In more ways than you probably realize. There is really no such thing as a #1 ranking anymore. Every search is essentially a unique search requiring a unique set of results. This means the search you perform on your computer will produce different results than the search your friend performs on their computer, even if they are in the same room as you.

Localization, personalization, and blended results have really changed the game. Not only do you have to optimize, but you have so many more options for getting your site in front of your search audience. If you’re a local company, then you’ll likely see traffic drop as your site no longer comes up in searches outside of your local area. But, you lose audience if you’re not coming up in their personalized results. This can be good if it weeds out those who are not part of your target audience, but can also help you if it puts you in front of a more targeted group.

Blended results give you more opportunities to get noticed. Video is the big “it” right now. If you create and optimize a video, it can get you additional exposure on the first page of search results. Same with optimized images, and even mentions, from those in your social circle.

Stay tuned for the last group of five answers…

This post started from talking about How NOT To Do An Interview: The Basics. What was originally going to be an intro paragraph turned into a full post. When this happens, I just do what I often do… take one idea and make multiple posts out of it. Love it!

What follows are 15 questions I felt were important for a business audience to know about SEO. And, now that I know what I meant when I wrote them (see introduction), I can provide the answers I intended. Here are questions 1-5:

1. What is the most important element of a successful SEO campaign?

There are a lot of factors that go into a successful SEO Campaign. There is content, keywords, titles, descriptions, usability, architecture, and link building. All of these play a significant role and cannot be ignored. But, to narrow this down into a single thing that is THE most important element to make a campaign successful is tough.

I think I’d have to go with website architecture. While this doesn’t contribute directly to the keyword optimization, it does give the search engines the best “sense” of a site. Without good architecture, your site can be keyword optimized to the hilt, but it won’t matter because the search engines are unable to read and decipher the content properly.

An unpublished book does no one any good. Getting your website content “published” into the search results is step one. Then you can worry about what kind of reach you can achieve.

2. What is the second?

The second, I would have to say is keyword research. This really goes hand-in-hand with the site architecture. You can build your site, but if it isn’t structured around the keywords that are important, you’ll either have a poorly targeted site or you’ll have to go back and re-focus your architecture accordingly.

There are a lot of layers to keyword research, but when putting together the site architecture, you only need to worry about the basics. The goal is to find the “core” keywords that people are looking for that will drive relevant traffic to your site. Map out those core terms to individual pages, and you’re well on your way to building a site that can develop a strong web presence targeting your core audience.

3. How do you determine which keywords should be optimized for which pages?

If you’ve built your site architecture right, then your keyword targeting for each page should already have been determined. In fact, your pages are built around the idea that you have keywords that people are looking for, so you’re building your site content and pages to provide the answers to the search query.

However, if your site is already built, and you’re not so inclined to go back and re-develop it with a keyword focused architecture, then you have to start at the other end and work backwards.

The best thing you can do here is to look at what your core keywords are and determine which keyword best integrates into what page. This is no small task and requires a lot of consideration.

Things to consider are: the current content of each page, ability to integrate a core term seamlessly, and to ensure that the page maintains it’s value for its original intent AND those coming in for the optimized term. If any of those aren’t 100%, then consider another term for the page.

4. What are the top three on-page factors that should be optimized?

The title tag is, as I have said many times before, one of the most important pieces of SEO real estate for a web page. If you get nothing else right, get the title right. That alone can work wonders on helping to get your pages to rank in the search results.

Next, is the content of the page itself. Your content must back up the title and has to maintain it’s keyword focus throughout. Look for opportunities to reinforce the page’s keyword topic (which should be the page topic). Don’t stuff keywords where they don’t work, but maintain a tight theme of content that provides answers for those searching for that topic.

The third most important element is internal linking. This is a factor partially covered with a solid site architecture, but also gets covered with content development. If you’re addressing a topic on one page that is covered more thoroughly on another, link the relevant, keyword rich content to the fully optimized page that addressed that topic.

Linking in this way not only reinforces the page topic for optimization purposes, but it also improves the usability aspects of your site, allowing visitors to move around based on topics for which they are needing more information.

5. You didn’t mention the Meta Description or Meta Keyword tag. Why not?

There’s a good reason for that. Neither of these play any kind of significant role in the optimization of a website. The Keyword Meta tag is 99.9% useless to all search engines. Might it be considered again one day? Perhaps. Likely? Perhaps not.

The Meta Description tag suffers a similar fate when it comes to search engine relevance, however it does play a very important role outside of optimization. Since the Meta Description tag is used in the search results, it has a unique role in helping visitors decide whether to click into your site or not.

Because of this, the Meta Description is actually pretty dang important. Not for SEO, but for click-thrus and bounce rates, both of which can effect the success of an SEO strategy.

If this post has captivated you from beginning to end, then stay tuned for the next set of five questions coming at you soon!

This series is pulled from a presentation given at SMX East. Part I of this serious covered the problems duplicate content creates. This post covers the causes of duplicate content, and Part III will look at the solutions you need to implement to fix your duplicate content problems.

Quick recap of Part I: Duplicate content causes problems. Duh!

Now that we got that out of the way, let’s take a look at the causes of duplicate content and bad URLs so we can then learn how to fix this mess and get on with better search engine rankings!

There is No Single Cause of Duplicate Content. Don’t collect them all!

I started off this series discussing the problems duplicate content causes. I did that deliberately because, if it’s not understood that there is a problem, the causes and solutions really won’t be of great importance to the reader. But, now that we know a problem exists, we have to identify the cause so we can then fix them.

If you’re gonna kill off your duplicate content, you first have to know what causes it. Any problem, until it’s has been recognized and analyzed, cannot be properly corrected.

Redundant URLs

The image above shows an example of several URLs that can all lead to the same content. In fact, these would all be considered the home page of the website. While it’s really only one page, there are four different URLs that can be used to access this page.

The search engines can pretty easily figure out that these URLs are really only one page. But still, they tell us how to “fix” the problem by giving us a canonical URL tag that we can implement just in case.

Eventually, the engines do get around to figuring this out on their own (even without the canonical tag) but not always as quickly as we would like, and not before we already start splitting link value on the site. Any site looking to get some strong improvements quickly shouldn’t wait around for the search engines to get around to figuring the site out. Be bold! Be proactive! Recognize the problem, and fix it!

Poor product categorization

Product categorization can create a lot of duplicate content problems if not implemented correctly. With a lot of systems, every category a single product fits into creates a separate URL that each particular product can be accessed. If your product fits neatly into three categories, you now have three duplicate pages. If ten categories, 10 duplicate pages. You can see the problem here.

While I’ll save the solution for the next part in the series, product categorization can be a bit tricky. We want our products to be accessible. This isn’t shopping in a store where the product can only be in one place. The beauty of it being online is that one product can be found in multiple “isles” at the same time. The tricky part is, by doing this improperly, you may be making your products easier to find by your visitors on your site, but more difficult to find for the search engines.

Secure page issues

Most site’s don’t need to secure any of their pages, until the visitor moves into the shopping cart area. Once there, the visitors can feel safe knowing their personal information isn’t going to be accessible to prying eyes. But, once in the secure area of the site, there will often be links back out to the main site. Sometimes, these links maintain the secure “https” in the URL.

You wouldn’t think this would be a problem, right? Who cares if any of the pages, they continue to visit stay “secure” or not? The problem is that security doesn’t mean locked down. It just means your information is protected. But, regular site pages generally don’t need to be protected. Once a visitor accesses a secure page, that URL now has opportunity to find it’s way into the search engine index.

Can we say: duplicate content problem? (I knew you could.)

This opens up what can be a Pandora’s Box of secure, yet duplicate, content that makes it’s way into the engine database and begins to steal value from your non-secure pages. Not good.

Unfriendly links

There are good links and bad links. And I’m not talking about the type of site’s being linked to. I’m talking about the code used to link to pages.

I’d tell you all about good link code, but that would spoil Part III. Gotta keep the suspense somehow! But, for now, the image above shows two kinds of bad link code you need to be aware of.

Both of these codes use JavaScript to open pages. Usually this is done when you want to open pages in a new window or a pop-up type window. The second one I consider to be a bad link, yet actually can be deciphered by the search engines. The question is, will they? Maybe, maybe not. Best not to rely on crossing your fingers and making a wish. Not unless you tossed a coin in a well, because that never fails.

The first example above simply provides no way for the search engine to know what page is supposed to be pulled, unless they dig into your JavaScript files. Again, they can, but you’re asking a lot.

Session IDs

Session IDs are a mess. To give you the gist, every user is assigned an ID number that is appended to the URL of whatever page they are visiting. Yeah, you heard that right. Every user. That means that a unique URL is created for each page for every visitor that lands on your site. Got 10K visitors this month that only visited one page? You now have 10K URLs out there that could be indexed by the search engines–all duplicate.

Told you. Mess.

Session ID’s Create Duplicate Page Farms

Just to give you a bit of a visual on what session IDs do, the image above depicts a single page linking to other pages on your site. It’s all well and good with the first session, because you only have a single URL for each of those pages. But, when you get into sessions 2 and 3 and 10,000, all the same pages are now duplicate pages. A 10 page site now has 100,000 URLs that the search engines are indexing, but most of which carry the same content over and over again.

Any time a URL is forced to change based on the visitor, you’re going to have a problem. Not only do you get some duplicate content problems, but you are essentially a duplicate content farm, pumping out more and more duplicate content with every visitor that comes to your site. Each visitor essentially devalues your site in the eyes of the search engine.

Now that we’ve explored both the problems that duplicate content creates (Part 1), and several different causes, we can move to Part III to discuss duplicate content solutions.

This mindset needs to change.

The success of a website’s online marketing efforts can make or break many businesses. It no longer makes sense to hire your SEO only after a website has been developed. That’s like doing demographic research after you have already chosen your store’s location and invested thousands of dollars in setting up shop.

Just as demographic research must be done to determine where and how a business sets up their brick and mortar store, SEO is needed before you begin to program the first piece of code or design the first graphic for your website. In reality, development and SEO are so completely intertwined that they both have to be considered together. Failure to do so frequently leads to expensive re-development costs as the SEO requests changes that could have been done during the initial development stages.

You never want to have to rebuild your foundation

I frequently get calls from business owners exploring Search Engine Optimization but want to wait until their website is fully developed and operational before they sign on with any particular SEO company. This strategy seems to make logical sense because business owners often want to make sure the site looks and performs properly before dropping money into a long term commitment to an online marketing firm. But, SEO is just as much a part of the business plan as the website development.

The website marketing plan should really be one of the driving aspects of the website development. But, unfortunately, many of the things related to marketing are typically done wrong during the site development. That’s not to say developers don’t know what they are doing, quite the opposite. Developers can be great programmers, designers, and creators. They’re just generally not great optimizers. And there is nothing wrong with that, it’s just not what they specialize in.

Rolling out a site that operates at less than it’s full performance capabilities is not only a waste of time, it’s a waste of money, even if you’re not quite ready to put the thing into high gear. It doesn’t make smart financial sense to develop a site that has to be re-developed again once you get your SEO involved. Nor does it make good sense to tie your SEO’s hands because you don’t want to invest in site development again. Ultimately, this puts you in a lose/lose situation.

Instead, you want to have a site built from the ground up that is search engine friendly and SEO ready. It’s the difference between being able to give your car a tune-up vs. having to rebuild the entire engine.

SEO before development starts you in the pole position

“Pole position” is a racing term I have adopted for my own company. It basically means to take the first position. When Nascar racers line up at the starting line, the car in the pole position is the one on the inside of the first row. This is the absolute best position to be starting from, giving you the best advantage.

Having a good SEO or SEM on board during the development stage can save countless hours, and dollars, because it starts you off in, what is essentially, the pole position–the absolute best position you can start from.

Here are just a few examples:

Database driven websites often come with their own unique set of SEO related problems. Over the years I’ve worked with a number of different CMS and never have two been exactly the same. Some are more SEO friendly than others, and some are easier to alter than others.

The basics needed for SEO is the ability to create default, dynamic title and description tags, with the ability to customize on a page by page basis as needed. Control over breadcrumbs, image alts, and editable body content that isn’t tied to a manufacturers database is a must. Being able to dictate URLs can also be a sticking point for some systems. Basically, it comes down to the ability to control and customize the environment.

Clean and lean code can improve website performance issues more than most people think. Bloated code can slow down both spidering and page download, both of which can have an impact on a site’s search engine rankings. If the developers use poor coding practices, your visitors won’t see it, but they’ll feel it as usability is diminished on top of everything else.

Quality content is just as important a part of the sales process as your “add to cart” buttons. Many sites are still not designed with content in mind, leaving SEOs to have to insert optimized content wherever they can, rather than having it be a seamless part of each page’s design.

I still hear people say that they don’t want a lot of text on the site because it distracts from the products. This is a valid concern, especially when content isn’t factored into the design process. However, content is part of the information gathering and decision making process. Without it, you lose all of your persuasive ability, and you’re just offering another product they can get anywhere else.

Not every visitor will read your content, but you need it for those that will and do. It’s up to you to satisfy each visitor’s needs and persuade them to buy your products from you, rather than from a competitor.

These are just a couple examples of how planning your SEO strategy before, or along with, your website development strategy is essential. Your website development budget should be a part of your online marketing investment, not a “development expense”.

This is an important point that I think still too few online businesses are getting. If you don’t bring your marketing team in to participate in the website design and development process, you don’t fully understand what’s at stake.

Before developing your website, choosing your design and development should be secondary to bringing your optimization and marketing team on board. The marketing team can help you interview and select the right designers that will build the site within the specifications and parameters that will be necessary for a successful marketing campaign, saving both time and money in the long run.

The clients come to us and they just want to get optimized. They want rankings. They want action, not reports. So we give them what they want, optimize their pages and get results.

Some of these clients have been with us for years. So… why now? Why, after all this time, do we need to work on the site’s IA? If they are successful and happy, why change what ain’t broke?

Well, because it IS broke and we’ve succeeded despite that. There comes a time when you realize that the foundation (or lack thereof) that you have built upon is shoddy, at best, and it’s time to go back and fix it. This often requires a drastic new approach – like remapping their entire site.

Developing an IA plan on an existing site isn’t much more than taking a bird’s-eye view of all your site pages and arranging (or rearranging) them in a more user and search engine friendly format. Easy, in theory, but not always so easy in practice, depending on the size and disarray of the site.

Ideally, the IA is done before the site even enters the design phase. This allows you to build a navigation and categorization structure that is based on how people search. Start it right, build it right, SEO it right.

But, not everybody got that memo. Too many jump right into the site development and even the SEO before taking care of the foundation. So, if that’s you… what do you do?

Well, you go back to the beginning. Fortunately, the SEO work you’ve done doesn’t necessarily have to be lost, but you will need to be willing to walk away from a bad game plan if a better one comes up. If the IA aligns with optimization work completed, fantastic. If not, then let it go, man. Just let it go.

The great thing about IA is it lets you get a fresh perspective on your site. You have some keyword data and site analytics that can help you out. You can see how visitors have been navigating your site and improve visibility of important pages that aren’t getting enough traffic.

The IA lets you go back to the basics. You don’t have to throw everything out, but be willing to move categories, pages, and navigation items. The goal is to make everything easier to find and organized in a way that will give you additional search relevance.

So, how do you do IA for an existing site? One page at a time. I’ll generally run a spider through the site and get a list of all the URLs. Then, page by page, start working your way through them. As you do, you’ll find pages that should naturally be grouped together under a particular navigational heading.

As you work your way through, headings will change, pages you thought fit in one place will suddenly look better in another place, and you’ll create new navigational elements and remove old ones.

Consider each navigational position. Not just top, side, and bottom, but also the order in which they should be placed. What goes where can be important, not only for search, but for visitors.

You’ll also want to look for similar or duplicate content pages that can be merged and/or discarded. Cleaning out the clutter is as important to IA as arranging what remains. Also be on the lookout for pages and content that may be missing. Don’t have an “About Us” page? Add one. Missing a “Site Map”? Create one.

Take your time working through the IA and double check to make sure everything is right. Once you’ve done that, all that is left is implementing the new structure, redirecting moved pages and changed URLs, and checking your analytics to see customer engagement rise!

If you’re in the market for a (quality) SEO, you’re going to find providers that go well beyond services aimed at achieving top search engine rankings. In fact, if your SEO only knows how to throw keywords you want to rank for onto your site pages, I can tell you that you’re NOT getting your money’s worth (even if you are only paying a few hundred dollars a month).

SEO, in today’s world, is much more about online marketing than it is about manipulating a site to achieve top rankings for a few keywords. Here are some key components to a well-rounded optimization campaign:

Keyword Research

Keyword research is one of the most important elements of the optimization process. While it’s not as important as the site architecture, you need to perform some initial keyword research in order to build your site architecture properly.

Spend some time to research your core terms, and then figure out how they will apply to your site. Be sure to build your site with your main keywords in mind, creating sections and pages around user search patterns.

Later, you’ll do more research and organization in order to make sure each of your pages is targeting your search audience in the best way possible.

Website Architecture

A solid architecture is the foundation for all your online marketing efforts. If your site isn’t built in a search engine friendly way, then you’re going to have trouble optimizing the site for search engines to index your data properly. You’ll also run into trouble with visitor usability.

It’s a good idea to start with some basic keyword research and information architecture (the site flow chart, if you will) to figure out how your site navigation and pages will be structured. Build this around your keyword research, while also keeping your industry and visitor expectations in mind.

Usability & Testing

You can get more sales by bringing more people to your site, or by improving the conversion rate. Bringing more people in before improving your conversion rate is like trying to fill a bucket with holes in it. Sure, if you pour fast enough, you’ll eventually be able to fill the bucket. But, if you plug the holes, you’ll fill it much faster and with a lot less waste.

In this case, instead of wasting water, you’ll be wasting money. Most companies fare far better by plugging the holes in their site to bring in those immediate sales, then worry about delivering more traffic to the site once that issue has been corrected.

Testing is an important part of this process. You can’t just make a change because it feels good. Test every change to see if it actually improves the bottom line or not. If not, change it back. If it does, keep it and move on to the next improvement.

Copywriting

A good Copywriter is essential to being sure that your content performs its conversion duties properly. Far too many people create text for the sake of text, not realizing that it is an extremely important part of convincing and converting searchers to become buyers.

If you lack good copy on a page, you just have a bunch of words and/or pretty pictures. Visitors read copy because it helps them learn about what you offer, the quality of the products or services, and what they can expect. It also tells them what to do next or provides them more ways to find needed information.

On-Page Optimization

On-page optimization is critical for optimization success, but it’s not a stand-alone process. It’s more of an oversight process. The SEO needs to have a balance between keyword targeting, usability, site architecture and more. SEOs have their hands in all of it, hopefully with the goal of creating a perfectly balanced page for both visitors and search engines.

Social Media / Links

I like Social Media over traditional link building because it is far more audience targeted. Link building is about getting a link purely for the “link juice” it provides. Social Media leverages your target audience to get links, name recognition, and branding. So instead of a link for link juice, you get a link for your audience that comes with link juice.

Using Social Media, each link gets passed around and broadcasted, which generates even more links, therefore reaching even more of your potential audience. When it comes to customer acquisition, the value is in Social Media. But, sometimes you just need a link. Either way, links are an important part of the process.

Analytics

Optimizing without analyzing is like getting all dressed up for a date, but not looking in the mirror before going out. Sure, you see people giving you a double-take as you walk by, but do you really know why?

Analytics provides you with the feedback you need to see why people are reacting they way they are. It allows you to plug more holes and open up other opportunities for success.

SEO Maintenance

SEO isn’t set-it-and-forget-it. It’s an ongoing process of optimizing, reviewing, analyzing, tweaking, and optimizing some more. There is always some new problem that can be uncovered and fixed. There are always more keywords that can be targeted. There is always something that can be improved.

SEO maintenance allows your SEO efforts not to go stale. Competitors are actively engaged in bumping you for those top spots. Inactive SEO makes that all the easier.

PPC

PPC isn’t necessary for an SEO campaign, but it can be a valuable asset. Roughly 30% of searchers click into the paid ads. That’s 30% of traffic you can be missing. Not only that, but running PPC ads with SEO efforts helps fill in gaps where the SEO is under-performing (there is always something, somewhere) and increases brand awareness where the SEO is performing strongly. This results in more traffic and higher sales.

As you can imagine, rolling all these into a single optimization campaign can be quite pricey. But, take any one of them out, and you’re missing a crucial component. Cut corners on any of them, and you’ve got half measures that may move you forward, but not necessarily as fast as you want.

This is where you have to balance budget with expectations and results. Lower your budget, and you have to lower your expectations… because you will get lower results. Increase your budget, and you can increase your expectations because that will increase results.

Leave something out, and you may get good results in one area, but it won’t necessarily translate to good results in another.

For example, even if you get rankings, but no one is converting, what’s the point? Or, you can test and make sure your pages convert well, but if you’re not driving traffic to your site, then you’re just all dressed up with nowhere to go. If you build traffic through Social Media, but the site isn’t optimized to target specific types of keyword searchers, you’ll see higher than normal bounce rates. I could go on and on…

Unfortunately, too many people look at all of these as separate entities that can be added or removed ad hoc. And while they can, they are best when working together for a common goal: your business success.

The information here has been updated to include not only the check points but also the explanations of each, so you don’t have to keep referring back to the blog posts above. I’ve also added a few points here and there, but no major overhaul or anything.

Anyway, here you go: The Best Damn Web Marketing Checklist, PDF!

What this is about: This list covers several elements regarding the architectural aspects of a website that focus on building a more search engine friendly site overall.

Why this is important: Website architecture can make or break the performance of a website in the search engines. Poor architectural implementation can create numerous stumbling blocks, if not outright roadblocks, to the search engines as they attempt to crawl your website. On the other hand, a well-implemented foundation can assist both visitors and search engines as they navigate through your website, therefore increasing your site’s overall performance.

While the search engines can’t read actual images, they can read what we say about the image. This information can be gleaned a few different ways:

• Image file name (image1234.jpg vs. mustang-gt.jpg)
• Text immediately surrounding the image
• The overall content of the page the image is on
• Image ALT attribute in the image tag

When trying to optimize images for image search, all of these can provide important indicators the search engines use to produce the best set of image results. In terms of traditional optimization and website usability, the ALT attribute plays an important role.

Site navigation can come in many different flavors. There isn’t just ONE way to do it correctly. If there were then every site would have navigation that looked exactly the same. So while navigation can vary greatly between sites and industries, there are certain navigational elements that should be implemented to ensure solid usability and effective website architecture.

I recently ran across a custom 404 page that did everything but what it should.

This screen capture doesn’t even give it justice. The best thing this has going for it is that it at least let’s you know what site you’re on. But there is nowhere to go after that. Not even the logo is hyperlinked to the home page!

So what’s missing here?

Well, the only thing you really need to do to fix this is to provide links! They sell DVDs, Cds Video Games, Books and more. Why not throw links to these categories on this page? It’ll only take a couple of seconds to give this the Amazon.com bare minimum fix. But while you’re at it, go ahead and spice it up a bit! Throw in a couple of top selling products, or show me what’s currently hot. Give me a few options to send me merrily on my way to making a purchase!

Oh, and don’t tell me to try my request again later. That does me no good, especially if the link still doesn’t work later. That would just be… pointless.

In-site link implementation can make a considerable difference in how effective your optimization campaign is. Or isn’t. While your site’s primary and secondary navigation is extremely important, you shouldn’t make that the only way for visitors to get around your website.

Back in the day, you know… the early 2000′s I loved to use relative links. Inserting relative links made websites development easy in cutting-edge programs such as Microsoft FrontPage. By using relative links you could move files around in your directory structure and FrontPage would automatically update all your link paths throughout the site, keeping them connected to the pages in their new location. No more manually updating all your internal links by hand! It was brilliant.

But now I’m not so big of a fan as relative links as I once was. I don’t have huge problems with them, but I understand the value in using absolute links rather than relative links. But perhaps I should take a step back and explain the difference between the two.

Absolute links contain the entire URL in the hyperlink.

<a href="http://www.site.com/category/page.html></a>

This link contains the full path of the destination page. Copy and past that into your browser address bar and you’ll get to the destination. When used on a page the link has no bearing on what page the visitor is on, only where they want to be taken. With absolute links, there is no mistaking the path to the destination.

Relative links show the path to the destination page using the minimal amount of information necessary, using the current page as the starting point.

<a href="page.html"></a>
<a href="../page.html"></a>
<a href="/category/page.html"></a>
<a href="../category/page.html"></a>

Above are four examples of relative links. Let’s take them one at a time.

The first link takes the user to the noted page that is in the same directory as the current page. This relative link would not work if the two pages being linked were in different folders or different directory levels.

Link from www.site.com/about.html
Link to www.site.com/page.html

The second link contains ../ which takes the user back one directory from it’s current location. For this to work the page being linked to must be back one immediate directory.

Link from www.site.com/category/page.html
Link to www.site.com/page.html

If the link pointed to a page several directories back then the relative link code would look like this: ../../page.html

Link from www.site.com/category/subcategory/page.html
Link to www.site.com/page.html

The third example above simply points to a link that is in a sub-folder which resides in the same directory of the current page. To link to such a page the name of the folder, in this case “category,” needs to be represented in the link.

Link from www.site.com/page.html
Link to www.site.com/category/page.html

Finally, in the fourth example above, the relative link takes the user back a directory, and then forward to another subfolder.

Link from www.site.com/products/page.html
Link to www.site.com/category/page.html

Most WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) HTML editors will automatically insert the correct relative link code when you insert your hyperlinks using their interface. This makes relative linking extremely convenient for the site developer.

Cautions of using relative links

While relative links can be more convenient for a variety of reasons, there are some cautions that you want to take, and some cases where relative links simply should not be used.

Scraped content: Over the years I’ve heard countless stories of a site’s content being scraped from their website and republished on another without permission. If the content that is scraped contains links, those links will often appear on the scraping site as well. If you used relative links then the scraped and republished links will essentially be broken. After all, what are the chances that the scraper site will also have a page located at /yourproducts/yourpage.html?

However, if you used absolute links, the scraped links will point people to the page you intended. Since the link contains the full link path, there really is only one destination, regardless of where on the internet that link resides.

Global include files: When using global include files for site navigation then you absolutely need to use absolute links. An include file allows you to grab content from a single page and insert it into any page on your site as if it belonged on that page. Include files are perfect for navigation because it allows you to easily edit, add or remove global navigation links on a single page but have it reflected on every other page that pulls that include file.

The reason to use absolute links in your include is because relative links will only be relevant from the location of the include file, not the actual page that displays the information. Let’s say that you keep all your include files in a folder called “includes”. Now create two relative links out:


../page.html
../category/page.html


Those links are only relative to the navigation file in the include folder. If you were linking directly from another page, those relative links should look like this:


page.html
category/page.html


While in this case the browser still might take the visitor to the correct page (if there is no folder to back up to) in other cases where the starting point is different, the links might be broken all together. The only way to prevent having these broken links and still use relative rather than absolute links is if you kept all your files in the same directory folder. That’s feasible, but usually not the most strategic thing to do.

The downside of absolute links

There is one downside to using absolute links. If you move your content or files from one location to another within your directory then it’s very possible that all links to that content will be broken. The simple solution is to perform a broken link check after making any such changes.

Checking for broken links on a regular basis is a good idea no matter what, so the downside here isn’t really significant.

Alternative link paths

While we are addressing how links are constructed I should point out a couple of other ways to create links that also have merit:

./

The single dot instead of the double dote before the slash tells the browser to go back to the root URL, much as if you had the full web address in the link. These two links are read exactly the same:

./products/page.html

http://www.site.com/products/page.html

The down side of this is, again, if content gets scraped, the non-absolute link won’t work.

< ?=$hostAddress;?>

Sites using PHP can use the above code instead of the domain name, where the domain name has already been pre-defined. This works the same as an absolute link because it inserts the URL into the link on the server side, the same way include files are inserted. The advantages to this are that if content is scraped the proper, full, URL is included. Secondly, if you ever have to change domain names (let’s hope that doesn’t have to happen), changing all your absolute links is as simple as making the change to the defined host address.

Images and 404 pages

When deciding to use absolute or relative links there are a couple of other considerations. You’ll need to decide what kind of links to use for your images. Most times it’s easiest to use relative links for them, but, again, the same issues apply in regard to include files and scraped content. Though for the latter, I’d think it’s less of a worry.

Also, when creating 404/redirect pages you will want to use absolute links for all navigation, links and images. Using relative links is sure to create broken links and images, depending on how the visitor happened to be fed this page.

So what is best for SEO?

Honestly, it doesn’t really matter. Relative links use less code so an argument can be made to go that route. But also consider that search engines are often less forgiving than a browser. Just because a relative link works fine for your visitors, there are times when the search engines won’t be able to follow it properly if the link isn’t exact.

The best solution, then, is to use absolute links. By doing so you’ll avoid all of the potential issues noted above and it is really the only absolute way to know your links will work properly.

When I talk of a site’s directory structure I refer to both the file directory and internal link structures. They are two very different things, but in reality they should often mirror each other very closely, but not always…