Posts Tagged ‘SEO’

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As a general rule bloggers tend to be really full of themselves. Just as a person needs a certain amount of ego to run for political office, you have to think pretty highly of yourself to write a blog. On the most basic level, you have to think that someone actually cares what you have to say, otherwise you’d just keep your ramblings hidden away in a Word document on your computer’s hard drive. And perhaps people do care. After all, you’re reading this blog post right now. But the danger is that as more people begin reading what one has to say on their blog, the more highly one tends to think of him or herself.

But who am I to condemn? You’re reading my blog post and making me think more highly of myself. But I’ll share. You’re welcome to get in on some of the ego action with your comments below! See? It doesn’t always have to be all about me.

But just because an over-inflated ego causes you to believe people want to hear what you have to say doesn’t mean you don’t have some valuable or important to contribute to the worldwide discourse on your given topic. As a business owner, communication is key and there is no better way to start a dialogue with your target audience than to start a blog.

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This is a continuing series of questions that you need to ask yourself before you engage in SEO strategies or services. Part I started off with Questions that need to be answered if you in-source your SEO campaigns. We specifically addressed questions regarding attempting to perform SEO yourself. Here we’ll discuss questions related to splitting the work between yourself, as the business owner, and another party, whether in-sourced or out-sourced.

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Monday I was interviewed by Jennifer Evans Laycock and Ross Dunn on Webmaster Radio. Aside from me talking over Ross quite a bit I think it all went well.

The topic of the show is SEO 101 so Jennifer and Ross asked me about my SEMMY winning article, Best Damn Webmarketing Checklist, Period. We talked a bit about things we look for first when optimizing and what might be most important in terms of architecture and usability.

You can listen to the SEO 101 Interview here.

Choosing a SEO to manage your website marketing has never been easy, but during these tough economic times it’s more important than ever to choose wisely. No one wants to be the guy at the end of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, who chose the wrong chalice. You’re site will be nothing but a shell of it’s old self with the Knights of SEO standing over you saying, “He chose… poorly.” Uh, yeah… “Information that would have been helpful yesterday!” (to mix my movie quotes.)

If you’re a small business shopping around for the right SEO to help you out, there are a lot of things you need to consider before jumping in and hiring a SEO subcontractor or firm. Even if you’re on a tighter-than-normal budget–and really, who isn’t right about now–you can’t shop for SEO simply on costs alone. That’s like buying an economy car when you really need a mini-van. You just need to find the mini-van that offers the best features at the right price.

Not all SEO providers are the same and not all sites require the same type of SEO service. All thing must be taken into proper consideration. Here are five things that are relevant to the overall pricing and success of your optimization campaign.

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This is a continuation of a series of website marketing checklists. Check out all Web Marketing Checklists in this series.

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.

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Marketing a website isn’t particularly difficult. It’s usually just a matter of knowing what to do, how to do it, and having the skills and time to get it done. With that said, marketing a website isn’t particularly easy either. There are so many factors and variables in play that at any given time that the job can be quite overwhelming. Obviously I can’t address the issue of whether or not you have the skills or time, but I can help you out with the “what to do” piece of the puzzle.

I’ve always been a lover of checklists, especially when it comes to getting things done. Especially when it comes to remembering what things need to be done! So over the last several years I’ve been putting together checklists for all kinds of things pertaining to website marketing.

Below is my master website marketing checklist covering over 400 specific items over 23 topics. These topics include things such as website development, SEO, usability, accessibility, etc. This list doesn’t cover any “how tos,” which are an essential ingredient to successful online marketing, but sometimes you need to first know what to do so you can then discover how to do it.

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Over the last two posts I discussed the importance of expert information in building a Destination Website. I also outlined seven different types of expert information that can be used in providing quality information to your audience. Building a Destination Website is all about serving your audience. It’s about finding what they are looking for in a website and providing it in excellence.

I’ve written quite extensively about website usability in the past so I won’t re-iterate everything I’ve said again, but usability is one of the key aspects in building a Destination Website.

Running SEO campaigns that don’t address usability concerns is like running radio and TV promos to drive people to a store that is unfinished. The traffic being driven may not be a total loss, but you certainly aren’t getting the full value out of each customer. Many won’t find what they are looking for, others will be frustrated trying to check out, and some may turn around the moment they walk in the door. Usability addresses those issues to ensure each customer has a good experience on your website.

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When providing SEO advice on the topic of website design, we often warn against placing important content into images. This is because search engines can’t read images like a person can. To them, an image with text is just an image. They really have no idea what the image is or if, in fact, it says anything at all. So when optimizing sites, anytime we are dealing with keyword optimized content, we want to make sure it’s standard HTML text. This includes headers, benefit lits, and even normal body copy.

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.

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• See Like An Outsider In 3 Not-So-Easy (But Worth It) Steps
• We’re Not In Search-Land Anymore, Toto
• Spank My Relevancy
• 10 Ways to Increase Your Site Crawl Rate
• Get Your SEO/M & Usability Groove On

There are a lot of little things that can junk up your code, but, for the most part, the search engines don’t really care. It doesn’t matter to them if your HTML validates or if you keep your code “clean” or not. When it comes to analyzing your pages for search engine rankings, none of that really matters a whole lot. But when it does matter, it matters a whole lot.

Here are some typical coding issues that can screw up your on-page optimization processes:

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