Top 12 SEO Tips for 2008

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1.Get your page titles 100% optimised for search. Page titles are the single best element of overall on-site optimisation that you can control, and one of the top things that a search engine, with its almighty power, uses to decide the destiny of the page. Will it rank your page or send it to the depths of the supplemental results where a bloodhound would find it difficult to sniff out?

Theories vary on how best to format the title for 100% optimisation. Long tail titles, key word stuffing, commas, density, bars and dashes have been tested and debated for many years.

I have found the best performance using the following method; First, I sit down and pick my top keyword, then I run it through one of many keyword tools out there that will show me the number of queries, demographic and geographic data, annual search trends, competition stats and so on. I take these results and start classifying them by this information to establish the pages that I will build. I continue to do this until I get down to 4 or even 5-word phrases.

From here I'll start to diagram the navigation of the new section using themed-based threads from the top to the bottom. In some cases I also use buffer words to control keyword weighting. So if I had a "blue widgets" page the next might be "Find Blue Widgets" and below that "Find Blue Widgets in Akron" and maybe even one more "Where Can I find Blue Widgets in Akron Ohio?" if it's been searched to some degree.

This is called going after the longtail and some friends of mine over at a company called HitTail made a cool little tool that I put on all my clients’ websites. It gives you real time results for the keywords that people are typing to find your site, as well as the search engine they are using.

Traditional logfile analysis can be expensive and difficult for the inexperienced and many times if you have a site getting 10,000 unique visitors a day or even a week you lose many of the prime longtail key word strings in the piles of data. It’s also a good way to monitor related buzz on your product/service/offering. It is perfectly okay to have the following title: Buy Widgets | Blue Widgets in Akron. I try not to stuff the title tags at all, but I always make sure I use it twice and I don't duplicate the page titles. Then when you are building content in the next steps you will have unique but relevant text to use in the link.

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2. Optimise your content

There are many on-page elements that can enhance the way the search engines rank your website. Assuming you have completed #1 above, the next step is to optimise the content based on the title that you have used for the page. In some cases where dynamic insertion is used, or an application like Wordpress is installed, you can optimise the way these elements are pulled into the on and off-page fields such as alt tags for images. If you don't use anything like this or you wrote it with Dreamweaver, there are other plugins and ways to make this process less painful, but I assure you it's worth the TLC. Here is a general list of the on-page and off-page SEO elements that I concentrate on;

In the URL - they become highlighted in results and increase click through rate.

In meta keywords (2-3 max.) - doesn't hurt to use so why not.

In the first and last sentence of the body content, and in bold as well.

In several places throughout the content but in a different form(I.e. plural )

In header tags. If it makes sense using h1, h2, h3 and then h4 in the hierarchy of a page then use them.

In alt tags for the images.

In the title tags for the images.

In html comment tags.

In meta description - see #5 for more more details

In an external link on the page - see #4 for more details

In a variation of the key word (i.e. plural) pointed to another internal relevant page (I.e. Concert Tickets page with Concert Tickets in Akron as the linking text linked to a page optimised for concert tickets in Akron)

Generally speaking I like to try and keep the pages with at least 250 words of relevant and themed content. This is a very important element to invest your time in because search engine robots parse, or remember your template if its static, which most are. Any optimisation that you have within the template won't have a significant factor on the SERP's (Search Engine Ranking Positions)so optimising your content is the best way to make sure your pages are not dropped into what in essence is the dreaded "sandbox" or supplemental results on Google.

It's also worth mentioning that even if you have an existing site, there are still many different bolt-ons you may find useful. Add a community section, a "widget" news area, or anything similar you can drop these new pages into.

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Hot Tip#1 - Do a search for the name of your website and copy the URL string and use it as the link for your logo. It is a popular belief that the number of searches for your brand and the number of end-users that navigate through to your website influences Google results, and I have to believe that it is a ranking factor that all the search engines use. I can't say exactly how much, but I think long-term this is a good strategy and have seen it work with no reduction in any of my traffic stats other than reducing the bounce rates throughout.

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3. Optimise internal linking

Internal link structure is a lot about getting the end-user to the conversion point. It can also be used for search engine optimisation in several ways. If you are using a content management system (CMS) that has a keyword tagging feature you can have it search for keywords within the content and link to other pages. This will increase conversions and increase the time the end-user spends on your website. Robots also like internal links within content that point to other, unique relevant content and they follow these links. Wordpress and other applications like VBulletin with the SEO upgrade can also accomplish this.

This is where the use of a "nofollow" attribute comes in handy. According to Wikipedia, the nofollow was intended to reduce the effectiveness of certain types of search engine spam, thereby improving the quality of search engine results and preventing spamdexing from occurring in the first place. Matt Cutts of Google and Jason Shellen from Blogger created it around 2005.

What it does is tell the search engines that you do not endorse the page you have linked to. Using this on internal links like your About, Contact or other pages will increase the "linkjuice" that is passed on to the important pages. A good example of this is if your template navigation is always the same; add nofollow attributes to all of the links beyond the front page so that the key word links I talk about in #1 and #2 that you place in your content will get all of the benefit of the "linkjuice".

Just be sure not to confuse the search engines by using the same keyword anchor text as the key word you are optimising the page for (don't link "buy blue widgets" in anchor text on your "buy blue widgets" page and link out to the "blue widgets" page.

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Hot Tip#2 - Another great way to use this tip is when you are creating new pages based on the keyword selection I mentioned above, you can link to them from the front page or an internal doorway page built for 'closer-to-the-root-file' navigation. Put nofollows on everything except your anchor text that points to these new pages. If your homepage carries a good Page Rank (PR) it will pass it down to the new page and will give you a boost in the SERP's. The goal is that you want to find a niche or longtail keyword phrase, build an optimised page for it, add a link to it from a well ranking page and suddenly your ranking at the top for the term.

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5. Write your meta descriptions

Meta descriptions are part of the off-page code you find when you go to a page and look at your source code - usually near the top you'll see '<META NAME="Description" CONTENT='. This is another element the search engines look at to determine the theme of the site. More importantly they almost all use it to describe the page in your search results. So if you are searching for 'blue widget', the results you will get have that keyword in bold. This will make it stand out more and increase conversions. It will also bold the partial word (I.e. buy blue widgets in Akron) in the title and the URL as well.

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6. Check your internal canonicalisation

Websites can have more than one URL. (e.g. http://www.bluewidgets.com and http://www.bluewidgets.co.uk). If you have been around for a while and people are linking to you they could be linking to either URL. By designating a primary it gets 100% of the above benefits. Go to Google's Webmaster Central and in the tools section designate one as your primary. Do a 301 redirect on the non-primary page to pass on any backlink juice, PR and authority that the page has to the primary page. Internal navigation needs to be checked to be sure all links go to the correct version as well. Bad navigation is common, especially with websites constantly being populated or worked on by many individuals. Pick one and use it throughout.

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7. Finding What Terms Are Converting Into Sales/Tracking Keywords to Conversion With Weighting

Having 100,000 unique visitors a day really doesn't matter in the end if you aren't getting any conversions (new members, info requests, sales).

Measuring successes and failures for landing pages, on-page content like CTA's, and especially ‘keyword to sale’ are some of the most important pieces of information that you can gather and use to improve and optimise your website.

Here are two scenarios to better illustrate this point;

Paid Advertising – A car insurance company starts a paid advertising campaign on Google and after a week or so they see that the name of their company or their 'brand' seems to be converting the majority of their sales. Because of this discovery, they target the majority of their budget on their brand terms like ABC Insurance and ABC Insurance Company.

A week later they see that their CPA (cost per acquisition) has sky-rocketed almost two-fold and can't figure out why this is. When they look at Google analytics and other third-party tracking software, they both say the same thing.
So why is this?

Let's take a look at the buying process (also called funnel tracking) to see where they went wrong; Mrs.INeedInsurance hopped online while enjoying her morning java to look for insurance because last night when Mr.INeedInsurance opened his renewal notice he got a significant premium hike.

At dinner they decided to start shopping around for insurance. Mrs.INeedInsurance searched 'car insurance' between 6-8am that day, going in and out of different companies websites, learning what she was up against…tens of 1000's of results. So at work (11am-2pm is the #1 time people shop online – not necessarily making purchases) Mrs.INeedInsurance has learned a bit about search and decides to add her city in the query. This time she searches 'car insurance London', and still gets several thousand results, but at least they are localised, and there are a few that she recognizes from this morning so she goes in and fills a few of the forms out to get quotes.

Throughout the rest of the day she gets the quotes either immediately from the website or via email. Now she's getting somewhere. Jump forward to after dinner that evening. Mr.INeedInsurance looks through the notes his wife brought home and decides that ABC Insurance offers the best deal for the money, then goes to Google and searches for ABC Insurance and makes the purchase.

See what happened here? I use this as an example because this is exactly what I identified for a client a few years back that inevitably led to changes that doubled their conversions.

The problem is that all the data pointed to ABC Insurance's brand name as being the top converting term, so that's where they concentrated the bulk of their budget. In actuality, 'car insurance' and then 'car insurance London' were the terms that actually led up to the sale.

The reason that this is important for PPC campaigns, or any paid advertising, is that many will allow you to do keyword weighting. This is where you increase your bids or decrease your bids by a percentage according to day parting. Day parting is turning your ads up or down according to the time table that you put in place.

In this instance I would turn my bids up to 125% on 'car insurance' and 'car insurance London' in the morning and afternoon, then down at night. On 'ABC Insurance' I would turn the bids down in the morning to 50%, and then back up to 125% in the evening.

Keyword weighting also allows you to weight your keywords and track them to conversion. It places a cookie on the end-users computer to track what keyword brought them to the sight, what keyword resulted in a quote, and what keyword resulted in a sale.

This is beneficial because I can further adjust my bidding strategies according to demographics and geographical metrics.

With these cookies I can also successfully measure and establish LTV (Lifetime Values) of the average customer. This allows me to adjust the conversion value, which allows me to go back to my company/client and potentially get a higher advertising budget.

Using this same insurance company as an example; initially they gave me a conversion value of $25. Now, since we were able to identify other sales made by this customer, the conversion value is $40.

Offline this company spends 100,000 on advertising through different venues, acquiring customers at a cost average of £/$56. Guess what happened the next month? They increased the budget by 100,000.

Organic Advertising – Same scenario as above, except ABC Insurance Company identifies through log files or Google Analytics that his top converting keyword is ‘car insurance’.

In light of this, the decision maker decides to create a landing page that is fully optimised so that the relevancy grade that all 3 search engines use will increase their organic positions, which it will.

The problem here is that the term that was actually bringing them to the website to buy was 'cheap car insurance'. If they had identified this they could have built the page around the term, 'cheap car insurance' rather than just 'car insurance'. This would have served double-duty and acted as a great landing page for both keyword phrases.

This is why tracking your keywords to conversion is so important. It can save thousands on paid advertising and identify the actual keyword phrases that need separate pages built around them to improve organic rankings.

If you are experiencing a high bounce rate or what you feel is high cart abandonment, you might be surprised to find that many didn't buy elsewhere; they actually came back to you and bought. This is also helpful in refining your stats. Rather than show this customer as 3 separate visitors, it identifies (through the cookies) that they were actually just one visitor, and the bounce rate or cart abandonment is significantly reduced. This information can be invaluable as well.

For instance, maybe I was getting high unique cart abandonment from unique users that was significantly higher once they went to checkout. I know that happens when I add shipping costs into the total. So I might try to do some A/B testing with and without shipping costs listed separately, added into the price initially and adding it during checkout and see which converts better. Or I may set the website up to recognize the cookie and create a drop down that offers free shipping today with any purchase over $/£XX.XX.

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8. Bump Your Competitors Multiple Listings Out of Google and Pick up a Position or Two

Every wondered why during a search you find a competitor that has two pages listed above you? I call them kicker listings. The home page is always the second listing, and the first is an internal page that actually has relevant content.

Here is why this happens. When you submit a query Google looks at its rank and if they are close to each other in their results, they group them together. If you are showing up in the SERP's first couple pages then it is most likely that you are listed again much deeper in the results. But when two pages are close, like top ten, or top 20, then Google shows them side-by-side. The second, usually the index page, will be listed below and also indented.

By going into 'advanced search' the number of default results can be changed, or you can add a bit of code to the end of the url string that is shown after a search for your keyword. The results will thus be more refined. Add this 'num=8&' to the end of the url. This number may change the results, if not reduce the number. This will show you where your competitor's second page should actually be.

Okay, so now you should go back to the original search that showed the double listing. Within the search results look where your competitor is showing up, then look below his listings for a non-competitor. It could be anything, a video, a news story or a Wikipedia or eBay listing. Use the guide in Tip #11 to do some social bookmarking, or even link to the page from your website (preferably on a second level subdirectory).

What this will do is add a little boost to the non-competitive website and bump the 'kicker' listing that your competitor has, back to where he belongs, below your listing.

This is surprisingly easy and quick using a combination of bookmarks and back links. It may even boost your trust rating with Google by having an outbound link to a high ranking website.

Using this method on EBay listing works well too because the listing will drop once the auction is over, therefor gaining you another spot (albeit temporarily until the next auction)

[newbiz]

9. Avoid common penalties

HTML Validation/W3C - may cause crawl issues with the spiders. If they can't get past the error then the pages beyond it may not get crawled, and therefore they won't get indexed. There are free W3C compliance tools on the web.

302 redirects - Black Hatters use these for a variety of unintended reasons and you may end up getting a penalty if you keep one in place over time. Do a site crawl with Xenu and verify that any 302 (temporary) redirects are identified and changed to redirects

Duplication - As mentioned in point #6, be sure you only have one primary URL, but if you already have more than one in the search engines, be sure to do a page strength comparison (You can use Firefox browser with the SEOQuake extension for this) and use a 301 with nofollows everywhere to pass on the maximum amount of linkjuice.

Some websites, especially older websites may have several versions of the same page, and some search engines may have cached versions of both pages as well. You may have a .com, a .com/index and a .com/index.asp all in your root and wide open to be crawled.

If these are duplicates I believe that all of the pages will suffer a penalty to some extent so do a 301 redirect to pass on any backlinks, PR and authority that the page has to one primary page. Internal navigation needs to be checked to be sure all links go to the correct version as well. Especially with websites constantly being populated or worked on by many individuals, bad navigation is common. Pick one and use it throughout.
The other problem with onsite duplication is many sites are using product feeds to populate their stores. Others may populate their content with an RSS feeds. The problem with these and other dynamic websites is that other websites may be using the same content. If this is the case you run the risk of being penalised for duplicate content. Use Copyscape to search for other duplicate content on the web. If you are not ranking well for the term/terms you'll need to change the content on the page, especially if you are not the originator of the content.

XML Sitemaps and Robots.txt
Universal XML Sitemaps - Providing an XML sitemap is one of the easiest things you can do to help search engines traverse your site. Google, Yahoo and MSN have all adopted this "standardized" tool.

Having a sitemap and then submitting it through WEBMASTER Central will tell you not only when the crawl (usually 1-2 days) is complete, but also if there are any errors that the bots found.
Robots.txt file - By defining rules in this file, you can instruct robots to not crawl and index certain files and directories within your site, or at all. For example, you may not want Google to crawl the /images directory of your site, as it's both meaningless to you and a waste of your site's bandwidth.

Spiderability
There are many tools available (Google's Webmaster Central for one) that will crawl your site and identify any problems. This like javascript, java applets, and flash navigation all create spiderability issues, as well as many others. Be sure to check these.