What I’ve Learned About SEO
Dec
So I’m ready to dust this bad boy off again. When I last wrote I was in my 7th week of a 12 week SEO internship. At the last day of the internship, my SEO mentor tells me he has bad news… “You have to come back to work on Monday.”
My internship had been extended for an additional three months, and I was given two sites to work on. Each of the sites had an in-depth SEO audit from early 2008. I was let loose on the situation, and worked with the sites’ manager and developers to optimize them. I couldn’t have asked for a better circumstance to work under. I was able to work autonomously with tons of support from the people around the office, whether they were directly involved with the project or not.
My internship ends again at the end of the year, and I’m pretty sure they’re serious this time. I learned a lot in that beginning SEO incubator, and I’d like to share some of it now.
Relevant, optimized content
When developing quality SEO content, you begin by discovering relevant keywords. Tools like the Google AdWords Keyword Tool or the Wordtracker Free Keyword Suggestion Tool are great. They can be even better when used together, as they offer different results. There are plenty of other free and paid keyword research tools as well. Using these tools together you can compile a excellent spreadsheet full of great terms to optimize your site for. You may want to take this list and separate it into groups. This will help you as you begin to plan the content structure of your site.
Break your content into many pages. Use the keywords you have gathered to nail down your primary web site structure including descriptive page titles, descriptions header tags and text anchors. As you do this, bear in mind that this will not be the final draft. You will continuously analyze and and modify these elements throughout the life of your site. Pay close attention to how you are doing this step, as it will begin to position your site to attract visitors from search engines, and encourage them to return.
You should now have an idea of what content you should be developing. You’ve already set your primary SEO keywords, so now you can choose what secondary keywords you will be using on each page. One important thing to consider at this point is this:
- Spreading out your content is good for SEO
If you have a multitude of relevant terms or information on one topic, don’t be afraid to create more pages. This will allow you to use fewer target words per page, thus concentrating your keyword density. This will make it easier for your readers to find the information they are looking for while allowing you to gain more specific keyword ranking within search engines.
When you are ready to draft the actual copy, there are a lot of factors to keep in mind. Think about your objective and which terms you wish to rank for. For instance, a personal injury lawyer may decide to focus a campaign based on helping on the job accident victims. Your content could include the keywords construction accident, workers compensation or workplace injuries. Include these phrases throughout your new page’s content and H1 / H2 tags such as “Construction Accident Lawyers,” “Worker’s Compensation Law,” and “Common Workplace Injuries.”
It is also very important to to continue to add fresh content. Keep up with news and events surrounding your industry and you will never run out of possible topics. Always look for sources of new content topics and new keyword targets to increase traffic to your web site.
Quality web site markup
The way your site is built has a significant impact on bringing in search engine traffic, and helps you to keep your visitors around longer. Using web standards when you write your markup and site architecture, and content integration can help bring in boatloads of traffic and help your users find exactly what they’re looking for when they arrive.
The appropriate use of web standards can significantly reduce development and maintenance time. One external CSS file can control the look of your entire site, eliminate the need for redundant HTML like <font> tags and allow you to make global style updates by changing just a few lines of code. Following web standards can also help to avoid the SEO mistake of duplicate content. For example, one XHTML file can employ separate style sheets for screen, print or mobile devices, removing the need for more than one document.
Separating formatting, structure and behavior will speed up the loading time of your web site. all of the CSS or JavaScript used in your site is downloaded only once when your user downloads the page that includes them. Search engines will have an easier time crawling your site when they can avoid things like missing close tags, complex nested tables and invalid code.
There are a few essential tags that should be used on every optimized page.
- <title> could be the most important place to place your primary keywords. Create titles using natural language, and avoid making them any longer than 60 characters.
- <strong> and <em> help search engines determine the hierarchical importance of a keyword, as in this example:
The more credible sites that <em>link</em> to your site, the better your <strong>search engine results</strong> will be. - <alt> Alternative or “alt” text is placed within an image’s XHTML to replace an image if it can not be rendered. Use keywords to describe what is shown in the image.
- Anchor text is the word or phrase a user clicks on in a link. Give your links’ anchor text some good, descriptive keywords.
Smart links for good SEO
Building quality links to your web site is just as important as anything mentioned so far. Some would argue that it is the most effective single method of SEO that you can do. There are many ways to build inbound links for SEO. I will not go through specific methods of link building, however there are some guidelines that you want to be cognitive of as you execute your link building campaign.
Link directories, press releases and interlinking are all great, tried and true ways to get links to your site. These methods are not always the most effective however. If you really want to get the most out of your linking efforts, networking is where you want to work. Rather than sending “let’s trade links” emails, it is important to use the relationships that you have built and initiate dialogue that will keep links pouring in. Your role in your professional community can be an unlimited source of inbound links.
When discovering good link building opportunities, the only limitation is your own creativity. Your brand is your company’s image, and if you value your brand you should already be sold on the value of things like press releases for new products or services. We are in an environment of webmasters, bloggers and online business people who all would love nothing less than getting inbound links from our neighbors. Since being a member of a community is about giving back, why not create a links page on your own site to offer reciprocal links?
Analytics
Now you have an optimized web site with content fit for a king, and all the inbound links you can dig up. What do we do with all this traffic? Analytics gives you a all the information you need in order to determine how well (or poorly) your SEO effort is doing.
Google Analytics has nearly everything you need to break down your success however there are tons of tools, both free and premium, that can supplement Google’s powerful analytics tool. Analytics will tell you things like what keywords searchers are currently using to find your site. A page can be optimized for one group of keywords, and still be bringing you traffic from others. By looking at these additional related long-tail keywords you can get a picture of how people are finding you. You could use these additional keywords to create new content pages and potentially increase your total traffic overall.
You want to develop regular, monthly reports based on the three major search engines – Google, Bing and Yahoo. Track your progress over time using services like WebPosition or my favorite premium internet marketing toolkits from seomoz and Raven Tools.
In conclusion
One of the biggest SEO mistakes that you can make is overestimating your efforts. SEO is a journey, and never a destination. As you explore beginning SEO methods and strategies you will notice that these methods often compliment one another. You will find that your web site is ranking for terms that you never intended. You may discover that you are being linked to from somewhere that you never expected.
All of these things I learned within the 5 short months I spent as an SEO intern. I’ve learned that by content development, link love, adhering to web standards, understanding analytics and keeping a firm finger on search technology and SEO industry buzz you can create success for your web site, and the sites of your clients.
