Website Optimization & Search Engine Optimization Tips & Services

I’ve heard so many questions over the years from people who want precise numbers and exact measurements for all the elements of SEO.  Like…

Exactly how many incoming links do I need to get on the front page? In the top 3? To be #1?
Exactly how many keywords can I focus on? Exactly how many times should my keywords appear on every page?
What is the perfect keyword density ratio? Am I spamming? Am I stuffing? I’m worried I might be stuffing!?!
Exactly how many backlinks do I need with each keyword as anchor text to get into the top 3?
Exactly how many backlinks do I need from a PR4 site to get into the top 3? What about PR5?
Exactly how many pages do I need? What is the absolute perfect site size?
Precisely how fast should my site load? What is the optimal number of seconds?
Exactly how many characters should be in my title tags? Exactly how many keywords should I use in my title tags?

Honestly, if you stopped spending your time looking for answers to these genuinely inconsequential (bordering on ridiculous) questions and started spending it on improving the quality of your backlinks and the content of your website, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.

If your entire website consists of 4 pages, hasn’t been updated since launch, and contains about ½ tsp of useful content, I’m certainly not surprised that it’s not ranking well. Are you? Search your most coveted keyword and look at the sites in the top 10. What are they doing that you’re not? Don’t look at their outgoing vs incoming link ratio, their keyword density, or their site load speed. Don’t spend an afternoon compiling a list of numbers. Yes, these elements ARE part of the algorithms search engines use to rank sites, but they are minute parts. What matters is content and links. Chances are, your competitors have a higher quality of both.

Don’t be duped into thinking SEO is a scientific or mathematical equation you can solve. There’s no right number. The answer is unique, useful content and high quality, relevant links.

In this new GoogleWebmasters clip, Matt Cutts addresses a question about creating a site map for users, or HTML sitemaps.  Are they still necessary alongside XML sitemaps?

The answer is a resounding yes.

Clearly Googlebot likes a sitemap, so don’t assume that this is an outdated concept.

An HTML sitemap is actually a faster and more efficient way to get content crawled and indexed than an XML sitemap is.  Content that is buried a dozen clicks away from the home page can go un-indexed, despite being listed on an XML sitemap.  Adding a user site map, with a link on the home page will get that content indexed fast.  Search engine bots are not perfect.  Anything you can do to help them crawl your site more efficiently is worth the time.

As Matt says, you don’t need to list every single page of your site on the user sitemap, which could be particularly daunting if your site is very large and adds new content daily.  Listing the head categories, or head and sub categories is probably enough.

Also, let’s not forget that this is a USER sitemap.  Many site visitors WILL turn to the site map if they’re looking for something specific.  Helping them use your site efficiently is just as important as helping the bots.

Do SEOs respect web design? Do web designers ignore SEO? This debate has been going on forever. It’s not particularly surprising, given that we’re always being forced to work together. But the problems develop from just that – NOT working together.

Designers work diligently to ensure their sites display and function properly in all browsers – testing and retesting for compatibility so no technical issues will prevent visitors from interacting with the website. SEO requires the same diligence, only to Google and Bing instead of Firefox and IE. Refusing to bring a site in line with search engine requirements is like dismissing a compatibility issue with a browser – only it’s the biggest, most important browser.

A web designer who’s unwilling to get up to speed on basic SEO principles can do a lot of damage. Every SEO has come across plenty of brand new web sites that appear to have been accidentally created from the entire “SEO Don’ts” list.

But, many designers have also encountered the SEO who seems determined to completely destroy a website’s aesthetic appeal and user experience in the name of improved search engine rankings. We know how frustrating it is to have us come in and demand that you add 17 paragraphs of text to your clean, minimalist design, or insist that you remove all Flash content immediately. I can absolutely see how designers may feel they are being impinged upon, or possibly disrespected by SEOs. We’re too demanding or unyielding, perhaps?

I suppose it makes sense that we would be at odds. SEO is not a creative process on the surface. If you get into it, you come to know that many sites will require more creative solutions for search marketing, and that the “feel”, concept and branding of the site need to remain intact through the optimization process. But by the same token, web design is not all about pleasing color palettes and graphics. The structure of the site is crucial for strong search results, and you can only be so “creative” with your site architecture before it becomes a problem.

If you’re about to fully redesign your existing website, or you’re preparing to launch a new one, this is the ideal time to hire an SEO firm. Bring them onboard to consult BEFORE the design is finalized, and definitely before the site is complete. Every SEO has heard “I’ll be in touch to get started as soon as our new site is live”. This timeline certainly makes sense from the client’s point of view, but realistically, it’s only creating more work, higher costs and longer wait times for everyone involved.

Of course many designers have decided to take advantage of the situation by also tacking SEO on to their service list. Which would be fine, if so many of them weren’t under the impression that SEO is all about meta tags or submitting the site to the search engines.

What search engine optimizers and website designers need to remember is that we both have the same end goal in mind for the client – a successful site. To get there we need to work together to build a structurally sound, attractive, content rich site that keeps conversion at the very top of the priority list.

Here’s a new Google Webmaster Help video from Matt Cutts.

The question being asked refers to various plugins that are available for article marketing automation.  They enable you to set up a blog that you don’t spend any time on at all – ever.  The plugin pulls and publishes articles from a specified category of an article marketing hub to the blog.  Sadly, a large percentage of the articles found on these sites are terribly written.  But that’s because they’re not actually “written”.  People take existing articles and feed them into software that uses a thesaurus-like program to swap out words, creating a “unique” version of the article.  Unfortunately they don’t work so well.  In fact, if you run the same article through a few times, you can end up with something that makes no sense at all – and if this is automated, who’s going to notice?

The article marketing sites claim to monitor quality, but that seems to be automated too – as their big concern is that there’s no keyword stuffing.  But really, article quality is not an issue here, as these automated blogs aren’t set up for actual people to read

The whole chain of content and distribution is automated.  Bots creating content for bots to impress other bots!

What’s the point?  SEO.

And we wonder why we’re not respected?  Oh boy.

So, it’s kind of amusing that Matt pretends to not know what the question is about.  Though, realistically, he’s probably just hoping to not turn anyone new on to the strategy – which I have just explained.  Sorry Matt!

His “America’s Funniest Home Videos” analogy is pretty great.  I can only hope that the potential damage of content automation he discusses is actually going to become a reality sometime soon.

Matt Cutts from Google is back with a new video post about Google’s site: query.

The site: query can be used by anyone to determine how many of a given site’s pages have been crawled and indexed by Google.  Simply type “site:domain.com” (minus the quotes) into the Google search field.  It will return a list of all of the pages Google has indexed from the domain.  Though, as Matt points out in this clip, it’s not as accurate as you might hope.

Matt says – “Site colon queries attempt to estimate how many pages are in our index”.  You wouldn’t think that a database would need to “estimate”, but apparently this one does.  Matt goes on to tell us that a site: query will only ever return “three significant digits of precision” and will always include “About”.  So, that could be About 691, or About 179,000,000, and they’re not going to make any claims about the accuracy of either one.

This isn’t fantastically useful information from an SEO perspective, but it does indicate that Google’s ability to handle million page sites in their database isn’t as flawless as you might have imagined.

What is White Hat SEO?  What is Black Hat SEO?

If you really think about it, doing ANYTHING to try and improve your search engine rankings is breaking the Google “Terms of Service”.  White hats do their best to tow Google’s line about content being the only thing that matters while optimizing their client’s websites to the best of their abilities.  They may also secure quality NON-PAID links, and assist in creating new, search engine friendly, relevant content.

Black hat SEO isn’t quite as evil and nefarious as it is portrayed by some.  Essentially, all the “black hat” methods entail is using techniques intended to exploit an area of the search engine algorithm to improve the rankings of sites they are working on.  They’ll often do things that search engines have specifically requested that site owners NOT do.  Generally, the problem with it is that when it works, it works very well – until Google catches on and foils their latest method (sometimes penalizing sites involved) and it doesn’t work any more.  Until they find their next weak spot.  Google takes the stand that black hat SEOs try to “trick” and “fool” the search engines.  Yes, if you’re Google, there is none more evil than the black hat.  They are a real thorn in Google’s side, constantly forcing them to adapt and rethink how they evaluate web sites.  But you’re not Google, so there are far, FAR worse forces than tricky SEOs at work on the internet  for you to be scared of!

The confusing part of the white hat/black hat division is that it’s assumed that those on the white hat side will be the most skilled and intelligent SEOs.  This is inaccurate.  In reality, those on the front lines of the black hat side possess a high level of knowledge about how search engines work, and put a ton of time into research and testing.  Just like white hats.  Black hats aren’t a bunch of amateurs.  To succeed in that area you need a specialized skill set.  Yes, many black hat SEO companies are simply copying methods they’ve seen used successfully, and probably don’t know exactly why they’re doing what they’re doing – which is where a lot of the problems lie.

A less skilled and knowledgeable black hat can do a lot of damage.  A less skilled and knowledgeable white hat may simply not perform.  So, hiring a black hat means you risk losing domain value and brand reputation, and hiring a white hat means your risk losing the money you’ve paid them and getting nothing in return.

The single difference between them is this: A white hat WILL NOT do anything that could potentially result in a penalty being placed on your site by a search engine.  A black hat WILL.

Why would anyone take this risk?  Results.  There are plenty of site owners willing to gamble on this.   A good black hat SEO can take a website from nowhere to front page very, very quickly.  The risk is that it may not (and probably won’t) last.  If you’re building websites of a disposable, transient nature instead of building a brand, the risks don’t seem all that risky at all.

There’s also talk of Grey Hat SEO, which apparently is what it’s called when white hats use methods they are ethically unsure of.   “Legal” techniques that are useful and productive, but that are also often used to excess by black hats.  “Grey Hat” sounds more like a personal, moral conundrum than a method of getting websites search traffic.  If you’re not an SEO, you probably don’t need to ponder that.

How do you get more free traffic to come to your website? You could write several books on all the various components that factor in to the answers to this question, but let’s answer this in 10 quick points you can think about and develop as you see fit.

1. Implement Basic SEO

To get free traffic, you want your website to rank well for appropriate keywords in the organic search results. That is what search engine optimization is, and it’s something every site owner should have a basic understanding of.

2. Get Links

Contact other site owners with content relevant to yours and ask about the possibility of them linking to your website – this will be beneficial in two ways. 1) Direct traffic from the links and 2) an increased link popularity rating at Google, which will improve your rankings and increase your free traffic.

3. Social Networking

You can use social networking platforms and social media like Twitter and Facebook to link to interesting content on your site, and engage other users. Use these platforms to chat with people you already know, and make new connections. They’re free, and if used wisely, can become a new source of traffic and links.

4. Social Bookmarking

Add links to unique and interesting content on your website to popular social bookmarking services like Digg, Delicious and StumbleUpon.

5. Create Interesting, Unique, Useful and Compelling Content

The more interesting the content of your site is, the more likely people are to visit it, link to it, or refer other people to it. Period. The more compelling your site is, the more traffic it will get. If you want free traffic, you need to put solid effort into your site’s content.

6. Free Ads

If your business is local, you can place free ads with links to your website on sites like Craigslist. Be careful with this one. Don’t post too often or within inappropriate categories, you WILL be flagged as spam.

7. Post on Forums

Find appropriate forums and get involved in the conversation, while leaving links to your site in your profile and footer.

8. Comment on Blogs

Find blogs that relate to your site and become a regular commenter, while leaving a link to your website behind.

9. Promote your site on YouTube

Upload some interesting videos and drive traffic back to your site.

10. Don’t forget to promote your website offline

Find ways to slip your URL on to people’s radar in the offline world.  T-shirts, utility poles, business cards, etc.   Be creative!

Unlike the other search engines, Google seems to be particularly great at finding content you wouldn’t think they’d be able to find – like areas of your website that have no links pointing at them at all.  It’s another Matt Cutts Webmaster Help Q&A video, and this time he covers two questions in one.

Matt goes over some basics first, stating that it is possible that there are links to this un-linked content from outside sources that you may not know about.  Because, when you run a link:example.com search you’re not seeing all the links Google has indexed.  Which, yes, seems very unlikely.  If there’s no links to your content on your own website, how would someone else know it was there to link to?  But given the volume of strange bots out there doing all sorts of strange automated things with other people’s content, it’s not that much of a stretch.

Then Matt delves into the second part of the question, covering how Googlebot sometimes deals with search fields and forms with drop down menus it finds on web pages.  Which is – to test them out and see where they go, picking a choice from the drop down at random, possibly indexing what they find.  Resourceful!

I’ll also mention another way to get Google to rapidly index content that has no links to it: Embed a YouTube video from the Google Webmaster Central Channel on one of the pages.  Googlebot will be by lickety-split to check it out!

Of course none of this information is particularly useful for basic SEO, as un-linked content isn’t going to come up in search results very often – if at all.

While creating content for a new page, think of the following questions:

What is my goal with this page?

Determine exactly what you want this page to do for you.  Is it a purely informational content?  An introduction?  Or is it a sales page.

What do I want the visitor to do?

Do you want to sell them something immediately?  Do you want them to contact you?  Do you want them to submit an email address?  Do you want them to click on to the next page?

If you don’t know precisely what you’d like the visitor to do on this page, they certainly won’t.

How can I make it easy for them to do that?

Make sure that the pages “call to action” is clear and obvious.  The “buy now” button, the contact form,  the link, or whatever it is should right there in front of them.

—

Then, take a look at it from the visitors perspective…

—

Why is the visitor here?

Determine what kind of visitor you would ideally have landing on this page.  Are they looking to purchase a product you’re selling?  Looking to engage your services?  Are they trying to answer a question or find some information?  Those are very different visitors – so make sure you keep the right one in mind when developing content for each particular page of your website.

What does the visitor want from this page?

If they’ve arrived looking for a particular product, make sure that product is exactly where they land.  Don’t require them to run a search of your site to find it.

If it’s information the visitor is looking for, make sure it’s what they find, and entice them to stick around for a while with targeted links to related content on your site.

What would compel them to follow your “call to action”?

Once again, make it easy for them to do it.

If they are visiting to make a purchase, make this easy.  Put the “buy” button right there.  Don’t place an obstacle like registration in the way.  Don’t require them to fill out a quick survey before confirming their order

If they want to get in touch with you, make this easy.  Put the contact form or contact information right there.

Accidentally preventing search engines from crawling and indexing your website’s pages is not going to help your presence in the organic search results.  If it seems like the engines aren’t indexing your content, it could be one or more of the following.

1. The content requires a login or registration

If visitors can’t get to areas of your website without logging in or creating an account, neither can the search engine bots.

2. No Text

If your page is almost entirely images, graphics, and videos – there is no text for the search engines to use in determining what a page is about.  You can help this along by using alt text for your images and using descriptive file names (like “eiffel-tower-sunset-paris.jpg”).  If you want the page to come up in search results, some text should be on it.

3. Different versions of pages being served at the same URL

If you’re serving different pages to different users arriving at the same URL, based on their location or some other variable, the search engine bot is only going to crawl and index one version.

4. Incorrectly configured redirects

Have you moved some of your content, or moved your entire site to a new domain, and implemented redirects?  If it’s been a while, and the search engines don’t appear to be indexing the new pages, these might be the culprit.  Ensure that they are 301 redirects (not 302s) and ensure that they are set up properly for every page involved.

5. The content is Flash or Silverlight

While search engines can now actually crawl and index some Flash, it’s still risky.  If you really want this content crawled, it might not be the best way to present it.

6. They can’t get to the content because of Ajax or JavaScript

Search engines only have trouble with javascript when it is poorly implemented.  If your site is using a lot of it and you’re having indexing problems, it may not be as accessible as it could be.