Step Wise SEO

The Google Sitemap is a specially formatted “map” made just for Google’s search engine spider to use as its very own key to navigating your site.

Google Sitemaps is especially helpful if Google has a hard time indexing your site; for example, if your site has a very large number of pages or dynamically generated pages. Here are the basics:

• You’ll first need to create a specially formatted file-a Sitemap-using Google’s Sitemap generator tool.

Google’s help page at www.google.com/webmasters/ sitemaps/docs/en/faq.html has the scoop on how to generate a Sitemap and where you need to put it on your site.

However you create it, the resulting Sitemap document contains the list of URLs that you want Google to crawl and, if you wish, additional data such as how often the page is updated and how important each page is to you.

• To get Google to notice the Sitemap, you must sign up for a Google Sitemaps account and perform a few steps so that Google can identify and validate your file. With all this squared away, you’re in business.

• Using your Google Sitemaps account, you can review basic data about your URLs, including whether they were indexed, which (if any) errors they returned, and what search terms your visitors used to find them.

You can even view PageRank summaries of your site’s pages and get your hands on some other cool tools: page analysis, robots.txt info, and more.

This data is not the same as Google Analytics (which is much more detailed and customizable), but it’s great for finding red flags.

Google Sitemaps, essentially, allows two-way communication between you and Google, which is a relatively new and wonderful thing.

Using Google Sitemaps won’t help you rank higher or increase your PageRank, and it doesn’t guarantee that your pages will be indexed. But it can certainly give your deep or dynamic pages a fighting chance!

You can sign up for your Google Sitemaps account here: www.google.com/ web masters/site maps/site overview.

What’s Your Problem?
In this article, we’ll give you a chance to tie up loose ends and chase down any remaining trouble spots in your search engine presence:

New Site, New Problems
Copywriting to Improve Your Search Results Snippets
Catch Up with Your Team
Fun Tools for Site Assessment

New Site, New Problems
It happens all the time, for big reasons or little ones, and it’s one of the greatest challenges to an SEO campaign: a website redesign in which all or most of the URLs on the site change.

All of a sudden, every inbound link to your site is outdated. Bookmarks lead to broken links. Traffic plummets.

Your search engine ranks drop off the map! And these problems can linger long after the revamp.

If your site was recently redesigned, or you’re still working through repercussions from a long-ago revamp, or even if you’re planning your site’s next incarnation, here are some ideas for handling the sticky situations that crop up:

Page Redirects Do all your outdated pages redirect to appropriate new ones? Don’t just redirect them to the home page.

Ideally, each old page would redirect to a new page with similar subject matter. If this is not the case with your site, your task for today is to create a list of old URLs that are still getting traffic and the new URLs that they should be redirecting to.

Then send it to your IT team member, who can help set things right using a server setting called a 301 redirect.

File Not Found Page Do you have a kinder, gentler File Not Found (404 error) page? The page should, first and foremost, apologize to your patient readers for not being the page they’re looking for. Next, it should help them find the page they’re looking for!

This could be by providing a site map, search box, or suggested links. If your File Not Found page is not helpful, your task is to propose new traffic-friendly content for the page and either implement it or deliver it to the person who can do so.

Inbound Links Do you still have a multitude of links pointing to your old pages? If so, your task is to sweep the Web for links to your old URLs and request updates.

Internal Links Did you clean up your old navigation? You’ll never know until you check. Run a link validator, a program that checks your website for broken links internally.

Before you think about a site redo just to “keep things fresh,” take stock of whether you’re satisfied with your rankings, whether you have a good number of inbound links, and most important, whether your site satisfies the overall goals of your organization.

Prevent Link Rot
Next time you redesign your site, use URLs that you won’t need to change-ever. Put some serious thought into file-naming conventions that will grow and expand with your website. Here are some rules of thumb:

• Don’t name files with words like new, old, draft, current, latest, or any other status markers in the filename.

This status will surely change as “new” files become “old” and “draft” files become “final.”

• Name nested folders by year, and possibly month, for press releases or other dated materials (for example, http://www.yoururl.com/press/2005/august/newproduct.html).

Try to put files in their final location as soon as they are launched rather than starting them out in the “current” folder and moving them later.

• Leave out any information that may change in the future. For example, you don’t want to include the name of a current copywriter in the filename.

This URL will feel outdated and awkward three years from now when that individual no longer works at the company.

Names of servers, the city where you’re headquartered, or any other contemporary information should also be left off of filenames.

Follow these guidelines, and your search engine presence may survive the next site redesign without a hitch!

Copywriting to Improve Your Search Results Snippets
Searchers choose which result to click in a matter of seconds. Of course you want your site to have the best possible representation in the search results-and that means you need a snippet that’s on your side!

Why does one snippet look deliciously clickable while the other looks more like a Dadaist poem? Stay tuned:

• How snippets work
• Check your snippets
• Your snippet makeover

How Snippets Work
A snippet is text taken from a web page and shown when that page is listed in the search results.

All four of the major search engines currently use snippets for many (but not all) search results.

The most important thing to understand about search result snippets is that they are different depending on what keyword has been searched.

A search for your company name will return a much different snippet than a search for another of your target keywords will, even if both results point to your home page!

The specifics of how snippets are chosen vary for each search engine, but here are the basic rules:

• In general, the search engine finds, the first instance of the searched keyphrase in the visible text on the page and displays it along with roughly 50 to 150 characters of surrounding text.

• The snippet often excludes titles and navigational elements.

• If the landing page doesn’t include the exact phrase searched, the snippet will show sentences that include the various words in the phrase.

• Searched terms will be bolded in the snippet, while stemmed and plural versions of the words may or may not be bolded as well.

Check Your Snippets
The first step toward optimizing your snippets is reviewing them! To check your snippets, simply open the search engine of your choice and search for your target keywords. Scroll to your search result and see what you find.

Review your snippets for each of your target keywords on the four major search engines. Make a note of any that you wish to improve in your Task Journal.

If your website is not ranking in the top 30 for a target keyword, you can skip the snippet improvement for now.

There may be other keywords you want to check as well. If you know phrases outside of your top-priority terms that are bringing traffic to your website, take a look and see if those snippets could use a makeover too.

Your Snippet Makeover
If you came across some snippets that you would like to improve, here are some possible approaches:

Add text. Sometimes, improving a snippet is as simple as adding one keyword-rich introductory sentence to the beginning of your page copy.

Be sure that it is formatted the same as the rest of the page copy-titles and headers may not show up in snippets. And use your good copywriting skills so it doesn’t seem jarring or “tacked on.”

Remove ALT tags. One of the less-appealing items in many snippets is repetitive image ALT tags.

A graphic button displaying the words Free Delivery in February! should have an ALT tag containing matching text.

But a tiny graphic that is used to create a corner on a button does not need an ALT tag stating “white button corner.”

Change your error messages. Search engine robots come calling at your website without any of the plug-ins, cookies, or JavaScript enabling that your site may require. If you’re not careful, your search engine snippet might end up looking like this.

We’ve already shown you the best ways to avoid this kind of listing: be a stickler for good robot-readable content.

But if you still have the odd error message making its way into the search results, remember that these messages are usually written by programmers without a marketing once-over. You might want to get in the loop!

Restructure the page. If your page is built using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), it may be a simple endeavor to move scripts around in the source code so that navigation or other less-optimized content is situated below the page copy.

This won’t make any difference to your users viewing the page in the browser, but to search engines it will make your page copy come first. This may be a good strategy if your snippets are getting bogged down in navigation text.

This is one of those rare opportunities for you to see rather sudden and dramatic changes in your listing quality.

You may even notice the difference in just a few days, the next time your pages are spidered.

Catch Up with Your Team
Are you all working together like a well-oiled machine? Or is your “team” more like a collection of squeaky wheels, revolving doors, and bottlenecks? Here are some good questions that may help you keep everyone on the same path:

Are my edits getting implemented? This is a biggie for many in-house SEOs: just getting simple (or not-so-simple) edit, made to the website may require jumping through design, IT, and even legal hoops.

If your recommended edits aren’t being taken care of, take time today and figure out why. Are you sending your requests to people who don’t have authority or access to make the changes?

Are your requests playing second fiddle to another department with more “pull”? Or, did enthusiasm wane after the first round of edits didn’t turn out the hoped-for quick results? Get the inside scoop on the holdup so you can take steps to flush it out!

Is anybody reading my reports? Are your monthly reports collecting virtual dust in your colleagues’ e-mail inboxes?

Are your action items chronically not checked-off? You may want to consider making some changes to your reports to gain a better audience.

Is SEO integrated into our processes? For Your SEO Plan to succeed, it needs to be part of the web development process.

That means an SEO review before, during, or (worst case) after changes are made to the website.

It also means integration of SEO considerations into the website style guide, if your organization has one.

If you’re feeling like an outsider, or if you think SEO is being given short shrift, you need to work on ways to integrate SEO into company processes.

This means you may have to take on the role of SEO evangelist: Write up the first draft of an SEO style guide and deliver it to your developers. Ask to be included in copywriting or design meetings.

If you don’t overdo it, you can even send articles or SEO tips to a team member who might benefit from this information.

How’s that conversion tracking going? If your system requires participation by members of your team (for example, you need Sales to track calls from a special 800 number), revisit it today and see if it’s working. Are you getting the information you need? If not, what needs to change?

Fun Tools for Site Assessment
Here, we’ll share a few more of our favorites! Every one of these can help your search engine visibility; read through the descriptions and spend your hour exploring the ones that interest you the most:

Link Validator There are many free tools online to check your website for broken links on a page-by-page basis. (For example, LinkScan/QuickCheck at www.elsop.com/quick/ and several spider emulators do this.)

However, it’s much more useful to run link validators sitewide. One site that offers a deeper crawl is www.dead-links.com.

Slow Page Load Checker Your site visitors and prospective customers aren’t the only ones who grow weary of slow-loading pages.

Spiders may also give up and walk away. A good online tool for checking page load time can be found at www.websiteoptimization.com/ services/analyze.

Another tool that checks load time along with spelling and several other HTML code factors can be found at www.netmechanic.com/toolbox/html-code.htm.

Link Popularity Comparison Use the tool at www.marketleap.com/publinkpop/ to compare your website’s link popularity with that of your competitors.

Keyword Density Tools www.live-keyword-analysis.com offers a quick and easy way to check keyword density in any text you choose.

Your Own Browser Here’s a tool we know you already have: a browser. You can also use your browser as a makeshift spider emulator.

Here’s how: Select Preferences from your browser menu. Then, figure out how to turn off image display and disable JavaScript.

You can choose to reject all cookies while you’re at it. Your browser is now a speed machine and a crude approximation of a search engine robot.

Accessibility Check One of the fringe benefits of Your SEO Plan is that it will improve your website’s accessibility for the disabled.

By the same token, a more accessible website will tend to be more robot friendly as well. Many SEO practices not only make it more efficient for search engines to crawl a website and index the content but can also improve the disabled user’s experience by providing easy-to-navigate links and machine-readable page text.

Tools are available to check your page with everything from voice browsers to color-blindness simulators.

We recommend you start with a free Web-based tool located at www.cynthiasays.com. Links and descriptions of many more accessibility tools can be found here: www.w3.org/WAI/ER/existingtools.html.

Sandbox Detection Tool The Sandbox Detection Tool, www.seomoz.org/tools/sandbox-tool.php, will help you analyze whether your site is trapped in Google’s temporary holding pen.

If you’re the type to spend hours testing out gadgets and techno-goodies, there are a couple of SEO tool smorgasbords that you may enjoy: www.webuildpages.com/ tools/default.htm and www.faganfinder.com/urlinfo/.

Caution: Heavy use of SEO tools may result in an increase in the size of your Task Journal. Embrace it! Good SEO means never running out of things to do!
 

Suppose you went on a diet but you forgot to weigh yourself at the beginning of it. A week of exercise and green leafy vegetables later, you step on a scale and it reads 163 lbs.

Is it great news or a great disappointment? You’ll never know because you didn’t establish your baseline.

You need to take care of the initial assessment for your SEO campaign so you’ll always know whether it’s time for a celebratory ice cream sundae. Here are your daily task to consider:

Conversions 
Ranks
Indexed Pages
Inbound Links
Site Assessment

Conversions
It is important to track the success of your SEO campaign. In marketingspeak, these measurements are called metrics.

Here we’re interested in only one thing: conversion metrics. Different organizations can have vastly different metrics, ranging from the number of people buying your product to how many third graders download your science report.

Whether it’s online sales, brand awareness, or just eyeballs you’re after, you know what your conversions are because you defined them way back.

If your website has a system in place to track conversions, it’s time to gather some data. The least you will want to know is this:

how many conversions has your site logged per month over the last three calendar months?

And if you can get additional information (for example, total conversion rate for all visitors versus conversion rate for search engine visitors), by all means, do.

The more you document today, the more you’ll know about the success or failure of your SEO campaign in the coming months.

You may know how to get this data by yourself, but if not, it’s time to enlist your IT, sales, or PR team members for the information you need.

If you haven’t done so yet, be sure to welcome them to your SEO team, and tell them what an important task this is for the future of the organization…it may even be time to hand out some bribe cookies!

Open up a new blank document and record your three-month historical conversion numbers and any additional conversion data you can gather. Save this in your SEO Idea Bank.

To be sure, if you haven’t been tracking conversions, you may think you have nothing to document today.

We disagree. Somewhere, somehow, there must be some information about how your website is performing for you.

If there’s a request for information form on the site, how many people have used it? If you suspect that people are researching your company online and then ordering over the phone, see if you can get a salesperson to back you up.
Or, just write down your suspicion. Even a guess is better than nothing here.

If you’re pretty sure that the website hasn’t given you any business, or recognition, or whatever it is you’re looking for in the past three months, make a note of that, too.

If you’re starting from zero, congratulations! Your improvement will be very easy to measure.

Ranks
No matter how often it’s told not to obsess about ranks, we know you better than that. So if you’re the one who spends your nights with visions of Googleplums dancing in your head, today is the day we’ll let you give in to your passion!

Of course, conversions are more important than ranks, and your fundamental business goals are more important than search engine traffic.

But great search engine ranks really do speak volumes, and checking your ranks can be a very enlightening experience.

Rank Assessment in a Nutshell

Here’s how you’ll do it:

• Moving one by one through your short list, search for your top keywords on Google. (To save time, you can set your search engines to display 30 results per page using the Preferences screen.)

• Scroll through the top 30 ranks. If any page on your website shows up within these results, note the rank in the Rank Tracking Worksheet. If you don’t see your site in the ranks, mark “none.”

• We’re looking at the main Web results only! Don’t record ranks in any other results sets, such as See Related, Local, or Sponsored Listings, as part of your standard rank check.

• Repeat with MSN, Yahoo!, and Ask.

Automated vs. Manual Rank Checking
There’s no way around the fact that reviewing all those results on all those search engines for all those keywords can be a bit of a snoozer.

Some SEO professionals have dropped rank checking out of the equation altogether because it is less connected to your business goals than other metrics such as conversion tracking.

Of SEOs that still perform rank checking, some use automated rank-checking software. Available programs include WebPosition, Ranking Manager, and Digital Point Solutions.

But even with all of the available tools, we still perform manual rank checking for our clients, and we insist on it for you too. Here’s why:

• Manual rank checking is more accurate than automated checking. In the ever-changing search engine results landscape, it often takes a human to determine whether your listings are surrounded by directory sites, partner sites, or even sponsored listings.

• Manual rank checking keeps you in close touch with the goings-on in the search engine ranks for your target keywords.

We want you to drink in the details. Keep an eagle eye out for your competition and any interesting or unusual results.

Who is ranking well, and are they doing well on more than one engine? Have you spotted any possible cheaters?

Did an unexpected page of your site (or a PDF or DOC file) show up? These are the kinds of things you can find if you take the time to look.

• Most search engines, including Google, frown upon automated rank-checking programs because they perform multiple queries that can create a burden on the search engine. Many of these tools actually violate the engines’ terms of service (TOS).

If you absolutely must use an automated system (for example, your organization has a need to track a large number of keywords on a monthly basis),

we recommend that you sign up with Digital Point Solutions, mentioned earlier, and get a free Google application programming interface (API) key (Digital Point provides instructions).

If you do that, you will be in compliance with the Google TOS, and that means you will have our blessing too.

As we touched upon earlier, your manual rank-checking task has fringe benefits: it provides a great opportunity to watch out for “uglies”: bad snippets, broken links, or any other interesting, mysterious, or undesirable results your website is showing in the search engines.

Feel free to slip on your headphones as you work: rank checking is one of the more tedious SEO tasks.

Search engines use complicated secret formulas, called ranking algorithms, to determine the order of their results.

The SEO profession is an upstart one, with no degrees to be earned or widely accepted canon of literature (and if there were, it’d change every five months anyway).

So we’re all out there trying to figure this stuff out on our own, using different test cases, chasing morphing search engines, and possessing varying levels of interest and talent in the writing and technical components of SEO.

SEO experts are a diverse group, ranging from the fanatical to the rabidly fanatical, and there are radically differing opinions within the SEO community about what works and what’s important.

We’ve distilled what we believe to be the best-of-the-best advice and present it here in a simplified form.

Here’s the lowdown on the most important factors:

• HTML page title
• Visible HTML text on the page
• Inbound links (quality and quantity)
• Inbound link anchor text
• Age of domain
• Lesser factors

As you read through them, think about how much attention you’ve given to each of them on your own site.

Maybe, like a lot of site owners, you’ve been focusing on the bottom of the list-the least important factors-more than the biggies at the top. As you think about what matters to the search engines, keep this in mind:

Each page on your website is analyzed individually by the search engines. That means each and every page is an opportunity to optimize for the following:

HTML page title
The HTML page title is today’s hands-down leader, and an Eternally Important factor, in search engine ranking algorithms.

As a bonus, optimizing your HTML page titles is one of those activities that will quickly affect the way your listings look in the search engines.

Visible HTML text on the page
It seems obvious, but you would be surprised at how many site owners miss this simple point: In order to rank well for a particular set of keywords, your site text should contain them.

True, there are examples of pages that rank well for words not actually appearing on the page (see the sidebar “Googlebombing and `Miserable Failure”‘) but this is not something you want to leave to chance.

You may see SEO pros insist that you need 250 or 1,000 words on a page and that
5 to 10 percent of these words must be your target keywords (SEO folks call that percentage keyword density).

As long as you have robot-readable text on your page (a great first step that many of your competitors, believe it or not, may have missed), you should use as many keywords as you need to state your message clearly and as many opportunities to insert keywords as makes sense within the realm of quality writing.

Your marketing message is much too special to be put into a formula.

Inbound links (quality and quantity)
Coming in at #3 in our list of search engine ranking factors is inbound links to your website.

Why are inbound links so important in the search engine ranking algorithms? Because they can indicate a page’s quality, popularity, or status on the Web and site owners have very little control over their own inbound links.

Being off-page factors, inbound links can be influenced only indirectly.

Links with the most rank-boosting power are links from a home page (as opposed to links from pages buried deep within the site)

and links from authority pages in the topical community, meaning pages with their own collection of fabulous inbound links from other websites covering the same topic. The same quality factors hold true for links coming from within your site.

Inbound link anchor text
The way other websites refer to your website is one of the ways that search engines understand your content.

Anchor text, also called linking text, is the text that is “clickable” on the Web, and it is an important factor in search ranking algorithms.

Anchor text that contains your page’s targeted keywords can help boost your page’s ranks.

Age of domain
In one of the more perplexing and frustrating developments in SEO in recent years, site owners have noticed that newer domains have a much tougher time making their way up the ranks than older ones.

So far, this phenomenon has only been spotted in Google, but you know what happens when Google does something: Sooner or later the others are likely to follow suit. You have been warned.

Lesser factors
There are a large number of additional, lesser factors that can influence Your ranking. Google, for example, probably includes hundreds and possibly even thousands of factors in its algorithm.

Things like keywords in your meta tags, image ALT tags, and page URL all have some degree of influence, as do factors that may be harder for you to control, such as the popularity of a page (as measured by the search engine’s own click-through tallies)

or how often it is updated. For a comprehensive list of ranking factors, including commentary from several knowledgeable SEO professionals, see this page: www.seomoz.org/articles/search-ranking-factors.php.
Keywords: Pay-per-Click Advertising, Paid inclusion, PPC, Personalized search, Social search, Mobile Search, White hat/black hat, Tripping a filter, Everflux,
 
 

The search engines are aware of the many sneaky ways that site owners try to achieve undeserved ranks (in SEO lingo, these sneaky activities are called spamming).

If they discover that you’re trying to do this, your site may be penalized: Your rank may be downgraded, or your page-or even your whole site-could be banned.

Even if your site is never caught and punished, it’s very likely, we dare say inevitable, that your tricky technique will eventually stop working.

Here are some practices that have been on the search engines’ no-no list for so long that they can safely be labeled as “Eternally Bad for your Site”:

Cloaking When a search engine robot visits your site, it expects to see the same content that any normal human visitor would see.

Cloaking
It is a method of identifying robots when they visit your site and showing them special, custom-made pages that are different from what human visitors see.

Cloaking is a method of identifying robots when they visit your site and showing them special, custom-made pagesthat are different from what human visitors see.

This thwarts the search engines in their attempt to deliver the most accurate search results to their users.

In the vast universe of website technology, there are sometimes valid reasons for showing different content to different entities. Tricking the search engines to give you higher ranks than you deserve is not one of them.

Duplicate content
They you the kind of person who thinks, “If one aspirin works, why not take two “If one aspirin works, why not take two?” If so, you might be thinking that if one paragraph of keyword-rich text will help your ranks, why not put it on every page in your site? ¨

Or worse, if one website brings you sales, why not make a bunch of identical websites with different names and get even more sales?

The problem with this kind of thinking is that it ignores the big headache it causes for searchers.

If the search engines listed identical content multiple times, it would destroy the diversity of their results, which would destroy their usefulness to the searcher.

So, if the search engines catch on to duplicate content schemes, they’re likely to knock you down in the ranks.

Keyword stuffing
Adding a keyword list to the visible text on your page is not exactly scintillating copy.
We’re not talking about overly optimized text, which may come off as pointless and dry.

We’re talking about repeating the same word or words over and over again so that your page looks like an industry-specific grocery list.

At best, sites that do this cause eyestrain for their visitors. At worst, they’re risking penalties from the search engines. There’s a place for your keywords list: It’s called your meta keywords tag!

Invisible text
This is about a ton of keywords invisible by making them the same color as the background. The search engines caught on to this one a long time ago, and they’re not likely to let you get away with it.

Those of you in nonprofit organizations are working with a different sort of bottom line for your websites.

Rather than following the corporate mantra of “money, money, and more money,” you fine people are out there trying to change the world, educate, and improve society!

And as a thank-you from the world of web search, you have some huge advantages in SEO.

Advantage: Linkability The culture of the Web generally adores noncommercial content-something that your website should be chock full of.

And, let’s face, it, giving you a link doesn’t cost a thing. Any webmaster or blogger who supports your cause-or at least has no major problem with it-will see adding a link as a cheap and easy way to help out.

You will want to adjust your SEO plan accordingly, giving extra effort to link-building.
And what is even better than inbound links from other sites?

How about some fabulous “site of the day” awards from major web presences like Yahoo! and USAToday.com?

“Site of the day” editors are always on the lookout for worthy sites, and nonprofits are in a perfect position to tap into this source of visibility and traffic.

It’s helpful-but not necessary-if you have something new on your site to show off. Be sure to include some time in your SEO Plan for building that “site of the day” potential.

Sure, it’s a little like winning the lottery of SEO, but for you, it’s worth a try. Your odds are a lot better than for-profit sites’ odds.

Advantage: Simple Website Structure And there’s more good news: some of the characteristics that might, at first glance, seem like disadvantages for nonprofits are actually not so bad.

Oftentimes nonprofits are short on cash but have plenty of untrained manpower available. Using your hour a day as management and training time for a small team of sharp-witted college students might just be the SEO strategy that brings you to the top.

Another “problem” that might not be as bad as you think: an old website. That’s right, your cruddy old 1999 website was probably built using no Flash, little JavaScript, and an absence of dynamic bells and whistles.

Well, guess what: Those are just the things that can send search engine spiders packing anyway!

A “classic” all-text site can be just the ticket for getting noticed by the search engines. Before you make any changes, make sure you aren’t in an “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” situation.

Advantage: Less PPC Competition Many nonprofits think that there’s no way that they can survive in the competitive world of paid listings.

However, there are a few ways that you can, as a nonprofit, get your foot in the door. For one, it’s very possible that the keywords that matter most to you are not the same words that commercial organizations are vying for.

After all, nobody’s out there selling “AIDS in China.” Even better, both Google and Yahoo! offer free advertising programs for nonprofits. Be sure to check their websites for current programs and availability.

Challenge: Internal Issues Internal disorganization, an overworked and underpaid workforce, lack of funding, and lack of a clear bottom line could throw hurdles in the way of Your SEO Plan.

If you are a small operation, you may not even have a marketing department to manage the website.

And without a clearly measurable bottom line, it may be very hard for you to prove the value of your efforts.

You will need to do some creative thinking to figure out a way to get that ROI measured. Is there a specific event that you can promote?

A campaign or drive that can be earmarked as an SEO testing ground? With any luck, your SEO campaign will be funding itself after a few months of effort.

You may be surprised to find that it becomes one of the most important outreach venues your organization will use.

Let’s say you want a great car wash, one that gets up close and personal with your car’s curves and addresses its individual problem areas.

You wouldn’t trust a gas station car wash-you’d do it yourself! Likewise, the SEO plan in this book presents a method that can be applied to a wide range of SEO efforts.

But you have to customize it for your particular business and website. This article gives you a great head start.

It’s Your SEO Plan
As you read this article, you may have had one of two reactions. Maybe you thought, “Great! A quick and easy SEO plan that I can follow!” Or maybe you thought, “Uh-oh! An oversimplified approach to something complex.”

Both of these reactions are perfectly reasonable. A simple approach is important, but you should be wary of anything that promises a one-size-fits-all SEO solution.

So let’s make one thing clear: there’s nothing cookie Cutter about your SEO plan. And since nobody knows your organization and website like you do, guess who’s in charge of the fine-tuning?) You!

Small and large companies, brick-and-mortars, nonprofits, and bloggers-each type has its own set of needs, advantages, and challenges.

Your assignment: Identify which categories your company is in, read our tips and guidelines for those categories, and think about how you can apply the customization to your own SEO efforts.

This is a “check all that apply” chapter-your company may fall into multiple categories. For example, let’s say you run an independent toy store in Des Moines, Iowa.

You would want to read at least three of the categories in this article: brick-and-mortar, B2C, and small organization.

If you’re the world leader in granulators for the plastics industry, you’d want to read B2B and large organization.

Read what applies to you, but also consider reading what may not seem to. After all, part of being an SEO expert is knowing the breadth of what the Web offers.

You never know where you might find something interesting and useful for your own site!

B2B
B2B sites run the gamut from the little guys selling restaurant-grade deli slicers to the huge corporation selling enterprise-level software and services.

Large and small B2Bs have a lot in common when it comes to the advantages and challenges of SEO.

Advantage: Niche Target Audience Because your business depends on it, you probably already know your customer well.

Your customer fits into a particular niche: restaurant owner, plant manager, candlestick maker, and so on.

While your customers may not all hang out at the same bar after work, it’s a good bet that they’re frequenting some of the same websites.

And if you don’t know what these sites are, it only takes a little bit of time and creative thought to find them.

If you already know what magazines your customer; subscribe to, what trade shows they attend, and what organizations they belong to, you’re well on your way to finding analogous sites on the Web that speak to them.

Challenge: Difficulty Gaining Links You may have heard that getting relevant, high-quality links, to your website is an important SEO endeavor, because it can improve your ranks, and traffic.

This is going to be a challenge for you. You’re not a big entertainment site or a fun blog with a cult following, and unless you’re a giant in your industry, your activities are not automatically newsworthy.

While you may have the respect of your customers, building a self-sustaining “buzz” is not the kind of thing that comes easily to a B2B website.

After all, your site probably isn’t built for buzz; chances are you’re offering straight-up product information, corporate bios, and white papers.

You’ll need to move forward with a view toward increasing your site’s linkability with noncommercial content.

Advantage: High-Value Conversions SEO is very appealing to B2Bs, for a good reason. Because each new customer or lead is very valuable to your business, your SEO campaign can make a quick and measurable difference to your bottom line by bringing in just a few conversions.

Don’t skimp on tracking-you’ll want your SEO campaign to get credit for these high-value conversions.

Challenge: A Slow SEO Life Cycle You know why scientists love that little fruit fly called drosophila:

The reason is that the drosophila has such a short life span that many generations of them can be studied in a relatively short amount of time.

In a similar way, an SEO campaign can be studied and improved in a relatively short amount of time if you have lots and lots of visitors coming through and either converting or not.

For a B2B, however, this is probably not the case. You will have a smaller, more targeted audience and will likely have a longer conversion life cycle.

That means less information, and a slower evolution, for your ongoing SEO campaign.
Advantage: Text-Heavy Content Got FAQs? How about product specifications and mission statements?

As a B2B, you probably have lots of text on your site, which the search engines love. While some site owners will be scratching their heads looking for ways to fit text into their design, you will probably have tons of text on which to focus your optimization efforts.

And if not, you may have marketing materials such as white papers and PDFs ready for quick and easy appropriation onto your site.

B2C
B2C is such a huge category that we almost hesitate to lump you all together. B2C ranges from big flower vendors making a killing on Mother’s Day to one-person operations selling homemade soaps.

You may have a local, national, or international customer base, and you may have anything from a phone number or a Yahoo! store to a complex, media-rich e-commerce experience.

However, there are some key elements that you have in common when you perform SEO. (Don’t worry about seeing so many, challenges here. You can look for advantages in the other category or categories that apply to you.)

Challenge: Less-Web-Savvy Audience The people who are searching for your product or service may not be as knowledgeable about the Web as you are, and certainly not as knowledgeable as you hope they are.

So, even though the Web is chock full of niche shopping sites that are worth looking into, it makes sense to give your attention first to how your site looks in the search engine mainstays: Google, AOL, Yahoo!, MSN, and Ask (formerly Ask Jeeves).

And, while you may have the benefit of marketing research and brand differentiation, your potential audience may be frustratingly unaware of your preferred labels for your own product or service.

Are you selling “the finest micro-techno-fiber all-weather apparel”? That’s great, but your general user base is probably- searching for “blue raincoats.”

In addition, they may be misspelling Your product or-the borror-your brand name. Careful keyword research can help you tremendously.

Challenge: Unexpected Search Competition As your audience is potentially very large and diverse, so too is your competition. We mean your search competition, of course.

You may know exactly who your top five competitors are in the “real world,” but when you get down to identifying your top-priority keywords in your SEO plan, you’re likely to be amazed by the sites that are clogging up the top ranks.

They might be competitors you’ve never heard of, or they might be individual consumers talking about how much they hate your products.

Or, as we often see, they may not be related to your industry at all. Did you know there’s a band called “The Blue Raincoats”?

Well, there is, and last we checked, it had the top nine spots in Google for the term “blue raincoats.”

Challenge: Page View Conversions If, like many B2C websites, your measure of conversion is a page view-for example, if you’re using traffic data to sell ad space on your site, or if your main goal is brand awareness-get ready for an exciting ride.

Simply going by the traffic numbers can have you shouting from the top of the parking garage one day and weeping into your latte the next.

This next bit of advice may be hard for a slick up-and-comer like you to swallow, but we’re telling you because we like you: Accept that you have less control than you think you do.

The Google gods are fickle. An algorithm change, or a search engine marriage or divorce, may be all it takes to sink your traffic.

Large Organization
If you’re about to embark on SEO for your large organization, brace yourself, this is going to sting a little:

In fact, your SEO campaign is likely to be challenged by your bulk, both in terms of your website and your organizational structure.

Challenge: Internal Bureaucracy From an organizational perspective, your SEO challenges are often a result of “too much.”

Too much in that your site is likely to be run by committee: designers, IT department, copywriters, and coders not to mention the executives who, with a single comment, can have you all scrambling in different directions.

We know how pressed you are for time, how many different people in your organization are all putting their dirty fingers in the pie that is your website, and we know what a struggle it can be to get any changes made on your site.

Here are some very common SEO tasks; see if you can get through this list without cringing about how many individuals you’ll need to complete them:

• Convert graphics to HTML text.

• Edit elements of the HTML code on every page of the site.

• Remove or reduce the use of Flash.

• Create a specialized text file called robots.txt and have it placed in the root directory of the site.

• Set up a web page redirect.

• Rewrite page text to reflect more commonly searched terms.

The takeaway here is that you’ll be putting a lot of extra time into internal communication and organization.

You need to know your team and get them in your corner if you want to succeed at SEO. In other words: Get your team on board.

Challenge: Brand Maintenance Another “too much” challenge for you lies in the need to keep your brand current.

You have probably - already witnessed several major changes to your site, steered either by real market forces or by the perceptions of your marketing department.

May be you have a redesign every six months, frequent new products or product updates, or new branding guidelines to implement.

Structurally, you may also have multiple subdomains, more than one URL leading to your home page, and lots of fragmented bits of old version, of your site floating around out there.

(Think you don’t, Cheek again. We can honestly say we haven’t met one large website that didn’t have something old and out-of-date live and available on the search engines.)

Maybe you have all of the above, multiple times over, because you have different reams responsible for different portions of your website.

Because of all these factors, the large organization has a special need to keep its “calling cards” on the Web consistent with the current state of its site.

Cleaning up old and dead links and making sure your listings talk about your current products and services should be two of your highest priorities.

Advantage: Budget and Existing Infrastructure Of course, “too much” works to your advantage too.

You may have a larger budget, which means that you can probably afford to buy some of the many helpful tracking and keyword tools that we will suggest in this book.

And your company probably has existing marketing data about your customers, their behaviors and habits, and their budgets, which your SEO campaign can tap into.

Advantage: Lots of Landing Pages Large sites often have a wealth of opportunities for landing pages.

Go deep, or more appropriately, go shallow-wide: think beyond your home page and main section pages when determining which pages to optimize.

This shallow-wide approach-driving site visitors to a large number of unique pages on your site-can help you compensate for some of the other challenges we’ve discussed.

Challenge: Pay-per-Click Pitfalls Pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns can help you accomplish your shallow-wide goals, and your average PPC campaign is much cheaper on a per-visit basis than any form of offline marketing.

But PPC campaigns for large organizations have the potential to be large and unwieldy. Even with the built-in management tools that make your PPC campaign a fairly user-friendly, experience, the sheer magnitude of a hundred plus or thousand-plus keyword campaign can be very, time-consuming.

PPC campaigns are an unlikely mix of the creative (word choice, campaign strategy) and the tedious (daily budget caps, maximum click price).

The danger for the large company is that it’s very easy to shift your attention away from the important details such as clarity of message and appropriateness of keyword choice and get distracted by the data.

Advantage: PPC Assistance Luckily, your larger budget may qualify you for helpful hand-holding services directly from the PPC engines-services where actual humans talk to you and manage the more tedious aspects of your accounts.

These services are worth looking into, but always remember: nobody knows your company and brand like you do!

Whether you manage the campaign yourself or hire someone else to do it, make sure someone with marketing sense and excellent writing skills is keeping an eye on it.

Advantage: Making News Last but not least, being large might mean that just about everything you do is automatically newsworthy-which translates into incoming links on the Web. That’s great news for your SEO potential!

Small Organization
Did you read the section about the large organizations and find yourself feeling a bit envious of all that money and manpower?

Don’t be. SEO can be the field-leveler you need to compete with larger companies, whereas competition in offline advertising venues would be much too expensive for you.

And, being smaller, your team, your site-and your SEO campaign-can benefit from a more centralized approach.

Advantage: Less Bureaucracy A busy small organization is often too tapped for resources to work on bettering its own marketing message or position-everybody else’s project seems to come first.

Your company doesn’t have room for large teams of marketing writers and strategists. So you may be the one person who is the gatekeeper for all of these activities.

Sure, it’s more work for you, but on the positive side, it means you won’t have to go through a huge bureaucracy every time you need to change your website. You have the power to make a real difference.

Challenge: Lack of Time If your business is doing well; your biggest SEO challenge is going to be a shortage of time.

You might even be sweating out the notion of finding your hour a day for SEO tasks. The great news is, SEO gives back what you put into it.

Advantage: A Friendlier Reception For any site, asking other sites for links is one of those lower-return tasks: very time-consuming, unpredictable results.

But being small can give you a real advantage in the area of “personal touch.” Do you have a really cool new product: Are You offering a discount for a particular group?

Tell a blogger who might be interested in telling the world. Or you may want to reach out to satisfied customers who have websites.

Even though link building might not be on the hot burner, if you chip away at this activity, you can probably increase your inbound links in a meaningful way.

Challenge: Small Budget Your time is right, and your budget is modest. Probably the smartest investment you can make, in our opinion, is a pay-per-click campaign.
Surprised? It actually makes a lot of sense. If you manage it closely, your PPC campaign gives you almost-instant feedback.

Is your message compelling enough? Are you targeting viable keywords? Is your conversion page doing its job?

With PPC, you can tweak to your heart’s content for pennies on the dollar compared to other advertising methods.

Advantage: Tools to Level the Playing Field Of course you know your product or service inside and out, and your customers may seem like close, personal friends.

But you might not be very well versed in your customers’ Web habits and searching behavior.

You may have little or no actual experience in marketing. Luckily, you don’t need to be a pro-or a big business-to excel in SEO.

You are big business for the search engines, and therefore, keyword research tools, directory listings, traffic analysis software, and the like are all often within the price range of the small business.

Even with a small budget, you can pick up an advantage by studying your competitors. Get ideas and insight from their websites and PPC campaigns, and use their resources to your best advantage!

You may get as much out of your do-it-yourself competitive analysis as you would get from an expensive marketing study.

If you’ve got the time and some natural curiosity, it doesn’t cost you anything to look at the companies ranking in the top 10 for your desired keywords and figure out what they’re doing right.

Advantage: Starting from Zero It may be that you have given no thought to SEO. Don’t let that discourage you!

But, think carefully about your plan of attack. With a small staff, it is possible to go from famine to feast more quickly than you may be comfortable with.

So, if each conversion on your site creates work for you, you may want to take it slowly.

Challenge: Seductive Quick-and-Dirty SEO Schemes Don’t be tempted, as some smaller businesses are, to put your money or energy into quickie link schemes or questionable practices such as cloaking (showing the search engines one page while showing your users another)

Or creating doorway pages (pages that have no real content and just exist to link to another page), which are likely to backfire.

Please, remember that the message on your site is what will bring you conversions. If your pages are stuffed with keywords and filled with awkward text aimed at getting rankings, your business is likely to suffer in the long run.

Keep your SEO campaign squeaky- clean!

Brick-and-Mortar
If you had the chance to put one thing in front of your customers, you’d probably give them your street address, not your web address, and that’s the way it should be.

Your site plays second fiddle to your day-to-day business. After all, the best way to turn browsers into customers is to get them to walk through your door.

You may not even be sure why you have a website, except that everyone else is doing it. So let’s talk about how to make your site do its job of playing the supporting role.

Advantage: An Achievable Goal If  you’re not selling your product online, then the best use of your site is probably to help people find your physical location.

Your SEO campaign begins with a simple goal: you want to be found when your company name is entered in the search engines.

You’ll focus your SEO campaign on variations of your business name and location. You’re likely to get the results you are hoping for because you won’t run up against too much competition for such tightly targeted keywords.

Advantage: Local Search And speaking of location, welcome to one of the hottest areas of SEO today: local search. It picks up where the local Yellow Pages left off in the last century.

Who wants to waste time slogging through nationwide search results when you’re looking for the sandwich shop around the corner?

If you’re a mechanic in Glendale, California, you can put yourself directly in front of someone searching for “mechanic Glendale CA.”

Talk about a targeted audience! But there are a couple of things to keep in mind: First, people using local search are probably more search savvy than your average Web user.

That’s because local search is still relatively new, and it takes a while for the rank and file to adopt new search technology.

Second, local search is changing fast, so you’ll need to stay on top of it. When you implement your monthly SEO reporting, (we’ll show you how in Part III) you may want to use some of it to keep track of shape-shifting results and to check the search-related blogs for developments in local search.
 

Have you ever checked for PPC advertisers who are targeting your company name or your proprietary product names?

What you find may come as a surprise to you, especially if you haven’t been performing regular checks on these terms in the search engines.

Other advertisers may be using your targeted searches as an opportunity to display their own ads.

For example, if your business happens to make a well-known snack food, you might see an ad for a diet supplement among search results for your product.

You can read your PPC service’s terms of service to determine whether these advertisers are breaking any rules.

If you think they are, consider politely contacting the PPC service or the advertiser to let them know your interpretation of the situation.

If this type of advertising is permitted, file this knowledge under “good things to know about your search competitors.”

And beware the affiliates you never knew you had-and probably never wanted! Is your product name showing up in the ad for a shopping site?

If so, does that shopping site actually sell your product? Due to haphazard use of dynamic keyword insertion, shopping sites create ads for a specific product but deliver only a landing page saying that the product isn’t found on their website.

It doesn’t benefit you or the shopping site to let this practice continue, so if you find that you’re in the middle of a bait-and-switch PPC ad, contact the shopping site and politely request that they remove it.

Follow these guidelines to maximize your press release visibility:

• Include keywords in press release titles and page copy, but don’t go so overboard that you sacrifice good writing.

There is no magic formula for the perfect keyword density. Find the same balance that you found for your landing page text.

• Be sure to include links to relevant locations on your website. However, since press releases generally will not be edited after the fact, pay close attention to choosing URLs that you do not expect to change in time.

• Submit your press releases to free online wire services and consider a fee-based distribution service if your release is particularly newsworthy. PRWeb at www.prweb.com is one of the best-known online distribution services.

• Don’t count on newswires alone to distribute your press release. Find on-topic publications, blogs, or journalists and send them a brief, personalized e-mail including a link to your press release.

• Feed, feed, feed-make an RSS or Atom feed for your press releases. This will help them get listed in news services and blog search engines.

To simplify this process, you can even use a blog creation tool to post your press releases.

Many in the media use search engines to find information on the Web. If you spend the time to optimize and distribute your press releases, you’re making great strides in improving your search engine visibility and media presence.
 

It may be helpful to know whether your competitors have taken the time to create directory listings.

Finding a directory listing, whether paid or unpaid, is an indication of how well your competitors are covering all their SEO bases.

Start by searching Yahoo!’s directory:

• Open your web browser and go to http://dir.yahoo.com. This page allows you to exclude search results other than Yahoo! Directory listings.

• Moving one by one through your Big Five competitors list, search for each competitor’s name.

• Since this is such a specific search, there will probably be very few listings. Look for one belonging to your competitor.

• If you don’t find your competitor’s listing, search for a product or service that they offer.

If this search turns up no listings, broaden your search to a general term related to what they offer.

If you still don’t find your competitor, you can feel comfortable that they probably don’t have a directory listing.

You can do the same with the Open Directory or niche directories that you think are appropriate for your own site.

Whether the directory listing is fee based or free is actually not important here. What’s important is knowing whether a competitor is aggressive and savvy enough to find a directory and get their site listed.