Step Wise SEO

Site Structiore Improvement
Assuming that you took care of basic site optimization and knocked down obstacles to robot indexing of your landing pages, you’ll here delve a little deeper into some techie decisions that can improve your site’s optimization, indexing, and overall visibility success.
You will involve a range of SEO skills, from PR-style communication to serious server geeking. You will definitely want your team queued up and clued in to your needs and reasoning.

The Spider’s-Eye View
Have you ever seen those photos that show what the world looks like to a dog? Or maybe you enjoyed the kaleidoscopic fly-cam scenes in the 1950s movie The Fly.

You’re going to learn how to take a search engine spider’s-eye view of your website. Viewer discretion is advised: what you are about to see might be surprisingly scary.

A search engine spider is simply software that goes through the Internet looking at web pages and sending information back to a central repository.

It doesn’t view content in the same way human site visitors do. Since spiders are an important-although by no means the most important-audience for your website, you want to know how your website appears to them.

You will use a tool called a spider emulator to put on your spider’s-eye view glasses and do exactly that.

There are lots of spider emulators available on the web. We use http://searchengineworld.com/cgi-bin/sim_spider.cgi often because we like
its simplicity and its built-in link checking feature.

Another of our favorites is: http:// tools.summitmedia.co.uk/spider/. You’re going to view each of your landing pages through a spider emulator today.

Here’s how to do it:
• Starting with your home page, go to http://searchengineworld.com/cgi-bin/ sim_spider.cgi or the spider emulator of your choice and enter your page URL into the emulator.

• Once you see your page as it is seen by spiders, ask yourself some questions: Does this accurately represent the information I expected to see on my site? Is it readable and in the correct order? Are my target keywords present?

• For any noted problems, consider possible solutions. For example, if the well crafted, keyword-rich content you added is not showing up, it may be that it’s not rendering in standard HTML text.

Print out this page and bring it with you to your web developer to track down the problem.

Or, are you seeing the same nonsensical image ALT tag (for example, ImgFile01) repeating multiple times on the page?

Make a note to have it removed or revised with appropriate keyword-rich descriptions.

• Perform this check for each of your landing pages.

Shape Up Your Site Map
It’s important to create a site map to help search engine robots navigate your site. If your website doesn’t have a site map, today you’ll consider creating one. If you already have one, you’ll optimize it today.

Why Build a Site Map?
We think that just about every website can benefit from a site map, especially websites that contain more than 10 pages.

Most people know that site maps are good for the user experience: they orient your site visitors and help lost visitors find their way to the right page.

But there’s even more benefit when you consider SEO. A site map can improve the search engine visibility of your website in several ways:

• By providing search engine robots with links to navigate through your site

• By pointing search engine robots to dynamic or hard-to-reach pages that might not be accessible otherwise

• By acting as a possible landing page, optimized for search traffic

• By providing ready-to-use content for the File Not Found page where visitors are automatically taken if they try to go to a nonexistent URL within your domain

If your site is small enough that links to every page are included in your global navigation (navigation provided on every page of your site)

or absolutely every page on your site is available within two clicks from the home page, then you may not need a site map.

But if your site is larger, and especially if it contains pages that may be hard for search engine robots to find, we highly recommend a site map.

Site Map Design 101
Simply put, a site map is a page that links to every page on your website. If you’re like many web surfers, you visit a site map as a last resort when you can’t find what you need or if there’s no in-site search function.

You’re happy to forget it as soon as you leave it. But if a robot visits your site map, it’s not going to forget what it saw, and it will be pleased as punch to come back on a regular basis.

Here are a few pointers for treating both robots and human users well:
Include the most important pages. People will get lost if your site map contains too many links. That means, if your site has more than, say, 100 pages, you’ll need to choose the most important pages and exclude the others. Here are our suggestions for pages to include:

• Product category pages

• Major product pages

• FAQ and Help pages

• Contact or Request Information pages

• All of the key pages on your paths to conversion, the pages that your visitors follow from landing page through conversion

• Your 10 most popular pages (To learn how to find these Click Here on server stats).

• Top pages clicked from your internal search engine, if you have one (For more information on internal search engines Click Here, “Extra Credit and Guilt-Free Slacking,”).

Go easy on the autogeneration. Some content management systems will automatically generate a site map.

As in so many other areas of SEO, we prefer the human touch. If you, or your tech teammates, are leaning in the automated direction, be sure you review the outcome carefully to be sure your site map has these characteristics:

• The layout is easy on the human eye.
• All links are standard HTML text that can be followed by spiders.
• The important pages (included in the preceding list items) are easy to find.

Look at other sites for design inspiration. Don’t waste your time reinventing the wheel. There are hundreds, thousands, nay, bazillions of site maps out there on the Web. Use one you like as a starting point.

Optimize your site map. We don’t mean you should think of your site map as one of your top-priority landing pages.

But if done tastefully, your site map can actually contain a fair number of your target keywords, not to mention compelling text.

For example, instead of a link simply labeled “Fungicides,” your site map could contain more keywords:

“Organic fungicides to eliminate lawn disease,” with the most important keywords, “organic fungicides,” as the anchor text.

Similarly, why use a title like “Our Products” when you can say, “Our Earth-friendly herbicides, insecticides, and fungicides?”

Link to your site map from every page. Users have come to expect a link to your site map in the footer of every page on the site, so make use of this spot.

If your site has a search box, you may also wish to add a link to the site map near the search box and even make a link to the site map a fixture within the site search results page.

Design your new site map or shape up your existing site map using the preceding guidelines. Deliver your requested changes to your web developer or make the changes yourself.

For more site map design hints, see usability guru Jakob Nielson’s website at www.useit.com/alertbox/200201 06.html.

By the way, your site map isn’t the same as your Google Sitemap. Google Sitemaps is a service designed to allow webmasters to submit URLs and additional page information directly to the Google index. Click Here for ideas on how to get started with Google Sitemaps.

Clean Up Ugly Listings
During your site visibility assessments, you probably found at least one listing in the search results that made you cringe.

A broken URL from your domain available to the searching public? An out-of-date press release announcing the hire of a long-gone CEO? Here you’ll take steps to clean up some of these brand-busting uglies.

Here are some of the more common problems we’ve observed and how to deal with them. You probably won’t face all of these problems, but we expect you’ll see at least one:

Broken links The search engines don’t want broken links in their results any more than you do. They will eventually figure out that a page doesn’t exist and remove it from their indices.

But why let a perfectly good search engine ranking go to waste? Try one of the following approaches:

• Since the URL is already indexed and may already have some good rankings, inbound links, or bookmarked traffic, consider creating a new page and saving it at the missing URL.

However, do this only if it makes sense to create a new page with similar content-it would be awkward if your cabinet hardware products were listed at a page called “floral-arrangements.html.”

• Talk to your IT people about setting up an automatic redirection, called a 301 redirect, that carries traffic on this page to another page of your choosing.

But don’t make the common mistake of pointing the redirect to your home page! Choose the page on your site that best matches the one that has gone missing.

• Sometimes, broken links linger in the search results because your server fails to mention that the page is missing.

That’s right; it’s possible for a server to return a “Page Found” message even if a page is missing! It’s a riddle wrapped in a conundrum, but luckily it’s an easy fix for your IT folks.

Out-of-date content You don’t want your potential customers seeing outdated product descriptions, promotions that are no longer active, or last year’s price list in the search results.

The best and fastest approach to this problem is to update your site’s content while keeping the file in the same location so that it doesn’t lose its search engine status.

In some cases, a simple update may not be so simple. For example, suppose you have found a well-ranked search engine listing for your web page featuring the Snackmaster 2003 but your company no longer sells this older model.

Your website now has a new page featuring the Snackmaster 2007. If you rewrite your 2003 page to describe your new product, your site will contain two pages with identical content, which is a search engine no-no as well as an administrative headache.

Instead, it’s best to edit the 2003 page content to include a notice that a new model is available and link to the 2007 model page.

A 301 redirect would be another option, especially if there’s no customer support or archival reasons to keep the old page live.

Private or inappropriate material There it is, staring out at you from between listing #5 and listing #7:

Your company’s holiday gift list, with addresses and phone numbers of all your best clients! You need to clean up your act, and fast. Here’s how:

• Remove the page from your site. Or, leave the offending file live, but immediately remove the offending content.

• Then request removal from the search engines

By leaving the file live but changing the content, you may benefit from a quicker update than if you took down the page altogether.

However, you should be aware that a search engine’s cached pages may retain a snapshot of the content for longer than you’re comfortable with, and there are historical web archive sites that may display the content forever.

If you have serious legal concerns-for example, if you posted a disclaimer that said, “All information on this site is medical advice” rather than. “…not medical advice”-you can use the copyright search methods to search for instances of your content throughout the Web and seek removal.

While these are all positive steps, in truth there’s little you can do to prevent robots from indexing pages that are live and accessible. If you really do not want pages to be found, secure them behind a password!

www and non-www URLs in your listings In the eyes of the search engines, these two URLs are different pages:

• http://www.yourdomain.com/
• http://yourdomain.com

Now, you know and we know that these are actually pointing to the same page, and we figure that soon enough the search engines will get it right.

But for now, most search engines have what industry insiders call a canonical URL problem (canonical is a programmer’s term for “standard,” so a canonical URL would be the standard or preferred URL for your website) and it can have a significant effect on your SEO success.

If your website is listed under more than one version of a URL, your ranks can suffer.

If your inbound links are distributed among different versions of your URL, the strength of these links can be diluted. You’ll need to take these steps to deal with your canonical issues:

• Ensure that all internal links within your site point to the same URL. Choose a format and stick with it. You might even consider using absolute links (which include the full address of your website, starting with http://) rather than relative links. This will eliminate all canonical problems caused by internal links.

• Set up a 301 redirect that always points the “bad” URL(s) to your preferred URL. That will help search engines know which one is your preference.

By the way, this could be a tricky one for your webmaster, so don’t suggest it without some sort of bribe in hand.

• If there are inbound links from other websites pointing to the wrong URL format, write to them and ask for an update.

Other sites stealing your mojo Is there a listing on the search engines that looks like your website at first glance but is actually the website of one of your affiliates, vendors, or partners?

Often, the best way to address this situation is with a direct phone call or e-mail requesting that the page be removed.

Click Here for more information on searching for other sites that use your content without permission.

Your Robots.txt File
A robots.txt file is the first file that a search engine robot visits on your website. Like a snooty nightclub bouncer with a velvet rope, the robots.txt file decides which robots are welcome and which need to move on to that less-exclusive joint down the street.

Robots.txt can admit or reject robots on a sitewide, directory-by-directory, or page-by-page basis.

SEO folks often feel a special affection for the robots.txt file because it provides a rare opportunity to communicate with a search engine robot.

However, its capabilities are really very limited. Robots.txt files exist only to exclude indexing.

Just as a bouncer can keep people out but can’t force anyone to come in, the robots.txt file can’t do anything to entice a robot to spend more time or visit more pages on your site.

Also, compliance with your robots.txt file is voluntary, not mandatory. The major search engines will generally try to follow your instructions, but other, less-reputable types might not.

This is why you should not rely on your robots.txt file to prevent spidering of sensitive, private, or inappropriate materials.

Do You Need a Robots.txt File?
You may not need a robots.txt file. Without one, all robots will have free access to non-password-protected pages on your site.

To decide if you need a robots.txt file for your website, ask yourself these questions:

• Are there any pages or directories on my site that I do not want listed on the search engines, such as an intranet or internal phone list?

• Are there any specific search engines that I do not want to display my site?

• Do I know of any dynamic pages or programming features that might cause problems for spiders, like getting caught in a loop (infinitely bouncing between two pages)?

• Does my website contain pages with duplicate content? (These should not be indexed or you may be penalized.)

• Are there directories on the site that contain programming scripts only, not viewable pages?

If the answers to these questions are no, then you do not need a robots.txt file. If you have any yes answers, you’ll prepare your robots.txt file.

Create Your Robots.txt File
Robots.txt files are very simple text files. To find a sample, go to just about any other site and look for the robots.txt file in the root directory. The robots.txt file usually looks something like this:

User-agent: googlebot
Disallow: /private-files/
Disallow: /more-private-files/
User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-scripts/

In this example, Google’s spider (called Googlebot) is excluded from indexing files within the two directories called private-files and more-private-files, and all robots (signified by a wild-card asterisk *) are excluded from indexing the directory called cgi-scripts.

There are numerous websites that will walk you through building and saving your robots.txt file. A very clear tutorial can be found here:

www.searchengineworld.com/robots/robots_tutorial.htm. Answers to just about any question you could think of about robots are here: www.robotstxt.org. ´

And we are particularly fond of the regularly updated listing of robot names, available here: www.jafsoft.com/searchengines/webbots.html.

Create your robots.txt file and save it in the root directory of your website, or request that your webmaster do so.

If you are feeling any doubt about whether your robots.txt file is written properly, don’t post it.

The last thing you want to do is inadvertently shut out the search engines.

Here’s a fun experiment-what do your Big Five competitors have on their robots.txt files?

Robots Meta Tags
A robots meta tag serves a similar purpose as the robots.txt file, but it is placed within individual pages on your site rather than in your root directory.

A robots meta tag affects only the page it resides on. Chances are you don’t need to use this type of tag, but here’s a quick overview in case you do.

You might choose to use a robots meta tag rather than a robots.txt file because you have only one or two pages you wish to exclude on the site, or maybe you only want to do a brief, temporary exclusion.

Another possible reason is that you do not have access to the root directory on your site.

To exclude the robots from a page using the robots meta tag, simply include the following code in the HTML head of the page:

<meta name=”robots” contents= “noindex, nofollow”>

This will prevent search engine robots from indexing content or following links from the page. 

PPC Quick Check
This Quick Check will ensure that your campaign doesn’t go dramatically out of whack over the course.

Here are the steps to include in your PPC Quick Check:

• Log in to your PPC account.

• Check your total campaign spending. Is your campaign on track to spend your monthly budget on schedule?

If you’ve set your daily budget appropriately, it’s difficult to spend too much-but bugs on PPC engines are not unheard of.

You should also keep in mind that spending too little can be just as bad as spending too much; you want to be right on target.

If your campaign is low, you may wish to add more keywords or increase some of your bids. If your campaign is high, reduce bids or remove or disable keywords.

• For each keyword category, figure out how to sort the list of keywords by total amount spent.

Some keywords are going to be naturally more popular and costly than others, so it’s probably not realistic to expect that your spending will be distributed evenly among the keywords.

If one or two keywords are using up too much of your budget and you don’t think they’re converting well enough, you may wish to temporarily disable them or lower their bids.

Some keywords with extremely high click-through rates may need to be checked on a daily basis.

If you’ve found a keyword that is gobbling up your entire budget, consider moving it into its own category so that you can watch and manage it more closely.

• If you are testing multiple ads for some keywords, review which are performing better. Click Here for more information on running a multiple-ad test.

• PPC engines are often so good at reporting that you won’t need to do much documenting elsewhere.

But until you get the hang of PPC, you may want to make a note of any changes to your account in your Task Journal.