Step Wise SEO

With so many SEO elements-organic, paid, on site, off site-in the works for your website now, you’ve built up a holistic approach to SEO that you can be proud of. But don’t rest on your success yet. SEO is never done!

In this article, you’ll find SEO-friendly solutions for expanding your site’s content, and you’ll learn how to get more out of your starter pay-per-click (PPC) campaign.

You’ll smooth out any rough edges on your website’s visibility, and you’ll take reporting a step further.

Build Content
Have you been slacking on link building because you think your site has no linkable content?

With more and better content, your search engine visibility will benefit in two ways: more people will want to link to it, and the search engines will find more unique pages to index.

But building quality, linkable, preferably noncommercial content is easier said than done.

You’ll uncover opportunities that you may never have realized existed and scrub out obstacles, all with the goal of making your site more linkable. To make this happen your assignments are as follows:

Discover Content You Already Have
Develop New Content
Optimize Non-HTML Documents
Content Thieves
PPC Quick Check and Link Building

Discover Content You Already Have
You know how great it feels to find a twenty in the pocket of a jacket you haven’t worn in a while?

Today is the day you’ll look for linkworthy and search-engine-friendly content that you didn’t know you already had.

Here are some likely hiding places:
On Your Website What could you already have on your site that’s linkable? Here are some possibilities:

• Product comparisons
• Research reports
• Industry news
• Free downloads
• Case studies
• Games
• Photo galleries
• Forums

You may - have content on your website that just needs a little tweaking-perhaps a reorganization or a minor rewrite-to become linkworthy.

What Makes Content Linkworthy?
Everyone is talking about getting inbound links. Some SEOs are even focusing on strategies specifically geared toward building linkable pages, called linkbait. For the best chance of gaining inbound links, content should be:

• original
• unique
• useful
• noncommercial (or subtle in its sales pitch)
• timely
• accessible without a password
• free of charge to view

And at the risk of stating the obvious, to be linkable, each page must be linkable-meaning it must have its own URL!

Perhaps you do have some of these elements on your site but they’re intertwined with your less linkable, commercial content.

If so, your site may benefit from a simple reorganization of materials. You can cluster this content, or links to it, within a new section of your site, aptly named “Resources,” -”Fun”. Or something similar.

And remember, your goal is conversions, not lust inbound links, so be sure to provide a clear path from this new section to your landing pages.

Sometimes, even a simple title rewrite can dramatically change the linkability of a page.

For example, one type of content that often draws inbound links is a product comparison. Perhaps your site has a page that compares features of your product with your competition’s.

The only thing stopping it from being linkworthy is the title “Why Choose Us?” which strikes a commercial chord.

Give this page a new, industry-specific but neutral title like “Compare Medical Imaging Products” and suddenly the exact same chart becomes potential linkbait.

By the way, consider this: Anything not free is just plain not linkable.

So you should separate out freebies such as freeware downloads or clipart onto their own page, for a linkability boost.

Your Sales and Promotions Everybody loves a bargain, and next to “free stuff,” a sale or promotion is a strong contender for links.

Trouble is, most websites move their promotions around, showing them temporarily at whatever URL seems to suit the moment.

Take the smart approach: If your site runs promotions, make one specific URL for all promo materials!

That way, linking sites will have an easy time sending you their bargain hungry traffic-and you’ll gain inbound links.

If your organization runs promotions but somehow doesn’t manage to get that content up on the website in a timely manner, put linkability on the list of reasons to turn over a new leaf.

Tools, Worksheets, and Sample Documents Are there any tools, worksheets, presentations, or documents that your organization is using in-house and might be willing to share?

For example, countless SEO firms offer keyword assessment tools or other useful gadgets for free on their websites.

Think they’re doing it out of pure altruism? Nope. More likely, they’re trying to attract links and repeat traffic.

Offline Marketing Materials You can add offline marketing materials, such as brochures and sales presentations, directly to your website in whatever format they were created in.

However, from an SEO standpoint, HTML is still the best format for your web content. Here’s why:

Other websites might hesitate to link to non-HTML documents because viewing them may disable the “back” button.

Also, many searchers will skip over links to non-HTML documents because they don’t want to wait for a separate program to launch and they may not be in the mood for a long download.

So, if your organization has a large amount of linkable content in non-HTML documents, see what it would take to re-create it in HTML.

If that isn’t possible, be sure to optimize your non-HTML materials. We’ll show you how later this week.

E-mail Newsletters If you’re already writing and sending out e-mail newsletters, why not add them to your site too? What appeals to your customers or opt-in readers may also appeal to linking sites.

Press Releases Press releases are excellent potential landing pages, naturally text based, keyword rich, and often linkworthy because they’re news!

If your organization hasn’t been posting its press releases online, start now. But make sure the press release is linkable news before asking for links. New products fit the bill. New hires probably don’t.

Click Here for guidelines on optimizing press releases.

If you didn’t have any luck finding usable content, you will work on some easy strategies for creating new content below.

Develop New Content
If the previous explorations didn’t unearth any unique, linkworthy, and search-engine friendly content for your website, you’ll need to create some new content instead. Here are two approaches:

• Develop new content in-house.
• Use other people’s content.

Develop New Content In-House
Of course, you could hire a staff of professional writers and set them to work full-time building fascinating, linkworthy content for your website.

Here are some ideas for building out your website content with limited resources:

Monthly Columns Is there anyone in your organization that might be interested in running a regular monthly (or weekly, but we won’t hope for daily!) column on the website?

Perhaps an “Ask the Expert” or “Helpful Hints” type of column, with no marketing agenda in mind.

Once these columns build up steam, you might even begin sharing them with other websites through syndication or simply by contacting other site owners and requesting inclusion.

Industry publications and e-mail newsletters are always looking for new content. But if you’re going to be generous with your content, make sure you get as much SEO benefit as possible: articles posted elsewhere should always link back to your website.

Corporate Blog Many organizations are finding that the easiest way to keep a fresh presence on the Internet is through a corporate blog.

This type of blog might allow contributions from many employees or just one. A blog can even be a great format for posting press releases.

The Need to Feed
Blog-specific search works differently than standard search. If your content-building effort is taking you in the direction of blogs, pod cast, vidcasts, vlogs, and so on, read on for tips to get your voice in front of the masses:

Ping me, baby First and foremost, make sure that your blog or ‘cast is set up to send out a ping to an updating service (such as Weblogs.com, blo.gs, BlogRolling.com, or Ping-0-Matic, which will ping a number of services for you).

Most likely, your blog creation tool is already configured to contact an updating service (also called a ping server) automatically when your blog changes. Check your blog settings for this option.

Submit Luckily, these submittals are generally quick and easy. There are no titles and descriptions to carefully craft, just a URL to submit. Pay special attention to specialty lists.
Tag yourself Set up accounts with social bookmarking systems, searchable sites that allow members to save and classify, or”tag,” URLs (del.icio.us, digg.com, and BlinkList.com are examples). Then make sure to tag each of your posts with keywords.

Get in the news If your website or blog contains regularly updated, unique, original content, it may qualify to be included on a news search engine such as Google News.

Your site will be reviewed by an editor before inclusion, so don’t waste your time or theirs with a submittal unless your content truly is news!

Blog your ‘cast Some podcasting tools include creation of a blog that goes along with your podcast.

This is a great opportunity for you to write accompanying text for your audio or video’ cast files (by the way, ‘cast is just a trendy term for all sorts of podcasts).

Potential subscribers will appreciate being able to read a description before downloading your podcast, and search engines-chronically allergic to audio and video content-will enjoy the tasty text treats you throw them in your synopses.

Compiled Resources You know your business, so you know the kinds of things your customers always seem to need help finding or figuring out.

Resources such as useful links, FAQs, reviews, and a reference table or glossary can be good draws for inbound links (not to mention bookmarks and repeat visits!).

Interviews Interviews with bigwigs in your industry, or anyone else who your target audience finds compelling, can be a great way to fill out your website.

For instance, if your company sells home furnishings, an interview with an interior designer could provide content of interest to your target audience while giving the designer a publicity boost.

Look for experts or service providers in fields similar to your own, and pick someone with a little flair.

Free Tools If your company has the technical chops for it, there’s nothing like a free online tool for drawing inbound links.

Translate dollars into yen; calculate shoe size in the European standard; figure out how many tablespoons of ground coffee it takes to brew a pot.

As long as it’s potentially useful to your target audience, it’s a great idea. And you can gain even more linkage if you allow your tool to be used on others’ websites.

Just imagine: Suddenly your “teaspoons to quarts” conversion table is on every recipe website on the Internet-and each one includes a link to your site.

Use Other People’s Content
We’re not saying you should go out on the Web, find some great content, and cut and paste it onto your website.

There’s this little thing called “copyright infringement” you’ll want to watch out for. But there are some ways to use other people’s content on your website without the Feds beating down your door. Here are a few ideas:

Articles Featuring Your Company Does your PR department keep a record of articles that mention your organization or include interviews or quotes from company representatives?

See if you can get permission to add these articles to your website. It goes without saying that you should stick to the complimentary ones.

Syndicated Content It’s quite easy to incorporate feeds onto your website-for instance, industry news or blog posts.

It’s not unique content, but providing a group of topical links may add freshness and a sense that your site is up-to-date, thus increasing your linkability.

Forums or Classifieds One of our favorite ways to increase content is to let your users build it for you, with posts in message hoards, classified ads, or product reviews.

This is content that constantly updates itself and is eminently linkable. But it also sets you up for abuse, such as people submitting meaningless content (a practice called comment spam).

So be sure you have a moderator or other system in place to protect your site if you’re thinking of offering these features.

Guest Contributors Many talented writers and artists would love to have space on the Internet to display their work.

Your contributors don’t have to be professional writers. Many websites are nicely filled out with the free expressions of regular folks, from birth stories to bedtime stories.

Copyright-Free Content Copyright-free articles on subjects ranging from wedding etiquette to tax advice can be added onto your website, usually in exchange for a link or a courtesy notice.

However, since this content is not unique, it’s of little value for your search engine presence and may even annoy your site visitors because they may have seen the same articles on other sites. So use it with caution, and only if you are certain it improves your site offerings.

An alternative to copyright-free content is Creative Commons (CC) content. The Creative Commons, at www.creativecommons.org, is a new type of copyright-you might call it a “some rights reserved” copyright. Explore CC content by searching for it using Yahoo!’s or Google’s advanced search.

We’ve given you a pretty long list of possible ways to add content to your website; not every one will suit your needs or abilities.

Today, choose which technique you’ll try first. Set a goal for yourself, perhaps adding one new page of unique content, and get started today.

Optimize Non-HTML Documents
There’s no harm in posting documents on your website in non-HTML formats such as Word, Excel, PDF, or PowerPoint.

All of these formats are indexed by the major search engines, and sometimes they rank well.

However, good old HTML still has the upper hand in search. Non-HTML content can be a turnoff to searchers.

Nevertheless, it can be optimized and serve you well, especially for the long tail of search.

For example, while your home page might rank well for “model cars;” your product PDF could have a better chance of faring well for the term “die-cast model car assembly instructions.”

Here, you’ll learn a little bit about what makes non-HTML content work on search engines. Then you’ll make any needed changes to your own docs:

• Metadata for compelling titles
• Content optimization
• When to remove

Metadata for Compelling Titles
Search results for non-HTML documents can be downright ugly, because the folks who wrote them never considered how these documents would be presented in the search engines.

For example, take a look at this page of PDF search results for the term “umpire whistles.”

Here are possible places that search engines will look for a page title for your document:

• The document title as specified in metadata, which is extra information you write to describe the document (and is stored in a file’s properties but is not visible in the body of the document)
• The first 60 or so characters of the document’s text
• The filename
• Any text in the document that you happened to format in a larger font.

Search engines will generally look for metadata first, so defining document metadata is the easiest way to improve your listings.

In Adobe Acrobat and Microsoft Office applications, metadata such as Title, Author, and Keywords is very easy to define by selecting File > Properties or File > Document Properties.

If you are using other programs to author your documents, look to their help pages for guidance.

Open up one of your non-HTML documents and review the metadata. Insert an optimized page title if possible.

You can also define a description in the document metadata, but the search engines will generally gather a snippet from the document content anyway.

Content Optimization
Non-HTML documents are basically thrown in the mix with all the other documents and websites in a search engine’s index.

So, in addition to inserting metadata as described in the preceding section, you should follow the same SEO guidelines for non-HTML documents as you would for your regular web pages:

include your target keywords in text, link to the document from other pages on your site, make sure URLs in the document are clickable so the search engine robots can follow them, and modify the content for improved snippets if desired.

We know it’s not always realistic for non-HTML content to be edited based on SEO principles.

And even if optimized, it’s hard for non-HTML documents to rank well against HTML pages for competitive search terms.

You may wish to skip optimizing the document content beyond basic metadata and hope for good results with the long tail of search.

Make a determination about whether it’s worth your time to attempt to optimize the visible content of your PDF files. If so, get started.

You can get a sense of how search engines see your non-HTML content by viewing the HTML alternate page created by Google. Click Here for more information.

When to Remove
You may be surprised to learn that keeping non-HTML documents-even if they rank well-can create disadvantages for your site. Consider the following:

• Files like PDFs and Microsoft Word documents are stand-alone entities, so they’re not likely to be integrated into your site’s navigation.

If a visitor clicks on one of these files directly from a search engine, they may never even look at the rest of your site.

You may want to weigh whether making your non-HTML content available to the search engines is worth the potential loss of traffic to the rest of your site.

• Since non-HTML documents will often be downloaded onto searchers’ hard drives, it’s possible that your content could be used in ways you don’t condone.

If you’re concerned about this, don’t put them on your site. At the very least, be sure that every document is clearly marked with authorship information, copyright notice, and your web address.

• Non-HTML documents may contain confidential information hidden in the metadata that you don’t wish to make public, including things like tracked changes, comments, and speaker notes.

It’s always a good idea from a security standpoint to review metadata for your documents before posting them in public view.

Workshare’s free software, Trace, available at www.workshare.com/ products/trace/, can help you weed out potential problems.

If you feel it’s for the best, remove non-HTML files from your website or exclude them from indexing using your robots.txt file.

With metadata in your pages and content rich with keywords, your non-HTML documents may turn out to be healthy sources of targeted traffic for your site!

Content Thieves
You’re starting to develop a lovely collection of content on your website, but is somebody else nibbling at your piece of the pie?

Unluckily, the Internet remains something of a Wild West for copyright law. Other websites might steal your content simply by cutting and pasting.

Or they may use scraping, a more sophisticated technique of automatically grabbing content from your web pages, to steal material from your site and put it up on theirs.

You want to be aware of content thieves, not just because they are using your content to compete with you for search engine visibility, but also because they may be damaging your brand.

If your content is stolen by a similarly pathetic character, unwitting users might actually think that they are visiting your website, and that’s something you certainly don’t want.

There are several ways to check if your material is being repurposed elsewhere on the web. Here are a few:

Search for text. Using the search engine of your choice, search for a likely-to-be-unique text string (a sentence or two will do) from the body of your website, using quotes around the text. If the search engine finds sites other than your own, something fishy may be going on.

Your competitors may be using your company name or proprietary product names in their PPC ads. Click Here to learn more.

Use a page comparison site. Copyscape is a website specifically designed to help site owners find copies of their content online.

A major limitation is that it searches only HTML content, not PDFs or other document formats.

Search for media. Stolen media such as images, audio, video, and Flash content is considerably harder to find than copies of your page text-for the very same reasons that search engines struggle with these formats in general.

If media content is a significant portion of your site, you’ll need to become an expert at using the media search options to help protect your rights online.

It’s often easier to prevent media theft than react to it. If you’re concerned about this, check in with your design team to make sure they’re savvy to copy prevention options such as adding watermarks to images, building your Flash files in multiple pieces, or embedding your server information in media files.

Review your server logs. Other websites can display your media content such as images, audio, video, and Flash and make it look like it belongs to them.

It’s not uncommon for these nefarious nerds to point their links directly to your content on your servers.

Not only does this infringe on your copyrights, it also puts an unfair burden on your servers, which are forced to serve up the content for someone else’s site!

Your server logs can help you find this sort of hijacking-yet another reason to make a habit of reviewing your stats.

You now know how to look for misused materials on the Web. But what will you do if you find any?

With any luck, a simple communication with the content thieves will clear things up. If not, you may need to contact the website host and request that the page be removed.

Detailed advice and links to sample “cease-and-desist” letters can be found at www.plagiarismtoday.com.