Step Wise SEO

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All of a sudden, every inbound link to your site is outdated.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Page Redirects Do all your outdated pages redirect to appropriate new ones?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!