Step Wise SEO

If your Task journal isn’t yet filled with dozens of fascinating ruminations, here are some ideas to get you out there and investigating:

• Is there a site that offers an award for your organization’s product or service? Can you get your site in the running? Try search for “[your product] web award” or “[your industry] web award”.

• Can you search for your site in a way that causes your meta description tag to show up on the search engine listings?

Try searching with your URL only or with text that appears only in links to you hut isn’t on your site.

Is your meta description tag showing up the way you expected? Do you see any funny characters? Did it get cut off earlier than you expected?

• Similarly, try to find searches that make your Open Directory or Yahoo! Directory listing show up in the results.

• Are you unintentionally spamming the search engines? Search for old pages on your site that are still live and displaying the same content as your new pages.

Check to make sure your pages aren’t doing something silly and spammy, like displaying text that’s the same color as the background.

• One of our favorite mysteries to investigate: Exactly which page on your site does Google think is your “official” page?

Search for your organization’s name and check the URL that Google returns for this search.

It may be your home page, or it may be an alternate domain, or it may something else deep within your site.

Are you surprised? Dismayed? What’s the reason that this URL is displaying? Is it the number of pages linking to this page? Is it that the “official” URL is the only listing your site has in the Open Directory?

• Do you know how to search like an expert? Try using advanced search operators on your favorite search engine.

For example, Yahoo! allows you to build your own search shortcuts. You can define a shortcut so you can type just “!pix” into the search box and Yahoo! will automatically search for “pictures of ethanol vehicles” or whatever you prefer.

Or, try one of the numerous built-in shortcuts, listed here: http://tools.search.yahoo.com/shortcuts/. Are there any that your target audience might be using?

• Are your competitors tracking their conversions using Google Analytics? Peek into their source code and look for the Google Analytics tracking tag. Just search for the text string “google-analytics” in their code, and you’ll see the script.

• Are there any additional domains that your organization should own? For example, do you own a .org domain name but not the com?

If a searcher had to guess at your site’s URL, what do you think it would be? And, when is your current domain set to expire? Make sure you don’t inadvertently let it run out.

• How’s your spelleng? Search for misspellings of your product or service and see what comes up.

• Do a little volunteer work for the search engines by helping them clean spam out of their listings.

Every major search engine allows you to report spammers; Google’s spam reporting tool can be found at www.google.com/contact/ spamreport.html.

• What are people saying about your organization on discussion boards? Look to Lycos Discussion Search at http://discussion.lycos.com to find out. Or, see where you stand on the blogs at www.blogpulse.com.