While many of us in online marketing are SEOs and work on a full time basis with web sites, and keeping ourselves updated with tons of articles from everywhere on the interwebs, it’s possible for some of us to lose track of the basics from time to time.  That’s why it never hurts to review the basics [of onsite search engine optimization] every once in awhile to keep our foundation strong and hopefully never forget these essentials to ranking well!

Title

This may be a no-brainer but there are still a few web sites I’ve been to that have even neglected to add their title!  Or, they leave an obvious default title that is not going to help anyone who’s searching on Google find the site.  It’s important to have a good well-written title!  The function of the title tag is to tell search engines what the page is actually about.  So, be sure to have your major keywords in the title, at the very least.  The title should be around 50-60 characters at the most.

Meta Description

A well-crafted Meta Description is another important on site item on your page.  This is essential because it does 2 things at once:  it tells potential clients running across your listing on search engines what your page is about, and can help convert a lead by enticing clients to click on the link and move forward into your site.  However, it really isn’t used by Google to that much as far as keywords are concerned.  Keep the description to 150-160 characters.

H1s, H2s, H3s

These are all header tags.  They need to be a part of the page because keywords and descriptions within these header tags tell Google what is actually on the page.  It helps to establish a page structure/hierarchy that will actually help your rankings. [Header tags also help break up the various topics on the page for the user, so it makes for a much easier experience.]

Internal Linking

This is another important page item.  Using appropriate internal linking does 2 things at once – it tells people what’s behind a link on a page, and it tells the search engines what to follow, what not to follow, what to index, and what not to index.  In short, links are the backbone of the world wide web.  Without links, you can’t expect Google to do much in terms of spidering and indexing your site.  Use links with anchor text that accurately describes the name of the page.  It’s important not to mislead your users or search engines, as doing so can raise red flags that your site may possibly be considered spam.

Keyword Mentions On the page

There is an age old myth in SEO that’s based on keyword density.  The keyword density myth includes requirements that claim anything from a 10% keyword density to more than 25% keyword density is a ranking factor and can get you ranked.  In all of my experience as an SEO, I have not seen this to be true.  One or two mentions of a targeted keyword on a single page is really all you need.  Anything more than that is unnecessary. [SEO Moz did an excellent article on keyword targeting that deserves a read]

Images

This may be the last thing that you think of when it comes to basics, but it’s probably one of the most important.  If you create images for your site and they take too long to load, that can cause search engines to spider your site more slowly than they would have otherwise, leading to slow site load times and other issues that can have a negative effect on your rankings.  In addition, it can cause a high bounce rate, a major limiting factor when it comes to increasing your lead conversions.  Instead, always ensure that you optimize your images for the fastest download times.  This will make it easier on both your users and search engine spiders who spider your site. [Additionally, if you're adding images, be sure to upload them with appropriate file names. A project I assisted with had a background image labeled skeleton.jpg, and 4 months later it was ranking for "skeleton in desert", "jack skeleton" and other terms, when there was no other reference at all on site in meta text or text about "skeleton".]

Image Alt Text

This is usually incorrectly referred to as the image alt tag.  It’s not actually a tag.  It’s the alternate text attribute of the image tag.  The reason it’s an attribute is because it’s something that you add to the image tag that tells it what to call the image.  See, by default Google does not read images – while they may spider and index them by file name, Google sees images as a blank space on the page.  So, you need to have some kind of text that appears in place of the image to tell the search engine what’s really there.  Enter image alt text.  Keyword rich, appropriate image alt text can actually help your rankings.  But, be sure that it describes the image itself and isn’t just laced with a number of keyword repetitions that are useless to the user.

Valid coding practices

This is true whether you’re a designer, SEO, or developer.  You need to have good coding on your site.  If you don’t or you’re not sure, then you’d best get over to the W3C and crack open your site with their HTML validator to ensure that you have valid code.  Or, you can utilize any of the cheap or free HTML validator software that’s available online.  Valid code ensures that your site design is going to work on many modern browsers on the market. [Remember that with all of the various browsers, and various versions of those browsers that site rendering may be different on each platform, and browser specific elements can be established in your CSS code to adjust for this. Additionally, more outdated browsers are now getting messages from places like Twitter that their browser is outdated, and should be updated.]

These are essential basics [for onsite optimization] that must be on your site to help it rank well.  Even if you know these by heart already, it’s always a good idea to review them from time to time to ensure that you’re optimizing your web sites correctly.  Remember – only you can prevent web site penalties!

Google Is My “Other Lady”

I came to the realization that the relationship that I have with Google is actually extremely similar to the relationship I have with my wife *shameless promotion* who runs an awesome online vintage shop. Looking at the way that I interact, communicate and understand what it is that Google is looking for mirrors the way that I find ways to communicate and interact in my romantic relationship. So we can take a stab at understanding Google’s ranking factors, by looking at the factors in our relationships.

Communication is Key

When you are talking to a girl, and hope to begin a relationship you have to let them know about you, who you are, what you do, and what your interests are in life. When you are building a website, you need to also be communicating to Google who you are, what you do, and what interests might bring people to your website. You can’t just be fluff, you have to have content that’s relevant and makes “semantic sense”. This means that the year 2000 tactics of stuffing pages full of keywords and not actually using real sentences is out. The way you present yourself and dress does say something about you, no it’s not just being shallow. If you like to wear a stained and faded black sabbath t shirt with hopelessly ripped jeans, it sends a message about you. Header tags ( h1, h2, h3 etc) have the same effect, they send a clear signal about your page’s content, so be sure to use them effectively.

Meta-tags: The Pick Up Line

Do you believe in love at first sight…or should I walk by again?

You only have one chance to make a first impression, and being far too forceful can have just a negative impact on your chances of impressing Google, as an attractive woman. In your first conversation, you also need to be truthful about what it is you actually do. If you claim to be “in finance” and turn out to be a cashier at the local Quikie Mart, then you aren’t going to be seen as particularly trust worthy.

In your meta-title, description and keywords you need to describe what it is your site is about, without adding items that you don’t actually cover. Also be sure not to stuff your meta-keywords with tons of repetitions or words and topics your site doesn’t cover. Recently Google made a change to it’s handling of meta-tags for longer queries, and uses items from the page to understand context, and this is important because it means that Google is looking past the “pick up lines” and looking at the content of your site, and letting searchers see more of the context from your page before they even click through to your site.

Don’t hate the Player, Hate the Game

If the people who know you refer to you as “shady”, or “flirtatious”, then a woman you want to be in a relationship with is going to be second guessing you, questioning your actions and generally not going to be secure in her relationship with you. Likewise, if you hang out with a crowd of people that are constantly having “drama”, getting in arguments with their girlfriends, go out gambling and hanging out in strip clubs, you are most likely hurting your chances. Whether you think it’s fair or not, people are going to make assumptions about you and your character based off the company you keep. Even worse is if you consistently stand up and talk up these people as your close friends who can be trusted…when they can’t be.

Google also looks at who your website is “hanging out with”, and is going to analyze your online relationships. If you’re linking out to adult and gaming websites, and recommending your visitors to those types of sites, you’re going to lose credibility with Google. What other sites say about you will be used by Google to evaluate your relevance to a particular topic, so be sure you’re getting good “anchor text” from reputable websites that are related to your site’s theme, topic, or geographic area.

It’s All About Trust

To summarize my analogy, no relationship can function without trust. Without it, both partners will start taking on negative behaviors, and trust me, you do NOT want to have Google as your Ex-Girlfriend! But if you stick to the straight and narrow, and faithfully update your content, find trustworthy links and friends to support you, then you will over time become more and more trustworthy to Google and your girlfriend.

I Now Pronounce You Man and Search Engine

A relationship in the end is about commitment. If you do not commit yourself to the time needed to write content, create videos, blog, respond to blog comments, submit yourself to directories, put out link bait, promote yourself socially then you’re not going to have a very successful website or online presence. So get over your commitment issues, and go for it! Now repeat after me:

I SEOer,
Take Thee Google,
To Love and to Optimize for,
With useful, unique content
through serp changes and algorithm updates,
For Adsense or Adwords campaigns,
Till Death or Server Outage do us part.

Pay attention to the bones of your Site: File Names

Well, I just went back and checked in to my Google webmaster tools account and discovered something very strange for this real estate and local centric website for La Quinta, CA…

I was totally confused why this site had so many different terms that it ranked for for “Skeleton”… Well I did some digging and realized that when I built the site, I had added the background image with the file name “images/skeleton.gif”. The rest of the site has NOTHING to do with skeletons but here Google is giving rankings for a wide mix of terms related to the main content of the page, as well as for terms related to skeletons! For example Google webmaster tools showed me ranking 48 for [Jack Skeleton] from Nightmare Before Christmas, as well as [skeleton in desert] which seemed to have used the geographic context along with the filename. The lesson here for your site is that filen ames are one of the many factors in how Google understands your website, so do everything you can to name them appropriately!

A Valuable Event

There is a niche type of website that caters to supplying this event information to online sources, and one component of your local search optimization should include the use of these resources. One reason for this is the “Citation” that they can provide your business, because when you list your business as a venue you enter your business name and address and also have an opportunity to get an inbound link to your site. You also have the opportunity of creating your own profile on that website and get another link on that profile. This is in addition to the even listing itself, so all in all you can get 3 quality inbound links all in one go, on top of the exposure to their users!

The Top Event Sites

Doux vintage Eventful profile
Doux Vintage Grand Opening Event

Upcoming Event: Doux Vintage Grand Opening

Doux Vintage Upcoming Profile

Zvents- Doux Grand Opening Celebration

Doux Vintage Zvents Profile

Doux Vintage : Venue Listing

Bonus Event Value!

It turns out that Zvents.com exports to several different platforms! So when you add your business as a venue, it actually gets syndicated to several different authority sites!It exports to Things To Do by MSN and also to the Press Enterprise Events page, and may have other partners, but these two showed up in a Google search very quickly as they are authority domains! Update: It looks like another exported page is on a High Desert News website, once again through Zvents.

What about your events?

Be sure to take advantage of Event Marketing because it has many valuable rewards to give you. Don’t think you have an event worthy of listing? Here’s some quick thoughts for you where you could list yourself. Host a seminar on your industy, create a “coffee group” to discuss your expertise, list your grand opening ( like I did for Doux Vintage…be sure to offer refreshments like cupcakes and wine and you’ve got a win!). You could also host a band, which could also yeild extra links if the band has a blog, since they’ll want to let their groupies and followers know where they’re playing(thanks Alex Guillen for that tip)!  Any way you slice it, there’s tons of value in event marketing so get to it!

Update: Thanks to everyone that attended the Grand Opening of Doux Vintage! Your support was very much appreciated!

My Own Case Study: From Online to Offline

My beautiful Wife Michelle has been twittering, blogging about fashion and running an online vintage store. She recently got moved into an art studio and has been diligently working to convert part of the studio into an exhibition room so she can show her collection off on the first Thursday of every month( as part of the Riverside, Ca Art Walk) and by appointment.  It struck me that she would now have an opportunity to take advantage of many online opportunities now that she was going to have a physical location. I decided to use this opportunity to publicly show what steps a small business should take to make an impact on their local search profile. I just hope that this turns out to be helpful, and instructive!

Surveying the Local Landscape

I first started doing Google searches for vintage clothes, accessories, stores and shops to find out what the local landscape was in terms of competitors. Fortunately, there are very few stores that are competing for this particular industry. The search engine results page quite often pulled a “onebox” map result, and the rest of the results of the page were actually listings of shops on 3rd party websites. I bookmarked those sites to come back to see if I could add her business as a listing on those ranked pages.

Hello World: Getting Listed

The first step was to get the shop’s physical location identified as a business listing. Google Local was my first move, so that I could be sure that any citations, reviews and links her listing would get would be credited with that value. Even the reviews that are entered into Yahoo get cited in Google Local, so it was really the only choice.

After you enter your basic information into Google Local you have the option of selecting categories. Now in Google Local, when you enter a search that isn’t in a specific category it will suggest a revision to what it beleives is the closest category that matches that query, so they’ve done a pretty thorough job of narrowing down the categories, so be sure that you enter in up to 5 categories that describe your business.

Google Categories: Clothing Collectible Period Vintage, Clothes & Accessories Consignment & Resale,Vintage Clothing Store, Vintage Accessories, Vintage Dresses

A Google Post Card: Greetings from Mountain View, CA!

Google is at least minimally interested in verifying that entries into Google Local are actual verifiable businesses, so they require either the phone number or physical address be verified. Now the phone verification is pretty much immediate, they’ll call you and you punch in a pin code, but you can also have a post card sent to your listed address to verify your business. Downside is that the post card takes some time to verify, but in this case it was necessary since the number used actually is a voicemail box that sends an email transcript.

My What a Nice Profile You Have!

The Google account that you sign up with for your Google Local listing can also yield a secondary online presence that is searchable, on the Google URL, and fairly customizable. Here’s the Google profile for Doux Vintage and my suggestion is that you tie it into a Picasa or Flickr account. If you use Flickr, then seperate out a set that has the specific pictures you’d like to use otherwise you might end up displaying pictures that aren’t exactly related. Be sure to list your contact information, and take advantage of the Bio area to get some good anchor text links in addition to the Links section.

Be sure to check out these resources on Google Local and Google Profiles and Small Business SEO

The Start of a Good Thing

That’s all for now, as I continue to expand on Doux Vintage, I’ll be continuing this as a series of posts, reporting my tactics and results so that you can learn from the example. Hopefully it’s a helpful one!

Question: Given that fact that Yellow Pages, Super Pages, Yelp and other “yellow page” type services now include geo tagging, address, and often a map of a business location, would you say that getting these entries could
be helpful in your organic rankings, if you have a geographically
centered Keyword?

Todd: If a business cares at all about local search, they have to go after these entries. Here is why: First, if a searcher is sophisticated enough to actually search with a geotargeted term, the local results are the first thing you see on the SERPS. In addition, for many local listings there are sub categories linking off to sites that google feels provide valuable information about that business.

Quality Local Information

This means that sites which are acting as local aggregators of business information are going to motivated to provide thorough and accurate information to be listed there. This will greatly improve the overall search experience.

Google is Getting Geographic

Second, it seems many people simply search a term like “pizza” or “car dealer”. Search on these terms and Google will ask you to enter a zip code to better refine your search locally. This is just another example of the importance that is being placed on local results.

Also, I think Google is trying to take the emphasis away from other aggregators like Superpages and try to keep it all “in house” so to speak. For that reason, I think it’s important now more than ever for the 100% local business to position themselves to take advantage of these local results.

Advice for Local Business Owners

The bottom line is, if you are a local business, it doesn’t make sense to go after broad keywords. Geotarget. Do everything you can to get listed in these results. Of course, to make sure your site shows up in these results is a whole other SEO discussion.

The Role of Keyword Suggestion
The most important answer to one of the questions that Aaron fielded in the webinar was about the continuing integration of keyword suggest into the search engines and how people use search. You can see in Google Chrome, IE8, and Yahoo integrating a keyword suggestion tool into the browsing experience and it is very important to understand the way that this will change search, and should impact our methods of optimization.

Keyword Suggestions are going to lead to fewer natural Queries, as full sentences and fewer misspelled queries as well.

Get a “Fat Belly”

Here is Aaron Wall’s advice on how to handle the impact of the keyword suggest systems that are becoming more and more integrated into the search experience:

Get a “Fat Belly”.

Let me explain what this means… as the suggest tool gives users suggestions on their terms as they write, one word terms and long tail keywords are going to lose ground to the “Fat Belly” terms i.e. terms that that are in between the long tail, and one word that fit a large number of queries. The key is remembering that it’s a cyclical situation, because the suggested terms that appear, and will continue to be used more and more by users, are ordered by popularity. This means that your keyword research definately needs to include some study of the Google and Yahoo suggested terms that describe your particular industry. By focusing on the “Fat Belly” terms, you will get better placement in those serps that searches are getting prompted to use by Google Suggest. So go get “Fat Bellied“!!

Don’t let your Images become a messy pile

Utilizing Images to Enhance your website content

There are many different types of content that people could be looking for online. People looking for the same subject are often going to be searching differently if they want to see different types of site content. With Google’s Universal Search playing a larger and larger role to accomodate these different types of searches, you need to make sure that you are incorporating media properly in your page content. In the Google Webmaster chat about Optimizing Images for Search it became clear that the context of the image is used to help determine it’s relevance to a keyword. So, as you add content to your site, make sure your images aren’t just piled up, and thrown willy nilly about the page. Your images should align with the content to further the message. No one wants to read through blocks of text with no relief. Additionally, that content you’re adding has it’s Alt text(title) description, so that Google can see how that image lines up with the information being conveyed in the text itself.
]]> http://footinmouthdisease.net/2008/08/06/treat-pictures-like-visual-content/feed/ 0 Foot in Mouth A Pile of Clothes http://footinmouthdisease.net/2008/02/01/content-without-purpose/ http://footinmouthdisease.net/2008/02/01/content-without-purpose/#comments Fri, 01 Feb 2008 16:56:02 +0000 Jeremy Rivera http://footinmouthdisease.wordpress.com/?p=27 ]]> When you are content writing for you site, you do need to keep in mind the user freindliness of your website. I read this great article about usability that gave an analogy of a restaurant that did tons of advertising but didn’t reap the benefits because their restaurant wasn’t quality.  

Write the content for your website in a way that is going to satisfy the people who read it. Filling pages with empty words that happen to match with your keywords will be much less successful than useful information that is relevant to your clients needs. 

Don’t focus on your rankings because you will become obsessed, checking other peoples sites and wondering why they are ranking higher. Take that energy and devote it to writing relevant website content! When you have quality information that converts visitors it is far more valuable than just sheer numbers.

It started out as a fling…I heard that it was a good thing..Peer pressure you know. So I put my site out there on del.icio.us. It seemed harmless at first..and then I saw that link appear in my google site maps! I went out to Reddit.com and bookmarked my self again…. and then blinklist.com and kept seeing the back links show up on my site links!

I know these are just free for alls, and lord knows who has gotten links from these sites before… it can’t be good for me I suppose…

I just can’t seem to help my self! Compared to other methods of having a good solid traditional link partner that you know and are personally familiar with, these link flings are addictive!

I’m sorry, my traditional link partners, but I’m going in another direction…. I think that we should still be freinds but I’m not going to be spending as much time with you as I used to….

 Furl.net, claimid.com and linkagogo.com…. I’ll see you kiddos later wink wink!