Every SEO company knows that high quality content is a staple of a good campaign. Compelling, relevant content helps a site rank (due to keyword density and by capturing long tail search traffic), greatly increases the potential for generating organic inbound links, and helps to increase conversion  thanks to increased traffic and a heightened perception of value and thought leadership in the marketplace.

However, developing content that is going to capture the attention of your target demographic is no easy task, and, to add another element of difficulty, it needs to be an ongoing process of developing and distributing compelling pieces. Even if you have a great hit with a single piece of killer content, you still need to be thinking about what’s next.

Unless you happen to have an insane genius on staff who simply can’t help but come up with killer content every time he or she touches a keyboard, you’re probably going to need a plan. I’ve spent some time outlining what I think are the core elements of an ongoing content development strategy, and I’d like to share them with you.

Building a Visual Outline

First, let’s take a look at this diagram, which I will explain below:

Let’s break down what the diagram is showing.

1. Expertise Categories

   Every piece of content generated needs to be based on the expertise of the person or organization it’s supposed to help promote. Blogs, for example, are wildly popular and useful because so many of them are written by knowledgeable, impassioned people who are providing useful, relevant information to their readers. You need to make sure that you follow the same model when crafting content. Don’t write about Paris Hilton because Google Trends is showing that she’s a hot topic today – write about what you know. Most likely, your expertise or the expertise of the organization you’re generating content for can be split into multiple topics. For example, a financial services firm might have expertise in risk management, retirement planning, and estate planning. Each of these would fit into the categories section, and would drive ideas for the types of content you should be generating

2. Buyer Personas

   After you’ve figured out what categories your content is going to live in, you need to think about the market for each of those categories. Who is your audience, and what writing style will appeal to them? In our example above, the markets for risk management and retirement planning might very well be quite different, and the types of people who will be consuming the content will be hooked in by different writing styles and topics.

3. Trends

   You need to know what’s going on in your industry right now if you have any chance of being considered an authority in your field. So, when generating content, it’s good to make note of current trends in the market that are worth commenting on. It’s always a good idea to have content in the pipeline that’s not time sensitive and can be used at any time, but late-breaking industry news is generally ideal to comment on.

4. Content

   Once you’ve figured out precisely what you need to write about, go ahead and generate the content. Make it compelling, make it personal. Afterward, you’ll need some kind of distribution mechanism. I discuss below the different distribution categories that content can fall into, but actually implementing a distribution plan is outside the scope of this post (though I will be writing about it later)

Applying it to a Real Website

Let’s take a look at what the diagram might look like in a real world example. We’ll use one of my personal favorite sites, seomoz.org. Seomoz offers a variety of SEO related services and is generally considered to be a leader in the SEO industry, especially thanks to their daily SEO blog. These guys pump out quality content on a daily basis, so I thought they’d be a good example for how toimplement a content creation plan. Note that this diagram is far from complete and probably far from accurate, but it’s meant only to serve as an example:

Expertise

I’ve taken three of the categories of expertise that SEOmoz has – SEO, tech startups, and online advertising. Additional categories can be added, but for the sake of our example, we’ll use these three.

Buyer personas

Next we have potential buyer personas for each of the areas of expertise included at the top. The colors indicate which areas of expertise are applicable to which buyer persona, with some areas being applicable to multiple or all personas.

SEOmoz provides search marketing consulting to high-end businesses, so that’s obviously a market they want to connect with. Additionally, they offer tools & services (branded as SEOmoz pro) to other SEO agencies who want to make use of their expertise, so I’ve also included a buyer persona titled “potential SEOmoz pro customers”.

A less obvious buyer persona

The other buyer persona, “colleagues and competitors”, is particularly interesting. Targeting this persona is useful not to generate sales directly, but to establish leadership in the industry. I have never hired SEOmoz, nor have I ever spoken to one of their clients, yet I have the distinct impression that these guys know exactly what they’re doing. Why is that? Because reading their content has given me that impression. This is a very important component of content development, usually dubbed “thought leadership”.

Trends

The trends indicated above were generated just from my knowledge of what’s going on in the industry right now. I was pleased to find that it was very easy to find content on the seomoz site dedicated to these trends, since it helped to reinforce my ideas on quality content development. For example, I know that a lot of large companies are dealing with budget cuts right now due to the economy, so I figured there would be a post about how SEO is the best place to spend your marketing dollars.

Content Distribution

Great content will not only get people to read it, but will generate inbound links. A full inbound link plan it outside the scope of this post, but I did want to break down the distribution categories a piece of content can fall into. Deciding on where you want to publish content can be integral to your success, and I may actually add that decision step in a next revision of the diagrams above.

Content distribution categories

• Internal / Generated
  This type of content is created by you and posted on your own site. It can include general website content, blog posts, or anything else that comes internally from you or your organization, and ultimately lives on your own site
• External / Generated
  The external/generated content type is where something like a guest blog post might live. You wrote the content yourself, but it didn’t get posted on your own site.
• External / Acquired
  The external/acquired type of content is where a newspaper article about your organization would fit. You may have had to request that the article be written (as in traditional PR), or a writer/journalist may have come to you for an interview. Either way, your involvement was an integral part of the process, which is what separates this type from the External / Organic type
• External / Organic
  The external / organic content type is covers content that was written about you or your organization, but that you had no involvement in whatsoever. For example, a blogger creating a post specifically as a reaction to a post on your blog would fall under the external / organic category

Conclusion

Engaging web content is the new way to market any business. With 113 billion searches being performed every month, you need to have a plan in place to get your expertise into the marketplace so that people looking for answers find you first. If you’ve already solved a problem for them before they’ve even gotten in touch with you, you’re way ahead of the game.

Wil Reynolds from Seer tweeted this link from Michael Gray’s blog earlier today, which basically answers the question of whether hCards are actually beneficial to SEO with “probably not”. Now, I’m not in a position to really argue based on anything I’ve seen (and my official position is that I agree with Gray), but we did see something last month with one of our clients that made me wonder about whether hCards were beneficial to our local search visibility, and I’d been meaning to post about it.

The rundown is this: We’re currently ranking well for a fairly competitive term in the Philadelphia region. Our organic positioning is in the top 3, and our local business positioning is generally #1 out of about 5 “top” results. However, for the past week or so, we’ve noticed that our client has become the only local business result for the phrase, despite there being very clear competitors who are also engaged in SEO.

To illustrate, the local results used to look something like this:

Google Local multiple results

And now, it triumphantly looks like this, at least from when and where I’m searching (identifying information removed):

Google local single result

One of our changes at the start of this month was the implementation of hCard formatting for their address, so I’m wondering if that change has given us a leg up on the local results. It’s quite possible that there are other factors at work here, but it was enough to make me wonder. Any thoughts?

Over the years, I’ve spoken to a lot of people who have been soured on search optimization due to a bad experience, and even some who don’t “believe” in SEO because it’s always been explained to them in an abstract, condescending, too-complicated-for-you-to-understand kind of way. Those of us in the industry know how effective SEO and conversion optimization can be because we see the results on our own sites and in the leads and sales we generate for our clients. However, I recently took on an SEO project that hit close to home for me, and I thought it would make for a nice little story that would highlight the impact a good SEO campaign can have.

My family owns a banquet hall in the heart of Northeast Philadelphia that my grandparents built up from scratch, starting with a small corner tavern in the Kensington section of the city and eventually growing into an event hall capable of holding 600 guests. It’s a regular reality TV show of parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins trying to keep the doors open and the guests happy without strangling one another.

Although the hall had seen prosperous times in the 80s and 90s, the past few years have proven to be difficult for business. The declining economy in Northeast Philadelphia – coupled with a few antiquated business practices – was causing a drastic drop in revenue, and it was clear that something had to be done to revitalize the business.

I decided to put Context to work building a new website for the banquet hall and implementing an SEO campaign to drive targeted traffic to the site.  We paid attention to our landing pages and optimized for local search, and the results were stellar.

With their old site and no SEO, they saw maybe 1 or 2 leads per month coming over the web. However, thanks to our efforts, they now receive an average of 4 to 5 leads per day. In fact, I just checked the analytics, and 9 leads were generated in the past 24 hours. Their website is now a core component of the business, and things have started to completely turn around.  With this new source of revenue, they’ve been able to renovate the banquet rooms, which in turn is generating even more business.

I guess the moral of the story here is that SEO works. More importantly though, SEO can go as far as to revitalize a struggling business. And while some people may think to themselves, “this is probably a ‘results not typical’ kind of situation”, I’d have to respond by saying that I have yet to find a client who didn’t see direct benefits from our efforts in search optimization and site optimization.

When clients are on a budget, it can be tough to build a decent inbound link campaign. Even if you’re only looking to acquire free links, there is a lot of time and effort involved in researching & securing links, especially if you want permanent, high-PR backlinks that are going to help bolster your search ranking.

One method a lot of SEOs use to jumpstart a link campaign is to submit their clients’ press releases to websites that will allow you to do so for free, and will also allow backlinks to your website. We set out to find some of the better, more SEO-friendly free press release sites, and I’ve included our list below (in no particular order). All PageRanks come from the Google toolbar, so they’re more of an approximation of PageRank as opposed to anything official.

Free Press Release Sites

1. www.prlog.org
   PageRank: 6
   Allows backlink: yes
   Custom anchor text: no
2. www.sanepr.com
   PageRank: 5
   Allows backlink: yes
   Custom anchor text: Yes
3. www.pressreleasepoint.com
   PageRank: 5
   Allows backlink: yes
   Custom anchor text: no
4. www.free-press-release-center.info
   PageRank: 4
   Allows backlink: yes
   Custom anchor text: yes
5. www.transworldnews.com
   PageRank: 4
   Allows backlink: yes
   Custom anchor text: yes
6. www.theopenpress.com
   PageRank: 3
   Allows backlink: yes
   Custom anchor text: yes
7. www.information-online.com
   PageRank: 3
   Allows backlink: yes
   Custom anchor text: yes
8. www.pagerelease.com
   PageRank: 3
   Allows backlink: yes
   Custom anchor text: yes
9. www.pressexposure.com
   PageRank: 3
   Allows backlink: yes
   Custom anchor text: yes
10. www.pr-usa.net
    PageRank: 5
    Allows backlink: yes
    Custom anchor text: yes

One of the toughest questions for businesses – especially businesses who don’t sell products directly through their website – is: how can we generate return on investment after launching our new website?

If you’re asking this question, you’re on the right track. Many businesses never bother to ask about website ROI, and instead pay for flashy web design and copywriting, only to realize that none of it had any effect on their revenue.  If you fall into this category, please be sure to read on, as you may be surprised at just how much your website can do for you.

Goals and Analytics

Website ROI comes down to two things: goals and analytics. In this article, I’m going to focus on setting up website goals. A followup article will detail how to measure and report on the effectiveness of your implementation of those goals.

Too many businesses think of their website as an online business card – a place where people may go if they’re directed there by a salesperson, but nothing that is going to drive new business opportunities.  Oftentimes, we find that our clients have never viewed their website in the appropriate light, and instead subscribe to an antiquated idea of what it means to do business on the web. Regardless of your industry, your service offerings, or your target demographic, your website should be a tool for generating new business, for creating and maintaining contact with warm leads, and for decreasing their overhead costs.

Setting Goals

So, how do we shift our thinking and get started with ROI on our website? First, set a goal.
Many companies have never asked themselves: “why do we have a website?”. Other questions too rarely asked include: “Ideally, what types of visitors would we like to attract to our website” or (this one is very important) “what do we want them to do when they get there?”

For companies that sell products online, the answer to these questions is generally pretty simple – “we want our visitors to go through the buying process and purchase our products”. There is still plenty of room for creating efficiencies & identifying goals in that process, but right now I will take a moment to talk about those companies who don’t sell products online. Maybe they are service based or have a lengthy sales cycle due to custom or niche products. These are quite often the companies that overlook the value of their website, assuming that because they don’t have an online store, the web can’t be at the forefront of their business. This type of thinking is toxic to a business model in 2009, and needs to be addressed and updated.

Why do you have a website?

The answer to “why do we have a website” should be something to the effect of “to drive new business to our company through search engines and to offset our customer service costs by providing information and online support to our clients, employees, and investors”.

The first part of this answer is handled by search engine optimization, or SEO, which is the process of positioning a website high in the search results for given keywords and phrases. This process should be handled by a capable SEO firm, but be wary of SEO companies that promise big results but don’t ask many questions, or who seem to be unable to give a clear idea of what you should expect from the process.

The second part of the answer – offsetting customer service costs – is often overlooked. Consider how many man (or woman) hours your company might save if you were able to reduce the number of customer service calls by 20%? What about 40%? What if you directed your customers or investors to a web page rather than mailing out hard-copies of presentations, white papers, or financial reports? For many companies, having complete, constant control over their website content is something they think is out of their reach, because the old method of content control is to email your web design company and have them make small changes to existing text (usually at a hefty hourly rate). However, content management systems (CMS) are the standard for building websites in 2009, and if you are operating on anything else, you are at a disadvantage. A CMS makes updating your website as easy as word processing, and is a staple of a successful website.

What types of visitors would you like to attract to your website?

The answer to this question should be: “everyone in your target demographic”. Often we find companies who are convinced that their target demographic is not using the web. Actual statistics show otherwise. According to Internet World Stats, 248,241,969 people in North America have access to the Internet (consider that the entire population of North America is 337,572,949, according to the 2008 census). Additionally, a recent PEW research study concluded that “Contrary to the image of Generation Y as the ‘Net Generation,’ Internet users in their 20s do not dominate every aspect of online life.”. Make no mistake about it: your target demographic is on the web, and right now, they’re browsing your competitors’ sites.

What do you want visitors to do when they get to the site?

The simplest answer here, if you’re not selling products directly, is “contact us”. It is extremely common for companies to purchase warm leads, why not use your website to bring in your own? Browse through your website and ask yourself “how hard is it to figure out the specific services we offer, and what value we bring as compared to our competition?”. Also ask, “how easy is it for a potential customer to contact us from any page of our site?”, and “how easy is it for visitors to get to specific information about our products and services?”.

Implementation

After you’ve determined what you’d like to do with your website, you need to implement changes to help reach your goals. A competent web strategy firm will be required to help you with this process. If you have separate marketing and web development teams, you should ideally have your marketing team develop a clear plan for the web team, who should then implement the changes.

Context can help you get the most out of your website by developing and implementing your goals, then measuring and reporting on the progress and ROI. Please read more about our SEO, Website Optimization, and Content Management services.

What’s Next

Once you’ve identified your goals and updated your site to best suit those goals, you need to find out how successful you’ve been in your implementation. This is where analytics comes in, and I will be following up shortly with an article about measuring ROI.

In rough economic times, businesses are looking for innovative ways to slash their budget without stifling forward momentum. In this article, I hope to make a compelling argument to suggest that now is the time to reevaluate and redevelop your web presence, and that marketing via the web is the most cost effective way to stay on budget while maintaining growth.

Cutting the Budget

Well, you’ve probably noticed that the economy has hit a bit of a rough spot. Companies are being forced to close their doors or lay off large parts of their workforce, and consumers are hesitant to spend any money on non-essentials. As a result, executives are focusing on their bottom line, and rightfully so.

It seems that, in many cases, one of the first departments to suffer massive cuts is the marketing team. Whether the company has an in-house marketing department or subcontracts to a separate firm, marketing has a way of ending up on the chopping block when it comes time to cut costs. While a strategy that involves slashing the marketing budget may be necessary in the short term, it can be detrimental to the long term viability of the company. An alternative, cost-effective plan for marketing and brand development needs to be implemented. This is where your web presence should come into play.

When compared to television, print ads, or other traditional PR and marketing efforts, the web not only offers the most exposure per dollar*, but it also lends itself to a level of customization and reporting that is simply unrivaled. Not only can you specifically target key demographics by geographic location, age, and interests, you can also fine tune your daily, weekly, and monthly ad budget as you see fit. Additionally, ad networks such as Google Adsense ensure that you only pay when a user actually clicks on your ad. Finally, you can report in realtime on how different ads are performing in terms of actual generated traffic, rather than simply releasing your ad campaign into the wild and never hearing from it again.

That being said, the key to a web presence development campaign doesn’t lie exclusively in online advertising. The goal is to install a sense of brand awareness in your potential customers, and recent innovations in web technology (“web 2.0″) have generated a slew of new, creative, and cost effective ways to meet that goal.

*originally I had outlined a real-numbers scenario of advertising in the NY Times website vs. print edition, but the article got too bogged down in numbers and started to run a bit off topic. I will provide the information if requested, or in another article.

Web Site vs. Web Presence

Typically, I tend to speak about a company’s “web presence” instead of their “web site”. The reason for this change in terminology is the following: simply having a website no longer affords you a competitive edge in your market – everyone has a website, and yours probably isn’t very special. In fact, it’s probably little more than an online business card or, at best, a brochure. And while the “business card” type of site worked well five or eight years ago, it is, to put it mildly, a suboptimal way of delivering your online presence in 2009.

The “web 2.0″ explosion of innovative, intuitive, and engaging websites marked a shift in the way people use the web, and how they view websites. Visitors have come to fundamentally expect clean, professional design, engaging content, and multimedia capabilities (especially video). Blogs, RSS feeds, and aggregate news and press release sites have made fresh, even up-to-the minute content the de facto standard across the Internet. Do you have a news section on your website? When is the last entry from? It’s 2009: stagnant content just doesn’t cut it anymore. And if your competitors have already caught on to the changing Internet, where does that leave you?

Before I outline solutions for these web presence woes, I’d like to briefly outline how companies have gotten into the habit of unknowingly stifling their web presence, and why it continues to happen.

An Antiquated Development Cycle

An all too common way of having a website developed is to find a web design firm, give them a general outline of what you want on the site, and have them provide a design idea. Quite often, the initial design is the final design, or is a very close approximation thereof. You provide some content, they build the site, and it launches.

What’s wrong with this picture?

For starters, the people who have developed your company brand (generally your marketing department/firm) had little involvement in what went on to deploy the site.  Oftentimes, the marketing team is involved in the periphery of the site development, but most of the decision making is ultimately done by the web design company – a company that most likely has only a passing understanding of your brand.

Second, what about this whole web 2.0 thing? Maybe you’ve heard about it, but don’t really have a grasp on what it means. Some people use “Web 2.0″ as an empty buzzword, but the fact of the matter is that whatever you call it, the Internet is a different entity than it was as recently as 1 or 2 years ago. Visitors expect engaging content. They expect multimedia, and they expect an opportunity to interact.

Finally, your web design company may have touched on SEO, or search engine optimization. Maybe they asked you for a few keywords for the meta tags to help your Google ranking, but it didn’t go much further than that. Now, there is crossover between SEO and site development, but ultimately SEO is an entirely separate process, and needs to be budgeted for and managed accordingly.

Bringing your Brand to the Web

The first thing to do when redeveloping your web presence is to put your marketing department (or outside marketing/branding firm) in the driver’s seat. Your web developers should take direction directly from the people who know your brand the best, and should work symbiotically to deliver something unique to your company, packed with engaging content and stable, robust functionality. When someone visits your website, you have an immediate opportunity to make an impression. All too often, companies view their own website from the perspective of someone who already knows who they are and what they do. However, what you really want is for your website to act not only as an informational resource, but as a marketing tool and a direct line from you to your potential customers.

Now, what about web 2.0? One of the flagship changes during the web 2.0 shift was the introduction of social & professional networking via sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, or Youtube. Even if none of those sites are a good fit your specific marketing campaign or business model, the concepts and opportunities introduced by the new “You”-oriented web are an essential part of modern brand development, and you need to use them to your advantage. Additionally, aggregate news and article sites such as Digg and  Reddit provide the realtime heartbeat of the web. These are the sites that keep the world up to date, and provide a direct line to the masses. Digg will receive half a million unique page views today, and you can rest assured that this article will be posted (for free no less). Where did you post your last press release?

Finally, let’s talk search engine optimization, or SEO. I previously posted an article that offered an introduction to SEO, which you can read by clicking here . In a nutshell, SEO is the process of making sure that your site appears high in the list of search results for specific keywords or phrases. I outlined the process in the other article, so here I would like to discuss another part of optimization that’s not necessarily “search engine” optimization, but is nevertheless an integral part of maintaining a healthy conversion rate.

The optimization I’m talking of can be referred to as site optimization, goal funneling, or conversion optimization. Either way, the idea is simple: whenever someone – anyone – visits your site, you have an ideal goal in mind as far as what you’d like them to do. For an online store, the goal is the sale of a product. For companies who don’t sell goods or services directly online, the goal may not be so cut and dry, but it can just as easily be identified and monetized. Despite the fact that the definition of a “conversion” may not simply be the sale of a product for many websites, we can still direct our visitors toward an end goal, assign monetary worth to actions on the site that direct them toward that goal, and ultimately report on the actual value of the company’s web presence in dollars and cents. For example, it may be the case that someone filling out a contact form to speak with a sales representative is your ideal endpoint for a site visit. You need to first make sure that your website is tailored so that people are properly directed (or “funneled”) into the end goal, then assign a value – again in dollars and cents – of what the sales lead is worth to you. At the end of the month, you can generate a report that will tell you what your web presence has done for your bottom line.

How does this relate to my current budget problems?

The processes I outlined above aren’t free, and can actually become quite expensive depending on the extent of the project. However, it is difficult to make a case for other avenues of marketing and brand development being more cost effective than web presence redevelopment. People are spending more time on the web than any other medium – IBM reported that 19% of Americans spend 6+ hours per day on the web, with only 9% spending that much time watching television. We are a Google culture. People go to Google first – not second or third – when they’re in need of a product or service. Search Engine Watch is currently reporting that Google performs 91 million searches per day. How many of those are for a service your company could be providing?

The economy will eventually get better, and when the dust settles, you don’t want to rub your eyes only to realize that economic panic has stifled your company’s growth beyond repair. Balance is the key – spending enough to keep forward momentum without breaking the bank – and the web is your ticket to finding that balance.

This article is a follow-up to my last entry about search engine optimization (or SEO), which you can find by clicking here. While the first article provided a broad overview of what SEO is and how it can help you market your business, this one is meant to provide a more detailed outline of how the process works and some of the tasks you should perform in order to optimize a site. My intended audience for this article is web design firms and marketing companies who are looking to break into the world of SEO, but need a primer to help them get started.

Getting Started

There is one key piece of information to keep in mind throughout the entire optimization process, and it can be said like this: Search engines have one goal, and that is to return the most relevant results for any given search query. SEO is essentially the process of ensuring that those search engines understand that your site or your client’s site is, in fact, a good, relevant result for certain queries. For example, if you or your client owns a coffee shop in Philadelphia, then their website is absolutely a relevant result for the query “Philadelphia coffee shops”. However, the search engine algorithms can’t determine the relevance of a given page on their own if the site isn’t properly optimized. Let’s take a look at the key steps that are involved in optimizing a site, thus allowing the search engines to realize, “oh! This is a very relevant result for the query I was given”.

Choosing Your Primary Keywords and Phrases

Choosing the primary keywords and phrases which you will be optimizing for is one of the most important pieces of SEO. You need to find what I call a “middleground” keyword – something that’s not so broad that it’s useless to optimize for, but not so specific that no one is searching for it.

Consider a client who asks you to optimize for the phrase “real estate”. With very few exceptions, this is a perfect example of a keyword that is simply too broad to be worthwhile. Anyone searching for “real estate” will immediately realize that they need to refine their search beyond such a broad term. For example – are they looking to buy real estate, sell it, invest in it, or find a real estate agent? And are they looking for commercial properties or residential properties? To buy or to rent?

It should be immediately clear that optimizing for such a broad term is almost always a wasted effort. Not only because the optimization process itself will be excessively difficult, but because, more than likely, the traffic generated will not result in any sales ( “conversions”).

Now, let’s assume your client is ABC Real Estate in Bala Cynwd, PA, and they are residential real estate agents specializing in the Philadelphia market. They might ask you to optimize for “ABC Real Estate Bala Cynwd”. This is an example of a keyword that’s incredibly simple to optimize for (I probably wouldn’t even call it “optimization” since there is only one ABC Real Estate in Bala Cynwd, pretty much guaranteeing you the #1 result), but this keyword is almost useless for driving new traffic to the site. People searching for the company name already know about the company and probably know what the company does. You want to drive traffic from people who are searching for a product or service the company offers, even when the potential customer doesn’t know about the company yet.

“Homes for sale in Philadelphia” is a keyword to think about in this instance. We know from this query that the person performing the search is looking for homes for sale in Philadelphia. Our client is prepared to provide not only home search capability, but real estate agents who are willing to help the searcher in their quest for a new home. This is the kind of traffic you want to drive to the site. You should choose 2-3 similar keyword phrases to serve as the primary search goals. It’s important to note that your site will not be locked into appearing for only those phrases, if you perform the optimization correctly. Now, let’s take a look at how you actually go about doing that.

Site Structure

The first thing to look at when tasked with optimizing a site is the structure of the site itself – the HTML code, the URL/link structure, and the title and meta tags. If the site doesn’t exist yet, but you will need it to be optimized once it’s built, this section still very much applies, so read on.

Navigation

One of the most common problems I see with poorly-optimized sites is a navigation system that is effectively invisible to search engines. Oftentimes, the main navigation was created with javascript or flash, and no alternative sitemap or links are provided. While search engines such as Google are getting much better at identifying links embedded in javascript and flash, it is still a much better idea to provide a plain HTML/CSS based navigation system. You can do this without sacrificing any of the javascript or flash functionality or changing the user experience at all, so there is no reason not to do it. If your navigation is javascript based, make sure you are using a “pure CSS” menuing system, meaning that you can code your navigation as if it were a normal <li> or <div> based menu, but the script will transform these tags into javascript-powered dropdown menus. Some of the menuing systems we use at Context are: Superfish, OpenCube, and SmartMenu. If your navigation is flash based, you can use a dynamic flash publishing script (see swfobject) that will transparently replace the HTML-based navigation with your flash element. In both of these cases, the search engines will see the original HTML and CSS based navigation elements, which are much easier to traverse and index than their javascript or flash-based counterparts.

A Note about flash based sites

If your site is done completely in flash, you may want to re-think your design, instead using flash for a header, footer, and/or borders, but leaving the main content as HTML and CSS. Otherwise, I recommend essentially building two full versions of the site – one in HTML and one in Flash.  As I mentioned above, search engines are becoming much more effective at indexing flash pages, but you are still doing yourself a disservice in terms of SEO if your site is 100% flash based. Also, completely flash driven sites can often degrade user experience, but that’s a topic for another article.

URL Structure

Now let’s talk about URLs. Search engines like very clean URLs, the kind you see at the top of this (or any Wordpress-based) blog. Even if your site is driven by dynamic content, you will want to rewrite your URLs to look like static pages. For example, rather than having /product-view.php?fromcat=5&id=32, you will want a url that looks more like /products/32/this-is-the-product-name.html. Not only is the actual URL part of what search engines look at when determine what a page might be about (which is why we include the product name), they also have a much easier time indexing static URLs as opposed to complicated dynamic URLs with a string of variables at the end.  There are many ways to accomplish the rewriting, and it’s usually not very difficult. The easiest way is to use Apache’s mod_rewrite module, which lets you transparently redirect one URL to another, while the visitor only sees the original. If you are using ASP.net on IIS, there is an excellent rewrite module for IIS6 here, and IIS7 has built-in rewriting capabilities. Finally, development frameworks such as Fuse for PHP or Ruby on Rails have extensive “routing” functionality which allows very fine grained control over the URL structure.

Title and Meta Tags

The <title> and <meta> description tags are very important in SEO. These tags are your first chance to explain to a search engine what your site is all about, and you should follow some guidelines when generating these tags:

1. The title and meta description tags should include your primary keywords and phrases, but only once. Don’t repeat “Philadelphia coffee shop” five times in the title tag, because the search engines will penalize the site for keyword stuffing.
2. While there are no strict rules on length,  the title tag should be no longer 60-80 characters, the meta tag around 200 maximum.
3. The title and meta tags need to be different for every page. Even if the title or meta description tags for some pages don’t actually include your primary search phrases (and they don’t have to), they should be clear and relevant to every individual page.

Content

It is a common SEO adage that “content is king”, and although the SEO process has gotten a bit more complex over the years, it is still largely true.

Your site should contain as much useful, unique content as possible. Simply plastering bits of text all over the site won’t do you much good, but the best thing you can do to optimize a site is to provide high quality content that people actually want to see or read. Developing such content can be tricky, but here are some basic guidelines:

1. Every page should have at least two paragraphs of relevant content. There are some exceptions here because some pages simply don’t require any text, but you should try to work in as much high quality, relevant (remember: HIGH QUALITY and RELEVANT) textual content as possible.
2. Don’t rely exclusively on bulleted lists. Bulleted lists are fine and won’t hurt your positioning, but they should be augmented by rich prose, since larger bodies of text will net you the most gains in terms of SEO.
3. Include your targeted search keywords and phrases in the content, but don’t “stuff” keywords by repeating them more times than is reasonable. There is a balancing act to be performed here, but as a general rule, I try not to include the same keyword or phrase more than once per two paragraphs. There are plenty of exceptions, however, so it’s something that you have to develop a knack for after some trial and error.
4. Your home page is the holy grail of content for your site. Every single website only gets one home page, so the content there is weighed very heavily by search engines. Make sure your home page content is of a decent length (at least 2 paragraphs), contains your primary keywords and phrases (gracefully – don’t keyword stuff), and is well written and relevant.
5. Include as much content on as many different pages as you can. Remember, though: high quality and relevant. Don’t create pages for the sake of having more pages – think about information that will be relevant to your potential customers and provide it through your website. For example, if you are optimizing for a coffee shop in Philadelphia, a page dedicated to how to identify & choose the best coffee beans might be a great resource. Oftentimes, you will be surprised and unable to predict some of the keywords and phrases that drive people to your site, but these relevant “landing pages” ensure that you can pick up good traffic that you weren’t necessarily expecting.

Inbound Link Building

Another essential piece of the SEO puzzle is getting other sites to link back to yours. There are several ways to do this, but also some pitfalls to avoid.

1. Directory submission – this is the process of simply adding your site to online directories that list and link to external sites. There are a few important things to remember when submitting your site to directories, however:
   • There are a lot of good free directories that do not require a reciprocal link. Don’t get caught up paying for every submission (though there are some directories that are worth paying for).
   • Make sure that the directory itself is in good standing with Google. You will want to check its Page Rank (Google’s 1/10 score of the importance of a site). The easiest way to check page rank is to install the Google Toolbar
     
   • Make sure the directory links directly to your site and doesn’t first go to a tracking page. If the link is not direct, it is essentially useless.
   • Try to find directories that allow you to specify the anchor text – the text that people will be clicking on to get to your site. Make the anchor text one of your primary keyword phrases, e.g. the words “Philadelphia coffee shop” should link to philacoffeeshopsite.com.
2. Press release distribution – Your client should have press releases that outline the current happenings at their company. These should be posted as text (instead of or in addition to PDF) format both on the website, but also on aggregate press release sites that allow you to submit your own press release. You should also include links back to your site directly in the press release
3. Social Networking & web 2.0 – There are many sites available that allow you to post your own business profiles on the web. Hotfrog and Merchantcircle are good examples of such sites, and I recommend adding a listing there for any site you are optimizing. Additionally, if you have interesting, relevant content to share with the public, consider posting it to aggregate sites such as Digg

Conclusion

Hopefully this article provided insight into the SEO process, and can act as a “getting started” primer for companies who are looking to expand their services offerings. I do not recommend that business owners attempt to optimize their own site, because you will not get the results you expect, and your time is better spent running the business. Hire a competent SEO company instead, and work with them to position your site for ideal keywords and phrases.

Search Engine Optimization, though an integral part of developing a complete web presence, is something that’s often overlooked by both web design companies and their clients alike. This article is meant to serve as an introduction to Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and it will be followed with a 2^nd article which contains a basic primer on how to go about properly optimizing a site. My intended audience for this first article is the savvy consumer who is trying to educate himself or herself, and the follow-up article will endeavor to help those design/development firms who are only just breaking into the world of SEO.

What is Search Engine Optimization?

Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is the process of increasing a site’s ranking on search engines such as Google, Yahoo, or MSN. Ideally, you want your business to appear as the first result to someone who is searching for a product or service you provide to your customers. For example, if you own a vegetarian restaurant in Philadelphia, it would significantly increase your restaurant’s exposure if your website were the first result for “vegetarian restaurant Philadelphia” on Google. This type of positioning is the goal of search engine optimization.

Organic Results vs. Paid Results

It is important to understand the difference between organic search results and paid search results. Organic search results are selected and positioned by the search engine itself, with no external bias toward one site over another. With organic searching, the order of results is determined exclusively by the relevance of the site to the user’s specific query, as determined by the search engine’s internal algorithms. Search engine optimization endeavors to “educate” the search engine about a site so that the site will be seen as relevant for certain queries, and therefore given better positioning in the results. This “most relevant site first” method of ordering search results is in sharp contrast to pay-per-click, in which the highest bidder for a given search query is given preference. However, pay-per-click results are generally shown on separate parts of the screen from the main organic results, usually at the top of the window or in a sidebar labeled “sponsored links”. Although there are compelling reasons to launch a pay-per-click campaign as part of your online marketing plan, this article focuses exclusively on organic search optimization.

Won’t the search engines just find my site on their own?

Modern search engines are very adept at crawling the web and creating a comprehensive index that contains every website they come across. However, the algorithms used by search engines take into account many different factors when determining where to position a site, and if your site doesn’t measure up when it comes to some of the more important factors, you will end up buried among thousands or millions of other sites.

Search engines have one goal: to return the most relevant results to a user’s query in order to help them find what they are looking for. Why is it, then, that if you do in fact own a vegetarian restaurant in Philadelphia, your website can still get buried on page 29 for the exact query “vegetarian restaurant in Philadelphia”? One reason for this apparent discrepancy is that search engines don’t view websites the way a person does. When a search engine downloads a web page, it sees only the markup code that was used to create the site – it doesn’t see visual elements like graphics or page layout. If the site hasn’t been optimized, more often than not, the search engine’s back-end view of the site offers little indication of what content is important and what the primary focus of the site is. These search engine “spiders” – the algorithms that do the actual searching and indexing – can make a good guess as to what the site is about, but without a clear understanding of why it would be a great result for a specific search query, the site will end up in a mediocre position at best.

Another reason sites receive a poor ranking is that they simply don’t appear to be very important to the grand scheme of the Internet. Search engines are trying to return the most useful results to their users, so if your content appears to be of little value, and if no other sites on the web are linking back to yours, your site is going to be very poorly positioned. One way to combat this problem is to work to build inbound links, which are links to your site from other sites. This can be accomplished by submitting your site to online directories, participating in forum discussions or blog discussions relevant to your site and including a link back, or by marketing the site via press releases or external product reviews (where applicable). Inbound links, however, aren’t the whole story, and it takes a comprehensive SEO plan to ensure long term, first page positioning, especially in competitive markets.

Why didn’t my web designer optimize my site when they built it?

There is a common misconception that search optimization is simply a matter of altering the design of the site or adding a few keywords to the content, and that such SEO-related tasks should be handled by the web designer prior to the site launch. While it’s true that there are design elements that need to be addressed when optimizing a site, SEO is, in many ways, a marketing effort rather than a technical one. The optimization process involves tasks such as copywriting and press release distribution, which fall well outside the technical realm of web development. In the end, SEO is an entirely separate product and process from the actual web design, and it needs to be treated (and budgeted) as such.

Recall what I said earlier regarding search engines evaluating the overall importance of your site in order to determine its search positioning. Much like a print campaign or TV ad, your goal on the web is to increase brand awareness, because it gives a sense of stability and competitive importance to your company, and it creates a connection between the company and your customers. The idea of brand awareness is well understood and sought after in the marketing world, but it often becomes diluted when crossing over to the web, sometimes to the point of being tacked on as an afterthought to the development of a company website. SEO should, conversely, be considered an integral part of any marketing plan, and should be budgeted and managed separately from web design and development.

Who can optimize my site?

In the world of SEO, it’s very easy to find companies who are essentially selling snake oil. Oftentimes, these companies offer little more than “directory submission”, which, while it is a piece of the SEO puzzle when done correctly, may not affect your positioning at all when done incorrectly (in some cases, it can actually hurt your positioning).  Choosing the right SEO firm can be tricky, but Google has a page dedicated to the most important things to consider when choosing an SEO company. You can find that page here: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35291

To add to what Google has suggested on that page, it’s important that the SEO firm you choose offers a plan that is tailored specifically for your website. If their plan seems instead to consist of generic link building and indiscriminate directory submission, it’s likely that you won’t see the kind of results you would ideally expect (if you see any results at all). The SEO company should take the time to detail individual changes to each page of your site, and should suggest new pages to be added. Additionally, any good SEO firm will be able to not only provide analytics and metrics, but will also be able to explain the data’s significance within the context of your specific website.

Conclusion

Search engine optimization should be considered an integral part of developing your company’s web presence, but it’s important to remember that SEO effectively crosses the boundary between technical process and marketing endeavor, so it needs to be managed and budgeted as an independent project, rather than being tacked on as part of the general site design. If your web development company doesn’t offer comprehensive and developed SEO services, it is important to hire a separate SEO firm and facilitate ongoing cooperation between the two companies.

Yahoo apple ad

I can’t say I’m thrilled about the idea of banner ads taking an increasing level of control over website structure itself to suit the needs of the advertiser, but the new Apple ad on Yahoo! Games is definitely cool. When the ad starts playing, the Yahoo! header is actually incorporated into the animation. I personally haven’t seen this done before, and I’m hesitant to say it’s something I’d like to see more of, but I thought it was worth mentioning since it certainly raises the bar in terms of what advertisers can do with the web.