You built a great looking website but where is the traffic you hoped to generate?
Too often I find very expensive corporate and business websites that have given little thought to how the site will play in the search engines. The development emphasis is typically on design and marketing content rather than positioning and search engine friendly content.
The scenario generally proceeds as follows:
The marketing or IT department contracts an expensive website development firm (or uses in-house techies) to build a nice browser presentation complete with rollovers and flash components. Once the site is built, they throw a plethora of keywords and phrases into the home page’s META tags believing this to be search engine positioning. The keywords and phrases generally come from the marketing department and are based on how they think people might search for them. Then the page titles and META tags are coded for the home page and often used over and over in monotonous fashion on each page of the website.
Minimal thought is given to structuring the page or website to be search engine friendly. JavaScript and cascading style sheet script is left on each page rather than stored off page. Keywords are utilized haphazardly or stuffed into the page in weak attempts at gaining ranking. In the end, the site lingers in cyberspace attracting only those who know it is there.
Proper planning and the inclusion of a search engine specialist on the development team prior to building the website will improve the odds of gaining top organic search engine ranking, as well as increase the ROI on your development dollar.
Planning for search engine positioning can be elaborate or fairly straightforward depending on the number of people involved, volume of content, dynamic page issues, and target market. At a minimum, the planning process should include the following steps:
1. Identify the target audience
2. Research and identify the keywords and phrases the target audience will use
3. Establish a focused theme for the website
4. Research and purchase keyword relevant domain names
5. Create a working site outline that utilizes relevant keywords and phrases
6. Develop website copy content from the outline
7. Build a navigation structure that utilizes the identified keywords and phrases
8. Create search engine friendly graphic content and page structure
9. Develop page and content structure
10. Test site for structural integrity on the host server
11. Review page titles, META Tags, page structure, keyword density, and content structure
12. Hand submit the website to the search engines
13. Incorporate miscellaneous Search Engine Positioning Strategies
The thirteen steps in more detail
1. Identify the target audience
The process of market identification runs the gamut of “I’ve got a gut feeling” to formalized surveys and studies. Your web audience may or may not be the same as your brick and mortar audience. Identifying the target audience for your website may provide some surprises and reveal weaknesses in your current marketing paradigm. In either event thorough market identification will be a good exercise in more formally identifying your audience.
Simply having a product and putting it on the net isn’t enough. You will also need to know what problems your audience has that is leading it to look for solutions like yours. The key to positioning isn’t just identifying your audience. It is identifying your audience’s problems and applying enough intuition to predict their search behavior.
2. Research and identify the keywords and phrases the target audience will use
Keyword identification and analysis is second only to market identification and is perhaps the key step in building a search engine optimized website. Finding and identifying the right keywords usually combines a process of intuitive and formal discovery. Typically, keyword discovery begins intuitively using your knowledge of your target market and industry insider keywords you believe your audience might search on.
After making your initial keyword selections you then need to take a more formal approach using some analysis tools, such as online or written surveys and other keyword identification tools that can be found online. There are two primary online services that you can use to search for keywords and key phrases, Overture term suggestion tools and WordTracker.
Overture provides a free term suggestion tool that allows you to enter a potential keyword or keyword phrase and see all of its related search terms. Overture search term suggestion tool will also tell you how many searches were performed on that word/phrase during the past month.
WordTracker is the primary keyword/key phrase discovery service used most by professional SEOs (search engine optimization specialists) and it is one of the most effective tools available for researching the potential of your selected keywords/phrases. The WordTracker service is comprehensive and allows the analysis to go into great detail on traffic and competition for a search term.
A concept central to WordTracker is the KEI or Keyword Effectiveness Indicator.
The KEI provides a measurement of how competitive a keyword is and what the odds are of getting ranking on it. The higher the KEI, the better chance you have of getting ranked for that keyword. Their stats also reflect the last 400 million searches; the previous 24-hour searches and how many websites are competing for a given keyword/phrase.
The Overture tool is more rudimentary in its approach but it will assist you in initially sorting out potential keywords however, when you get into the serious work of positioning you need to use WordTracker.
3. Establish a focused theme for the website
The next important step in your planning is to be sure that the website will have a theme and that the theme is highly focused. Theme based design, not just graphic theme but also content theme, is an important factor in attaining top rankings for a website among many of the leading search engines.
A focused, theme based website will provide many expanded benefits to your search engine positioning efforts. Theme-based optimization relies on developing the site’s primary theme and then compartmentalizing that general theme category into more specific subcategories.
The home or index page is a gateway for your visitor, as well as for search engine spiders to enter into the more specific/targeted categories of the website. For example, if you built a website with a broad category about golf, it might have the subcategories of courses, swing techniques, rules, etc. and then again be divided into sub-subcategories of courses in Alabama, etc. It is key that you keep the links within each category on-theme and, hopefully, utilizing keywords. It is also important to minimize cross-linking between disparate categories such as courses in Alabama, and hitting a chip shot.
If the website and its links are not kept clean and on theme it will cause some search engine confusion because the search engine is attempting to make sense of the importance of what it is categorizing. For this reason, it is important to understand the basics of how a search engine views a website.
How does a search engine view a website?
Initially, the search engine looks at the URL, then it looks at links/subdirectories of the URL, followed by page titles, maybe meta tags, heading tags, external links, alt text (if it has a link associated with it), internal links, and content (copy).
It essentially takes a snapshot of the page and from this picture the search engine has to categorize the information by deleting words like and, a, the, etc. and it then attempts to identify recurring words. Following this, the SE stems words by changing plural to singular, etc. After it has completed those sorts it attempts to identify word phrases that recur and determine the weight of the recurring “keywords” through indexing. Finally, the search engine attempts to identify a site theme based upon the dominance of recurring keywords and keyword phrases.
4. Obtain relevant domain names
What is in a domain name anyway? Everything!
First, there is the technical nomenclature of the domain name. The IP address is divided into a network and a host portion specified by four fields each separated by a period. Typically this is written in dotted decimal notation such as 205.157.24.121, the network portion might be the 205.157.24 and the host portion might be the .121. However, recognizing and remembering numeric IP addresses would be too difficult for us humans so a system of attaching a domain name to the IP address solved that problem. It is important to note that the search engine spiders still utilize the IP addresses; which brings up a key point, if you are seeking to get good search engine ranking it pays to have your own IP address rather than host your website on a shared server with 100s or 1000s of other websites.
How do you use a domain name to increase your relevancy to the search engines?
Most individuals and companies select a domain name based upon the name of their business, product, or trade name, which is an obvious choice. However, the business, product, or trade name isn’t necessarily the best name to use from a search engine-positioning viewpoint. In addition to the obvious domain name choice, it pays dividends to review the keyword combinations from step 2 and identify keywords or phrases that might make good domain names. A generic domain name will carry some weight with the search engines. For example: www.xyzcorp.com will mean less to the search engine than www.fly-fishing.com or www.flyfishing.com.
An alternative to purchasing a generic domain name is to create a generic named sub-domain within your primary domain. For example: www.xyzcorp.fly-fishing.com. Most domain hosting platforms will allow you to do this.
5. Create an outline utilizing relevant keywords and phrases
Now that you have used intuition, WordTracker and Overture tools to identify your best keywords and keyword phrases you are probably anxious to begin writing copy. Still, before you begin writing copy you need to create an outline for each page of the site. The outline is your next step and your best bet for staying on theme and keeping your keywords in focus and out front.
For example: Lets say your topic is best places to fish in Wyoming and you’ve identified the keyword phrases “Fishing in Wyoming”, “Fishing in Fremont County”, and “lures for German Brown trout”. Your outline might begin something like the following:
1. Fishing in Wyoming
   a. Fishing in Fremont County
    i. Fishing at Louis Lake
  b. Fishing in Park County
    i. Fishing at Buffalo Bill Reservoir
  c. Best lures for Wyoming game fish
    i. Lures for German Brown Trout.
The key is to create an organizational theme that makes sense and moves from the broad to the specific. In this site, the broad theme is fishing in Wyoming; the next is fishing in Fremont county, then specific lakes. Another theme within the site’s main theme would be lures.
6. Create website copy based on the outline
While completing your outline you might find additional keywords within each category that have potential. As an example, fishing in Fremont County might also include “The Sinks,” a favorite tourist attraction and stream. If you use WordTracker you can check to see if that term is searched on and to what extent.
A key to content optimization for the search engines is relevancy.
A website that provides little in the way of relevant content will not achieve high rankings. Relevancy is important in both the human driven directories and the spider driven search engines. Both rely on an ever changing and evolving set of guidelines and/or algorithms to determine a web page or a website’s ranking within their framework. Like the Colonel’s secret spices search engines keep us all guessing as to what is important to them making search engine marketing a challenging and labor intensive job.
7. Create a navigation structure
Creating navigation structure is a component of outline creation and copy development as the navigation structure is essentially created from the site outline.
Good site design includes an intuitive navigation structure that results in the visitor being able to easily find information within the site. To reach any point within the website, the website’s visitor (human or search engine) should not have to click on a menu item more than three times. This keeps the design structure flatter, resulting in a better structure for search engine optimization because search engine spiders tend to traverse only a couple levels deep into the website structure.
The top level of the navigation structure can be buttons, navigation bars, text links, animated graphics, or drop-down selection menus. However, make sure that graphic links, buttons, etc. use the “alt” tag and are properly labeled because the search engine spiders will use the “alt” label of a link to determine its weight and relevance. Text links are best for the search engine positioning purposes, especially text links that use keywords and keyword phrases.
Below the top layer of your website’s navigation structure, links should typically be positioned within the body of your content. However, there can be secondary level navigation menus as well. The secondary level of your website’s navigation should be text based. Navigation launched from content-based text links using keyword phrases tends to hold more weight with search engines.
Some guidelines for developing navigation structure include:
Create an intuitive structure
Maintain consistency throughout the site
Give the user location feedback
Keep it relevant and in context
Offer alternative routes to important material
Use clear visual messages
Use labels that are clear and concise
Maintain consistency with the site’s theme
Design your navigation and links for both human visitors and search engine spiders
8. Create search engine friendly graphic content and page structure
Simply keep in mind that a key to website optimization is download speed to the visitor’s browser. Unless you are developing an art or graphic art website, keep graphics small and only use what is needed to keep the site design interesting.
9. Page and content structure
Page design from a search engine optimization viewpoint requires several basic elements. Keep your page clean and simple! Search engine spiders can’t read JavaScript rollovers or cascading style sheets. They have a difficult time sorting through frames, and sometimes tables. If you must use JavaScript or CSS, move it off page into separate .css or .js files. Do not, repeat, and do not use frames. No need to go into why, just don’t use them.
Build your pages so that your
and its text copy sit high within the page structure and are not pushed down the page by JavaScript, CSS or tables. Most search engines place more weight on content that is close to the top of the page. Be sure each page is titled and that its title is relevant to the page and uses the page’s primary keywords. Don’t create a generic title for every page in your site. Each page’s META tags should be specifically designed for that page and should reflect the same keywords on the page that appear in the “keywords” and “descriptions” META tags.
10. Test site for structural integrity on the host server
This is an important step. Make sure your site works by testing all of the internal links and external links before going live. If your links are not working, or pages are not showing you will be hurting you’re chances for search engine ranking. Test, test, and retest before taking the next step of submitting your site to the search engines. Also, validate your pages html to make sure it is consistent and not broken.
11. Review page titles, META Tags, structure, keyword density, and content
Each page should be checked for congruence of titles, META tags, and keyword density within the body content and the internal and external links. Typically keyword density should be 3 to 4% of the page content but this depends on competition and other factors. There are several good software applications and online services that allow you to test your pages for proper structure compared to the top results for a given search term. You may find that you will have to make several rewrites and passes at each page to maximize its potential for obtaining top organic search engine listings.
12. Hand submit the website to the search engines
I bet you’ve seen them, or received their emails. “Get top ranking by submitting your website to thousands of search engines!” We guarantee top rankings and will submit your site for $39 a month! Those submission shops typically use automated software that shotguns your website across the net in a very poorly targeted manner. In fact most search engines and search directories frown on automated submission and have adopted methods to prevent it. In the war for search engine positioning site submission to only a few of the major search engines and other targeted regional and national search directories is what counts. Additionally, submission to many of the minor search engines and directories may help build some link popularity.
There are only a few major search engines to focus on initially and those include Google, Yahoo, Teoma, Fast/Lycos, Inktomi, Open Directory (DMOZ) to mention a few. Most other search engines and directories draw their results from one of these major players.
You might also find that there are some industry and regionally specific search engines and directories, but beware of the services that claim to submit to thousands of search engines. Most of those operators are tied into link farms and groups that will harvest your email for spammers. Some represent link farms, which will hurt you more than they will help you, so stay away from them.
Also, be careful of the so-called classified ads. If you submit to any of these, be sure to use an email address you don’t mind throwing away because you will receive 100s if not thousands of unwanted spam emails.
13. Miscellaneous Search Engine Positioning Strategies
A discussion on search engine positioning and website optimization wouldn’t be complete without a brief discussion about “cloaking”.
The technique of cloaking is used to display a different page to the search engine spiders from the one the visitor views. In theory, the idea behind cloaking is to create an optimized page for the search engine spiders that is all text and stuffed with keywords. The search engine spider sees the all text based page and the human visitor is presented with a prettier more graphic page. Therefore, cloaking requires that two sets of pages be created; one for the search engine spider and another for the human visitor.
This dual page concept allows the site to present a flashier look and feel to the human visitor, while being able to present search engine optimized pages to the spiders. Cloaking also serves the purpose of preventing competitors from seeing what kind of optimization techniques are being used. The concept is excellent in theory, but in practice it is somewhat less than perfect and typically is not recommended.
Cloaking requires the Website to identify whether the arriving visitor is a search engine spider or a human visitor. Checking the visitors’ IP address or their User-agent string is typically used to correctly identify whether or not it is a search engine spider. This requires the cloaker to maintain a comprehensive up-to-date database of known spider IP’s, which takes a lot of work to gather and maintain.
Cloaking may have some legitimate uses as a spoofing technique but it causes many search engines that dislike the practice to punish sites that are cloaking their pages. Potential punishments include burying the site deep in the results far from the top, or completely banning it from the index.
The risk involved in cloaking depends on what it is actually being used for. In an IP-based cloak where the title, META Description and the first row of text are the same for the search engine optimized and visitor optimized pages, and if the sizes of those pages (in KB’s) are close in size, the site is fairly safe. However, there is still risk and like going to jail the “cloaker” has to weigh the risk of getting caught and punished with the benefits of the offense because it is never completely risk free. You should always be prepared for the worst when using cloaking – your site could get banned.
Link building strategies
Some search engines have been placing some emphasis on “link analysis” in addition to traditional algorithms and other information retrieval techniques to help determine relevance. Traditional search engine algorithms use factors like textual, semantic, and conceptual relationships between pages and queries. Using link analysis, they try to categorize the structure of the web and its “social networks” formed when people link web pages to one another.
Link popularity refers to the number and quality of the incoming links pointing to a site. The search engine places weight on the fact that other sites consider your site important enough to link to. So, in the engine’s view, your site is raised in importance.
Building link popularity, in my opinion, is one of the most difficult areas of search engine optimization because the search engines filter out “artificially created”, non-relevant links. This is partly due to the fact that in the early days, link farms and link exchange programs worked were subject to extensive spamming techniques. Search engines want links from authoritative sites, or links from sites that share the same focus as your site.
Good luck in your positioning efforts I hope that one or two ideas within this article will give you the information you needed to achieve higher and more consistent search engine rankings. Remember, search engine optimization is an ongoing process not a one-time effort and even if you achieve higher rankings, today you may need to return to the basics repeatedly to keep your rankings.
Jordan Misner is an SEO consultant based out of Tucson, AZ. His experience and background includes extensive marketing, marketing management, sales force automation and web development. His current consulting practice focuses on Website optimization, online copy writing, and developing positioning strategies to achieve prominent search engine rankings.
http://www.jmisnerconsulting.com