SEO Strategy

There is no unanimous opinion on how to optimize a website, but certain principles are generally accepted. Here are some of these principles:

1. Do some keyword analysis to define a set of keywords (which I refer to as your “keyword group”) that range from your most general theme to more specific sub-themes. For example, if your site is about “golden retriever puppies” this term, along with two or three other closely related terms should provide the focus for your home page.

2. Your home page is usually considered your site’s most important page, so it should be optimized for your most important keywordS - as mentioned above. Your home page should be more general in content and emphasis, with links pointing to more specific sub-sections within your site. In other words, organize your home page around the most general (small) set of keywords you want to rank well for.

3. Create internal pages focused around specific keywords related to those emphasized on your home page. For example, you may have sub-sections within your site on topics such as:

- golden retriever puppy care
- buying a golden retriever puppy
- toys for golden retriever puppies
- best features of golden retriever puppies
- etc.

Each of these pages should focus on a narrow set of keywords related to (and linked to) the home page, and all the other pages within your site.

4. You need simple navigation tools - such as a nav-bar - to interlink your pages. These links are important, both for navigation purposes and for SEO purposes. These are seen as inbound links and they help form a “neighborhood” of related resources. Neighborhoods are good in the eyes of the search engines. The SEs assume that a neighborhood of closely related resources contains more information than isolated pages.

5. Expand your neighborhood by creating resources in other places and linking back to your main site using specific anchor text. For example, you could create a Squidoo page (Hub page, Knol, Wordpress blog…) about “toys for golden retriever puppies” and link back to your main website. You could also write an article about “buying a golden retriever puppy” and link back to your main website. Then upload it Ezinearticles.com and several other article sites. Or you could create a video demonstrating the “best features of golden retriever puppies”, link back to your main site, and then upload the video to Youtube.com, Revver.com, Google Video, etc.

This way you expand your “neighborhood” of tightly related resources. These days that’s what “link building” or “getting links” is all about.

Check out the Link Builder Network, launching August 15/08.

The emphasis placed on links by Google over the last few years seems to have led many people to assume that you can “buy” ranking by acquiring inbound links without having properly focused content on the actual web pages being ranked.

Once you’ve done SEO for a while you realize how unrealistic it is to expect Google to give a high ranking to pages that don’t contain any useful information - links or no links - and especially when the keywords in question are fairly competitive.

I was reminded of this over the last week or so by two websites I was asked to evaluate. One was produced by a very credible business involved in relatively high end online activities. Their site was made completely in Flash and had virtually no identifying text, headlines, titles or other useful metadata. From the search engine point of view there was no way to tell what it was about. Consequently they did not even rank for their own domain name - which was also their primary keyword.

The other was similar, except in this case the site had no serious content, and much of it was “under construction.” A site like that is basically useless and doesn’t deserve to get ranking.

My advice in both cases: create some readable content, follow two or three of the most basic SEO rules and your problems will be solved. We’ll see if they take the advice.

Here’s another post by Loren Baker along the same lines: Don’t Sour Your Link Juice By Forgetting Basic SEO.

Wikipedia gets a lot of Google love. By some estimations Google drives more traffic to Wikipedia than to any other site. Just do some random searches in Google and see how many times a Wikipedia page comes up very high in the results.

So presumably we can learn something about SEO from Wikipedia. According to this article and discussion, What Wikipedia can teach us about SEO, there are a few important things that account for Wikipedia’s SEO success:

1. Wikipedia uses search engine friendly file names, title tags and page descriptions.

2. Wikipedia has a ton of text based content - and, of course, it is very keyword focused.

3. The internal linking between Wikipedia pages is very extensive and very thorough.

4. Wikipedia has more than 5 million inbound links, and many (if not most) to internal pages.

This should make Wikipedia a much-copied model for all websites looking for good Google rankings. But the fact is, many marketers - especially those running ecommerce sites - do not appreciate the importance of on-page optimization. They are content to show a picture of a product with a short description and price. But if they were to follow the Wikipedia model they would use keyword-rich titles for all product pages, along with optimized descriptions on every page. They would also inter-link internal  pages - not just from a common navigation bar, but from within the text of pages by using such devices as “Similar products you might be interested in…”

However, as many of us involved in providing SEO services know, many clients are not prepared to go that far. It would take much more than just tweaking their page titles and metatags. It would take a remake of their entire site, involving writing of a lot of text, and actually providing some useful information about the products.

Most prefer to just offload the problem to someone else and spend their money on things like link building. But that is only half the battle. Without decent content it is hard to win at the SEO game.

I recently did some investigation into the suggestion that leaving comments on blogs is a good way to get backlinks to your website and thereby increase its Google ranking.  Jonathan Leger, who I refer to from time to time in this blog, has done some testing on this question, and has also recently recommended some tools that might help in the quest to get backlinks by doing commenting. His most recent suggestion is a tool called G-Lock Blog Finder.

As explained in his video, this little program lets you search for blogs by keyword. It goes out and finds blogs relevant to your keywords, tells you their PR, the PR of the actual pages it finds, and also tells you whether it is a “nofollow” or “do follow” blog. In case you’re not aware, a “do follow” blog is one in which the Google-inspired “nofollow” tag is deactivated so that links in comments actually get (a little bit of) link juice. Google has come convoluted reasons for encouraging the use of “nofollow”, and most bloggers are in love with Google, so there you go.

G-Lock Blog Finder then lets you click on the address of a specific post and it then shows that post in a window where you can create a comment (and leave your link of course.)

Now if you think it sounds just a bit anal to spend an hour or so every now and then to find random “targeted” blogs, do a cursory reading of the content, and then leave a comment for the purpose of getting a link, I completely concur. Most SEO experts think links from blog comments are, at best, of minimal value anyway, so spending any time at all generating such links seems like a pretty pointless way to waste your life away.

If these links actually were worth anything that would be a different matter, I guess. But first, there is the “nofollow” issue - which most blogs adhere to (rightly or wrongly). Second there is the question “Don’t I have anything better to do with my time?” And third you will inevitably ask “Do I really want to read this crap?” since so many blogs - even the ones turned up by a program like G-Lock Blog Finder - are little more than self-congratulating navel gazing.

On the other hand, finding relevant blogs can be a very useful exercise. Some blogs actually have very interesting content, a fair bit of traffic, and offer you a place where you can both learn something about your niche and meet others who are also interested in it. In other words, they perform the same function as social networking sites do - they let you get involved with others in your area(s) of interest.

No doubt this can turn out to be one of the most important sources of traffic to your site. Not because you have created a bunch of backlinks and have thereby improved your search engine rankings (although I suppose that may happen occasionally), but rather because you have entered into “the conversation” with others who share some of your interests, and they see some value in having a look at your site from time to time.

So I suggest you forget about looking for blogs based on the value you might squeeze out of them by leaving comments. Instead, I suggest you look for blogs that offer you useful content that can teach you something and a lively community of readers who might be interested in hearing what you have to contribute to the conversation.

To come (more or less) full circle, a tool like G-Lock Blog Finder might actually help you find blogs like this. So it is at least worth a look.

You can download a free trial version of G-Lock Blog Finder here.

In his recently released report titled “Search Engine Myths Exposed” Jonathan Leger tackles some of the most basic assumptions most of us make about getting successful ranking in Google.

He presents case studies and actual research to show that most of these assumptions are nothing but “myths” propagated by “gurus” who are just repeating stuff they have heard elsewhere, usually to promote their own products.

Of course Jonathan himself is promoting a product - a link generating product called 3-Way Links - so we might wonder if that has influenced his emphasis in the report just a bit.

Personally I think not, since he has been consistently saying the same thing ever since I have been following him. He also provides some pretty convincing evidence that, Continue Reading »

In a series of blog posts Jonathan Leger has examined some of the more common myths about SEO (search engine optimization). In the post called “Beware of “common sense” search engine optimization!” Jonathan presents concrete examples to debunk what he calls the “The Themed-Link Myth”. This is the claim that links from sites with the same theme are the only way to rank for your keywords. This is usually referred to as the “relevance” criterion: you must have links from relevant sites (those with a closely related theme) in order to do well in Google SERPs.

Jonathan presents a couple of examples that he thinks clearly contradict this claim. He says of submitexpress.com, for instance,

“If you go to Google and take a look at the backlinks pointing to submitexpress.com (using the link: command), you’ll notice that very, very few of those links have anything to do with search engine optimization or marketing at all.”

Jonathan’s point is that you don’t need links from pages with a similar theme to yours. You just need a lot of links.

This seems to square with my own observations - although I admit I have not done an exhaustive study of the situation. It should be pointed out however, that Jonathan’s study is not very exhaustive either. If, as many SEO specialists point out, a link from a “relevant” high PR site is worth significantly more than a link from a low PR “irrelevant” page, than having such a link (one from a relevant high PR site) will skew the result significantly. It is not really satisfactory to draw hard and fast conclusions until such an analysis is undertaken.

What would be most instructive is if it could be shown that there is little obvious difference in link value between a high PR link from a “relevant” site and one from an “irrelevant” site.

My own conjecture is that you would find there is very little difference (and thus I am agreeing with Jonathan’s thesis). But, apart from what I have more or less casually observed, my reason is quite speculative. I don’t think Google (or anybody else) has the ability to make the necessary evaluations about “relevance” to make such evaluations meaningful, and therefore they (probably) don’t even try to do it.

That isn’t to say they won’t have that ability in the future. And if they did, links from “relevant” sources would have more value in the future as a result.

In any event, links from “relevant” sources have other things going for them - the most important of which is to attract traffic from those sources.

As you probably know, the point of SEO is to get the search engines to send visitors to your website. Traffic is what it’s all about, and SEO is meant to generate traffic.

SEO accomplishes this by helping you come up high in Google’s search results for your most important keyword phrases.

But is SEO difficult? Do you need special skills to be effective? Is it a mysterious art that only a few understand?

Not at all. Getting good search engine ranking is not as difficult as you might think. Even if you have failed miserably in the past, you can be successful right now by applying some very basic principles.

SEO is really just common sense once you understand it.

So how DO you choose the right search terms and then come up high in search engine results pages (SERPs) for your keywords?

You have to think like a search engine.

That’s right. You have to think like a search engine.

And the most important thing to understand is that search engines only read what is there on the page. They do not read between the lines or make assumptions about your content like humans do.

Continue Reading »

This blog is called SEO Strategy and is about SEO Strategy. SEO is a group of techniques used to get better results and more traffic from search engines like Google, MSN, Yahoo and others. This blog will discuss a range of SEO tactics and strategies aimed at “optimizing” search engine results.