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Advanced Search Engine OptimizationSearch Engine Optimization tactics have grown increasingly complex in the past few years. Gone are the days when a properly crafted Meta tag ranked a site well on Google. Now phrase and competitor research, content, Meta tags, url and navigation structure, design code, and links all play an essential part in getting a site to the top of algorithmic search engines. Phrase and Competitor Research Doing this work is in no way optional in an SEO campaign. Companies often believe that they know what phrases their customers are typing into search engines online. It is our experience that there are always surprises found in this stage of the SEO process. Oftentimes internal language does not match the language the target demographic uses. There can be forgotten and overlooked phrases discovered during this research. And finally, knowing the volume of searches for a particular phrase is invaluable for making important decisions about where to focus SEO energy. It’s also important to understand what websites are doing well online in search engines for desired key phrases and why the sites are doing well. Knowing this data is essential for your SEO expert, so that they can get a sense for the market and what level of SEO is going to need to be done to achieve your website objectives on your desired timeline. Content Content is always king when it comes to SEO. If your website is filled with valuable content for your users, then it is filled with what the search engines want to read and index. Of course, there is always room to optimize that content with good phrase placement. And it is also important that the content is presented in the best way possible to engines through clean code, an optimized site map, and well-structured navigation. Meta tags Once the darling of SEO, the Meta tag has lost much of its value, but still remains important. Especially important is the title tag. The targeted phrase should always occupy a prominent spot in the title. Next most important is the description tag. That tag used to appear in search engines as your listing’s description. Thanks to Meta tag abuse, this is rarely true any longer. Now engines pull body content for the description. But some still reference it for indexing and occasionally it will be what is displayed in the listing as the site’s description. The keyword tag is now essentially meaningless, but there are some rumors that engines may still be looking occasionally to this tag for indexing guidance (although we sort of doubt that). Design code All the best content in the world is useless if the search engine spiders cannot get to it. This is too often the case when websites use Flash, Frames, JavaScript, or just plain sloppy code. Spiders value what appears at the top of a page in code more so than what appears at the bottom of the page. That means getting body content and other appropriate text information to the top of the code is essential to doing well online. Here’s a good test: view the source of your homepage and hit print. If you don’t see significant text content on page one or two, you have a spider accessibility problem. Url structure Design code isn’t the only thing standing in the way of spiders. Long url strings also stop search engines short of reading page content. Yes, search engines CAN read dynamic websites, but we have rarely seen a dynamic site do as well as an html counterpart. Why is that? Because search engines want to know that the content they’re indexing is going to be the same content in 2 weeks and dynamic sites are just that – dynamic and potentially ever changing. So while engines CAN rank that content well, they don’t always prioritize ranking it over a clearly static content page. And the more variables a url string has “?,” “=,” “&,” the less likely it will be read. Navigation Structure Here’s another accessibility question: Can search engines follow your navigation to important content two or three levels off your main pages? Once again the answer is “probably, yes,” but whether or not they’re bothering too has more to do with how important your site is considered already by the engine. The best bet is to make all your content very easily accessible. Text navigation would be best, but few designers consider that a priority. So, when that’s not possible, be sure and create a static site map that uses text links. Links Links are the new Meta tags -- many will claim it is the secret to doing well on any engine and a lot of people are abusing them to get the job done. And like Meta tags, links will always be important. But viewing a link strategy as a long term campaign element is much smarter than joining a link farm or engaging in other temporary listing boosting activities. Buying links from a brokerage house is a good option for a quick boost in link popularity, but ultimately, establishing long-term, free incoming links is what is most valuable. | ||||||
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