There are a lot of small details in the world of SEO that are important to understand in order to maximize your SEO campaign. Everything from PageRank sculpting using rel=nofollow, to XML sitemap feeds, to analyzing competitor backlinks. But some of the biggest gains in SEO can be accomplished by paying attention to the basics. Here are my top three basic SEO tips we apply at our search engine optimization firm that can help you increase your search engine rankings TODAY!

1. Keyword focused Page Titles – You would think in 2008 that every man, woman and child in America would know that having keywords in your Page Title is step 1 to actually getting ranked for those same keywords. Ok, so maybe I am overstating it just a little. *lol* But I still see a huge number of clients and potential clients that have web sites with the same page title on every page of the site, or with little or no keyword focus.Incidentally I have said this before and will continue to do so. Limiting page titles to 64 characters because that’s all Google displays is not good for usability or SEO. Page titles should primarily serve as a reference point for users as to what the content of the page, and even the web site, is relevant to. Page titles should convey as much relevant information to the user as possible and should read like intelligent sentences. Personally I limit page titles to about 150 characters as this is near the upper limit of what we have found that Yahoo will actually index and is close to the maximum number of characters that most users are capable of seeing in their browser. Of course many of the page titles I create are no where near 150 characters, it just depends on what is called for based on the keywords and content found on the page.
2. Homepage Alt Tag – In Google, a link is a vote. Even if the link comes from your own web site. So my motto is, vote for yourself early, and often! If you don’t vote for yourself, who else will? And one of the most powerful ways you can vote for yourself is via the Alt Tag (The alt=”" attribute of the image tag.) on your homepage logo. Most web sites have a company logo that they link back to their homepage. And all too often that Alt tag lacks keyword focus. Most commonly the alt tag is equivalent to the company name. That’s great if you are having a hard time getting ranked for your company name. But in order to maximize the SEO benefit of that link, it is much better to use at least a couple keywords in the overall phrase.According the Matt Cutts Alt tag video, Alt tags should be around 4 to 7 words in general. I lean a little closer to 7 most of the time myself as I believe that good, detailed Alt tags help with both usability and accessibility as well as SEO. For example, if I was writing an alt tag for Sony PlayStation, instead of “Sony PlayStation” as my Alt tag, I would use “Sony PlayStation Video Games and Game Systems”. This tag not only conveys useful information to the end user, but also helps the search engines understand that Sony PlayStation is relevant for phrases like “video games”, “video games”, “video game systems” and many other phrases based on the permutations that can be derived from the keywords found in the Alt tag.

   This same concept should be applied to all image links, especially any images you might have in your global navigation.

3. Internal Linking – As previously discussed, a link is a vote. And while external links are certainly a huge driver of search engine rankings, internal links can often times yield very powerful results if leveraged correctly. One of the best ways to use internal linking to augment your rankings is to simply find occurrences of the keyword phrase you want to rank for, and make sure those phrases are all linked to the same page within your site. You can usually find a number of different pages on your site that mention any particular keyword phrase you are targeting. Linking all these occurrences to the same page sends a strong signal to the search engines that the page being linked to is relevant for that keyword text. This can be a very fruitful exercises if you have a blog as many people do not take enough time to link blog content to Web site content.It’s good to do this exercise on a monthly or semi-monthly basis using not only the keywords that you have identified that you want to rank for, but just as importantly, the keywords you already rank for. This is especially true for the long tail keyword referrals that can be seen in your analytics report. It’s very common to get a good lift for long tail keywords by just adding a handful of internal links as many of the longer tail phrases are not that competitive.

So there is your SEO plan for the day:

1 – Evaluate and add keyword focus to ALL the page titles in your Web site (do the Meta description tag too!).
2 – Add keyword focus to all image Alt tags, especially images that link
3 – Evaluate opportunities within your site to link keyword phrases you are targeting (as well as phrases that you are currently ranked for), back to the pages that have the best chance to rank highly for them. Do this on a consistent and ongoing basis.

See you at the top of the search engines! Have a great week.

Catfish

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One of the things that I notice about a lot of Web Design firms and even creative agencies who say they bake SEO into everything they do, is that very few of them bake it into there own sites. Now I don’t want to call anyone out today but I do want to give people a quick little guide on the top five things to look for when evaluating the SEO ability of design firm that says they know SEO. I mean, if SEO is part of their overall offering, they would be silly not to SEO their own site right? And if they haven’t taken the time to do that, is that a firm that you can really feel confident in? I think you know my answer. *lol* So here is the top 5 things that I would look for in a design firms web site that will give you some idea if they know what they are doing:

1) Are their page titles unique on every page and are they keyword focused. If you see a site with Page Titles like “About Us – Company Name”, they have not been optimized. Page Titles should read like intelligent sentences or phrases and convey as much information about the content of the page as possible. If you see short page titles that lack keyword focus in relation to the content that is on the page, that’s a sure sign that the optimization skills of this company are lacking.

2) Are all their pages indexed in Google, Yahoo and MSN? Many times if a site is dynamic or has extra long URL strings with too many parameters, search engines can have some difficulty indexing pages. Doing a site:www.domain.com search on the company URL can tell you if the pages you see on the Web site are indexed. If they are not, or there are issues with duplicate content where content is indexed, your company might not be the best option for SEO.

3) And speaking of dynamic URL strings, if your design firm has you using URLs that are a mile long with more than 4 or 5 parameters, you want to recheck #2 to see if those pages are indexed. Google does fairly well with long URL strings nowadays although they are inconsistent at best. The other engines are farther behind in their ability to understand and rank these types of pages. So it’s best to be on the safe side and have URL strings which are as short and easy to understand as possible.

4) Flash – While there have been a lot of advancements over the last year in SEO, it is still not recommended that your site be completely based in Flash. Usability and accessibility concerns aside, unless your design team has a specific solution to optimize your Flash, like using FlashObject or one of the other Flash Solutions that Benj has recommended, your SEO millage may vary. And if they put your primary navigation for your site in Flash with no alternative way for spiders to see it, you have clearly found someone who does not have a SEO.

5) JavaScript – Again, if the entire site navigation is built in JavaScript with no alternative text link navigation or noscript tag, odds are the company in question has a very limited understanding of SEO.

Obviously there is a lot more to SEO than these five issues. But these are pretty easy to spot and can be a quick clue as to the relative sophistication level of your Web design firm or creative agency as it relates to SEO. If they don’t offer SEO as part of their services, then these types of issues may be expected. But if they do offer SEO and these issues exist, it might be time to re-evaluate whether or not you want to engage that company for SEO work.

I hope that helps a few people in their decision making process. Have a great week!

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Another comment I thought was important to make about the description tag is that before Google removed the Supplemental results tag, one of the most effective methods for getting pages out of the supplemental results was to ensure that it had a unique Meta description. We found numerous cases of pages that were in supplemental results that had no Meta description. Once we added to the unique description to these pages, the majority of them escaped the supplemental results and even more importantly, we saw dramatic traffic increases for these pages coming from organic search. Couple this with Barry’s observation that pages with no or short Meta descriptions are flagged in Google Webmaster tools, and it is fairly apparent that unique Meta descriptions are of utmost importance to your SEO campaign.

One of the areas though that Barry and I disagree about descriptions however is the length of the description tag. Confining the length of your description to the 155 character limitation in Google in my opinion is not good for search engines nor is it good for your long tail keyword targeting. I’m not saying that every description should exceed 155 characters, but I don’t believe truncating the description of a page to fit into a screen character limitation is best practices for a tag that is supposed to be primarily to communicate information. Part of Google’s algorithm is based on Latent Semantic Analysis, so the more contextual information that is available to the engine, the better able it is to correctly rank your Web page for relevant keywords.

Take for example the following description that is less than 155 characters:

The BusinessOnLine SEO blog covers the latest tips, techniques and news in world of search engine optimization. (112 characters)

It’s not bad and has some pretty good keywords. But if you add the next sentence which pushes the description over the 155 limit, you get a lot more information for the search engines to make ranking decisions with:

Authors Ray “Catfish” Comstock and Benj Arriola discuss topics like 301 / 302 redirects, link building, on page optimization, usability, online marketing ideas and other current SEO issues. (301 characters total for both sentences)

I usually make my descriptions about two sentences because it has been my experience that you can communicate quite a lot of information in two sentences, both from a keyword perspective, and a competitive advantage standpoint. The marginal value of each sentence after that usually doesn’t justify the energy to create it although you might find exceptions. And while the control over the messaging isn’t as standardized across relevant keywords as it would be with a shorter description, you increase the amount of opportunity to rank better for a number of long tail keywords. But more importantly, you communicated more USEFUL information through the Meta tag (assuming your doing it right and not spamming)which is it’s primary function, regardless of the search engine’s display constraints.

But my disagreement with Barry over this one point doesn’t take away from what I think is an outstanding article. I think that’s what makes SEO so interesting, is the different philosophical approaches that various people take to things like Meta tags, redirects, nofollow tags, paid links, etc. Have a great week.

Catfish

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Here are my top 5:

1) This isn’t what I would recommend for my homepage keywords:

“< name=” keywords ” content=”qiskodslajdmnkd, ddakaieciuaj jkdalladpaoaw, wdaopeqndlkakljad”>” – spaces inserted so that it would show up in Blogger

Unless this is some kind of SEO test (which I don’t recommend for high profile pages), I think you would get a lot more traction out of Yahoo by making this data meaningful.

2) I see that SearchEngineLand.com is not listed in the top 20 results for “search engine optimization”. This seems like a no brainer to include in the Page Title. Not only does it increase your chances of getting listed for the specific phrase “search engine optimization”, but it dramatically increases your chances of getting listed for the thousands of permutations that are associated with that phrase. I have a hard time believing that “search engine optimization” isn’t a primary keyword for this site.

On a related note, for http://searchengineland.com/google.php, the Page Title, “Google Land” leaves a lot of valuable real estate on the tab. This is also ineffective from a usability standpoint. Anyone seeing this title in the SERPs, may or may not understand the value of the content that lives there as it relates to their interest in search engine optimization. If the Page Title were “Google Land: News and Articles About The Google Search Engine Including SEO and SEM”, it would fare much better. Now I understand that they may be keeping the title general because of the amount of information on the page. But I have never felt this to be a wise strategy. It’s always best to highlight the most important keywords in the title. In this example, their Google SEO page which is linked to from the Googleland page is a PR5. The Googleland is a PR6. It has a better chance, all things being equal, of ranking for more competitive keywords like
“google news” and “google articles”.

3) The homepage logo only says Search Engine Land in its alt tag. Adding some keywords in this alt tag would significantly increase your propensity to rank for those keywords since Google sees this link pointing at your homepage from every page on the Web site. Maybe something like: “Search Engine Land – News and Articles about Search Engines”. That is probably a little short for what I would normally recommend, but it seems more in line with the general style and theme of the site. Implementing this alt tag will significantly improve your opportunity to rank for “search engine news, search engine articles, news about search engines, articles about search engines”.

I would keep this same idea in mind for the image links on the global navigation as well. The link connectivity of the Internet Architecture is not currently keyword focused and therefore leaves a lot of opportunity on the table.

4) On article pages like this http://searchengineland.com/070821-221946.php I would recommend grabbing the first couple sentences of the page and use it for your Meta description. Unique meta descriptions are important for sites with thousands of pages based on templates. Before Google did away with the supplemental result tag, one of the observations we made was that by adding unique descriptions to some pages in the supplemental results, those pages broke out of the supplemental results and started to perform better in organic search. As a general rule until we can prove otherwise, we always recommend that every page has a unique description.

5) Keyword focused alt tags on the images that link to conferences from this page http://searchengineland.com/events.php would help those Web sites that Search Engine Land is associated with.

6 – Bonus…lol) I always recommend an html sitemap (sitemaps if more than 100 links and certainly in this case there is) that is linked from the homepage. I notice a lot of stuff on the site hasn’t got any PR yet which could be expedited by a good sitemap structure. Not a huge deal but also helps with usability for those who prefer to navigate using the sitemap.

Another note, I bet you would save yourself from passing a lot of Page Rank out to useless links if you put rel=nofollow on all the social media buttons whose URLs don’t get indexed anyway.

I just wanted to take a few minutes to give people an idea of the kinds of things we look at in our SEO Labs that we’ll be doing at OMS in February and how those principles might apply to a popular Web site. In this case, it also illustrates that even for Web sites that understand the principles of SEO, it’s hard to stay on top of it. I hope it gives everyone some ideas on how to improve their own sites. See ya next time.

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