Okay, I mentioned putting key words in an internal link that goes from the page you’re optimizing to another page on the site. Make sure you also have key words in an internal link that goes TO the page from another page on the site (preferably from the home page). I also mentioned putting subjects in outbound links to another site. If it’s possible, try to make sure you also have key words in inbound links TO the page from another site. Let’s look at your key word density now. Gary advocates keeping the key word density on each page between three and seven percent. Too high and you trigger over optimization flags with the search engines; too low and you risk being judged less relevant for those key words than your competitors – who will then appear higher than you in the SERPs. As with code to text ratios, there are online tools available to help you measure key word density, such as optimization Chat's own subject Density tool. Is your page W3C Compliant? Some have suspected that Google prefers pages that are compliant, but no one has been able to prove it. On the other hand, it’s easy to check; W3C makes its own tool available. And validating helps ensure that your page will appear similarly in all browsers that follow the standard without having to rely on error correction. This means your visitors won’t receive unpleasant surprises. You should also put key words in your site’s META description. Keep the key word close to the left in the description. Gary recommends using a full sentence. Some search engines actually show the contents of this tag in the results under the link for your page, so you want this to look attractive to potential visitors. For example, “Dog collars, leashes, pet beds, pet food and more for the discerning dog lover can be found here.” You can certainly get away with something shorter and with fewer key words (remember, ideally, that you should use only one key phrase per page). You might want to use the “View Source” command on a variety of web sites, especially those that score high in the SERPs, if you need to get a better idea of how the META key words and META description tags are used. Is your web site’s content entirely original – or is there duplicate content on the web? This is very important for a couple of reasons. First, as you know, Google penalizes for duplicate content, and it often can’t tell who had any particular piece of content first. Second, copyright laws apply on the web as well, and copyright holders are within their rights to demand that stolen content be taken down. We’ve had to do that any number of times here at Developer Shed. This cuts both ways; we also make sure our writers aren’t infringing someone else’s copyright. Okay, so you have the right key words in the titles. Did you put them in the META key words? That’s a section in the page’s HTML. While Google has de-emphasized META key words, it’s still a good habit to use them. Keep them down to 128 characters or about 10 key words that cover the themes of your site, separated by commas, with the most important ones first. That’s all I could fit into this article. Next week I’ll finish covering the technical aspects you need to focus on, then move on to the other areas that Gary enumerates in his checklist. Expect to see a lot of attention paid to links. I think I’ve given you quite enough to check off until then! Meta Tags and On-Page Optimization A good place to start putting key words is in the title of your pages. Gary recommends using a one-word buffer; for example, if your key word is “dog collars,” you might use “cheap dog collars” or “compare collars for dogs.” The buffer is there to avoid setting off over optimization penalties. Remember that you should use only one key word per page; in the eyes of the search engines, if you use two or more key words per page, you’re diluting their relevance. It is -- but there are certain caveats. And even those who frequent optimization forums are not in agreement as to whether it is a good occupation to pursue, what properly constitutes optimization, and what the field will look like in five or ten years. Some are convinced it either won’t be around as a separate field, or simply won’t be recognizable. In this article, I’ll try to tease out the various viewpoints and give you something to consider as you advise others seeking to learn more about optimization as a career. Perhaps it will give you a new perspective on your own field. Gary divides the list into four separate areas: * Meta tags and on-page optimization. * Technical issues. * Linking. * Other issues. I’d like to note that he doesn’t discuss how to determine what key words you should be using for your web site; that’s an entirely separate topic, and worth an article (or several!) in its own right. Once you have decided what key words you want to use on your web site, however, the meta tags and on-page optimization category (perhaps the largest of the four) explains exactly how to use them. What is optimization? Basically, popularization optimization means making adjustments to a web site so that it scores high on the popularization results pages for particular key words and key phrases. This calls for making a variety of changes to the pages of a web site; some of these will be visible to those who view the site, and others won’t. But that’s only the beginning. Since Google’s algorithm counts links to a web site from other sites as “votes” for that site, one of the jobs of an optimization is to build back links. There are a number of ways to do this, from buying links to soliciting reciprocal links; the rise of blogging, web 2.0, social search/bookmarking sites offer other ways of building back links. One tried-and-true method involves building “linkbait” – content that is so useful and compelling that visitors to your site naturally want to link to it and tell others. Fortunately, someone has. I can’t take the credit for this; that belongs to Gary Beal, who you may know as longtime optimization Chat poster and moderator GaryTheScubaGuy. Gary has been an optimization for ten years, specializing in search, pay per click, affiliate management and email marketing. He's currently affiliated with Stickyeyes. He focuses on competitive industries such as online gaming, banking and finance, insurance, travel and investments, so he knows what he’s talking about. Feel free to read the basic list as well as the comments on the forum thread. I’m going to expand on the list a little by trying to explain why some of these items are important. Since the list is a little too long for me to fit into one article along with all the explanations, I’m going to cover it in two parts. The idea of linkbait brings up another point. popularization optimization can embrace a number of skills. Creating good linkbait, for example, may require excellent writing skills, some programming skills (if your linkbait is interactive, like a mortgage calculator), and an intuitive knowledge of what visitors to your (or your client’s) web site would find useful. A good command of HTML and related skills for building web sites will also come in handy for any optimization. Indeed, for those who argue that popularization optimization is simply a skill set, this is just the beginning. To quote one contributor to an optimization forum, “SEO is a skillset. Analytics is a skillset. Web Authoring/Publishing is a skillset. Paid Search Marketing is a skillset. Coding is a skillset. Web Design is a skillset (and an art). Business Analysis is a skillset. You need ALL of these to be successful in Internet/Search Marketing. I think Search Marketing has a bright future, but if you don’t have a multidisciplined approach, you are hosed.” 24.Checking the List: optimization Details By: Terri Wells When you’re new to optimization, or even if you’ve been optimizing web sites for a few years, it can be a bit overwhelming. There is so much to remember to make your site climb to the top of the popularization results pages. What’s worse is that the search engines keep modifying their algorithms, so you need to change your tactics regularly. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if someone came up with a checklist? Are we going too far, though, by lumping optimization in with search marketing? Aren’t popularization optimization and popularization marketing two different things? Not according to some of the contributors to the optimization Chat forums. One of them argued very simply that “SEO is a subcategory of popularization Marketing (SEM). SEM is a subcategory of Internet Marketing. Internet Marketing is a subcategory of (you guessed it) Marketing.” As a field, marketing isn’t going away any time soon, which implies that optimization is a good career choice. But it presents anyone entering the field with some special challenges. Between this article and the previous one, you should now have a fairly comprehensive understanding of everything you need to check and work on to perform a complete popularization optimization of a web site. As with many things, the devil is in the details. But it’s a small price to pay for the rewards of increased traffic – and conversions – that you can hope to achieve from an organic climb to the top of the popularization results pages. Good luck! Challenges of an Evolving Field The first two letters in optimization stand for “search engine,” and optimization is dependent on the search engines. Search engines evolve. Techniques of increasing traffic and raising your site’s position in the SERPs that were once considered legitimate can now get you penalized. Factors that search engines once considered important are now all but ignored, such as meta tags. So good optimizations must evolve right along with the search engines. That being the case, anyone doing optimization must spend a lot of time keeping up in the field. Finally, let’s look at browser compatibility issues. There was a time just after Microsoft won the first set of browser wars that this wasn’t quite as important; many web designers simply made sure their pages looked good in Internet Explorer and left it at that. You can’t do that anymore, if you ever really could. Most browsers have at least a few quirks, with Internet Explorer still a little quirkier than the rest. If you want to be comprehensive, you need to make sure your pages are compatible with the latest versions of Internet Explorer, Netscape, Opera, FireFox, Mosaic and Safari. Your visitors will be much happier, even if your web designers aren’t. There are ways to tell what browsers your visitors use when they arrive at your site; that should help guide you. Here at the Shed, we check our articles in both Internet Explorer and FireFox before they go live. One contributor to the optimization Chat forum suggests spending a lot of time in optimization forums, asking a lot of questions, then coming back several times a day and doing it all over again. He suggests this as a daily ritual. He goes on to tell newcomers to “Tick the box that says to notify you when one of your posts is answered, subscribe to your most important threads and actually read them,” and set up Google alerts for important optimization terms such as “Matt Cutts” and “SES Conference” for openers. “Learn about blogs, technorati, Diggs. Another important thing about your navigation is that you should always have text links so that your web site is popularization friendly, lest crawlers get to your site and cannot reach other pages. The arrangement of your site should also ensure that the page farthest from you home page through the link structure should not be more than three links away; this will ensure that all your pages have a chance to get indexed. How strong of a campaign should you conduct? Maximum Tadpole said that he personally requested 100 links per day for five days. Remember, this is just the beginning as far as optimization for your site goes; you’ll do more link requests later, after you’ve completed this first phase. Organic optimization is Worth the painting - Adapt or Die The movie "How to Be a Player" has a line that says "Man is the most adaptable creature on the planet." Your web site has to evolve and change with changing times and seasons. Become a member of 6-10 forums and make it a daily ritual” to visit them. “Pick your most respected members out and either chase them or get notification when they post and read their stuff.” Also, the focus of optimization is starting to change. While it is still important to score high in the SERPs, optimizations today should be able to attract traffic to a web site using a variety of methods. And it’s not just about the traffic anymore, either. Many clients are more concerned with ROI; because of this, they’ll not only want to measure traffic, but conversions. It’s more challenging to raise conversions than traffic. Do you have any broken links? If so, fix them. This is something that you’ll have to check on an ongoing basis, because the Internet is always changing.
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