Search Engine Best Practices

Created February 2008 for Clockwork Active Media Systems by Nina Hale, LLC.

Fundamentally, search engine optimization (SEO) is based on three principles:

1. Pages that are easily and fully accessible to search engine spiders.
2. Content on the pages, urls, asset names, etc that clearly indicate what the pages are about.
3. Links to your site pages, "vouchers" that legitimize your claims about the content.

Technical Website Architecture:

Clockwork is constantly ensuring that the technical architecture of your site satisfies the first principle. The more you do to satisfy the other two, the higher you will rank in search engines.

Content:

• Research and choose keywords that both define your product and match those often searched by your potential customers. Some free tools:
  • Google Keyword tool (free) - good for PPC/SEO.
    https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
  • Trellian Keyword Discovery (free trial) - good for SEO:  
    http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/
• Include your chosen keywords in all naming conventions, such as content, page titles and names, asset names, headlines, alternate text, and the text name you give to an internal link of your site. Save the asset with identifying keywords even before uploading it. For example: "car-detailing-image.jpg."
• Have enough content to give the search engines something to read.
• Focus on a few keywords per page. You can't convince a search engine that you are about 50 different things on one page.
• Make sure that the "higher" pages are optimized for content, otherwise the spiders may not go deeper into product or other keyword-rich pages.
• Include keywords in press releases and in any other content that could link back to your website.

Links:

• Add links to your site wherever they are relevant to your industry, or from "important" websites.
• Make sure your "anchor text" includes keywords.
• Purchase links sparingly and from sources that seem relevant or are ranked higher themselves. Industry directories are especially helpful for this.
• Only allow link trading if you think the link on your site is very relevant to your customers and won't take potential sales away from you.

Internet users in the U.S. conduct upwards of almost 220 million online searches every day (Nielsen/Net Ratings  – Google claims in over 200 million searches per day.). Approximately 48% of those searchers go no further than the first page of search results before clicking on a listed result (According to iProspect), and 10% of the searchers will click on one of the sites found on that first page. If you are in the top three listings of the natural search results, it is conceivable to achieve a 40% click-through rate or more to your site.

How Search Engines Work

1. Search engines send spiders (also known as robots, bots, crawlers) to websites to take snapshots of the pages, which are then indexed in their database cache. The spiders follow the links on the pages to get to more pages on the site. They will also spider and categorize specific elements on the site such as images and videos.
2. Search engines categorize the page according to the content on the page and what links to the page indicate it is about. For example: "Clockwork Active Media Systems - a web design and development company based in Minneapolis, MN. This previous sentence is also an example of anchor text or a link name.
3. When someone types a query into a search engine ("Minneapolis web design companies"), the search engine will look through its cache and create a list of results for that query.
4. If a lot of other websites have links to your website, your ranking will improve.

Think of a lost-and-found box. Spiders collect stuff left on a playground. The site's architecture ensures the spiders can see all corners of the playground. The content sews a name on a collar ("Jason's blue sweater"). The links support Jason's claim to the sweater ("I've totally seen Jason wearing that blue sweater"). Important people and websites carry more weight—the playground monitor has more credibility than Jason's best friend.

Common misconceptions about SEO

• If you buy ads on search engines, you will get better natural search rankings. There is actually NO connection between natural search and paid search. Only Yahoo offers a grey-zone product, and not many sites use it.
• "We will submit your site to thousands of search engines." These offers are a scam. In general, you don't have to submit your website, and it won't help your rankings if you do. Also, many search engines use the same database. You can, however, submit a sitemap (a list of all pages on your site) to a few search engines, which can help.

Screen Shots of Different Search Results

Natural results vs. paid results

A. Sponsored links are PPC. They are ads. The advertiser only pays if someone clicks on the link. 

B. Natural results are what the search engines consider relevant. Companies don’t pay for clicks. These days, getting top ranking is the result of a wagon-load.

Universal search

"Universal search" is a newish concept. The search engines believe that an image might be as relevant as a website for this query.

Glossary

SEO. Search Engine Optimization. Actively working to get better natural search rankings. Search engines make no money for their natural search results. 

SERP. Search Engine Results Page. A way to distinguish between the search engines as entities and the pages listing the search results. The type of term you use to get dates at technical conferences.

Ranking. What order you appear in search results. Most search engines have 10 sites per page, so rankings 1-10 will have "first page rankings."

PPC. Pay-Per-Click. Search engine ad networks. Here is how search engines make most of their money. Ads are “sponsored links,” for which companies bid in an auction system. Payment is based on the click, not the impression (when someone sees the ad).

Spider. A program that finds and crawls website pages for search engines.

Search-engine friendly. Pretty much what it sounds like. A site, url, image, etc. that makes it easy for a spider to get to your page, and to know what it is about.

Visits. One entity that enters your site. Many tracking programs filter out spiders.

Unique visits. Visitors who only came once. If someone clears their cookies, they will be counted as unique.

Hits. Total page views. One visitor could account for multiple hits. Also, including your content in RSS feeds or emails may "call" to the site for images or copy, resulting in multiple hits.

Exit. Leaving the website on a page. On a page with a 25% exit rate, 25% of page viewers make that the last page they view. It's not necessarily the first page they view.

Bounce. Arriving at and exiting from a page without clicking to any other pages.

CPC. Cost-per-click. The price you pay for each click on a "sponsored link" ad.

Conversion. An action that you define. A conversion can be an email sign-up, an eCommerce sale, a lead form submitted, etc.

CTR. Click-though rate. The percentage of searches that click. If one person clicks for each 100 searches, you have a 1% CTR.

CPA. Cost-per-action (also CPL, cost-per-lead). The cost to achieve the defined conversion.

• 1000 people search on your keyword and 100 click, you have a 10% CTR.
• If your CPC is $1.00, and you have 100 clicks that result in two leads: Your conversion rate is 2%, your CPA is $50. 

Some Best Practices For Search Engine Ranking

How do you make your website friendly to search engines? In general, search engines want to reward you for having a relevant, user-friendly site, so if you think of SEO as having this goal, you will often satisfy the search engines. Some SEO elements are only for the spiders, but most satisfy a human need for clarity and relevance. Although the following is by no means a comprehensive program, it covers the basics of most search engine optimization.

Best Practices: Content

Provide content and categorization that lets the search engines properly identify what you sell and to which markets and audiences.

Choose keywords

Having the right keywords is vital to attracting visitors. You must first know what keywords people search on. You might know these intuitively, but supporting intuition with research is recommended. You need to choose keywords that both accurately describe your products and are used by your customers. Some steps to research keywords are:

• Start with your company. Talk to salespeople, product managers, call centers.
• Conduct customer focus groups if possible.
• Look at your competitors. Look at the websites that have the best results in Google—especially if they are companies, and not commonly high-ranking sites like Wikipedia. If they rank high, they may have already done the industry research. Take a look at the keywords that they have put into their copy and titles for specific words or phrases. (See graphic below for an example of a title.)
• Free and paid resources for keyword research.
  • Google Keyword tool: (free) - good for PPC/SEO.  
    https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
  • Trellian Keyword Discovery free trial - good for SEO: 
    http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/
  • WordTracker free trial - good for SEO: 
    http://www.wordtracker.com/free-trial.html
  • SpyFu - Check out what your competitors are up to: 3-day access for $6.95. 
    http://www.spyfu.com/

Write metadata

Metadata is the term for code used for titles, descriptions, and keywords. This is how you summarize each page for your customers and the search engines. Meta code refers to the mostly hidden code on your website that search engines use to properly categorize your pages. It is important to write brand-appropriate meta code that is also dense with your keywords.

If the keyword is very competitive and you are already on top for your brand name, consider putting the keywords before the brand. Search engines think that the first words in metadata are more important than the last words.

Avoid common words such as "a", "and", "is", and "the." Known technically as stop words, they are generally ignored by search engines.

• A good meta title is approximately 11 words long and ideally has brand appeal and clear keywords. Often the first letter of each word is capitalized.
• A good meta description has keywords and brand appeal in the first 20 to 25 words. People will almost never see words beyond that, since search engines truncate descriptions after the second line. The description, however, can be longer, and some experts believe it doesn't hurt for it to be quite long (50 to 60 words). Capitalize it as you would a normal sentence.
• Meta keywords are not seen, but are read by search engines. The importance of meta keywords to the search algorithms fluctuates, so you may as well include them.

The title is seen at the top of web browser and appears as the headline in a Google search.

The description is only seen underneath the headline in a Google search.

Keywords are not seen at all by people.

Increase keyword density on page copy. Putting a keyword into metacode won't do any good unless it's also in the page content. Where feasible, and, without "stuffing" or repeating the keyword ad naseum, add the keywords more often into copy. This is especially helpful in headlines and product descriptions. It's fine to combine keywords; for example, “edible dog toys” might cover two targeted keyword phrases ("dog toys" and "edible dog toys ").

Put copy in parts of your site

• Links to other pages on your site: "more dog toys" instead of "more."
• Alt tags on images and especially your home page logo (no more than a few words long). This can be a spot to put less brand-desired keywords. Instead of a logo alt tag "Joe's home," you might write "Joe's used cars home page."
• Name the original image with keywords before you upload them to your site. This is especially helpful if you want your images to rank high in image search results.
• A site map with keywords in the links to other pages. Just balance it so you don't overdo the keyword stuffing.
• Add keywords to persistent footers. This is especially important if you are focused on a geographic location.

Common questions about choosing content

"How do I deal with misspellings of my name?" If it's a common misspelling, people will get the "did you mean..." response, and it shouldn't be a problem. Search engines come up with these and you can't influence this response. If it's not a common misspelling, or the misspelling is another valid word, then you may need to manage this. Some suggestions:

• Put a persistent statement in the footer that says "common misspells are..." or "whether your spell it _____, ______, or ______, we still make great _______."
• Bury the misspells in alt tags, image names, after 25 words in your meta description, and in other discrete spots seen by spiders but rarely seen by people.
• Put a page on your website with copy about all the kooky ways people spell your name (maybe a fake, backdated, press release).
• Buy PPC for the misspelling. This may also be necessary if your brand name is shared by a very popular term.

"We have a brand positioning that's not the most popular search." Rebranding can be an upward battle, especially on search engines. Aesthetician-training programs have a problem because everyone still searches for "beauty school". Three ways to deal with his:

• Search engines can't understand nuance. If you only want to message that you sell pre-owned machines, try writing a sentence like "customers have used machines in many ways." This will satisfy the more common search for "used machines."
• Sneak it in. As with misspellings, hide the common terms in less human-read places. However, you get more "points" in the search algorithms for content that's out in the open.  
• Compromise. Have a big image with your new positioning, and smaller text with the common search. Or balance the two throughout, because your best customers hopefully are the people who like your brand position.
• Rejoice. Maybe you don't want those cheapskates who are always looking for "free  ______."

"My research says there are zero searches for my keyword." Most of the research tools extrapolate from the available data to come up with the volume of searches. The numbers are not always true, but the relative ranking is. So if Keyword A comes back with 2,000 searches, and Keyword B with 200, you can feel confident that Keyword A gets more. You may need to average a number of the results if you really want to get a sense of how many searches are being performed. 

"Should I always pick the most popular keyword?" You should balance three factors:
How relevant is the keyword to your most profitable services? A keyword that closes 10% but gets far fewer searches might be best. 
How competitive is this keyword? If there seems to be no chance of getting past the top runners of a keyword ("Apple"), maybe there's another one you should choose. 
How many searches are being done on a keyword.

Best Practices: Build Links

Links to your sites from other websites (sometimes known as "link strength"). This "vouches" for you to the search engines, and can be the slowest and sometimes most difficult thing to grow. Websites with poor link strength will rarely achieve or maintain high rankings, regardless of the perfection of their copy and technical architecture.

Clean up your current links

Get a list of all links to your site. There's a good free tool for this that's generally easy to use:http://tools.seobook.com/backlink-analyzer/. It will list the text anchor (the blue words) used to link to you, which is better for SEO if it includes your keywords. If you get really into link building you should set up a free Google Webmaster account to get access to the information they provide there about your website.

If you have changed domain names, be sure to run this on your old domain.  A changed domain is one of the easiest and most valid reasons to contact websites to request a change in a link to your site.

Once you have a valid list of links, determine which ones need to point to a different page, or that could have better anchor text. Create a spreadsheet that ranks them:

1. From urls that you control.
2. From urls that are run by organizations you are friendly with, such as vendors, partners, and clients.
3. From urls that are high in search listings on their own, or that have a high “Google Page Rank.”
4. From all others.

Contact the webmaster to change the link. If not listed, you can often find this at a Register.com or other domain registrars. For example, a local chamber of commerce website has the following copy: “Joe’s construction business sells gravel and does driveway repair. Contact them at www.joesconstruction.com.” You will want to send an email that gives

1. The url on their site where you link is located.
2. The exact chunk of code about your site on the page. (Copy this code by "viewing source" in the drop down menu.)
3. A request to change it to “Joe’s Construction - Plymouth driveway repair and gravel” (this is the anchor text).

Try to contact the webmaster up to three times.

• 50% will ignore you.
• 25% might change it.
• 25% will say no, want to charge you for the link, or will ask for a reciprocal link. Keep track of these - some of the $ options may be worthwhile. Reciprocal links aren't recommended, except under very special conditions (see common questions below).

Build new links

Here are some recommendations for ways to build links. When you create new links, remember to include keywords in the anchor text.

• Vendors, sites you control, partners.
• Industry directories, chamber of commerce or city sites.
• Add yourself to Google Maps and other local listings.
• Are you a member of any associations, organizations or houses of worship?
  • If you have a board of outside directors, often in the bios on their own company sites, it will state they are a director of yours.  Try to make that into a link to your site.
  • Can you add a "link to us" appeal in an email newsletter to loyal customers, staff, or alumni?
  • Can you make interesting enough content, products, lists, statistics, or news that other people will link to you, blog it, or add your site to social sites like Stumble, Technorati, Del.icio.us?

Buy links

• Buy links in good directories such as Yahoo and the Yahoo local directories, Business.com, Best of the Web, etc.
• See who has top ranking on your keywords or in your industry and buy listings on that site if possible. If you are given a paragraph or an entire page as part of your sponsorship, optimize that copy for content just as you would for your own site. Many industry sites can't be beaten in the rankings, so the best you can do is to buy a sponsorship and internally outrank your competitors that also have bought a sponsorship.
• If you're adding a link just for the link, not for the traffic or brand appeal, be sure it is a followable link. Some sites, like Wikipedia, have code that tells the search engines not to follow the link. Wikipedia added this in part to reduce the "link spam" industrious marketers were adding to point to their sites. Some sites that sell links will put a redirect on the link so they can track the clicks in a report for you. This redirect will invalidate the value of the link for SEO purposes.

Common questions about linking

"Should I put reciprocal links to other sites that link to me?" Is it relevant to your business, and would it be a good partnership, and would it be a helpful link for your customers? If so, maybe you should. In general, it's not terrible to put some "helpful links" on your site, and if the links are to strong sites in your industry, it can be fractionally good in the search engine algorithms. Remember that search engines want to reward you for having a user-friendly web site. If they are to sites that have nothing to do with your industry, and that have tons of links on them, they could hurt you. Sites like this are sometimes called "link farms" and search engines try to recognize and shun them.

"I've heard that purchasing links is bad." Like eating and drinking, all things should be done in moderation. Think of purchasing links like eating dessert; do it after you have built some legitimate links.

Best Practices: Technical

Create a site that is built and designed in a manner to be fully accessible. Theoretically, every page and asset can be indexed by the search engines. But spiders can only spend so much time at each website, so you have to make each page seem to have unique and relevant content.

Some important technical elements

• Each page has metadata (described earlier).
• There is enough text on the page. Ideally this is at least 250 words of actual readable content, but can also be presented in other formats. For example, a long list of items to choose from may be inside a smaller scrollable box that uses less room on the page. Copy can also be put into alt tags, image names, etc. But this is not as important in the algorithms as readable text.
• A site that loads quickly. Each page should download completely in a second or less. Pages that take a second or more to “render” or appear in the browser window are less useable, but less search-friendly.
• A searchable site should not redirect the home page.
• A search-engine friendly home page. If a spider thinks there's nothing that could be relevant on the home page, it may not bother going to the "lower" pages.
• Videos are indexed well if each one has its own page (with a search engine friendly url). A video that exists in a page with more content may be more user-friendly, and most sites want to have a user-friendly site that is search-friendly rather than a search-friendly site that sucks. Regardless of the location of the video, save the file with keywords and the word "video" and try to write a text excerpt of the script, or copy describing the content.
• Save images with important keywords in the files names and in ALT attributes, the text behind the image, whenever possible.
• Never have multiple domains with the same content (mirror sites). When possible, redirect a site like http://domain.com to http://WWW.domain.com. Google considers any mirrored domains to be “duplicate content” and not worth ranking highly.
• If obsolete pages are redirected or removed, code them with a 301 or permanent redirect to a new page. This announces that the redirect is permanent, and search engines will trade the page in their index with the new url.
• Don't duplicate content or metadata, if there are large blocks of replicated content try to hide them in style sheets. This especially true of canned text, disclaimers, and legal statements. This text is best included in a separate page.
• Don't put anything you want searched in pop-up boxes. Seems like a no-brainer, but it's still very common. Pop-ups are perfect for canned text, disclaimers, and legal statements.
• Don't require cookies - search bots won't accept them.
• Don't make it required to advance by clicking a list of choices. A common example is "choose your country" with radio buttons. Search bots can follow links in code, but they can't actually click.

Common technical questions

"I have a new website and Google won't even index it." This can happen - it's called being put into the "sandbox." It can sometimes take up to six months before a new domain and website are indexed in search engines. In general, old domains with some type of content will receive fractional favor in the search engines. If you have a brand-new domain and website, building links is crucial. New sites should also create an xml site map and submit it via Google Webmaster Tools. This is recommended for all sites, but if you add pages and don't update the site map, those pages may not be indexed, so make sure that if you do submit a site map, that you will be updating it either manually or with a script.