SEO Blog

One of the most important skills of a search engine optimization specialist is the ability to very quickly see the search engine readiness, or “friendliness”, of websites and the web documents housed within them. It doesn’t matter how well a SEO writes or how deep their keyword determination skills go, if a website is unwelcoming to search spiders, documents from the site will likely not rank and will certainly not rank as well as they should.

Making a website search engine friendly is far less difficult today than it once was, partially because of standardization in the way websites are built and spidered, and partially because the search engines themselves are far better at accessing web documents than in previous years. Nevertheless, there are a number of small steps webmasters and search engine optimizers can take to make a website and the documents housed within it as search engine friendly as possible. The first place to start is site structure.

“Hello, I’m not sure if you’re they guys I need to talk to but I have a problem…”

Somebody has an emergency. Their business is in trouble and they know they need help. Since they are calling us with a big problem this is likely the first point of contact our agency has had with the caller. They almost certainly should have called sooner…

“My website was getting lots of traffic and making sales but in the past couple of weeks, all that has dried up. What should I do?”

Search engine optimization and marketing firms get this type of phone call every day. Somebody has invested a lot of money (relatively speaking, of course) and probably a lot of time into his or her online business and now they have an issue. Most of the time, the caller didn’t know who to speak with about their problem until it hit a critical point. Often, they didn’t even know they had a problem until their disaster struck. When it did, they would have turned to a friend or business associate that then referred them to us. Such is the extended marketing cycle for a well known search marketing shop.

An interesting report from the Kelsey Group predicts the interactive classified advertising market will grow from its current $3.9Billion spend to over $14.7Billion by 2010. Advancing at a phenomenal 30.5% compounded annual growth rate, the increase in ad-spend will come primarily from traditional media such as newspapers, radio and television. A radical increase in online advertising dollars is not extraordinary news to the search marketing community. We’ve sensed and benefited from this shift in the sensibilities of advertisers for several years now.

What might be a surprise to many search marketers are the exact directions that increased ad-spending is likely to go in. According to the report, much of that money will be focused on highly vertical markets such as home services, home and garden care, health care, legal, finance and auto repair. Because items or inventory from each of these vertical sectors tend to have specific search tools or sections of larger search engines dedicated to them, search results from those categories might soon be found faster amd more easily “off-Google” than at-Google.

To quote search journalist Michelle Greer, “Apparently, some online advertisers are realizing that having ads on the 60th page of a Google keyword search isn’t exactly fruitful.” This is a scenario in which Google becomes its own worst enemy, leading searchers and advertisers to focus their attentions elsewhere.

(Article originally published in WebProNews as part of a ten-part expert article series on SEO. An episode of Webcology on WebmasterRadio.FM also covered points in this article)

Content Is King

Content is king. More than a truism, the phrase is a mantra. Content is the stuff people are looking for on a website. A commitment to developing and deploying great page, document and site content is a commitment to good SEO.

Comprised of the most common site elements, content is the most effective tool SEOs have to work with. Loosely defined as All Things On-Page, the term “content” would include titles, tags, text, in-site links and out-bound links. In some SEO practices, the acronym ATOP is used to refer to the hands-on work environment. (ATOP, i.e.: Mark sends the keyword targets to Jade whose staff works ATOP in the overall SEO effort) Content optimization is where creative art gets mixed into the webmaster science of SEO.

In the SEO process, content optimization describes most of the hands-on work done to make unique documents place well in search engine rankings. For the purposes of search engine optimization; content either exists, has to be created, or both.