We Do Search Engine Optimization.

I love seeing what other webmasters do to try to improve their rankings. This SEO technique (used extremely loosely here) demonstrates why SEO’s have such a bad reputation in the online marketing industry.

This webmaster makes no effort to hide the keyword stuffed text, and trys to direct search engine spiders to his special content.

I give this is a search engine optimization blooper a 10.

Please excuse me while I increase our chances of getting to the top of the engines. I will repeat myself.

see this in action (warning do not try this SEO technique on your own website)

http://www.bajabigfish.com/

Using good keyword research and educating editors on proper search engine optimization techniques helped the Hearst publishing empire increase traffic to their web properties by 150%.

Hearst publishes 15 of the world’s most popular magazines including Cosmopolitan, Esquire, Oprah’s O Magazine, and Good Housekeeping as well as 5 web only magazines. Their Senior SEO Analyst for the Digital Media team overcame the challenges of introducing SEO to management, staff writers and editors.

Choosing the right keywords is essential. An online writer must adapt to the online world, which means using different words than for a print publication. Below is an example of using keyword research to write title tags that will reach the largest audience:

When writing for women’s fashion: titles are big part of what they do, so early on we made the decision that we’d instruct them to run some comparatives on the keywords ‘fashion’ and ’style’. In the print context they like to use the word style, but I stressed to them that style is somewhat nebulous in that it can mean a number of things. People’s behavior online is different because when they are looking for content they tend to be much more literal, because they have to be. The Wordtracker keyword research data showed us that 7:1 people were more likely to use ‘fashion’ than ’style’ when looking for the kind of content we were promoting.

Here is a great tip on assisting editors with search engine optimization, and coding the keyword research tools into the web based publishing platform.

We have incorporated a link to the Wordtracker keyword tool directly into our CMS (content management system) so that when someone is entering a critical field, like the meta-title, right next to it there’s a link to Wordtracker, which acts as a ‘call to action.’ They can at least check to see if the keywords they have chosen are a solid choice, or if there’s something better out there.

Hearst probably uses a custom CMS, but this could easily be added to the ‘write’ page in wordpress.

Read the full article on how Dan Roberts helped increase Hearst Publication’s online traffic. This is a good thing, because the Hearst.com design looks like it was last updated in 1996.

http://www.wordtracker.com/academy/hearst-magazines-seo

Your auto shop has a 15 point inspection list for optimizing your driving experience (making sure you don’t break down 50 miles away from home) and SEO’s need a website evaluation checklist.

Proper on page search engine optimization starts with identifying your targeted keywords and keyword phrases. Once you have your keyword list you may begin optimizing individual pages

The 15 Point SEO Checklist 

1. Title tag starts with keyword phrase
2. Domain name or filename contains desired keyword phrase
3. Each content page or product has only one spiderable page – there is no duplicate content on the site and all pages have unique content
4. Each page has a heading element <h1> containing the targeted keyword phrase
5. Important site keywords should be linked to other internal pages. For example in this phrase ‘we have additional green lanterns in the gift section’ the keyword ‘green lanterns’ should link to a focused page on this keyword
6.  Your keyword phrase appears in the first sentence
7. Targeted keyphrases are proximate to each other. For example if your keyword was ‘auto parts’ and this  your sentence was ‘find auto parts in our Los Angeles stores’  the phrase ‘Los Angeles stores’ would become part of the secondary keyword phrase.
8. Main keywords should be highlighted/bold/italics/underlined
9. Keywords should be towards the beginning of a sentence
10.  Images should be links and use alt text. Alt text is indexed only if the image is hyperlinked.
11. Meta description tag contains keyword phrase
12. Title attribute is used in hyperlinks: <a href=”link.html” title=”additional keywords”></a>
13. Keyword is in the last sentence of the page
14. Outbound links to major authority site or link to trusted resources, government documents, or third party verification sites. An example of linking out to an authority site would be a CPA business linking to IRS.gov
15. You can include the keyword in the meta keywords tag, but this has no known impact on website ranking

After you have completed these 15 items for all website pages the next task is off page search engine optimization, which is defined as acquiring backlinks or simply getting people to link to you.

Everyone frets and worries about their website and this leads to over optimizing and spending money on useless SEO techniques. Safe yourself some money (and gray hairs!) and use this free search engine optimization advice to relax about the current state of your SERP’s.

These are 10 things you worry about with your SEO campaign but shouldn’t:

1. Obsessing about number one rankings – being #1 for one keyword is nowhere near as good as being #5 for 25 keyword phrases.
2. Focusing on PageRank – Google’s little green bar means nothing to your website. It does not control your website any more than little green men live on Mars.
3. Worrying about who is linking to you – so your enemy submitted you to 500 automated top 100 websites, spam directories, and link farms? There is no problem as long as you do not link to any of these unsavory web properties.
4. Worrying about what other people tell you – usually SEO salesman or well intentioned but misguided friends
5. Outranking Wikipedia – For most generic keyword searches Wikipedia will be in the top 5, and they may even push your website to the bottom of the search results page. There is nothing you can do about this, and the almighty Wiki is likely to remain an authority site indefinitely. Be creative, join them by submitting images to the Wiki commons and link them to your site.
6. Trying to rank in Microsoft/Yahoo/Ask – they don’t matter, really. Google is the traffic king.
7. Banging your head over DMOZ listings – DMOZ is a powerful free directory – or not. DMOZ editors ignoring your passionate pleas? Join the club. The web is simply too big for the volunteer editors to handle so the open directory is becoming less relevant, and this trend will continue into the future. A better idea is to be listed in smaller topical directories that are directly related to your website.
8. Meta Tags – using a meta description will allow you to control your website snippit, but meta keywords are as useless as shoes on a fish.
9. Stressing over Alexa or Compete.com rankings – Seriously would you trust a robot to run your business or make decisions for you? These automated systems make sweeping generalizations about web traffic and are only accurate for spproximately the top 5000 web properties.
10. Changing rankings & temporary position loss – change happens, and this can be a good thing. Google is constantly refining the way they count and score backlinks and evaluate duplicate content, so as long as your links come from trusted quality sources and you only use original copy any rankings drop should only be temporal

More details courtesy of SEL.