Effective search engine optimization is not achieved in a few days, nor in a few weeks. Good SEO requires ongoing work and dedication and a constant evaluation of site content and usability. Below we’ve outlined a few points to help further your SEO momentum:

• Research – factors that influence SEO are constantly changing and there is a lot of “advice” out there that can be very misleading. Find sources that you trust and subscribe to their feeds. Stay on top of trends and changes in the industry.  We recommend starting with a few key industry leaders, such as SEOmoz, Google’s Webmaster Central Blog, and Search Engine Land.
• Practice – take knowledge you’ve gained through experience and couple that with industry research and best practices. Track changes you’re making to see which are having an effect. Remember that correlation does not always indicate causation. A/B and multivariate testing should be used to determine which content is most effective and which changes are having the most impact. Log your findings somewhere that enables you to keep them top of mind. We recommend synthesizing a list of efforts that are of the most benefit to your SEO strategy and continually implementing changes based on this list.
• Hard work – to maintain SEO momentum and develop a strategy that works for your organization, it requires dedication and hard work. As trite as this may sound, SEO success is dependent upon constant evaluation and targeted changes and updates to your site and strategy. Your competitors may have more money invested in their efforts, but SEO success really boils down to passion, dedication, and hard work. Pick at least one small item a day to evaluate or change, whether that’s your site navigation, number of clicks from point a to b, or tweaks to content.
• Engage your audience – wherever possible, find out what your stakeholders are wanting when they visit your website. Educational resources, better site structure or usability, and more platforms for user generated content and contributions often appear at the top of this list. Listen to your site visitors and give them what they want. Giving users a reason to come to your site and stay engaged is key in any effective SEO strategy. After all, if they’re looking for it, it’s likely that potential prospects that haven’t even found you are looking for it too.

These are just a few tips to help maintain your SEO momentum. Combining these ideas with your own, industry-relevant and innovative practices is certainly a step in the right SEO direction.

People have a tendency to stray away from things they fear. We loathe going to the doctor, even when we don’t feel well, for fear that we may find something wrong. The same is true with analytics data. Many people are scared to face their site’s data for fear that there will be so much work to be done that it’s not even worth a look. However, analytics data, as scary as it may be, provides the most insightful clues into the successes and failures of your current SEO strategy.

For example, if using Google Analytics, “traffic sources” data is extremely useful. Here you are able to analyze where your site traffic is coming from and where these sources can be improved. Let’s say a good majority of those finding your sites from natural search are using your company or product name to do so. While it’s great that you have some brand recognition going on here, generating traffic from people who already know about your company and product is not enough. What you should be focusing your efforts on is garnering traffic from those who haven’t yet heard about you. If you can boost traffic that finds you from natural search terms related to your industry, you’ve jumped a huge SEO hurdle.

Dig deeper into your keyword traffic data and take a look at some of the terminology searchers are using to find your site. Putting yourself in users’ shoes is key. At SEO State of Mind, we like to call this web empathy; and if you’re not familiar with phrases and terms searchers in your industry are using, you’re missing out on a gold mine of web traffic.

Even if only a few people each month are finding your site from a broader industry term, you may be well served by incorporating this term into your content more frequently. Doing so can result in better search rankings for these particular terms, and hence, increased site visits. This also ties back to our previous post on SEO keyword selection and optimization. Where it makes sense to do so, you should use your analytics data to incorporate keywords and phrases into your site content.

We will continue to chip away at pieces of the analytics interface and discuss how you can use this data to improve your current SEO strategy. Stay tuned!

There is tons of contradictory information out there on the Web regarding what to do to achieve successful SEO results. All too often, these sites ignore the discussion of what makes for bad search engine optimization. The following list are the five things not to do when approaching SEO:

1. Using hidden text- it is bad practice to hide text or links either by making the font color match the background or via the use of hidden text.
2. Keyword Stuffing – do not overload your page or metadata content with keywords. As we’ve previously discussed, using keywords in moderation (3-5% of body content) and when they’re of help to the user is key.
3. Non-search engine friendly URLs- using references such as “page-1″ in your URLs does not help your SEO efforts. Make sure to avoid general paths such as this and instead, use descriptive, hyphen-separated paths to your pages.
4. Shallow internal linking – links on your site should be used frequently and where they are of help to the user. Linking only to your homepage, for example, from your internal pages is an SEO no-no. You want to spread the SEO “juice” across your site by linking from pages with high levels of authority to relevant pages deep in your site hierarchy, and vise versa.
5. Non-hierarchical site structure – for company websites especially, it is imperative that your site is structured in a hierarchical manner in which certain pages are automatically deemed more important by their rank/placement amongst your website content. That is to say, if you have 3 products– product a, product b, and product c, these should all be housed beneath a “products” page/section, which should be housed beneath your homepage or another parent category that makes sense. Avoid placing less important content in a top level position on your website.

These are just five things (of many) to keep in mind when implementing an SEO strategy. In a future post, we will dig deeper into SEO no-nos and the damage that can be incurred if not adhering to SEO best practices.

Recently, Google made an important announcement affecting search engine optimization efforts everywhere—they will now include site speed as an official factor in their algorithm. To determine the significance of page load times for search users, Google intentionally slowed down search results page load times by 100-400 milliseconds and found that it had a “measurable impact on the number of searches per user of -0.2 to -0.6%.”¹ This demonstrates the importance of page load times for users. We all appreciate a fast site, but why should you take note of this new development?

Google’s algorithm uses 200 different factors to determine a site’s rank in search results, and specifically, its PageRank. PageRank is a proprietary ranking system used by Google to determine the importance or significance of a website, based mostly on the value of linkbacks to that website or page. Sites are ranked on a scale of 1-10, with 10 being the highest attainable PageRank. To stay competitive, sites are encouraged to garner valuable linkbacks to continually improve PageRank, and thus authority and rankings in search results.

However, site load time doesn’t only affect PageRank. It also affects rankings in search engine results for specific terms and keywords.  As we’ve mentioned in previous posts, the ultimate goal of search engine optimization, and the inherent focus of these efforts (shaped often by engines such as Google), is to improve the user experience. While those operating websites should definitely take a closer look at load times to stay competitive in the realm of SEO, they should also continue to focus on quality, relevancy, and making changes that enhance the user experience. Fewer than 1% of search queries will be impacted by this recent change in Google’s algorithm, and as Matt Cutts, Google employee notes, “Quality should still be the first and foremost concern [for site owners].”²

We encourage you to take a closer look at your site load times, but as Google recommends, to continue placing your SEO emphasis on the experience your users have when searching for terms relevant to your site and in the navigation of your site itself.

¹: www.searchengineland.com
²: Ibid

In an earlier SEO blog post, we discussed the need for building relevancy and correlation in your site’s web content.  It is important that before you do this, you identify the keywords for which you will be optimizing your web content. Once you’ve selected your keywords, they should be used in the page headers, titles, the first 100 words of body content, metadata, link anchor text, and if feasible, backlinks to your site.

Using the example from our previous post, if you’re selling vintage action hero figurines, imagine the increased significance in the eyes of search engines if this term is in your homepage header, title, URL, body content, metadata, and anchor text versus just appearing once in body content. The more you build correlation in page content around a particular term or set of terms, the more your pages become increasingly relevant for those search terms.

To prove this theory, we ran a search on Google for vintage action figures. The first result has “action figures” in its domain name (part of URL) and the terms action figures and vintage in the page title. It also uses these terms in its descriptive metadata. The second result has <h1> tags with vintage action figures and first and second paragraph content repeat this same term.

In addition, infusing your page content and metadata with terms that relate closely to your selected keywords (derivative terms) boosts page relevancy.   In the example above, including terms such as vintage toys, vintage action heroes, action hero figurines, and so on will help boost correlation.

We’ll delve more into content correlation as a facet of search engine optimization in an upcoming post.