Whether you’re a single person trying to gain more visibility via search engines for your local retail shop, a firm looking to hire a person for in-house SEO efforts, or a large company hiring an agency to handle SEO, there are several key things to look for in the person(s) you are hiring for SEO.

You may not know the lingo, you may not talk the talk, but below are some things to help guide you in finding the right SEO service:

1. Don’t Believe Anyone Who Tells You SEO is a One-Time Thing

Easy mistake to make, but while being wooed by tales of first page listings and low costs, remind yourself–search engine optimization is NOT a sprint, it’s a marathon.  It requires constant new, fresh content, tweaks to existing content, a strong and continually updated internal linking strategy, and countless other factors, all of which require consistent and focused commitment.

2. Not All Backlinks are Created Equal

When it comes to backlinks (inbound links to your site from other sites) quality is much more important than quantity. Although PageRank is less of a factor now than it was in the past, if you’re ever wondering how strong an inbound link from a particular site is, a good place to start is by checking it’s PageRank. PageRank is measured on a scale from 0-10, 10 being the best (Only a handful of sites (literally) have a PR of 10). Don’t let a vendor fool you into thinking 1,500 backlinks from content farms, scraper sites, and link farms are going to do more for your SEO strategy than 15 high quality links. It’s just not true.

3. Data Can Lie

Numbers can tell any story desired for a person savvy enough with analytics and keyword ranking tools. An increase in traffic doesn’t mean the potential partner’s work was the cause. Any piece of data or parameter you can think of to sort it with is accessible in Google Analytics. If you want to see the sites from which people arrived at yours, you can. If you want to see what keywords they used to find you, you can. If it sounds shady, it probably is. Unfortunately, there is a lot of shadiness in the Web world. There are still enough people who don’t fully understand how the Web’s puzzle pieces fit together, and as long as that’s the case, there will be people out there talking big game and failing to deliver.

4. I’ll Take My Search Results Unpersonalized, Thanks

Don’t be fooled by your potential vendor or employee showing you a Google search in real-time. Search results on Google come personalized, unless specified by the user. What does this mean? If I search 60 or so times for the same term over the course of the month, and click the same result (say, my client’s site) each time, chances are when I conduct my next Google search for that term, that listing will be on my first page. That doesn’t mean it’s the first result for you. When getting a demo of results, request search results be unpersonalized. Ask that they log out of their Google account, and clear their cache. You can also add “&pws=o” (no quotes) to the end of a search query URL to remove personalization.

5. Know Thy Industry

Tactics associated with good search engine optimization are fairly similar regardless of industry. However, if you can get someone on board who is familiar with your industry, related websites, relevant terminology, and who has an understanding of the competitive landscape, your search engine optimization strategy is much more likely to succeed. This is not to say that someone without this knowledge can’t excel. But if you do bring on someone who doesn’t have your-industry-specific knowledge, make sure they have the aptitude to pick up on it and really dedicate and immerse themselves in it.

If you ever have any questions when hiring for SEO, feel free to leave them for me in the comments and I’ll be happy to give some advice!

When I started this blog last year, I thought I would be able to make time to contribute to it daily and watch my own SEO space grow. I was wrong. In the ebb and flow of life, things get chaotic and at times, we lose our ability to focus on things we enjoy and appreciate. For me, sharing my insight and experience with SEO over the years is one of those things, and unfortunately, something that was put on hold. So, how does this relate to the title of this blog post?

In order for any site or blog to perform well from an SEO perspective, it requires constant attention, a steady flow of new content, and consistent updates to existing content. By failing to contribute to my blog space regularly, I have broken the SEO rules. More importantly, I have undone any possible momentum I had achieved when I first began the blog and was posting regularly. As of now, I have more work ahead of me in building this blog presence than I did before I started. It would be easier at this point to start a completely new blog space and push it forward from the start.

I will not take the easy way out. I broke the rules I so avidly preach and will now use this blog space to prove that the damage can be undone. Until next time, friends.

I’ve covered anchor text in many previous posts, but this topic is one that’s important enough to examine further. Most people working in SEO are keenly aware of the importance of inbound links. Not only do strong inbound links help boost PageRank, but if placed properly with keyword rich anchor text, they also significantly impact Search Engine Page Results (SERPs). Furthermore, prioritizing keyword rich anchor text in your internal linking strategy will supplement your SEO strategy and result in further benefit. Let me elaborate.

Search engines like Google using spiders that crawl the web. Below we’re going to cover two examples of links (that would be crawled by spiders) placed from site A to site B and evaluate the respective benefit of each.

Site A: Respected technology blog

Site B: Salesforce.com (CRM system provider)

In this example, we’ll assume that the PageRank between each site is the same, so in regards to PageRank, the inbound link will only serve to solidify the PageRank of Site B, the receiving site.

If Site A, the technology blog linked to Salesforce’s website with something like this:

For more information about CRM solutions, check out the links below:

* www.sugarcrm.com
* www.zoho.com
* www.salesforce.com
* www.avidian.com

This does little for the receiving site, salesforce.com. Even if we overlook the fact that the link does not use anchor text, we also have to consider the fact that the link is far enough away from the relevant keywords to even be associated with them. In essence, what this says to a search engine spider AT BEST is, ‘salesforce.com has something to do with CRM systems.’ At worst, it tells spiders nothing more than the technology blog is providing salesforce.com as a resource given the other content of the page. Hopefully, in this case, the page content would be fairly saturated with references to CRM solutions.

Even better, however, would be providing the link with anchor text. If Site A’s content looked like this:

‘We recommend thoroughly researching CRM systems before purchase.’

This type of link is invaluable when it comes to SEO. If a spider were to crawl this link it immediately recognizes that Site A is saying it considers salesforce.com to be a CRM system or a resource on CRM systems. When people search for “CRM systems,” having this inbound link will boost salesforce.com’s search engine ranking for this term.

When it comes to inbound links, quantity is great but quality is better. If you can get inbound links with keyword rich anchor text, your search engine results for those particular keywords will start to climb. Keep this in mind when distributing a press release over the wire, for example. If you’re placing links to your website all over the web via press release distribution, make sure the links to your website in the press release are optimized with keyword anchor text.

In an upcoming post, we’ll discuss anchor text as part of your internal linking strategy.

Having worked in search engine optimization (SEO) for large and small companies both on a freelance basis and as part of an organization, I get asked a lot of different questions about SEO. Common to almost every interaction I’ve had around search engine optimization is a question something along the lines of, “We want to accomplish SEO in the next 3 months, how do we do it?”

It should go without saying that not every conversation goes exactly this way or is always a 3 month time line. What’s important here is to understand that no organization just “does” SEO. On the contrary to some marketing tactics such as pay-per-click campaigns or banner ads, SEO is a long term commitment. It is a gradual process that takes time and frequent work and evaluation.

The amount of time it takes to achieve significant search engine results page (SERP) improvement is dependent upon the beginning status of the site, the terms for which you’re optimizing, the effectiveness of the optimization strategy, and the amount of effort put into the the search engine optimization tactics.

Attention to detail such as improving usability through a strong internal linking strategy and use of effective metadata everywhere possible is a critical component in achieving ideal results. In an upcoming post I’ll discuss in more detail the recommended level of detail and optimization frequency for achieving the best results.

One of my favorite parts of doing search engine optimization work is tracking the results. Suprisingly, this is a key step in the process that many people seem to forget about. What’s the point of dedicating time to SEO and your web content if you’re not going to measure its return?

Individuals and small businesses are often unaware of the drastic change they can see in their search engine results page (SERP) performance by taking on some basic SEO tactics and tracking efforts in-house. Frequently, agencies trick their consumers into believing that SEO can only really be done by “professionals” who have spent years cultivating their trade. This is NOT true!

There is simply a  lack of education on ways to track SEO performance and improvements without spending thousands of dollars to get help from an agency or the latest SaaS application.  Over the course of my next several blog posts, I will outline steps anyone can take to develop a basic SEO Dashboard to track their website’s performance, all using Google Docs and Google Analytics. Please keep in mind, that as your operation becomes more sophisticated, so too will your SEO strategy.

While you wait for the first post in our series on in constructing your SEO Google Docs Dashboard, please begin thinking about the 15 or so core terms for which you’d like to see your business or personal website ranking better in SERPs. We will use these terms to create your Google Docs Dashboard in our next post. Also, if you don’t already have a Gmail account, please create one so you will be able to use Google Docs.

I’ve been asked a lot recently by people writing web content where they should most focus their on page SEO and keyword efforts. While it’s important that your core keywords appear throughout your site content and pages, keywords specific to each page should certainly be placed in a few key places. Below, I’ve outlined the most important places in which your keywords should appear on page.

1. Page URL – when infusing URLs with keywords, make sure the words are separated by hyphens. Try to place your keywords in the most upfront location in your URL possible. For example, if your website is www.CompanyABC.com and you offer multiple products, one of which being SEO services, you would want your URL to look something like: www.CompanyABC.com/products/search-engine-optimization. (As a side note – having your keywords in your site’s domain name doesn’t hurt either).
2. Page Title – The core keywords for each page should without question be placed in your page title. Using the example above, the page title could be something like “Search Engine Optimization Services”.
3. First 100 words of body content – make sure that the same keywords you are using in your search-engine friendly URLs and page titles are also placed in the first 100 words of body content. The closer to the start of the first paragraph, the better.
4. Keywords in headers – whether H1, H2, or H3 tags (and so on), including keywords in your page headers is always helpful. Just make sure that your keyword density does not exceed 5% of total page content.

This is a very basic list but a good place to start for web content writers. Please feel free to provide additional ideas and thoughts for on page keyword placement in the comments below.

People often forget to consider how and in what order they are serving up content when dealing with SEO. A logical site hierarchy and a thoughtful folder/sub-folder structure for site content is critical. Use of a strong sitemap, fairly shallow website depth, thoughtful keyword driven folder names, and a good linking strategy (including use of menus and context navigation) will drastically improve SEO and PageRank results. Let’s discuss each of these pieces in a bit more depth.

Sitemaps - Even if your website is one with thousands of pages, making a well-organized sitemap available from each page of your site ensures that every page on your website will be within just a few clicks away. This also means that these pages will be only a few crawling steps away for search engine spiders. In general, it is a best practice to make every page on your site reachable within just a few clicks.

Website Depth - When you run a search for the pages indexed on the Apple.com site by Google you can see there are over 7,000,000 results listed. Even with this immensely large number of pages, Apple does a great job of making every page available within just a few clicks of the mouse. In Apple’s sitemap, there nine available top-level headings under the About heading. However, once you arrive at Apple’s About section, you can see that it is not necessary to drill down further on the page to access anyone of these headings. Furthermore, each subheading under these top-level headings are available within just one additional click (all listed at the bottom of the page). The faster a user can get to each page, the easier it is for search engines to do the same.

Folder Names - For sites that use a content structure that matches their hierarchical folder directory structure ( i.e. – www.companyxyz.com/about/management rather than www.companyxyz.com/management), using keyword driven folder naming conventions is key. This allows for easy navigation of content in hierarchy driven sites. Furthermore, it affords a more keyword infused URL while allowing users to easily identify the location of the content they’re viewing. As a naming convention best practice, when multiple keywords are in any portion of your URL, use hyphens to separate these words rather than underscores.

Linking Strategy - The organization of your site and use of menus such as breadcrumbs will provide a strong internal linking structure. By providing a link to every top level section of your site from the homepage (via a top navigation menu, for example), not only do you pass along PageRank from your homepage to pages beneath it in the hierarchy, but you also provide automatic internal links that help users navigate your site with ease. For pages a bit deeper in your hierarchy, using breadcrumbs that display a backwards path from the current page to the homepage will accomplish this same effect. Wherever possible, use menus to improve site usability and navigation; doing so will automatically afford you some great internal link juice.

These are just a few things to consider when evaluating your site structure and how your organization is serving up its content. We recommend researching each of these pieces in more depth to consider what strategy is best for your organization. Remember, every SEO step you take should benefit your end-user. When you keep your users in mind, your SEO rewards will always follow close behind.

There is a lot of confusion about duplicate content and whether it is considered an SEO no-no. There are occassions where duplicate content is frowned upon; however, there are also situations in which duplicate content is appropriate and in which sites will not be penalized for offering the same content in multiple formats. Below we’ve outlined a few common situations in which duplicate content may come into question, and what you can do about it.

• Print versions – if you offer multiple formats of the same web page, such as PDFs or .txt outputs, you can guide search engines to crawl the preferred version of the page. Use your site’s robots.txt file to disallow crawling of these alternate formats.
• Multilingual content - If yours is a multilingual website, or one that presents the same content in a variety of languages, rest assured that the same content presented in different languages is not considered duplicate content. Check out their Webmaster Central Blog post that details this.
• Syndicating your own content - if syndicating your own web content, duplicate content is not an issue. However, we recommend including an absolute link back to your site as the original source of the content. If you syndicate content at the same time as it’s being published, other websites may pick up on the article (and be crawled) before Google crawls your own site. With the link back to your own site in the syndicated version, you can rest assured it will be credited to your own site.
• Syndication by external sites – once again, the best practice here is to include absolute link backs to your website as the source of the content. Google will try to identify the original source of content by checking items like which version was published first, etc. However, sometimes even Google makes mistakes. By including an absolute link back to your site you can make sure Google will have an easy time identifying you as the original source.
• Duplicate content within your site - sometimes it’s necessary to have the same block of content appearing in multiple places. To ensure the preferred version of a page is being crawled and served up, include the link to the preferred page in your sitemap file.

In most cases, duplicate content will not result in a penalty. Search engines such as Google have gotten very good at analyzing content and determining its purpose and source. As we always advise, the general best practice is to provide content and resources that help the end user of your site. If you keep this in mind, you will always include only the content, links, etc. that are necessary to guide your users in the right direction; and for this, you will be rewarded.

Working in SEO, a question we often get asked is “what KPIs should I use to track my efforts?” While key performance indicators used to measure success will vary based on the specific initiatives of each organization, we’ve outlined a few that we suggest all organizations measure:

1. Linkbacks – tracking the number of linkbacks to your site from other sites can provide valuable insight into several things– a) the value and quality of your content and b) the success of your own linking efforts. If your content is of value to people in your industry, you’ll notice that links to your content are building themselves. Imagine you’re writing a blog on ways to automate Twitter tweets. If you find a good article that discusses how to do so, you may link to it. Furthermore, if you find a good service for automating Twitter tweets, you may link to that as well. The goal here is to be providing content that gives other sites a reason to link to your content. If you’re just starting out and placing links for yourself, tracking linkbacks is a good way to measure how effectively you’re placing links for your own site. Yahoo Site Explorer is a great tool to get started with tracking inbound links.
2. SERP rankings – to measure your success in optimizing for specific keywords, we recommend tracking where you place in search engine results pages for particular terms. Start with something simple and set up a spreadsheet using Google Docs with each of your keywords listed in its own row. On a weekly or monthly basis, run a search for these terms (make sure you disable personalized search results by appending &pws=0 to the end of the search url) and track changes in search rank for each term. You can also download a host of tools to do this automatically, but if your starting with ten or so terms, doing the SEO grunt work yourself isn’t terribly cumbersome.
3. PageRank – your PageRank is Google’s way of determining the significance of your site based on its inbound links. If you’re using Firefox, the Live PageRank add-on is a great way to check up on your own site’s PageRank every time you visit. Once you’ve developed some PageRank authority, you can spread this SEO “juice” through the rest of your site using internal linking, which we will discuss more in an upcoming post.
4. Conversion Rates - it’s lovely if people are coming to your site as visitors and leaving after they get the information they need. However, if you’re offering this information without a means of capturing their data, the visit is of no use to you. If the pages of your site that come up in certain search results are relevant to that search term, you should have no problem converting site visitors into prospects. Using Google Analytics, you are able to set up goals, such as a form conversion, to measure the actions taken by visitors when arriving at your site. For example, if someone is searching for “SEO white paper” and they arrive at a landing page on your site that offers such an article, it should be a very easy process for he/she to fill out a quick form and for you in turn to capture his/her prospect data. Measuring conversion rates is key to assess the value of your current content.

These are just a few KPIs that every organization looking to track SEO efforts should keep in mind. Staying on top of your data is key and we recommend that you take a look at other goals specific to your organization to develop more specific KPIs.