What’s the big deal about search engine optimization? Isn’t it enough that you’ve put up a website, purchased some Google AdWords, and sent out an email to everyone you know announcing your site? In short, no. There is an art and science to search engine optimization (SEO), and it is critical for web-based businesses to know, understand and utilize if they want to drive quality traffic to their website via the Internet.
Where do you begin, though? How can you possibly know whom to trust or what to do first with so much information out there on SEO? Do you buy links or not? Pay per click or go organic? And what about those SEO companies who are aggressively promising #1 rankings? When it comes to search engine ranking, there are a lot of rumors and myths about what will increase your rankings and what won’t.
Debunking Some Popular Search Engine Ranking Myths
- Pay per click (PPC) ads will either help or hurt organic rankings. (Organic simply means the process by which web users find websites having unpaid search engine listings.)
Debunked: PPC is categorized differently than organic listings. There is no effect, one way or the other, on ranking.
- Websites are banned if they ignore Google guidelines.
Debunked: While it’s a good idea to read Google Webmaster Guidelines or Google 101: How Google Crawls, Indexes and Serves the Web, you are not banned if you ignore their guidelines.
- Websites are banned if they buy links.
Debunked: Sites are not banned. The links just aren’t counted.
- Copy must be a certain number of words, use a specific keyword density, and contain bold or italicized keywords.
Debunked: It used to be thought that there was a magic number of words used or certain times a keyword or keyword phrase should be repeated. Not so. Same with bolding and italicizing. They don’t do anything for ranking.
- Duplicate content will get your website penalized.
Debunked: It will just get filtered out and not counted.
- Reciprocal links won’t count.
Debunked: Every link counts, to a certain extent.
- SEO companies can increase your rankings without doing any on-page work.
Debunked: Run if an SEO company tells you this.
According to SEO expert Jill Whalen, SEO isn’t magic and isn’t a crap-shoot. “SEO is about making your website the best it can be for your site visitors and the search engines.” Want to help the right kind of people find your website? Then you need to design your site so search engines can find, crawl and index your pages.
Seven Ways to Get Your Website Crawled
- It’s better to have one main website with numerous domains pointing to the main domain, than to have mini-sites or multiple sites with similar content. Mini-sites and multiple sites with similar content do not increase search engine listings and are frequently viewed by search engines as SPAM.
- If you do have several stand-alone websites, make sure each serves a different target audience and has unique content with different domain or sub-domain URLs.
- Search engines need to be able to follow internal links. To make that happen, use tags, text links, image links, and CSS menus. Spiders have difficulty with JavaScript menus, pop-up windows, drop-down menus, and flash navigation.
- Choose keyword phrases that are most relevant and specific to what your web page is about. Think from the perspective of someone searching for what you are offering on your site. Ask, as if you were they: What would I search for if I am looking for something on your page?
- Validate your keyword phrases through either paid or free services, such as Keyword Discovery, Wordtracker, or Google AdWords.
- Check for keyword competitiveness. Take into consideration the size of your business. In this case, size does matter. If you are a major player with a major brand, you can play in a larger competitive pond than a smaller company just starting out. Know what size pond is right for you, and check for competitiveness by putting: allintitle: “keyword phrase” in your browser and check the number count.
- Once you have your keyword phrases validated and checked for competitiveness, use them in anchor texts, clickable image alt tags, headlines, body text copy, title tags, and meta descriptions. Meta tags aren’t all that important for crawling.
SEO can be both intimidating and exhilarating. Intimidating because it seems as if just about everyone has an opinion on what it takes to get a high ranking in Google, so it’s hard to know what to believe. Exhilarating because, once you understand the method behind the madness of SEO, you see the art and science of it. Then it becomes fun and easy to come up with a strategic plan about where to place keyword phrases, how to write copy, and what size pond is best for your company to compete in. Optimize your website, and they will come.
Business Coach & Consultant for entrepreneurial women starting up small businesses, Dr. Susan L. Reid is the Award-winning author of “Discovering Your Inner Samurai: The Entrepreneurial Woman’s Journey to Business Success.” For ideas, tips, and support for your business journey, sign up here for our free e-Zine.
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Optimize Your Website and They Will Come
by Stoney deGeyter
When providing SEO advice on the topic of website design, we often warn against placing important content into images. This is because search engines can’t read images like a person can. To them, an image with text is just an image. They really have no idea what the image is or if, in fact, it says anything at all. So when optimizing sites, anytime we are dealing with keyword optimized content, we want to make sure it’s standard HTML text. This includes headers, benefit lits, and even normal body copy.
While the search engines can’t read actual images, they can read what we say about the image. This information can be gleaned a few different ways:
- Image file name (image1234.jpg vs. mustang-gt.jpg)
- Text immediately surrounding the image
- The overall content of the page the image is on
- Image ALT attribute in the image tag
When trying to optimize images for image search, all of these can provide important indicators the search engines use to produce the best set of image results. In terms of traditional optimization and website usability, the ALT attribute plays an important role.
The ALT attribute should by no means be considered a substitute for regular text. ALT text doesn’t get weighted as heavily as body text so relying on it as a replacement for body text is like entering a Prius into the Indy 500. It doesn’t have a chance.
Ok, so that was a bit of an exaggeration, but you get my point. There are effective uses of the Image ALT attribute when it comes to SEO and usability. Let’s start by looking at an image tag with the ALT attribute:
<img src="images/image.jpg" alt="This is the ALT attribute" />
Almost universally, you should be using ALT text to describe each of your images. I say “almost” because if you are still using clear images for formatting, styling, or spacing (you shouldn’t be!) then those images don’t need any description. As a side note, if you want your HTML to validate properly then every image needs an ALT attribute, even if it’s left empty:
<img src="images/spacer.gif" alt="" />
In some cases, the ALT text can act as a replacement for the text in an image, such as a company name, tagline or some kind of special promotion, and in other cases the ALT text should actually describe the image. In either case, if the image contains text, then you will almost always want to put it in the ALT attribute as well.
For example, the logo in my company site is really nothing more than just the words “Pole Position Marketing” with my tagline.
I could go a couple of different ways with the the construction of the ALT attribute, depending on the context of how it’s used. Here, since I’m using the image as an example, it’s not important for me to use much more than a basic description:
alt="Pole Position Marketing logo and tagline"
But on my own website, since this isn’t jut an image in the body copy, but one of my key site indicators, I produce a much more complete description:
alt="Pole Position Marketing: Velocitize Your Website Marketing"
Now, if I wanted to be even more descriptive, and more accurate, I’d write my alt tag this way:
alt="Pole Position Marketing logo: Velocitize Your Website Marketing"
Again, I let the context be the guide for what I write in my ALT text. If the reader, with images turned off, won’t know that the image is a logo then I’d add that to the description. But since this image appears repeatedly at the top of the page, in the typical place that logos and/or other site indicators go, then I really don’t need the additional description.
Describe your image meaning
Let’s look at another example. Here is an screenshot of an image-heavy home page:
Now, when we look at this same page with the images turned off you can see how that by not using any image ALT attributes the site becomes unnavigable.
The only place you can see any ALT text is in the logo, which reads “Super 8 Taos”. The rest of the site is just a big jumble of images, some of them links and some not.
[Note: you can mouse over any of the images on this page to check out my ALT text usage for each.]
As you can see above, ALT text becomes even more important when navigating a site with images turned off when the navigation is all image based. Let’s add some ALT text to these images and see what we get:
The header and navigation are pretty obvious. Here we simply added the same words that are in the image. Again, since this is obviously navigation we really don’t need to describe the images, so much as just reiterate what they say. This allows the visitor to know where each link will take them, just as if images were turned on.
You can see that I didn’t bother adding ALT text to any images that didn’t serve a function beyond eye-candy. There really is no reason to attempt to describe them in any way, so in these cases I would just add an empty ALT attribute, as shown above, just so the code will validate.
In the center area I got a bit creative with my ALT text. Even for less image-heavy websites, this is a great example of how to use ALT attributes for images that attempt to convey meaning without words.
We could attempt to describe the pictures perfectly by saying something like, Picture of our room, picture of the bay, picture of downhill skier. While those are accurate descriptions they don’t convey the intended meaning that you get when you actually see the image. So in this case we’ll use the ALT attribute to try and get some of that intended meaning across:
alt="All of our rooms are comfortable and spacious with living room seating and ceiling fans."
alt="You can reserve a suite featuring breathtaking ocean views."
alt="We are only minutes from some of the worlds best ski resorts."
With images like this you can get a bit more or less flowery, depending on your needs. It also makes it easier to work keywords into the ALT text without looking junky. Instead of just throwing a keyword in every image, describe the image a bit and work the keyword in naturally. Just like you would with body text.
Considerations for SEO and usability
It’s easy when SEOing a website to just throw a quick word or two into your alt images, but that’s a mistake. Even in your navigation the ALT text can be used to expand on a links meaning when there is not enough image space to do so.
For example if the image reads “About Us” the ALT attribute can say “Learn more about our company.” If the image reads “Accommodations” the ALT text can read “Deluxe accommodations.” If your image reads “FAQs” then the ALT text can spell it out with “Frequently asked Questions.”
When dealing with navigation you want to be careful about how many words you use. Too much and you lose the ability to be effective, especially with quick scans. Always check what your page looks like with images turned off, ensuring that your ALT tags flow well with the rest of the site design. On my site I edited my ALT attributes specifically to provide better usability with images turned off. Here is what my site’s top navigation looks like with images:
The drop downs are all absolutely positioned so if I had made any of these ALT descriptions longer then the drop downs would have been been misaligned. By editing my ALT text properly, we keep proper alignment.
Just to provide one more example of good ALT attribute usage, I’ve added ALT text to the Better Business Bureau logo on our site. Instead of just saying “BBB Accredited Business” I added a more lengthy description that reads:
alt="We are a Better Business Bureau accredited business. Click here to check our BBB rating."
This text much more valuable to the reader that has images turned off.
I should also note that Internet Explorer will display the ALT attribute when you mouseover an image. FireFox, on the other hand will only display text that is in the image’s title attribute. If you are adding great descriptive text in your ALT attribute as I have shown here then it’s probably a good idea to also place that text in a title as well.
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Stop Wasting Your ALT Attributes and Make them Work for You
Your boss just read an article on the benefits of online communities… You know, how online community members visit Web sites nine times as often, stayed five times as long, and represented 65% of sales.
or maybe
how 89% of mid to large sized companies have adopted at least one of six community-building tools, such as blogs, wikis, social networking, or content-tagging.
so now he’s asking
“What about our website? Shouldn’t we have an online community?” (Damm you McKinsey! Now I have to come up with an online community strategy).
Developing an online community strategy is a HUGE endeavor.
All too often businesses think that if they call it a “community” their website will magically transform itself into a community. And when the traffic and sales don’t present themselves, they’re left wondering what went wrong?
so what makes a website a community?
1) The community must satisfy a need
Generally there are three different types of communities:
a) Those that satisfy the need for information (i.e. sphinn, car enthusiast sites, etc.)
b) Those that satisfy the need for support (i.e. weight loss groups, cancer support groups, etc)
c) Those that satisfy both needs for support and information (i.e. when I was pregnant with my first child I joined an expecting club - we supported each other with information about our pregnancies and loving support)
It’s important to identify what kind of need your community is going to fill up front. This is because you will have to build the right community components or infrastructure to support that need.
If your community’s need is for information, then an article library may have worked in the old days. Today, that need for information is more likely to be served using a wiki or pligg type type solution.
If your community’s need is for support, then you need to make sure that you build profile functionality combined with easy communication between members like the ability to email or IM your community friends.
If your community’s need is for both information and support then you’ll want to evaluate if one is more important than the other. If they’re equally important then you’ll want to make sure that both types of infrastructure are equally prominent in your community.
2) User participation or interaction
Giving people the ability to comment on your blog is a good start. But a community it does not make. And signing up for your email list does not make me feel like I’ve just “joined your community”. Especially when I’m spammed regularly by your sales offers and incentives afterwards.
One- sided conversation is the most common mistake that I see with Corporate Websites. They are initially built to sell a product and then Community is just a label that’s slapped on as an afterthought with little or no effort given to meeting the needs of your visitors.
User participation can be built into your community in many different ways:
- Comments - not just on your blog but elsewhere on the site too.
- Forums (think Digital Point)
- User Reviews (think Trip Adviser)
- Social Networking (think Facebook and LinkedIn; even Stumbleupon)
- Content tagging (think Delicious)
- Content Aggregation (think Flicker)
- Content Aggregation Plus Ratings & Reviews (think Reddit)
Remember to make sure that you build your interaction in a way that solves the particular need of your community (don’t guiding principles make life easy 
?)
3) Ability to get to know other community members
It is impossible to build a community based on the visitors’ lone interaction with the site.
A community needs members.
The ability to get to know other community members is a critical element in meeting a need for support.
But companies must think beyond profiles.
In regular life we are defined by our actions not words. Online, our words are our actions. You will learn much more about me by looking at my comments, by the content that I submit to aggregation sites and by my user reviews then you will ever learn through the crap I wrote in my profile.
There are many ways you can build the ability to get to know other community members:
- Avatars - people are visual. It’s difficult to make a connection with an alias, handle, or even a name. I can connect with an aviator even if it’s anime or a pair of red shoes.
- Allow user feedback through comments. Encourage it through a point type system like SEOmoz. Remember your voice tells me a lot about you… people gravitate towards like-minded people.
- Conversation - Social Networking capability like the ability to email or IM members is a great way to allow your community members to get to know each other.
- and yes, User Profiles :). Especially where the profile can be further personalized through pictures and videos and free form comments (not just filling out a few profile questions)
4) Have a reason to go back
The most popular communities make you feel like you will miss something important if you don’t go back regularly.
The more stagnant your website the less reason people have to go back to it. The converse is true with a community. The more active your members, the more your visitors will need to go back regularly.
So if new information, conversation, content is the carrot then you must build incentives into the design of your community:
- A Visitor Usage Statistics are easy to implement and go a long way. When I first joined Stumbleupon I felt painfully new having less than 100 stumbles. This was incentive for me to become an active user in the Stumble community.
- A Community Statistics readerboard can provide incentive as well. This is because being in the top percentile of content contributors, commenter’s or voters can help to position you as an expert in your industry.
- The more prominent the stats the more incentive they create (to a point). Focus on the positives or it will be a disincentive if new community members are too obvious.
- Points system for contributing where accumulating points gets you additional privileges in the community.
- This can be as simple a concept as allowing do follow links after 5 comments or as complicated as allowing access to premium content if a threshold of points is maintained.
- The ability to elevate your status in the community (member, gold member, moderator, etc) based on your participation can also provide incentive to be active.
Understanding your visitors needs and staying true to these Guiding Principles of Building an Online Community will help you to successfully transform your website into a vibrant Community.
Jennifer Osborne writer and marketer for Search Engine People.
More:
Key Elements of an Online Community Strategy
How do you know if your SEO is working? Here are five stages outlined below to give you a better idea and measure the results.
It doesn’t matter if you call it Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Search Engine Marketing (SEM) or any other fancy acronym, what matters are results. Fortunately results are quantitative and measurable so you can deduce which tactics are effective and which are a waste of time.Relevance is a moving target, it is completely molded by the individual referencing the query, which means that positioning relies a great deal on your ability to read the market and forecast trends and buzzwords with traffic attached. Aside from picking keywords, writing content and building links, you need to know which guideposts to assess to determine if your optimization is falling on deaf ears or in fact pulling its own weight. (more…)
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How Do You Know Your SEO Is Working?