http://www.webvanta.com/ebooks/Webvanta-5tips-for-better-sites.pdf
Drive Traffic With SEO and Social Media
Most web site owners want their sites to be found – they’re investing in their sites to attract
an audience, whether they be customers, fans, or converts. To do so, you need to integrate
the site with social media, and pay attention to SEO.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a complex topic that involves a few facts, lots of
“best practices”, piles of superstitions, a lot of hard work. It’s not surprising that most site
owners are completely at sea when it comes to SEO — yet it is vitally important to them.
Google is the Elephant
Search engine optimization is perhaps the most confusing, ill-defined, and controversial
part of web design today. It has a certain "blind men and an elephant" quality to it, with
Google being the elephant.
There is a vast amount of advice available on SEO. You can spend your life reading about
it, and anywhere from hundreds to tens of thousands of dollars a month on SEO
consultants.
This situation leads to a sense of overwhelm among many web designers, and especially
among site owners. As a result, they just ignore it. We see web sites every day that have
terrible SEO.
It’s a shame, because everyone wants to bring more traffic to their site. Search engines
bring free traffic, and for many sites they are the most important source of visitors.
The good news is that there are some simple things you can do that will provide a huge
boost. Follow the easy steps outlined here, and you’ll be way ahead of the average site.
Make Sure Every Page is Accessible and Has a URL
The most fundamental thing you must do is to ensure that every page of the site is
accessible by following links, starting from your home page, even if JavaScript is disabled
and Flash is ignored. (You need to take these same precautions for accessibility as well as
for SEO.)
This is not hard to achieve, as long as you are not using Flash for your navigation, and
JavaScript is used as it should be: for enhancement, and not as a requirement.
You can also easily do an end-run around any issues by linking to a site map from your
footer, and including a link to every page in the site map. Providing an XML site map also
helps when not all pages are directly linked.
Every page must have a unique URL. That means not building the entire site in Flash, or
using Ajax to swap out the contents of a page without changing the URL (unless you think
carefully about the SEO implications). It’s OK to use JavaScript to hide and reveal parts of
a page, as long as all is revealed if JavaScript is disabled (which is how the standard jQuery
tab and accordion widgets work).
Keyword Research
Before you can begin optimizing your pages for search, you need to know for what
keyword phrases you are optimizing.
Your gut feel will get you started, but you need to use research tools to find out what
phrases people are actually searching for the most, which sites rank well on those terms, and
how much traffic each term gets. (See www.webvanta.com/5tips-resources for links.)
Keyword research can be valuable for making sure you are targeting the right keywords,
and that they are used in lots of searches.
The keywords you have in mind may or may not be the ones that are being searched for by
the people you’re trying to reach. Small variations in keywords and phrases can have a big
impact.
This is one of the first things for which you might want to bring in an SEO consultant, or
you can spend the time to learn to use the research tools yourself.
Once you have settled on a set of keywords you are targeting, you can focus your efforts.
For each targeted keyword, you should make an ongoing effort to add content focused on
that keyword, get incoming links that use it in the anchor text, and track your position in
the search results so you can tell if you are making progress
The All-Important Page Title
Assuming these basics are taken care of, then the two most critical things are the page title
(the metadata title in the <title> tag, which appears in the browser’s title bar) and the
contents of the first <h1> element on the page.
The page title is super-important, yet it is very commonly overlooked or written poorly. If
your site has the same title on every page, you’ve thrown away most of your SEO
opportunities. Go in right now and write a unique page title for every single page.
The page title can include the name of the site, but it should begin with content that is
unique to each page and describes that page. The page title will appear as the headline in
search results, so it must be written in such a way that the first few words telegraph to the
user that this page has what they’re looking for.
Having a page title like "Home", "Products", or "About Us" is useless (and very common).
You can’t assume that the viewer of the search results (or the search engine) has any
context; the title must be completely explicit, and include as many keywords as you can
reasonably get in there. Keep the length below 65 characters.
For example, instead of "Products", use something like "Quality dog food and cat food at
the best price"
Next Up: The Visible Headline
Next most important is the visible headline on the page, which should be in an <h1> tag.
We see a number of common mistakes here:
• Pages that have no headline
• Headlines that are in <p> tags, or other tags, which are then styled to look like
headlines, or in images
• Headlines that aren’t explicit enough
Make sure that your page begins with a headline in an <h1> tag. You'll help the search
engines and the human readers. You can style the h1 to look however you want; it doesn’t
need to be visually huge.
Sometimes you want the main headline to be something clever, or cute, that lacks the
keywords you’d like to have in the headline for SEO. In this case, you may want to put the
actual headline in a <p> tag, styled to look like a headline, and then have the SEOoptimized headline below it in an <h1> tag, styled to look like a subhead or an introductory
paragraph. In writing that headline, keep the site visitor in mind, but make it more explicit than you
might naturally do. This is much the same as for the metadata page title, except that you
may want something shorter on the page.
For example, while you might use "Experienced dog grooming services for Sonoma
County, in Santa Rosa, CA" for the metadata page title, but use "Expert Dog Grooming"
for the h1 tag (the page title that appears on the page).
Now Fill In the Meta Description
The metadata description tag is important not for getting your page listed on the search
results page, but for getting users to click on the result if they do see it.
The search engine will show your description as the two lines of text below the headline; if
you don’t provide a meta description, it will grab something from the body of your page,
which may or may not be what you want.
The description should be about 150 characters long, since that is what fits in a typical
search listing. Think of it as a teaser that promotes your page. Write it for humans, not for
search engines. But it is helpful to include your targeted keywords, because the search
engine will highlight them, drawing users to your listing.
Don’t Worry About Meta Keywords
The keyword metadata field is not worth worrying about, at least on your first pass. Google
ignores the keywords in this field, because they are too easily abused. (Too many people put
“Britney Spears” in the keywords, for example, not because their page had anything to do
with Britney but because it is one of the highest-volume search terms.) Other search
engines may use them, but you won’t sacrifice much by ignoring them.
This does not mean you can ignore knowing what keywords you are targeting; that is an
entirely different matter. But the place to use keywords is in your page titles, headlines, and
body copy — not in the keywords meta tag.
Incoming Links
Everything we’ve discussed up to this point is what is called on-page optimization: things
you can do on your site, and that are entirely under your control.
Unfortunately, it’s not enough.
If your content is so unique that people are searching on phrases that exist only on your site
and a handful of other places, on-site optimization may be all you need. But for any search
term that is remotely competitive, you need incoming links in order to rank well in search
results.
Incoming links are important because of the way search engines rank pages. The on-page
optimization ensures that the search engines can figure out what each page is about. But
the web is a very big place, and even for any single niche topic, there are thousands, if not
hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of pages.
How does a search engine decide which pages to put at the top of the search results?
The distinguishing factor is incoming links.
All Links Are Not Created Equal
You want as many links to your pages as possible, but some links are much more valuable
than others.
Search engines don’t disclose the details of their algorithms, but there are a few points
about incoming links that are generally agreed upon:
• The rank, or authority, of the site that is linking to you has a huge influence. A
single link from whitehouse.gov is probably worth more than thousands of links
from little-read blogs. Links from .edu and .org sites are often thought to be more
valuable than links from .com sites.
• The anchor text (the text to which the link is applied) is important. If the link says
“click here”, then that link text tells the search engine nothing about the site being linked to. But if the link says “San Francisco Hotels”, the text tells the search
engines a great deal.
• Links from many sources have a special attribute applied, “rel=nofollow”. This tells
search engines not to take that link into account. Nofollow was invented to reduce
the link spam on Wikipedia and soon spread to many other sites. So while links
anywhere are good for driving traffic to your site, many links in blog comments and
forums do not help your search rankings.
• Google is thought to penalize sites if large quantities of links to your site show up
in a short period of time, especially if the links are identical. This is presumably an
attempt to defeat people with a large network of sites that exist just to provide
backlinks, as well as other “black hat” SEO techniques.
• One-way links (a site that links to you but that you do not link to) are thought to
be more valuable than reciprocal links.
You need to solicit links, but you should do so carefully, choosing sites that relate to your
topic and have good search ranking themselves. It is helpful to suggest link text, but vary it
from time to time.
You will get solicitations from random sites asking for reciprocal links. These links are of
little value, and may even hurt your rankings, so just ignore these requests unless the site is
one you would want to point people to anyway.
Getting good links is a slow and time consuming task, but it is one that is essential if you
are going to get sites to rank well on competitive terms. If you have great content that
people share with their friends and blog about, then incoming links may happen on their
own.
If you want to be more proactive, do searches on the terms on which you hope to rank.
Look at what sites rank well, and look for ones that might link to you. If there are
influential blogs, add your comments to their posts regularly. This may not give you useful
links back, but it helps to build a relationship and a reputation.
Adding Content Frequently
Search engines love content—and so do people. There’s no substitute for having lots of
quality content, and adding more every week, if not every day.
When search engines see that new content is added to your site frequently, they will index it
more often, and you’re more likely to rise up in the results. The more content you have, the
more likely it is that someone will link to a particular piece of content, simply because you
have more opportunities to hit someone’s hot button.
The easiest way to add content frequently is with a blog. Blogs provide a natural vehicle for
whatever content you can produce, and they’re a structure that both readers and search
engines understand.
By using tags or categories with your blog, you automatically get pages that list all the
articles for a particular tag or category. These pages can be very attractive for search
engines.
Write for Readers, with a Touch for Robots
When you are writing blog posts (and other web content), you should write first and
foremost for your human readers. But you should also stretch a bit to include your targeted
keywords more frequently than may otherwise seem natural.
To a human reader, context is often apparent, and headlines written solely for readers often
leave out important keywords. With a little creativity, you can usually get some more
keywords into your headlines, as well as into the body of your posts, without making the
writing seem strained.
Integrating with Social Media
Aside from search engines, social media can be a major source of traffic. Links from social
media sites typically have their “nofollow” attribute set, so they often won’t directly improve
your search engine rankings. But they bring you traffic just like search engine results do.
Social media integration works two primary ways:
1. Linking from your site to your social media pages and accounts. A business that is
taking advantage of social media should have, at a minimum, a Facebook page, a
LinkedIn page, a Twitter account, and a YouTube channel.
2. Making it easy for your site visitors to add content from your web site into their
own social media streams, sharing your content with their social networks.
Implementing the first of these is just a matter of providing an appropriate icon and linking
it to a particular external site. Most services provide an icon or badge that you can use.
The second is a little more complicated. At a minimum, you want visitors to your site to be
able to click a “share via xyz” icon and have a link to the current page pushed out to the
visitor’s network. You can often do this with widgets provided by social networking sites,
and you can use general-purpose sharing widgets such as that from AddThis.com.
In addition, you may want to directly include content from your site on your social media
pages, and vice versa. Each of the services provides widgets you can use for this, and there's
a variety of third-party widgets that either display information from an RSS feed or access
a social networking site via its API to get content to display.
Drive Traffic With SEO and Social Media
Most web site owners want their sites to be found – they’re investing in their sites to attract
an audience, whether they be customers, fans, or converts. To do so, you need to integrate
the site with social media, and pay attention to SEO.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a complex topic that involves a few facts, lots of
“best practices”, piles of superstitions, a lot of hard work. It’s not surprising that most site
owners are completely at sea when it comes to SEO — yet it is vitally important to them.
Google is the Elephant
Search engine optimization is perhaps the most confusing, ill-defined, and controversial
part of web design today. It has a certain "blind men and an elephant" quality to it, with
Google being the elephant.
There is a vast amount of advice available on SEO. You can spend your life reading about
it, and anywhere from hundreds to tens of thousands of dollars a month on SEO
consultants.
This situation leads to a sense of overwhelm among many web designers, and especially
among site owners. As a result, they just ignore it. We see web sites every day that have
terrible SEO.
It’s a shame, because everyone wants to bring more traffic to their site. Search engines
bring free traffic, and for many sites they are the most important source of visitors.
The good news is that there are some simple things you can do that will provide a huge
boost. Follow the easy steps outlined here, and you’ll be way ahead of the average site.
Make Sure Every Page is Accessible and Has a URL
The most fundamental thing you must do is to ensure that every page of the site is
accessible by following links, starting from your home page, even if JavaScript is disabled
and Flash is ignored. (You need to take these same precautions for accessibility as well as
for SEO.)
This is not hard to achieve, as long as you are not using Flash for your navigation, and
JavaScript is used as it should be: for enhancement, and not as a requirement.
You can also easily do an end-run around any issues by linking to a site map from your
footer, and including a link to every page in the site map. Providing an XML site map also
helps when not all pages are directly linked.
Every page must have a unique URL. That means not building the entire site in Flash, or
using Ajax to swap out the contents of a page without changing the URL (unless you think
carefully about the SEO implications). It’s OK to use JavaScript to hide and reveal parts of
a page, as long as all is revealed if JavaScript is disabled (which is how the standard jQuery
tab and accordion widgets work).
Keyword Research
Before you can begin optimizing your pages for search, you need to know for what
keyword phrases you are optimizing.
Your gut feel will get you started, but you need to use research tools to find out what
phrases people are actually searching for the most, which sites rank well on those terms, and
how much traffic each term gets. (See www.webvanta.com/5tips-resources for links.)
Keyword research can be valuable for making sure you are targeting the right keywords,
and that they are used in lots of searches.
The keywords you have in mind may or may not be the ones that are being searched for by
the people you’re trying to reach. Small variations in keywords and phrases can have a big
impact.
This is one of the first things for which you might want to bring in an SEO consultant, or
you can spend the time to learn to use the research tools yourself.
Once you have settled on a set of keywords you are targeting, you can focus your efforts.
For each targeted keyword, you should make an ongoing effort to add content focused on
that keyword, get incoming links that use it in the anchor text, and track your position in
the search results so you can tell if you are making progress
The All-Important Page Title
Assuming these basics are taken care of, then the two most critical things are the page title
(the metadata title in the <title> tag, which appears in the browser’s title bar) and the
contents of the first <h1> element on the page.
The page title is super-important, yet it is very commonly overlooked or written poorly. If
your site has the same title on every page, you’ve thrown away most of your SEO
opportunities. Go in right now and write a unique page title for every single page.
The page title can include the name of the site, but it should begin with content that is
unique to each page and describes that page. The page title will appear as the headline in
search results, so it must be written in such a way that the first few words telegraph to the
user that this page has what they’re looking for.
Having a page title like "Home", "Products", or "About Us" is useless (and very common).
You can’t assume that the viewer of the search results (or the search engine) has any
context; the title must be completely explicit, and include as many keywords as you can
reasonably get in there. Keep the length below 65 characters.
For example, instead of "Products", use something like "Quality dog food and cat food at
the best price"
Next Up: The Visible Headline
Next most important is the visible headline on the page, which should be in an <h1> tag.
We see a number of common mistakes here:
• Pages that have no headline
• Headlines that are in <p> tags, or other tags, which are then styled to look like
headlines, or in images
• Headlines that aren’t explicit enough
Make sure that your page begins with a headline in an <h1> tag. You'll help the search
engines and the human readers. You can style the h1 to look however you want; it doesn’t
need to be visually huge.
Sometimes you want the main headline to be something clever, or cute, that lacks the
keywords you’d like to have in the headline for SEO. In this case, you may want to put the
actual headline in a <p> tag, styled to look like a headline, and then have the SEOoptimized headline below it in an <h1> tag, styled to look like a subhead or an introductory
paragraph. In writing that headline, keep the site visitor in mind, but make it more explicit than you
might naturally do. This is much the same as for the metadata page title, except that you
may want something shorter on the page.
For example, while you might use "Experienced dog grooming services for Sonoma
County, in Santa Rosa, CA" for the metadata page title, but use "Expert Dog Grooming"
for the h1 tag (the page title that appears on the page).
Now Fill In the Meta Description
The metadata description tag is important not for getting your page listed on the search
results page, but for getting users to click on the result if they do see it.
The search engine will show your description as the two lines of text below the headline; if
you don’t provide a meta description, it will grab something from the body of your page,
which may or may not be what you want.
The description should be about 150 characters long, since that is what fits in a typical
search listing. Think of it as a teaser that promotes your page. Write it for humans, not for
search engines. But it is helpful to include your targeted keywords, because the search
engine will highlight them, drawing users to your listing.
Don’t Worry About Meta Keywords
The keyword metadata field is not worth worrying about, at least on your first pass. Google
ignores the keywords in this field, because they are too easily abused. (Too many people put
“Britney Spears” in the keywords, for example, not because their page had anything to do
with Britney but because it is one of the highest-volume search terms.) Other search
engines may use them, but you won’t sacrifice much by ignoring them.
This does not mean you can ignore knowing what keywords you are targeting; that is an
entirely different matter. But the place to use keywords is in your page titles, headlines, and
body copy — not in the keywords meta tag.
Incoming Links
Everything we’ve discussed up to this point is what is called on-page optimization: things
you can do on your site, and that are entirely under your control.
Unfortunately, it’s not enough.
If your content is so unique that people are searching on phrases that exist only on your site
and a handful of other places, on-site optimization may be all you need. But for any search
term that is remotely competitive, you need incoming links in order to rank well in search
results.
Incoming links are important because of the way search engines rank pages. The on-page
optimization ensures that the search engines can figure out what each page is about. But
the web is a very big place, and even for any single niche topic, there are thousands, if not
hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of pages.
How does a search engine decide which pages to put at the top of the search results?
The distinguishing factor is incoming links.
All Links Are Not Created Equal
You want as many links to your pages as possible, but some links are much more valuable
than others.
Search engines don’t disclose the details of their algorithms, but there are a few points
about incoming links that are generally agreed upon:
• The rank, or authority, of the site that is linking to you has a huge influence. A
single link from whitehouse.gov is probably worth more than thousands of links
from little-read blogs. Links from .edu and .org sites are often thought to be more
valuable than links from .com sites.
• The anchor text (the text to which the link is applied) is important. If the link says
“click here”, then that link text tells the search engine nothing about the site being linked to. But if the link says “San Francisco Hotels”, the text tells the search
engines a great deal.
• Links from many sources have a special attribute applied, “rel=nofollow”. This tells
search engines not to take that link into account. Nofollow was invented to reduce
the link spam on Wikipedia and soon spread to many other sites. So while links
anywhere are good for driving traffic to your site, many links in blog comments and
forums do not help your search rankings.
• Google is thought to penalize sites if large quantities of links to your site show up
in a short period of time, especially if the links are identical. This is presumably an
attempt to defeat people with a large network of sites that exist just to provide
backlinks, as well as other “black hat” SEO techniques.
• One-way links (a site that links to you but that you do not link to) are thought to
be more valuable than reciprocal links.
You need to solicit links, but you should do so carefully, choosing sites that relate to your
topic and have good search ranking themselves. It is helpful to suggest link text, but vary it
from time to time.
You will get solicitations from random sites asking for reciprocal links. These links are of
little value, and may even hurt your rankings, so just ignore these requests unless the site is
one you would want to point people to anyway.
Getting good links is a slow and time consuming task, but it is one that is essential if you
are going to get sites to rank well on competitive terms. If you have great content that
people share with their friends and blog about, then incoming links may happen on their
own.
If you want to be more proactive, do searches on the terms on which you hope to rank.
Look at what sites rank well, and look for ones that might link to you. If there are
influential blogs, add your comments to their posts regularly. This may not give you useful
links back, but it helps to build a relationship and a reputation.
Adding Content Frequently
Search engines love content—and so do people. There’s no substitute for having lots of
quality content, and adding more every week, if not every day.
When search engines see that new content is added to your site frequently, they will index it
more often, and you’re more likely to rise up in the results. The more content you have, the
more likely it is that someone will link to a particular piece of content, simply because you
have more opportunities to hit someone’s hot button.
The easiest way to add content frequently is with a blog. Blogs provide a natural vehicle for
whatever content you can produce, and they’re a structure that both readers and search
engines understand.
By using tags or categories with your blog, you automatically get pages that list all the
articles for a particular tag or category. These pages can be very attractive for search
engines.
Write for Readers, with a Touch for Robots
When you are writing blog posts (and other web content), you should write first and
foremost for your human readers. But you should also stretch a bit to include your targeted
keywords more frequently than may otherwise seem natural.
To a human reader, context is often apparent, and headlines written solely for readers often
leave out important keywords. With a little creativity, you can usually get some more
keywords into your headlines, as well as into the body of your posts, without making the
writing seem strained.
Integrating with Social Media
Aside from search engines, social media can be a major source of traffic. Links from social
media sites typically have their “nofollow” attribute set, so they often won’t directly improve
your search engine rankings. But they bring you traffic just like search engine results do.
Social media integration works two primary ways:
1. Linking from your site to your social media pages and accounts. A business that is
taking advantage of social media should have, at a minimum, a Facebook page, a
LinkedIn page, a Twitter account, and a YouTube channel.
2. Making it easy for your site visitors to add content from your web site into their
own social media streams, sharing your content with their social networks.
Implementing the first of these is just a matter of providing an appropriate icon and linking
it to a particular external site. Most services provide an icon or badge that you can use.
The second is a little more complicated. At a minimum, you want visitors to your site to be
able to click a “share via xyz” icon and have a link to the current page pushed out to the
visitor’s network. You can often do this with widgets provided by social networking sites,
and you can use general-purpose sharing widgets such as that from AddThis.com.
In addition, you may want to directly include content from your site on your social media
pages, and vice versa. Each of the services provides widgets you can use for this, and there's
a variety of third-party widgets that either display information from an RSS feed or access
a social networking site via its API to get content to display.
