Like may things in the web everybody is looking for the edge. You can go and read the JimBoykin.com site and get some interactive agency to do an audit, but often it is the same SEO stuff over and over.
A couple of years ago, at the beginning of SEO, Search Engine Optimization, around 2001, I was tasked with getting this startup speed dating site as high up in the search engines as possible, because as you can imagine, it is always less expensive to be found naturally, than to be found through PPC, Pay Per Click. Lots of stuff out there and lots of the same stuff where ever you look, so much so, for interactive firms these have become a standard.
Surprisingly, like 90% of sites have yet to meet these standards. These are pretty much the same as when we started SEO around the early 2000’s, plus all the new media stuff like blogging, plus now webmaster tools from Google, Yahoo and Bing like sitemaps.xml files.
There there are some additional small details that you would not think of to round this off. This is what I call SEO in Overdrive. Recently I gave a short talk on what are critical technical issues in getting a site nicely found on Google. So here is my SEO in Overdrive list below. I will probably miss a few things here and there.
1. Choose either www or no www URL.
Choose either www.strategicpoints.com or strategicpoints.com. Having both URLs working on your site will cause Google to count your rankings for pagerank separately. Together, as one domain, this will increase your site pagerank, because these two URL’s pagerank power is diluted. How to do this? If you have a linux server, the .htaccess file can be used. I am pointing to a good refernce to figure this out. If you are using WordPress, then do it for you automagically, and will switch you over to either one or the other based on the choice. If you are using windows…well I am sure there is an answer out there.
2. Localize or specialize each page of a site.
The old days of one title for all 100 pages of a site are like 1999. The top areas are title and Meta Description. As I have found out recently, if you mess up your title, the listing on Google will reflect this. So make sure the title is accurate and contains the key words you want to be found by, first… The Meta Description (if you don’t have top content) will be used by Google to show the descriptive text underneath the title on a Google result page. Take for instance a situation recently where we migrated a site, and the Meta Description was removed from a page. Without the little description beneath the title on the Google Results page, the link looked like an ad, especially since it was showing up first in the rankings. We learn from our dumb mistakes. We put the Meta Description back, and wholla, the link reappeared and so did our traffic.
3. Healthly, always changing content…
The search engines love content, no matter where it exists on your site. This is why having a forum, blog or other interactive parts of your site are so critical. This content is always changing, and this is always freshly indexed on the search engines. The introduction of the blog, and WordPress, which I favor, has really given us an ability to SEO in Overdrive, because it pings out to the rpc servers that update the search engines within 24 hours. This means not waiting for crawlers to come out to your site, but telling the search engines when and where to look for new content.
4. Text Links…
Who knew they would be so important. For sites that do not provide text links on the home page, they are missing out on the ability for both crawlers to go deeper, and the ability to make these links important part of search criteria for your site. Ever notice a group of links below your search results on Google… They determine these for you initially. These are considered the top internal links from your homepage on your site. The calculate it for you if you don’t do it yourself as sitelinks, through Google Webmaster Tools. You can remove these, but you can’t add these I believe… Only having images links is a downer…, and can be a negative impact on your sites. Top sites that want to continue with image links often put <div> based text that is not visible behind the image, that state the link in real text as a way to solve this issue. Either way, always take your links seriously.
5. Images, Site Elements and alt tags.
One of the tricks we used years ago to get to the top of the search engines without violating any code of ethics with Google was a technique I call snow balling. We decided on our top search content words, which were “speed dating”. Then we renamed the /images/ directory to /speed-dating-images/. Then we proceeded to add alt tags to each image, that said the image name with “speed dating” after the name, like “party photo – speed dating”. Then we went on to include alt tags in the links with the name of the link “event xyz – speed dating”.
6. Directories and Virtual Directories.
A newer technique is to create directories or virtual directories with tons of additional terms. No need to create these real directories anymore, unless you are on a windows server. I only know the Linux apache version of .htaccess and this can be used to create virtual directories for SEO. In our case it would have been /speed-dating/, /speed-dating-parties/, /speed-daters/, etc., etc. These so called directory and sub directory structures are really the cutting edge of the web today in terms of getting found on the search engines. No need to work hard and create these directories and subdirectores anymore or even a super .htaccess file. This is why I am lovin WordPress. If you have WordPress, all this is done for you and no need to work about it. WordPress not only can create these for you with real directories, but the redirection program I mention in my enterprise wordpress discussions on earlier blog entries gets into how it works, and why to use it.
That’s it for now. I am going to add some more to this list soon, and as you know there are a hundred other blogs out there with a lot of the same information. Good luck putting your SEO in overdrive. Contact me if you have any questions about the stuff I mention today at dgudema AT StrategicPoints DOT com.
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