The next Youtube viral video!

1. Focus on the user (the web visitor)
2. Create titles that include likely search terms
3. Include call to action – conclusion – make your point clearly
4. Brainstorm, sort, prioritize (general to specific)
5. Make it visually stimulating and compelling
   - headings
   - short paragraphs
   - bullet lists
   - white space
   - pleasing font
6. Simple words – plain language
   - utilize > use
   - commence > start
   - less wordy, succint
7. Active voice
   - was done to > did
8. Write when you are at your best, not your worst
9. Revisit – add links – edit – improve – augment – update
10. Add tags and categories

SEO Gimmicks Don’t Work

Roughly five minutes after the invention of search engine optimization, there was a company out there offering a way to get you to the front of Google faster, using some “ultra secret” technique that they made up out of thin air.

Back in the day, there were certain number of SEO gimmicks that actually worked. Or at least they worked in the sense that they helped you increase your search engine profile. There were quite a few of them, but most of us are familiar with the basic ideas behind junk article marketing, intense keyword repetition, and shady link farms, all of which worked to trick the search engine spiders into thinking your site was more important, or authoratative, than it really was.

Where these tactics usually fell flat, however, was in generating actual sales. It was one thing to fool automated software systems, but another thing to convince people to buy. Few readers were willing to stick around and see what your junk article copywriter had come up with, or look at a page that had the same few words pasted over and over.

Of course, these days, search engine algorithms have gotten more complicated. Trying to claw your way to the first page of Google, Yahoo, and Bing using any of those tricks is almost guaranteed to be a waste of time. And even if you could, it wouldn’t matter because search engine optimization gimmicks can only bring you traffic – they can help you do anything with it.

With that in mind, here are three quick tips to help you get your search engine campaign moving the right way:

• Take your time. Google and the other engines like content and links, for sure, but they appreciate them all the more if they’re built up over time. Remember that and learn to be patient: do the right things long enough and you’ll get to where you want to go.
• Remember that shortcuts end up costing you. Worse than being ineffective, shady gimmicks are likely to get you flagged by search engines for trying to scam them. Once that happens, it won’t matter what you do – your site could be blacklisted from them forever.
• It’s all about quality. It’s drastically better to have five visitors who are so blown away with your site that they buy from you and pass your URL on to friends or colleagues than it is to attract a thousand people who will never return. Build up an inventory of quality content, because that’s the best way to build up a steady stream of buyers.

Any good search engine optimization program is going to take some time, research, follow-up, and expertise.

Good website governance includes the task of archiving Web pages. Archiving a Web page is a fundamental task of Web content management and falls near the end of most models of the Web content lifecycle. View it as a part of your complete content management strategy. Managing the information you intend to deliver to audiences is like tending a garden: you need to pick out the weeds and the dead or dying parts so that what remains flourishes.

Archiving is a necessary process as Web pages are reviewed and updated; as new information architectures are being considered and then put into place; or as content audits uncover duplicate, orphan, or little-visited pages (your lonely pages). For some organizations, archiving a website may be governed by laws and regulations, and professional services are available to support these activities. If this is the case, you might want to consult your internal legal or records management staff for guidance.

If you are a Web Content Manager and do not have access to professional support services, and you are not regularly auditing your pages and archiving unnecessary pages off your site, you may find yourself trying to manage an unwieldy mess of pages, folders, and related information assets (documents, images, etc.). Now imagine the experience your visitors are having as they try to navigate to the information they need to do the tasks they want to accomplish at your website. They might feel like they’re hacking their way through a forest of outdated or misplaced content in search of a clear path.

Realizing the importance of archiving Web pages, I developed a process anyone can use for sites built with static HTML pages.  Typically, the task of archiving Web pages falls to a Web Content Manager, not software engineers or developers on the IT staff. I hope you’ll find this to be a simple, content-friendly process or one that you can take and modify to suit your needs.

Definition of Archiving a Web Page

Archiving a Web page might mean one of two things:

1. Placing “Notice of Archive” information on a Web page to inform visitors that the page is no longer being updated by website owners and is being left in place in the site architecture for some reason (historical, informational, etc.).

Or

2. Completely removing a page from a website.

Why Archive a Web Page?

Managing a website means managing content all the way through the Web content lifecycle. Stages in the lifecycle include content creation, revision, distribution, and, finally, some form of archiving for (possible) re-use.

Archiving should be done as needed to help maintain the integrity of a website. Websites age, content owners and projects come and go, and Web Managers remain challenged with keeping content fresh and engaging. Archiving removes unnecessary pages from your website, helps visitors accomplish tasks more easily on your site, and supports site optimization. Archiving (in the sense of completely removing a page) keeps a record of every page that has been on your website in its original information architecture; so if you ever need to repurpose or rollback content, this can be readily done.

Which Archiving Choice is Right for a Page?

As a Web Content Manager, you’ll want to consider the needs of your audiences when considering what type of archiving a page needs.

A “Notice of Archive” may be appropriate for a page with “timely” information, that is, related to a project. When the project is completed, what should be done with the page(s)? Remove them completely? Or “freeze” them in time on the website but with a “Notice of Archive” placed on the page?

Complete removal of a page is needed for duplicate pages, orphan pages, or pages that have been determined to be no longer useful to the website’s information architecture.

“Notice of Archive” Process

Placing a “Notice of Archive” on a page is done by drafting appropriate language and placing it on the page where visitors can easily see it. Between these steps you’ll want to vet the notice through internal governance structures, of course, including legal and marketing departments. Point forward, you’ll want to make sure that the page content truly is frozen. Consult with internal IT staff on how best to accomplish this.

Examples of “Notice of Archive” language include the following:

• This page is obsolete and kept for historical purposes only.

• This page was placed in “online archive” status since [date] and is kept within our site architecture for historical purposes only. See current [page].

• Notice of Archive. The contents on this page remain on our website for informational purposes only. Content on this page will not be reviewed or updated from [date].

• This page is available primarily for archival purposes. Page and contact information may be out of date; please [Contact Us] for current information.

You may want to place the notice within a standard image or box, so consult with a graphic designer or Web developer as needed. Make sure the text is retrievable through your site search engine.

Complete Removal (Archiving) Process

Pages removed from a website contain information that might be needed later for any number of reasons. You may want to re-purpose content or other information assets (documents, images), you may need a record of project activities, you may even need it for legal purposes. Whatever the need, the archive should contain everything as it was presented on the live website. So you’ll want to replicate three areas: the content (including documents and images), the code, and the site architecture. For your own benefit, the replicated archive should be easily searchable.

First, re-create your website’s folder structure in a secure environment:

Next, use MS Word documents to capture each Web page’s information assets. Information at the top of the page to include would be the page URL, the date the page was removed from the live site, documents/images linked from the Web page, content owners, etc. Taking a screen shot of the page as it presents to visitors on the live site can be a useful record, as will the complete source code for the page. Simply copy and paste source code from the View > Page Source toolbar in a browser.

During this process you’ll want to check all links (internal, external, and inbound). Archiving can wreak your SEO if it results in “404 Page Not Found” errors. (Use the Google Webmaster Tools internal link checker for this.) And you don’t want to break links to sites with which you have established relations. Inbound links to a page can be checked through Google. Just type “link:” followed by the URL, and Google will present a list of sites linking to that URL. With this information you can devise a plan: will you create re-direct pages, move certain page content elsewhere on your site, or contact sites linking to only your most popular pages? The upshot is: Think about links before you archive a page, work with current and future content stakeholders, and find appropriate content-based solutions.

Place the MS Word document in its proper folder, and name it according to its complete Web file name.

If there are documents or images that exist as links only on the page being archived, then those documents and images should be removed from the live website and placed in the archived site in their replicated locations.

A final step of documenting this process would be to make appropriate notations in your content inventory workbook. Create a tab in the workbook inventory for your archived pages and note the date of archive along with any other information you need to track.

Strategy

Strategy plays a role in archiving, too, because it will impact the site’s overall content strategy. If you manage a particularly large website, you may want to develop an archiving policy and process as part of your website governance documentation before beginning any archiving work. You’ll want to sort through content review cycles, content ownership issues (individually and across departments), and time limits for justifying the continued existence of old content.

Conclusion

Archiving Web pages from a website is part of best practices of website governance. Without proper archiving of individual Web pages, your site can become unmanageable to you and a frustrating experience for your audiences.

The process presented here is easy to implement and will keep a complete record of your website’s code, content, and information architecture, for historical purposes or future re-use. As one stage of the Web content lifecycle, archiving (when done properly) can be a vital part of how you manage your website and its information assets.

Acknowledgements

Thank you to David Harbottle at Typeclear and Pete Stevens for their reviews and helpful comments.

Robert Jacoby is a past Website Manager for the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health and Editor-in-Chief of the American Medical Writers Association Journal. He is currently enrolled in the Master of Information Management program at the University of Maryland’s College of Information Studies.  You can reach Robert by email at rajacoby at gmail dot com.

Posted August 19, 2010.

An Often Forgotten – and Critically Important – Part of the SEO Process

Search engine optimization is no longer just a game for online marketers. These days, everyone from local grocers to multinational corporations is in on the act. That’s because each of them knows the same thing that the rest of us do: that having one of the best positions on Google, Yahoo, or Microsoft’s Bing has the potential to double, triple, or quadruple any business’s revenue almost overnight. Regardless of what you sell, there’s no substitute for some prime online real estate.

But, as all of these marketers get busy generating keyword rich content, optimizing their page headings and alternate text, and generating incoming links to their websites, they often miss the simple, yet crucial, piece of the puzzle: paying attention to the results.

Strange as it may seem, many of them – including more than a few professional web designers – never get beyond putting their company’s name into a Google search box and seeing where it comes up. It’s a good piece of information to have, but it’s certainly not the only one that matters. Savvy marketers will also want to know things like how many visits they are actually getting, whether or not potential customers are returning, how long they are spending on the site, the value per visitor, and so on.

Good metrics make for good search engine optimization, but it’s something that too many business owners and advisers miss the boat on. Here are four tips to help you keep your SEO campaign measured and on track:

Use good SEO anlaysis tools. There are all kinds of software programs and plug-ins available to help you keep track of what’s happening on your website, ranging from the simple and cheap to the complex and expensive. This isn’t an area where you have to spend a lot of money, but be sure to buy what you need, since getting the right information is crucial to making the right judgments.  SEO Quotient specializes in web analytics to measure past performance, monitor current performance and predict future performance.

Know what SEO metrics you’re looking for. At the end of the day, any visitor that earns youprofit is a good one, while all the hits in the world won’t mean much if they don’t buy anything. For that reason, it’s important that you track more than simply your search engine position, or the amount of visits you get – learn to spot the numbers and data that point to sales, and then keep a close eye on them.

Remember to remember. A good rule from for checking out your website metrics and search engine optimization progress is to not rely on your memory. It’s an easy thing to forget, or just put off, when you’re busy with dozens of other details. So, make a regular appointment – either with your web marketing team or yourself – to check in at regular intervals and see how things are going.

Adjust your sights. What’s important this week, in terms of search engine positioning, might not matter down the road. Don’t just look for how you’re doing with the key words and phrases you’ve already identified – look out for other profitable ones on the horizon. If you can spot a market opportunity before anyone else, you might be able to gain a step in the race to the top search engine spots.

The Three Things You Must do When Beginning a Search Engine Optimization Campaign

It’s always fun to see someone discover search engine optimization (SEO) for the first time. And while it might seem like every business owner and online marketer has been trying to claw their way to the first page of the Google listings for a while, we can assure you that there are plenty of folks who are just getting started.

This is a great thing, for businesses and searchers alike. The more people get involved with SEO, the easier it becomes for consumers to find what they’re looking for. In that sense, everybody wins.

That’s not the same as saying that search engine optimization is easy, however. Too many marketers—having had it dawned on them what kinds of profits they could be making with a strong SEO campaign that brings tens of thousands, or even millions, of qualified customers to their website — turn into children on Christmas morning, tearing their way through one page after another looking for the goodies.

SEO doesn’t work that way; there isn’t a magic secret that turns your site into a search engine superstar overnight. Instead, it’s a slow, sometimes tedious, process of adding and tweaking content on your company’s website. To help you stay on the right path, we would like to offer the three things you absolutely must do when beginning a search engine optimization campaign:

Learn search engine optimization (SEO) basics.

Whether you are going to be handling your SEO campaign on your own, or working with an established search partner, it makes sense to learn the basics. Even if you aren’t going to be the one crafting page titles, keyword rich headings, incoming links, and so on, you’re going to have an easier time figuring out what you’re paying for if you at least understand the concepts. There are lots of great books on SEO out there, so pick one up and spend a couple of hours looking through it before you get started.

Make an SEO plan and blog schedule.

As we mentioned, SEO campaigns are more like marathons – or maybe ultra marathons – than they are sprints. To keep things moving along at a reasonable pace, you’re going to want to make a comprehensive plan and schedule to stick to. That way, you can know right away whether you are accomplishing what you need to, without getting lost in the details and losing your focus.

Keep track of your progress – SEO analytics.

Success in search engine optimization often comes in small increments at first, and exponentially later. What that means to you is that careful record-keeping – especially when it comes to how you’ve changed your pages, what you’ve added, and where you are ranking on Google and the other major search engines for your most important keywords and phrases – can be a lifesaver. With good notes, you’ll be able to see the small improvements as they happen; without them, you might not recognize that you’ve made progress and be tempted to give up before you see results.

Editors note: SEO Quotient will also keep track of your SEO progress, trends, visitor stats and keyword rankings.

Of course, following these three tips alone won’t guarantee your success with search engine optimization. If you can follow them, though, and keep your goals in mind, we can promise you’ll be off to a flying start.

This may be a ridiculous question or correlation, but, if you think about it…

• Fundamental to Google’s algorithm is PageRank
• PageRank is calculated by inbound links from other websites
• If you want to rank well on Google then you try to get inbound links
• Webmasters will often pay link developers for inbound links
• Spammers have created robots to generate inbound links via blog comments
• These blog comments sometimes have malware
• Therefore, Google’s algorithm causes malware

I’m sure that my Logic Professor at my alma mater would be horrified at my conclusion.  But, there is a loose correlation.

There has been talk that Google’s Page Rank, or PR, is becoming less and less significant and perhaps even irrelevant with regard to a site’s ability to rank on Google.  This site, SEOQ.com, for example is a PR zero.  But, if I Google some of my most important search terms then it will rank on the first or second page of Google.  And, SEOmoz thinks that SEOQ.com is a PR4 or MozRank 4.

And, not all link builders are spammers and not all spammers create or propagate malware.  But, the nature of Google’s algorithm has certainly motivated spammers to create robots to build thousands of links and most of these links live in blog comments.

If Google were to stop using or relying so much on inbound links as a signal, which I believe it has already begun to do, and then if it were to more proactively and broadly advertise this change to the public then there will be less demand on link building and less motivation for spammers to automatically propagate spammy link comments and that would, hopefully, lessen the propagation of malware.

Some interesting articles that I have seen on the subject:

• How-Black-Hat-SEO-Abuses-Search-Engines
• google-anti-malware-diagnostic-pages
• malware-warnings-on-google-search
• google-flags-whole-internet-as-malware
• Google: About malware and hacked sites
• study-calls-google-king-of-malware
• Google: faq-malware-and-hacked-sites

 

Most business owners and webmasters want their website to rank high on Google search engine results pages.  The whole purpose of SEO, after all, is to optimize your website so that it can be found on Google, Bing, Yahoo and other search directories.  One way to get found on Google is to avoid the things that prevent you from getting found.  And, I suppose, there are some companies or people that have web pages but actually don’t want to be found.  They want to make their pages accessible via the web but remain somewhat stealthy.

So, regardless of whether you want to hide from search engines or if you want to avoid making mistakes in getting found, this is my short list or top 10 ways to not get found on Google.  Conversely, if you avoid these top 10 items then you are at least on your way to getting found and becoming more visible across search engines.

Top 10 ways to not get found on Google:

1. Create a robots.txt file and disallow all robots.  Tell the robots to not follow.
2. Create a 100% Flash website with no other textual content or hyperlinks, just Flash.
3. Don’t link out to any websites and don’t encourage anybody to link to your site.
4. Don’t include a title tag, meta description tag or any other headings in your web pages.
5. Use Photoshop to save all of your textual content and headings as JPGs or GIFs.
6. Add as many slow-loading 3rd party widgets to your home page as possible.
7. Steal content from other websites and copy them to your web pages.
8. Host your site on servers that specialize in pornography and gambling sites.
9. Stuff a ton of secret keywords into your HTML using the same font color as your background.
10. Don’t renew your domain name registration and allow it to expire.
11. Bonus: Force people to sign up and login to see the content on your site

Avoid these major search engine stumbling blocks and you will likely get indexed naturally and organically across Google and Bing.

Web Analytics

Advanced web analytics are sophisticated tactics to help you understand how users are interacting with your website. These tactics give you insight into who these visitors are, how they found your site, what they were looking for, and whether your site delivered on their search. For commercial sites, advanced web analytics can help you track revenue, seasonal trends, and sales changes, especially as you make modifications to your site or introduce promotions.

Web Analytics Tools & Software

Because of the importance and growing desire to access advanced web analytics, there are many tools and software solutions available to help. Some of these tools are free; others are shareware or paid subscription services. If you’re serious about truly advanced web analytics, it’s worth your time to examine and try many of these tools. Once you’ve figured out what platforms you like best, use at least two analytics services to monitor your website.

Web Analytics Trends & Data

Why at least two? Even with the most advanced web analytics software, the trends are more important than the actual numbers. Each analytics platform measures its metrics slightly differently; it’s important to understand exactly how each metric is judged and weighed, and to be able to compare and contrast any discrepancies. Also keep in mind that no matter how advanced, web analytics are an imperfect science, dependent on each users’ cookie and privacy preferences.

Web Analytics Results

Still, advanced web analytics goes beyond raw numbers provided by your tools and software. It’s the ability to take disparate pieces of information, create a larger picture, and formulate hypotheses and conclusions upon which to optimize and better your website. Therefore, the most important element in advanced web analytics is what makes anything advanced in the first place—the human mind.

Danilo Lee is a Los Angeles search engine marketing consultant specialized in Web Analytics. Lee is a Google Analytics Qualified Individual who can develop advanced strategies and provide accurate answers to your company’s business questions. Connect with Danilo Lee on LinkedIn.