I think it is possible to list the most important elements in optimizing a web page (or web site for that matter) for search engines. Here are my top 10. Feel free to list yours or correct mine. They are not in order from most important to least important.

Top 10 Tips to SEO

1. Find out what keywords from your service and industry web site visitors are using in the search engines. If you manufacture blue, red and green widgets, find out if people are searching with those terms or if they are using big, medium and little widgets instead.

2. Optimize your web site’s Title tags. These are HTML scripted tags that appear in between the open HEAD and closing HEAD tags on your web page. Place your researched keywords in these Title tags because search engines count that tag as one of the most important on-page factors in ranking your page for the keywords it is optimized for. The Title tag is predominantly displayed in search engine results; is the first line of the result and is usually the link to your web page.

3. Optimize your web site’s Meta description tags. These also are HTML scripted tags that appear in between the open HEAD and closing HEAD tags on your web page. The Meta description tag is often shown in search engine results as one or two sentences that briefly explain what the web page is about. Place your page’s keywords in the description tag and write it as a grammatically correct sentence so searchers can get an idea of your page’s content.

4. Optimize your web site’s Meta keywords tags. These fit in between your web page’s open HEAD and closing HEAD tags on your web page. Many web page optimizers say this tag can be left out because the search engines no longer take it into consideration due to past spamming techniques that abused this tag. Directory managers, however, can use the keywords Meta tag to help place your web site in their directory.

5. When creating a web page for the first time, utilize one of the most important keywords or phrase for the page name. You will know what keywords are important for the page’s content through the research you conducted when you performed #1 above. If you are using more than one keyword, separate the words with a hyphen (dash) and use no more than three keywords for the name of the page. See an example in #6 below.

6. When creating a sub-folder in your web site, use a keyword or phrase in naming the folder. For example, if you sell widgets and you have pages on red widgets in a different folder than pages on blue widgets you might want the names of the folders to match the names of the pages. It would look something like this for a business web site named Widgets For All: www.widgetsforall.com/common-widgets/small-red-widgets.html.

7. Take advantage of the alt image attribute in HTML scripting. The ‘alt’ term stands for ‘alternate’ and was originally built into HTML scripting so that persons who didn’t want their browsers to display graphics could get a description of the image instead, hence ‘alt’. Search engines read the attribute (also known as the alt tag) and it is appropriate to place a keyword or phrase in the attribute. Don’t stuff it, use no more than five words if possible and have it make sense.

8. Make sure your web pages load quickly. While many people in the United States have high-speed Internet connections, search engine spiders (also known as robots) take into consideration the page’s size in kilobytes. If it takes a long time for your web page to load, the search engine’s spider will not travel through it (known as spidering a page or web site) and then your page will not rank for the keywords it has been optimized for. In addition, web pages that take a long time to load will probably not have many human viewers. There are too many other pages available on the World Wide Web for someone to wait during the time it takes for yours to load.

9. Make a plan to get links from web sites that carry authority in the search engines. These are established web sites that have been around quite awhile and have many web sites linking to them. A good example is MSN’s home page or Adobe’s home page. While it would be extremely difficult to receive a link from them, they carry the weight and have been established long enough to represent those kinds of web sites to seek out for an inbound link.

10. Have web sites that are linking to yours use your keywords in their links. Using the widgets example above, ask the web site owner you seek a link from to use something like this: A good source for red widgets is Widgets For All. The words,’ red widgets’ in the previous sentence would be the link that points to www.yoursite.com/common-widgets/small-red-widgets.html.

Warren Taylor – Senior Account Executive

I recently read that Google Analytics is now open for everyone. Apparently there is no longer a long wait before you receive an invitation.

Google Analytics is a great Web visitor and traffic statistics package. It allows a person to drill down and get insights that can make a difference between completing an action or not on a client’s website.

One feature is found under “All Reports” and is called “Cross Segmentation Performance”.

What keywords and search engines are visitors to my client’s website using? There’s a way to view that information by first navigating to the “Visitor Segment Performance Report” in the left side navigation of the window (it has a plus sign in front of it) and selecting “New vs Returning”. This report compares new visitors to my client’s website with those visitors who are returning to it. When that option is clicked on, a pie chart and a table showing Visits, Pageviews/Visit, GoalCompletion/Visit (and two other categories that do not apply to this client’s website) appears.

In front of each category (New Visitor and Returning Visitor) in the table there is a red button with double arrows pointing upward. Select the one in front of New Visitor by clicking on it. A dropdown menu appears with the options of Data Over Time, To-date Lifetime Value and Cross Segment Performance.

Using the Cross Segment Performance menu, click on it, to access another sub-menu.

The sub-menu choices include Source[Medium], Campaign, Keyword, Content, Country, and more.

Skip down to Keyword and click on that. The result shows the top 10 keywords that website visitors used during this particular reporting period to arrive at the website.

I like to see the ‘long tail’ so I go to the top of the report and select display 100. Now I can see not only the frequently used keywords but also those that are used just one time. This provides insight into what my client’s website visitors think its contents should be as well as what they know it is. Are there any keywords listed that I should consider using for optimization?

As I review the keywords, I also look to see how many pages were viewed when a particular keyword was used. If I also have set up some goals, I look to see what kind of activity was produced by the keyword.

In one client’s report, a keyword that was used only 4 times produced an average of 6 Pageviews per visitor. Even more importantly it also brought a whopping 25% of goal completion. That is significant information and I could have missed it by simply not looking at this client’s website traffic.

Google Analytics is free, easy to install and gives information that is valuable to websites that provide content or customer service or ecommerce or lead generation. That list is all the types of websites there are, so your website can benefit from using Google Analytics or a similar traffic statistics package too.

Warren Taylor – Senior Account Executive

I was recently reading a newsletter from WebProNews where a forum visitor asks,

“Are we in an update on Google?”

One of the responses I found intriguing was,

“Are sales way down? Remember the days of ranking reports on Google are going bye bye. This is the way it will be on Google now, like it or not.

Now if sales are down then yes your website has been affected by the latest Big Daddy changes. The thing that has been most consistent with websites which have been suffering from the update is the lack of new and relevant/quality links. If your website has not been getting any new links from high quality, relevant websites it appears to be hurting your ability to rank well now.” [http://www.webproworld.com/viewtopic.php?t=65567]

I’ve always told my clients they need to make a real effort to find quality websites and pursue a linking plan. Once natural optimization has been placed on their web pages, the second phase of good optimization is acquiring links naturally, regularly, over a long period of time.

But I also saw in the forum member’s comment a need for clients to have a basic understanding of their website statistics. Every website has a statistics package. Some packages are very poor, some can be modified to be better and some are really great. But the need to understand web traffic statistics is growing even greater now that we see the rankings in a search engine like Google can be constantly shifting. I’ve noticed some of my own client’s website rankings drop in the morning and be back up in the afternoon.

I think what the forum member was getting at was that a ranking report is a snap-shot. It shows a website’s rankings in a brief moment of time. Thus, the ranking reports on Google are going bye bye because they don’t tell the whole story about a website’s rankings in Google. If sales are down then that could be a better indication that the website has dropped permanently in Google.

To balance out ranking reports, web statistics tell the story of how many visitors came to the website from Google as well as what keywords brought them, how many pages they viewed, what page they exited on and how many participated with the website. For example, whether they signed up for a newsletter, purchased an item or service or took some other kind of action.

If ranking reports on Google are on the way out, then I know reading, analyzing and understanding the website’s traffic stats is on the way in. And probably for a very long time to come. Reading website visitor activity has been made easier and more detailed in the past 2 years or so through ClickTracks, Google Analytics and other programs. It’s a good thing it has too; Google’s changing algorithm has created a need to understand website traffic like never before.

Warren Taylor – Senior Account Executive

Statistics can be boring and they can be confusing, but there is plenty of clarity in the most recent numbers revolving around real estate websites. For example, according to comScore, traffic to U.S. real estate sites grew 23% from April 2005 to April 2006, representing an increase from roughly 34 million to 42 million unique monthly users. That’s right, monthly users.

The NAR (National Association of Realtors) reports that the percentage of potential U.S. home buyers using the Internet as part of their housing search process went from 2% in 1995 to 77% in 2005.

Our Real Estate clients should realize that their sector of business has become tremendously competitive in the past 18 months and it looks like that won’t slow down in the future. With the advantage of putting an address into a search function, querying housing prices, being able to see color photographs of the properties and more, an Internet presence is mandatory to stay up with the competition.

Speaking of competition, there are some websites out there to help Realtors bring traffic to their website. For example, Google Base will let a Realtor list a property, give its address and description and it might show up in the main search results. But the fact is, search engines have trouble with framesets, they want unique tags on every page (not globally implemented tags) and certainly don’t want the duplicated page content that is so prevalent in templated solutions. Natural Search optimization needs these problems to be solved for it to work.

Beating the competition can be as simple as having a non-templated website that will allow each page to receive its own title and meta tags as well as staying (far) away from duplicated content that is showing up on every Realtor’s page that uses any given service. I wonder about those services that offer Realtors templates that don’t stand up to common sense. Why have duplicate content and apply tags globally when it flies in the face of the major search engines guidelines? The providers are offering solutions that are at least 5 years behind the times.

In the meantime, I strongly recommend Realtors get their own unique IP address, have a website with unique content and good optimization on each web page. Because people are now searching the Internet for new homes and it is the well-optimized web page that gets the crowd.

Warren Taylor – Senior Account Executive

A client does not have any of her website’s pages in Google’s index. What to do? It can seem daunting, but the following 4 steps can lead to a satisfactory conclusion.

1. Create an account with Google sitemaps so you can begin the process of asking them why your site is not indexed. The Google sitemaps function will point out problems with the website that prevent Google from spidering the pages:

(http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/docs/en/about.html)

2. Place a new Google site maps page inside your web directory. It needs to be in the root directory and it needs to be named with an .html extension. When you activate your Google site maps account, part of the process will give you a unique .html page that must be created and placed in your website. There are other methods to verify your website but this is the one I chose for ease of implementation.

3. Point Google to your sitemap.xml page within your website’s root directory after it has been created and uploaded to the root directory of your website.

4. Submit a Reinclusion request of your website at Google’s Reinclusion page:

(http://www.google.com/support/bin/request.py)

These are the bare-bones steps. But Google’s sitemaps page has detailed instructions that will walk you through the process.

This process also anticipates some of the steps Google will want you to take to find out for yourself why your website is not being indexed and what you can do for Google to assist it in finding your pages.

Warren Taylor – Senior Account Executive

Google Base is a method to list your real estate, products and services in Google. For example, type seattle real estate into the Google search box and the results include an option to refine your search through the use of a drop-down menu. This function appears because people have listed homes for sale in the Google Base.

It is easy to list real estate (or other items) in Google Base and it is free. Simply create a free Google Account if you do not already have one and then go to the Google Base page: http://base.google.com/

When you arrive at that page you need to sign in (the link to do so is above the Post An Item link and also at the top right part of the page).

After you sign in a page displays listing your Active items and places to choose what kind of item you want to post.

In the case of real estate listings you can choose an existing item type: Housing

The next page is a form with fields that you can fill out describing the posted item.

A Title is required. You can also include pictures of your property but that isn’t something that has to be included.

A price is not necessary to post and the Price type offers Fixed price as well as Negotiable and Minimum. There are examples for the fields so you will know what Google Base is looking for. Below the Square footage field there is an additional area with two boxes. Inside the boxes are the words Attribute name. You place additional information in your listing. Examples of the kinds of information you can put in the fields is displayed when you click the Text link below the two boxes. There is a description of the different kinds of Attributes you can use. For example, you can input Author in one box and your business name in the other box. If you use the Location alternative and place the address of the property in your post it will appear in Google Maps. That way if someone searches on your keyword and the refine your search option appears and is clicked, a new page opens with your Google Base entry plus a map showing where the property is located. If you want to use more than one extra field, you can create additional fields through a link that shows up on the page.

After you enter the Location go to the next field. It requests some keywords for the item you are posting. Some of the keywords should be the ones we optimized your web page for, like seattle real estate.

The next field asks for a description. This can be one or two sentences describing the property you are listing.

The final steps to take include previewing your post before you publish it so you can make sure all the information is correct and that it has the right picture you want on display. You can always go back and edit any of the fields or add more fields to your post before you publish it.

This presents yet another way to use Google for your business. It is quick, easy and best of all FREE!

Warren Taylor – Senior Account Executive

Here’s a recent post on Matt Cutts blog about how BigDaddy indexes website pages:

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/indexing-timeline/

Interesting read. A summary is offered and discussed in Jill Whalen’s forum:

http://www.highrankings.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=22570

I have been looking for a way to apply the 301 redirect solution to the Microsoft IIS Server. Here is the page on MSN that gives instructions:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;313074&sd;=tech

Every great once in awhile I need to see if a client website has working 301 redirects in place.

Here is a website/tool that will check the HTTP of a webpage that is fed when requested.
There are some basic instructions and expalanations on the page:

http://www.rexswain.com/httpview.html

Warren