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Content-Driven Search Engine Optimization
Over the years, SEO’s have employed a wide range of tactics. Some who violated search engine guidelines have enjoyed short-lived success. Others have pursued a long-term strategy. This usually involved more work, but paid off in the long run. The following summarizes a long-term approach to search engine optimization favored by many reputable professionals. It enables a site to attain and maintain high rankings across a wide range of keywords. This approach is not a quick fix. It may take a year for a site to reach it’s full potential with these methods, faster if you work harder. It is labor intensive and as with every approach, success will vary with the subject matter of a site, its potential audience, and the degree of its competition on the net. It may take a year for a site to reach it’s full potential with these methods, faster if you work harder. Of course, this is not an absolute or exclusive approach to SEO, but most sites would do well to apply the main principles of it.
Content
Commercial sites need to be information resources for potential clients – with relevant content that visitors will want to read and come back to repeatedly, not just to buy things but to stay informed about an industry’s main topics of interest.
Don't set up separate sites for separate functions, such as a commercial site and a resource site. Google’s algorithm prefers one site with one domain. If you have already split a site into multiple sites, you should re-combine them. Here's how.
Content is king. Google loves sites with lots of quality content. If you already have a site, find ways of building your content. If you’re planning a site, before you even decide on a domain name, start gathering content for at least 100 pages. Link pages, resource pages, about/copyright etc. pages would be in addition to this. Use your primary keywords as your main topics.
These content pages will not only be for search engine consumption – search engines are not going to buy your products. Ultimately, they will be for people to read. But most web users don't read - they scan. Writing for the web should include lots of text breaks – headers, short sentences, dashes, and bullet points – and should read quickly. Most people, unless they’re highly motivated to read what you have to say, will hit the back button before trying to read a huge overblown page.
If you’re selling products, include as much information as possible about each one. If you post articles, keep them timely, topical, and appealing to a general audience of your interest group. If you have print content – newsletters, brochures, articles you’ve written, articles that have been written about you, etc., convert them to web pages and archive them on your site. If these articles are not current, they may not hold readers’ attention, so be sure to include clear navigation on them to other areas of your site.
Stay abreast of developments in your keyword sector. If a new product is coming out at the end of the year, then build a page and have it ready in October so that search engines get it by December.
Plan on going beyond 100 pages as time goes on. Try to add 200-500 word pages to your site regularly - daily if possible. If you do this, at the end of a year’s time, you should have around 400 pages of content. That will get you good placement under a wide range of keywords, and generate reciprocal links.
If appropriate, consider adding a guest book or discussion forum to your site. This will enable your visitors to write content for you. Use options such as Email-a-friend and mailing lists to round out your site’s offerings.
Domain Name
Make it easily brandable. If it can be keyword-rich as well, fine. If not, go with brandable. Keyword-rich domain names are not as valuable as they once were.
Site Design
Keep it simple. Text content should outweigh code and pages should be viewable in all browsers. Avoid Flash, Java, JavaScript, etc. If you must use JavaScript, keep it external. Search engines can’t read it.
Keep your site clean and professional. Don't clutter or spam it with frivolous links like "best viewed in such-and-such browser" or traffic counter graphics. Google itself sets a great example here – simple, clean, fast to load. This is what both surfers and search engines prefer.
Your site should respond almost instantly to a request. Even a 3-4 second delay until "something happens" in the browser, may hurt you. By some estimates, you’ll lose 10% of your audience for every second beyond that.
Site Structure
Arrange the site logically. Name your directories after your top key word phrases. Some web designers don’t use directories. They put all their pages in the root directory, on the observation that the more deeply a page is buried in the directory hierarchy, the less favorably the search engines will rank it. Of course, this approach may be unworkable with large sites, but in any case, try to create a directory structure that’s no more than two levels deep.
Your Pages
Page Size: The smaller the better. 80% of web surfers are still at 56k or less. Keep pages under 15k if you can, preferably between 5k and 10k. This helps both search engines and surfers.
Page Optimization: Use the keyword once in each of the following: title tag, description tag, a heading, a url (link on the page), and use it once in bold, once in italics, and once high on the page. Aim for a density between 5% and 20%. Write well and use your spell checker. Search engines are learning to auto correct during searches, so you no longer need to use misspelled variations of your key words.
Link Structures
Outbound Links: From every page, link to one or two sites which rank highly for that page’s keyword. Use your keyword(s) in the link text. See if you can get those sites to link back to you.
Internal Link Structure: Don’t direct all your traffic and PageRank to one page within your site at the expense of all the others. From each page in your site, link to all other relevant pages. It’s better to have 50 pages each producing one referral a day than one page producing 50 referrals. As with outbound links, include important, relevant key word phrases in your internal links wherever possible.
Putting Your Site Online
Don't put your site online until you’re satisfied with the quality of it. Better to have no site at all online, than a "nothing" site.
Find an Internet Service Provider (ISP) that can give you a fixed IP rather than virtual hosting. With virtual hosting, you may end up sharing an IP with porn sites or a site that gets penalized for some reason, and this could adversely affect your site. Your current ISP may be able to switch you from virtual to fixed IP hosting.
Make sure your site is "crawlable" by the spiders. Each page on your site should be linked to more than one other page. As much as possible, link the page topic vertically back to root, as the major directories do. For instance, from http://dmoz.org/Health/Animal/Veterinary_Medicine/Veterinarians/Feline/, each page is linked back to all the pages above it in the topic hierarchy. If you have a standard menu on every page, it should link to your site’s main "topic index" pages.
Submit Your Site
Submit your site to the ODP (http://dmoz.org) and if your budget allows, submit to Yahoo. If you have a non-commercial site, try for a free submission to Yahoo. Find and submit to authority hubs on your keyword topic. You can submit your root URL to Google, Fast, AltaVista, Teoma, DirectHit, and Hotbot. On the other hand, you can just start getting incoming links from well-ranked sites and let the search engines find you. Google may favor sites it finds this way over submitted sites. Either way, forget about submissions after this. Regular submissions are unnecessary and possibly deleterious to your rankings. After six months, see if you got listed in all the search engines you submitted to. If not, then resubmit and forget again.
Logging and Tracking
Get a quality logger/tracker that can track inbound referrals based on log files in real time. A graphic counter is inadequate for serious sites. Make sure your ISP supports referrers. If they don’t, get a new host. After 30-60 days, you will start to see referrals from places you’re listed. Look for the keywords people are using. Do you see any you hadn’t considered? If so, then build pages around those topics. If your site is about "books", but you keep getting referrals about "book cover design", then write some relevant articles to supplement your content about the generic "books." Keep tweaking your site to feed the search engines what they want. The search engines will tell you exactly what they want to be fed – pay attention, there is gold in referral logs - it's just a matter of panning for it. Watch for spiders. If they are not crawling your full site easily, double-check your linking system (use standard hrefs). It may take two visits to get your whole site spidered by Google or Fast. Don’t hold your breath on the others. You’ll be lucky to be added to them within six months.
Link Popularity
After your site has been accepted to the ODP, identify the sites in your keyword sector of Google’s directory that have links pages or freely exchange links. Ask to swap links with them. Keep your link pages focused on your topic and don’t bother soliciting links from unrelated sites. Another good way to find related link partners is to see who’s linking to the sites ranking most highly for your key words. When you receive link requests, make sure site is related to yours, the linking page has a decent PR value (install the Google Toolbar to see this – http://toolbar.google.com) and fewer than 50 other links on the page. Links from low PR pages with hundreds of unrelated links on them will do nothing for you.
Networking
Networking is critical to the success of a site. Find relevant forums and participate. Don't just lurk. You gain much more from interacting with your colleagues. Networking will pay off in link backs, tips, email exchanges, and it will put you "in the loop" of your keyword sector.
Conclusion
Do all this, and within a year you will call your site a success. It will be drawing between 500 and 2000 referrals a day from search engines. What you do with that traffic is up to you, but that is more than enough to "do something" with.
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