Utah Search Engine Optimization | SEO

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Stoney deGeyter recently wrote a great post on when usability is more important than SEO. Stoney ends by stating “By fixing usability issues you can sell more while without having to spend a lot of money always trying to bring in a lot of new traffic. A little goes a long way. Once you are able to increase your conversion rates, every dollar you spend on marketing and SEO will be more effective and have a much bigger impact on your profit margins.” Stoney is absolutely right. Rather than spending more money or efforts for the #1 position, try improving the usability, accessibility, and marketing communication of your current site. Exponential growth is derived from such improvements and will equate to higher conversion.

With this article in mind I got into a conversation with a great and well-respected Flash developer, Dan Decort, about Flash and the caveats it places on usability and search engine optimization. My problem with Flash is that the increased load times make for larger file sizes, longer waiting periods, inaccessible content, inability to bookmark, print or deep link, no screen reader and mobile device support, uncrawlable architecture, and overall problems with accessibility, usability, and SEO.

Sure, Google can crawl a limited amount of Flash now, but that’s just Google. Other search engines don’t have that technology implemented yet. I’m sure Google places less weight on Flash content due to the inaccessibility of it to other users. We started talking about technologies like SWFAddress and SEFFS that almost serve as a cloaking mechanism for Flash. SWFAddress does “address” some of these usability and accessibility issues but I’d still choose static/dynamic pages over Flash pages any day. Yes, if you’re serving the exact same content to search engines as embedded in your Flash movie then you should have the green light to go ahead and do so, but you might be looking at running the site through a spam filter with Google to check your site with a fine-toothed comb.

Aside from SEO, let’s get into the meat and potatoes of this discussion. After my ranting and raving about Flash, Dan made the comment that user-experience is more important than usability, although he didn’t discredit usability. To define the difference for you:

• Usability - a property of websites (and other systems and products) that relates to ease of use. Usability is commonly defined as having three core components: effectiveness (how well a task can be completed), efficiency (how easy or quick it is to complete the task), and satisfaction (the user’s perception or opinion of the system).
• User-Experience - a concept that places the end-user at the focal point of design and development efforts, as opposed to the system, its applications or its aesthetic value alone

It’s important to note that usability and accessibility both DO contribute to the overall user-experience as well, but while user-experience is an important element of information design it really should be the icing on the cake not the foundation of the skyscraper. Usability is what drives conversion on a Website due to the efficiency in of usage, findability of desired content, and ability to navigate through site architecture with ease. Flash user-experience provides bells and whistles to be admired by people like myself and Dan, but your average user isn’t going to care about the feedback of the site (animation, graphics, sounds, actions) as much as he or she is going to care about information retrieval and timely satisfaction.

I invite you to join the oratory of our discussions and leave your feedback.

Recently, Yahoo! and Google have both been adding new options to their search engine result pages (SERPs). These options include Google’s PlusBox and and Yahoo’s Quicklinks. Illustrated below is Google’s PlusBox for Walmart. They have a PlusBox for their stock quote that expands to give stock information. Along with that, they have category or sub-page links within their site. Google typically does this for strong authorative Websites with a high amount of Trust Rank.

Another example below shows Google’s PlusBox being used for localized search. They have a PlusBox that shows the localized listing in the SERPs with their map, address, and phone number. You don’t have to be an extreme authority to have a PlusBox with this type of localized integration.

Yahoo’s Quick Links are similar to Google showing subpages for authorative sites. However, Yahoo! will also be charging for these Quick Links if you’re a site that doesn’t get them naturally. The think I like better about these Quick Links in the search engine result pages is that they are inline horizontally. Thus, they take up less room.

Good or Bad Usability Practices?

In my opinion, I think Google and Yahoo! are getting out of hand with their SERPs. I firmly believe in allowing the Websites, authorative or not, to display their prominent content to the user (i.e. stock quotes, maps, sub pages, shopping categories, etc.). It is a search engine’s job to display quality and relevant results to queries, but it is not the search engines job to display a site’s content to the user.

When you have more options on a Webpage you have more:

• Distraction
• Noise
• Thinking
• Load Time
• Code
• Images
• Bandwidth (a problem for mobile search)

I think Google became the most popular search engine not by their results but by their simplistic user interface and good usability. Both Yahoo! and MSN have searches integrated into their news pages whereas Google has just had a single standalone search box.

I’m sure I stand alone on this because I’m sure Google and Yahoo! both held extensive case studies, focus groups, stakeholder research, and testing before putting this into motion. I guess they know what they’re doing, but I’m annoyed by it. Sometimes less is more, right?

The way SEOs conduct search engine optimization is changing all the time. The future of a large portion of search engine optimization is really just good usability, accessibility, development, design, information architecture, and marketing. All those measures are going to lead to one thing: developing a quality site that gets users to visit, read, bookmark, act, and come back for more.

Search engines like Google, Yahoo!, and MSN will start observing how users behave on your Website to add to a hidden trust rank score, similar to a page rank score. Google already has the tools in place to observe this data through Google Toolbar, Google Desktop, Google Analytics, and sites that have registered XML sitemaps with their Google accounts. With these kind of tools Google can measure how many people visit your site, what pages they land on, how long they stay, what they click on, what they book mark, form submissions, etc. This data is invaluable in calculating the authorative value and trustability of a Website. Once this information is collected it can be used in their algorithm to give further trust rank to Websites and thus boost their SERPs.

There are two approaches to this for whatever hat you wear. Whitehat SEOs will have to make better quality sites and focus on user retention and driving calls to action. Blackhat SEOs will figure out some methodology of fake user-surfing emulation. Either way, it’s time to start preparing for the inevitable.

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(wmv - Double Click to view full screen)

In this screen capture vidcast I give strategic development and SEO advice on two URLs of one of my professors. Below is a summary of the things I came acrossin these two different Websites. If you would like your Website analyzed and posted on my blog please e-mail me at Jordan {at} JordanKasteler {dot} com.

Podcast-Tuneup.com

Things to work on:

• Canonical issue of index.html to WWW version of domain and /main/ version of domain
• Keyword Research
• Include Keywords in Meta Data / Titles
• Descriptive ALT attributes
• Anchor text usage
• Content optimization for keywords
• Inline Javascript and CSS usage
• Blog URL length
• Deprecated HTML
• Duplicate content of RSS feed, blog page, and permalink
• Duplicate content of printer friendly version
• Favicon is Squarspace’s

Things that are good:

• Canonical issue of WWW vs non-WWW
• Usage of “Podcast” in Title/H1 tags
• Good linking
• Tableless layout
• External CSS/Javascript files
• Favicon
• Inline Javascript and CSS usage
• RSS feed offered via “link rel”
• Custom error 404
• Printer friendly version offered
• Included keyword in domain name

NANlink.com

Things to work on:

• Canonical issue of index.html, WWW version, and non-WWW version of domain
• Title tag
• Make CSS external
• Avoid 100% Flash
• Seach engine listings
• Custom error 404

Things that are good:

• Tableless layout
• Valid use of Flash embedding

My top ten list of search engine optimization techniques will primarily focus on on-page optimization with the exception of a couple things. I want to keep this list more at a beginner-level because I intend it to be a general protocol list for Webmasters to implement in their development. I will explain the list in much further detail below.

1. Canonical Domain Issues
2. Keyword Research
3. Title Tag Optimization
4. Meta Data
5. Keyword Density
6. On-page keyword Usage (ALT attribute, H tags, body copy, meta data, title, anchor text, images, file/folder names)
7. Sitemaps
8. Crawlability Issues
9. Code Optimization
10. Internal/External Links

1. Canonical Domain Issues – Typically a domain can consist of several different versions such as: www.domain.com, domain.com, www.domain.com/index.( html | htm | php | asp | jsp | etc). Google can read your WWW and non-WWW as two different versions of your site. The bad thing about this is it triggers a duplicate content filter and then chooses to index only one version. Let’s say Google indexed your non-WWW version, and all of your backlinks went primarily to your WWW version. Well those are wasted backlinks now because they aren’t being passed.

Solution: 301 redirects with a .htaccess file if your site is hosted on an Apache server. A 301 redirect is a “permanent move” of a Webpage. The code below tells bots to redirect the non-WW, index.html, index.htm, and/or index.php to the www.domain.com version. Place the following code in a file called .htaccess and put it in your root directory of your site:

Options +FollowSymLinks

RewriteEngine on

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domain\.com

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [R=permanent,L]

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /([^/]+/)*index\.(htm(l)?|php)\ HTTP/

RewriteRule ^(([^/]+/)*)index\.(htm(l)?|php)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

If you’re using an IIS server instead of Apache then do this:

• Open Internet Services Manager, right click on the file or folder you wish to redirect
• Select “a redirection to a URL”
• Enter the Webpage of redirection
• Check “exact URL entered above” and “A permanent redirection for this resource”
• Then “Apply” those settings.

2. Keyword Research – There are a lot of great resources out there for keyword research that I’d like to share. One of my favorites is by Aaron Wall author of SEOBook. His free tool is a compilation of many different keyword research sources ran together to help you find what people are searching for. It can be found at SEOBook.

Overture.com, also known as Yahoo!, has always offered a free keyword selection tool. Overture Keyword suggestion tool

Keyworddiscovery.com and Wordtracker.com have always been the two biggest paid ones. However, Keyword Discovery is currently offering a free keyword search tool. There was a good article in Search Marketing Standard comparing the pros and cons of each. Unfortunately, I have no used Keyword Discovery, but I have been very pleased with Word Tracker. It’s also good for finding those long-tail keywords. In case you are wondering, the long-tail is the 5-7 word longer key phrases that are less popular. A lot of marketers have found it very beneficial to target these large amounts of longer phrases than the few extremely popular ones. I will blog more about this another time.

Incorporating related words and phrasing to your targeted keyword is very important to spiders especially in relation to LSI/A and PaIR. I will blog more about LSI/A and PaIR later, but for now just know that your content should have a related theme to your keyword, and not just be filled with “happy text”. MSN recently released adCenter Labs. There is a tool on here called “Search Result Clustering” which is great for finding related keywords to your main keyword. The caveat is there data is based of their top 10 results for your keyword. MSN ranks sites differently than Google. MSN results tend to favor on-page SEO and Google tends to favor off-page SEO.

3. Title Tag Optimization – Titles should stick around 5-7 words. A lot of people will say that it’s not how many words but its how many characters. I’ve found word-count to be more important. Your title should have your main keyword and then your branding, typically.

For example: Utah Search Engine Optimization | Utah’s SEO Pro

I’ve managed to stick to 7 words, and incorporate my main keywords. Fortunately for me, my branding, “Utah’s SEO Pro”, is also related to my main keyphrase “Utah Search Engine Optimization”. Keywords and branding should be separated in titles with either a dash – or a pipe |. I lean towards pipes since dashes are also used in breaking up words.

4. Meta Data – How many times have you heard someone claiming they know SEO because they know how to construct meta data? I know I have many times. Meta data isn’t half as important as it used to be. I’ve read recently that MSN is the only one who cares about the meta description tag anymore. Even if they don’t matter they’re still good to have because some search engines still use them. Also, meta description is used as the descriptive text in your search engine listing. Here’s an example of proper meta data:

<meta name=”keywords” content=”utah search engine optimization, utah seo, utahs seo pro, salt lake city, utah, search engine marketing, social media, utah web designer, jordan kasteler” />

<meta name=”description” content=”Utah’s SEO Pro is a blog and podcast related to search engine optimization and search engine marketing. Author and Host, Jordan Kasteler, is a Utah SEO professional who is been working in the area of search engine optimization for quite some time now.” />

Here are some rules to follow for your meta keyword:

• List keywords in order of most important to least important
• Keep keywords around 250 characters or below. MSN accepts a maximum of 1024.
• Be careful of repeating a keyphrase more than 6 or 7 times
• Don’t use keywords in your meta data that cannot be found on your page’s content

5. Keyword Density – It used to be that people kept a very close watch on the density of keyword in their body content. Typically they kept their keyword density around 2-7%. Now days there is very little weight on the keyword density of your content as long as it’s not overdone or unnatural appearing. They keyword density I’m referring to is in your meta data and title tag. I’m not going to give you an exact rule to follow, but just use common sense for this. Don’t have your title, meta keywords, and meta description all be just your main keyphrase. That’s a 100% density and will raise a red flag.

6. On-page Keyword Usage – There is such thing as over-optimization if you abuse your usage of your main keyphrase. The places you do want to have your keywords and keyphrases are here:

• ALT attributes
• H tags
• Body copy
• Meta data
• Title
• Anchor text
• Images, file, and folder names

ALT attributes can be added to your <img> tags. They tell spiders and screen readers what that image is about. If possible, use your main keywords to describe the image.

H tags should be set up as a hierarchical tree of headings. Your main header description of your page’s content should be a H1 tag. The H1 tag is the most important and should include your main keywords or keyphrase. Secondary headers should be H2’s, Tertiary should be H3’s, etc.

Body copy should have your main keyphrases used throughout. It’s most important to have them in the first 200 and last 200 words of the content. Extra weight is given to them if they are bolded or italicized. This is an old technique that many SEOs cringe against using, but search engines, especially MSN, still give good weight for it. Like I said before, there is such thing as over-optimization. I wouldn’t bold the main keywords more than 3 times in a typical 750 word page.

Meta data – We’ve discussed this up until now, but to recap, don’t overdo it. Don’t repeat keyphrase more than 6 or 7 times, keep meta keywords to 1024 characters or preferably 250 or below, and don’t add keywords that can’t be found in your content.

Title – We’ve also discussed this as well. Don’t go too far past 7 words and don’t repeat your keywords in your title.

Anchor text is very important for internal and external links. Your anchor text tells crawlers and users what that link is about. It is important to you user main keywords in the anchor text of link to give that particular page or site good ranking for that keyword or keyphrase. When getting backlinks from other people, try to vary your anchor text around your main keyphrase. Too many backlinks with the exact same keyphrase, especially in a short amount of time, will trigger Google’s ‘Google Bomb’ filter.

Images, files, and folder names should also be focused around your main keyphrase. Use dashes (-) when separating words in your naming convention. Dashes tell search engines that the word is separated. Underscores (_) tell search engines to read it as a whole. For example:

Utah-SEO-Pro.jpg will tell a search engine to read “Utah SEO Pro” as the name of that image.

Utah_SEO_Pro.jpg will tell a search engine to read “UtahSEOPro” as the name of the image.

Do you see where your keyphrase can be hurt by using underscores?

7. Sitemaps – Sitemaps are important to search engines and users. My favorite sitemap tool is www.xml-sitemaps.com. It will create an XML, ROR, and HTML sitemap for your Website. In addition, it will create a URL list of all your pages to submit to Yahoo! for indexing that can be submitted here http://search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html. The XML map is made especially for Google to submit to their Webmaster tools that can be submitted here http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/. This is important in telling Google how to crawl your site. MSN, Google, and Yahoo! teamed up to create one generalized protocol for XML sitemaps at www.sitemaps.org. It’s nice to seem they playing together on this issue.

8. Crawlability Issues - Never hide your navigation behind Flash, JavaScript, or Images. Always use text for search engines to crawl your navigation. CSS gives your text-based navigation the power of styling similar to using images and the power of roll over similar to JavaScript menus. Spiders have a hard time crawling Flash, and almost impossible time with JavaScript, and they can’t read text that is made from an image (although, Google’s new vector reading patent on images might change that in the future). If you are insistent on having a Flash menu or image-based menu then I suggest creating a text-equivalent alternative in the footer of your site.

If you have a dynamic site then your pages might not be crawlable if they have many parameters. If your URL looked like this for example:

http://www.domain.com/folder/index.php?var=1234&sort=date

Google can typically crawl up to 2 or 3 parameters of your site. It’s best not to risk it though. Any more parameters than 2 or 3 you definitely need to use Mod_Rewrite

Solution:

Mod_Rewrite. Many tools can be found on the internet such as this one: http://www.linkvendor.com/seo-tools/url-rewrite.html. In a (.htaccess) file you can tell your Apache server to write your parameter-based URL to appear as a static URL such as : http://www.domain.com/folder/1234.html instead of http://www.domain.com/folder/index.php?var=1234&sort=date.

9. Code Optimization – CSS layouts have many benefits over table layouts. They lessen your code-to-text ratio and allow spiders to access your content easier without sifting through tons of nested markup. Keep your CSS and JavaScript out of the <head> and in external stylesheets. This reduces your on-page markup and index page’s file size. It also gives a slightly quicker load time. You can use PHP to combine your scripts into one file so it only makes one call to the server. It also can strip out empty space and comments to condense file size. To learn how to do that visit: http://www.ejeliot.com/blog/72.

For table data use the “summary” attribute to tell screen readers (and search engines) what the content in that table is about. Also, use the ALT attribute to describe images. “Longdesc” is a good attribute if you have a longer description of something such as a Flash movie. You can store the description in a completely separate HTML file it will read from.

It’s good practice to keep your code validated. The World Wide Web Consortium offers great code validation tools for XHTML and CSS. Although, Matt Cutts claimed that Google doesn’t care if your code is validated or not other crawlers might. If there’s a code conflict it can halt the spider dead in it’s tracks and may not be able to fully crawl your site.

10. Internal/External Links – Receiving external links from other sites is the #1 item of importance for your rankings. If “content is king” then “linking is queen”. Just keep in mind that pages that link to you should be related to your content. One-way links from sites carry far greater weight than links that are reciprocated. Reciprocal links are a dying practice. Try to keep a good ratio of top-level URL links and deep links. This means don’t get all links going to your www.domain.com. Get some links going to the most prominent pages of your Website (i.e. www.domain.com/page.html). The reason being is because it looks natural to search engines when someone is linking to something specific, like your internal page, rather than something general like your main domain. There are many variables that determine the weight of the link such as:

· The content of the page that’s linking to you

· Where on the page your link is (within the body content is the best)

· If it’s a directory listing then the higher on the page the better

· The anchor text of the link (should include your keywords)

· The # of outgoing links the page that linking to you currently has

· The relevance and authority of the page that’s linking to you (PageRank is a small determination of that)

· If the site linking to you is blacklisted in search engines or not

Internal links help users find things throughout your site, and help search engines crawl pages better. It’s good practice of information architecture to link to related pages within your content. This will help pass PageRank throughout your site as well.