Search Engine Optimization Blog

How an article on Rebranding turns into Optimization Inspiration.

I’ve learned many things over the years about website design. Some things were surprising and many others were not. But the most surprising realization I’ve come to in recent years is that one of the most important things I can do as a website designer each and every day is read. It is not important for me to sit at a computer and hand-write code all day if I want to create the best websites that I can. On the contrary, the more time I spend writing code the more likely it will be that I continue to use bad habits and continue to produce sub-optimal websites for clients.

Now I’m not saying that I never need to write code. What I’m saying is that every day I find myself learning more and more from the resources around me about how to produce high quality websites and, more importantly, highly optimized websites. OK so this realization didn’t hit me in the face all of a sudden like a hot cup of coffee on a cold Wisconsin morning. Indeed, I’ve been familiar with the concept, that the more I read the more I will know, for quite some time now. But today I was struck by just how many ideas spring out of the information I read pertaining to website optimization.

Let me begin with the backdrop for how this recent website optimization realization began…
On my way to work today I dropped by the mailbox to see if I had missed anything important from yesterday’s mail drop. Inside my mailbox lay the December 2008 issue of Inc. magazine. I really like reading this magazine because it usually generates many good ideas and it always stimulates my creative side which usually results in some kind of update to our website. The Twitter updates to our main page are an example of one such implementation.

This month’s Sales and Marketing article is entitled “The Rebranding Game - If at first you pick the wrong name, you can always try, try again” and is written by Ryan McCarthy. In it, Ryan asks Danny Altman, founder of the naming and branding firm A Hundred Monkeys, how a business can improve their chances for choosing the right name a second time around. Altman’s response gave way to my new website optimization realization which, in an effort to make itself the center of attention, reached up, grabbed me by the nape of my neck and forced me to read those words again. Ryan described how Altman takes clients through an eight- to 10-week process that begins with a series of brainstorming sessions where clients will produce a number of names that answer broad philosophical questions. The questions Altman relayed to Ryan were: Who are we? What are we good at? What territory do we want to occupy?

OK so you’ve read those questions as I’ve relayed them here and you might be sitting there wondering… What is this guy talking about? What kind of website optimization realization did he pull out of that mess of philosophical mumbo jumbo?

Well first I’ll give this realization in a nutshell. Then I’ll go into detail about how this realization can be used to optimize your website, and in a way that better reaches your desirable customers, those consumers that come to you as sales rather than leads.

Nutshell: This portion of the article is about Rebranding and in particular coming up with a new name for your business from the results of brainstorming sessions based on broad philosophical questions. If these broad philosophical questions can be used to help you pick the best name for your business, in other words the name that describes everything about your business in one word, then why can they not also be used to optimize your website?

OK enough with the nutshell and on to the details. If you can rebrand your business with a completely new name that better matches your company by answering broad philosophical questions, then you should be able to take those same questions and use them to optimize your website content so that it also better matches your company. By including answers to these broad questions on every page of your website you will always maintain the right keywords and content for your target market.

The following questions are those questions used in the article; there will be many more questions you can ask yourself about your company as you are optimizing your website. Let’s think about these questions from a search engine optimization standpoint.

Who are we?

Many times companies will want to include as much information as possible about the services they provide and products they are selling. This doesn’t make it easy to stick to the primary purpose of explaining to the customer who we are now does it?

For example, let’s say we run a web hosting company and included in our services are virtual dedicated and dedicated servers. Because we want customers to know that we offer premium web hosting on the best servers we start writing web pages about our servers. First, we start off by rambling on with a lot of product information about IBM System x3850 Express servers. Then we go on to describe the latest Citrix System XenServer™ Enterprise Edition software our company uses to provide virtual dedicated hosting solutions. Pretty soon we find that we have put together a fairly impressive advertisement for IBM servers and Citrix software.

As search engine optimizers we know that CONTENT is KING, but you can see that we’ve started to go too far and way off topic. We are starting to include tangents in the company’s website content don’t help customers understand who we are and what we do. If this content is detracting from who we are to our customers then it certainly isn’t going to help our search engine rankings.

If we want to rank well for the keywords that describe who we are and what we do then we need to make sure we stick to that content throughout our website. It might matter to one or two customers that we use the latest Citrix virtualization software for hosting their websites, but our purpose is not to market Citrix – our purpose is to market ourselves and what we do.

What are we good at?

Working along the same lines as the previous question “Who are we?” we oftentimes lose focus when writing about what we are good at. Every company wants to be the best at everything they do. But if your company has too many products and services you will never be able to rank well for all of them. It is usually at this point that a company needs to focus on what makes them successful, what they do best.

How about discount superstores like Walmart, Menards or Home Depot? When your business provides many different products to many different people how can you describe what you are good at? Walmart’s does a nice job focusing on their “low prices” instead of the thousands of products you can find in their stores. Menards might be known for providing lumber and hardware products but they also focus on low prices. You might not be able to rattle off a product that they specialize in, but you can definitely remember their jingle, “Save BIG Money at Menards!”

Our own company, Capable Media, provides website design and web hosting services, but what we are good at and specialize in is Internet marketing and Search Engine Optimization. Instead of including extra information about graphic design and web hosting we focus on our primary skills with Website Optimization and Accessible Website Design. These are the services that we are good at and so these are the keywords we want to include within the content of our website.

What territory do we want to occupy?

Every business would like to be everything to everyone and even everywhere. But the reality of the situation is your business is successful because you found a market that you could perform well in and then you start to succeed. Let’s face it you can’t offer the same services to everyone and you can’t be everywhere at once. For example, cable companies cannot provide the same services to rural communities that they offer customers in cities and suburbs right?

Myspace is the world’s most successful social network with an estimated 110 million active users. Myspace’s territory is primarily youth and users interested in multimedia: music, photo-sharing, and videos. Facebook maintains the number 2 spot for social networks. Facebook chose to stick with a territory they knew well, colleges. By introducing their social network to college students and professionals throughout the US, Facebook was able to grow without being in direct competition with Myspace.

The territory that our company wants to occupy is with small and medium-sized businesses throughout the Chippewa Valley and the Eau Claire metropolitan area. Businesses that are just getting their feet wet in the big pool that is the World Wide Web. Businesses that are ready for Internet marketing and that want to see high rankings for their company website. We only see growth in this market and are very excited to be a part of it. So when we write copy for our website we write about Internet marketing and accessible web sites.

I began this article by talking about how surprising I found it that I spend more of my time reading than I do writing code. Maybe this won’t come as a surprise to some of our readers, but there should be a few of you out there nodding your heads. This blog post is a great example for how I found myself reading an article that wasn’t specifically targeting search engine optimization, but inside that article I found useful information for better optimizing client websites.

Source

Ryan McCarthy (December 2008), The Rebranding Game – If at first you pick the wrong name, you can always try, try again. Inc. 37-38.

Pretty much everyone that works with SEO (search engine optimization) can agree that there aren’t any real secrets to it. However, if that is true, then why is it that there are so many websites out there that simply do not use any of the blatantly obvious optimization techniques? The answer to that question is simple. Most people (businesses) don’t know what these techniques are. But let’s go beyond that, many of these same people (businesses) really don’t understand how much SEO they can actually do themselves. Today I will discuss five do-it-yourself seo tips that you can use right now to start getting your website ranked.

Let’s start with on-page optimization. According to HubSpot, On-page SEO makes up roughly 25% of the factors that Google uses to rank webpages in its search engine results pages. What this means, in a nutshell, is that the portion of SEO that a business has the most control over only accounts for 25% of the work that must be done. Well that’s easy enough and straight to the point. So let’s make it quick and get right to the the meat of this post, because after the On-page SEO is finished there is still another 75% of the job left to finish!

Tip #1 - Name your page

The first part of On-page SEO should include deciding what your page is all about. This is where you are going to build the “title” of your page. If you were asked to describe your webpage in 10 words or less, what would your answer be? Not only do you need to describe everything that can be found on this webpage, you also need to make your page sound pretty amazing at the same time. Because who wants to click on a link to what might be dullest story ever posted to the web?

Titling a webpage is much like titling a blog post. You want to state exactly what you are going to talk about, but in a way that is interesting so that you will actually gain some readers. Now, this isn’t always going to be the case, because let’s face it some pages were meant to be dull and uninteresting. “Terms & Conditions”, now that’s a page that everyone really wants to read, right?

One thing to remember about titling your webpage is this: make sure that your page title is unique. I repeat, make sure that your page title is unique. No one wants to read the same thing over and over again and search engines like it when you describe your webpages uniquely throughout your website. Performing SEO on a new page? Time to write a new “title.”

Ok, now that we’ve decided on a title (we’ll go ahead and use “Top 5 DIY SEO Tips” for our example) let’s throw it into our webpage. You can do this by opening up your webpage in the editor of your choice (notepad, dreamweaver, visual studio, etc…) and find the text located between the 2 title tags (<title></title>). This is where you are able to “name your page.” For the purposes of this discussion we would end up with a title that looks something like this: <title>Top 5 DIY SEO Tips</title>. On our Search Engine Optimization Blog, Wordpress writes the title of our blog into every page of the blog so the actual title of this page is “Search Engine Optimization Blog » Top 5 DIY SEO Tips.”

If you have any questions about how to edit your title tags, or if you are having problems doing so, you can send us an email with your issue and we’ll be able to help you out.

Tip #2 - Describe your page

The second tip for SEO that you can do yourself involves another piece of On-page SEO. This piece is the description for your webpage. This piece looks a little different from the title tags in the first tip; instead of looking between two tags like <title></title>, you will need to look for the information found in one of the meta tags. Meta tags are located in the <head></head> portion of your webpage, just like the title tags are. The description meta tag might look something like this: <meta name=”description” content=”Five do-it-yourself SEO tips for optimizing your website. Search engine optimization that you can do yourself.” />.

As you can see in the previous paragraph we’ve inserted a short phrase that describes the type of content you should expect to find on this webpage. A short descriptive phrase that can be read naturally by a potential visitor to your website is probably the best way to complete this part of search engine optimization for your website.  The main reason that you want this phrase to be easily read is because the description that you give here is what a search engine is going to use to describe your webpage to anyone that finds your webpage on their search results. Combined with an exciting unique title, the description can be a great call to action for anyone searching for information through a search engine.

Before we move on to the next tip I want to make a quick suggestion. Even though this second tip is all about the description tag of your webpage, I believe you can take this information and use it as the basis for every other piece of content on the page itself. If you describe your webpage as containing 5 do-it-yourself seo tips, like we did, then you better make sure that the content matches the description. So before you move on to linkbuilding, make certain that the page content you are going to be linking to matches its title and description.

Here is where we are at after the first two tips.

<title>Top 5 DIY SEO Tips</title>

<meta name=”description” content=”Five do-it-yourself SEO tips for optimizing your website. Search engine optimization that you can do yourself.” />.

Tip #3 - Link to your page

The first two tips are probably the largest pieces of On-page optimization. Now it is time to talk about the biggest piece of Off-page optimization - linkbuilding. Link building can be accomplished in many different ways, but we’re going to stick with the ones that you can do yourself. This should make sense, since this is a DIY SEO tip!

When doing linkbuilding yourself and without the help of an SEO firm you need to be careful how you approach potential opportunities. The first word of caution that we want to give you is to watch which directories you are thinking about using to link to your website. There are many directories out there that offer “free” listings and just ask that you complete a form with information about yourself and your company. The main problem with these “free” directories is that they do not discriminate against websites based on the amount of value these websites might or might not have. This means that you may have worked very hard at creating a good name for your company and at producing a very high quality product, but you are going to be listed right alongside all of the fly-by-night companies that laugh in the face of all your hard work.

Directories like those described in the previous paragraph will more than likely hurt your page ranking more than they will help it, so we suggest sticking to a very few directories and ones that put potential listers through the ringer in order to get listed. The directories that we would suggest you use are DMOZ.org, Yahoo!, and Business.com. DMOZ is a free directory, but is monitored heavily by a group of moderators who make it very difficult for the fly-by-night operation to get listed. For this reason, we definitely recommend a listing in DMOZ’s Open Directory Project. Both Yahoo! and Business.com offer their directory submissions at a fee so choose these directories based on how much you are willing to spend (Yahoo! charges $299/yearly).

Directories are not the only way for you to build links that point to your webpages, there are many other venues that you can choose to use but make sure that you use the same caution with these venues as you would with a free directory. Additional opportunities for link building include: partnerships (you link to me and I’ll link to you), press releases, blogs (start your own and get added to the blogosphere!), and other social media.

Directories, press releases, blogs, and other social media are definitely useful when building links to your webpages. Linkbuilding is by far the most important aspect of search engine optimization and will help you immensely when climbing ranks with your website. But remember this: if you do all of this and your website doesn’t have enough high quality content, you will begin to spin your wheels. All of the momentum in the world isn’t going to help your website rank any higher than it already is if you don’t have enough traction to continue moving forward. This is where high quality content comes in.

At the beginning of this article I stated that HubSpot describes On-page SEO as being just 25% of the work required to get Google to notice your webpage. The other 75% is Off-page SEO and consists of the linkbuilding opportunities suggested above, but just as importantly it consists of building high quality content that visitors will not only read… but will also “link” to. By becoming a reliable, quality resource for the type of information that your target audience is looking for, you can gain more press than you could ever pay for. If your website has content that is worth coming back for and worth telling others about, then you’ve achieved the sort of traction that will drive your website and your business forward.

Tip #4 - Rate your page

The first three tips have covered On-page SEO and Off-page SEO, but there is another item that needs to be discussed if you are going to be able to know whether or not you are succeeding. This is where the tip “rate your page” comes in. In order to understand whether or not your efforts in SEO are working, you need to be able to measure the results.

There are a number of websites, and a number of companies, that have been created to provide for this very necessary component of SEO. Analyzing how well your webpages are doing will let you know whether or not you are doing the right things for your website to begin ranking better. The main factor will of course be your webpage’s position in the search engine results pages for the keywords that you are targeting, but there are other factors that you can monitor as well. These include PageRank, Alexa Traffic Rank, Blog Rank, # of inbound links, and others…

By monitoring this information, you will be able to learn whether or not your SEO efforts are helping or hurting your webpages. This information will help you better understand how well you are doing and where you should make some changes to your strategies. Tip number four is a little bit easier than the rest because most of the information is out there and available to you, but it is up to you to continuously measure this information in order for you to make the right choices for optimizing your website.

Tip #5 - Repeat Tips 1-4

Perhaps the hardest item on the table, tip number five definitely hits on a subject that isn’t always talked about during a typical SEO consultation. No one in SEO wants to tell a potential client that when they’ve finally finished optimizing their website they are going to need to start over and do it all again. Who wants to hear something like that, right??

Well, it may be sad, but it is true. In order to maintain the amount of success that moving to the first page of the search engine results pages brings, you will have to go back to step one and start all over again many, many times if you want to continue to be at the top of the list. Why is this so? Well, to put it bluntly, it is because you are not the only fish in the sea, and many others are out there trying to climb just as high or higher!

I consider these tips to be the Top 5 DIY SEO Tips because they contain the most important steps that you can take to optimizing your website that you can actually do yourself. There are many other tips that will help you rank higher in the search engines, but these five are the most important.

I hope you’ve enjoyed my first article here at the Capable Media Search Engine Optimization Blog. I want to put a lot of time and effort into each of the articles that I write so expect a little bit of time between each update, but rest assured that they will possess the same amount of quality information. Thanks again!

Welcome to Capable Media’s Search Engine Optimization Blog.

This is, as you can tell, our first post for our search engine optimization blog. We hope that you are able to find a lot of useful information about optimizing your website here at our blog. This is where we will be providing tips, tutorials, and information for small and medium sized businesses that are interested in finding out how they can stimulate growth for their business online!