SEO in 2012: An Essential Guide to Search Engine Optimization

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1 SEO in 2012: An Essential Guide to Search Engine Optimization Whether you re new to SEO or need to improve your skills, this guide is designed to teach basic-to-advanced methods for getting a website crawled, indexed, and ranked in search engine results. Additionally, you ll find corresponding digital marketing ideas that employed correctly will boost SEO return on investment and help you beat the competition online. Why is online search important? Search engines are a crucial necessity for commerce in today s marketplace. Roughly 80-90% of considered purchasesboth online and offline- is the result of a search on Google, Yahoo, or Bing. Combine online advertising with traditional avenues of stimulus- television commercials, radio advertising, magazine ads, word-of-mouth recommendations- and you will find that all roads lead to search. Today s always-on consumers use search engines to find a restaurant, buy a house, price a new or used automobile, purchase insurance, hire an attorney, buy groceries, start a relationship, plan a vacation, purchase movie tickets, and so much more. Major life purchases all the way down to daily household items are searched for, compared, and purchased online millions of times every second of every day. But search doesn t stop with consumers. Every day millions of new business partnerships start online. Everything from hiring a web developer, to placing job ads, equipment procurement, supply-chain management, purchasing software, leasing office space, managing documents, and much more can be accomplished at astonishingly fast speeds by using a search engine. If you re looking for a cost-effective way to find new talent, purchase needed supplies, or start a business of your own, chances are that a search engine is where you ll start. And just to illustrate the importance of search in today s B2B arena: 93% of online B2B purchases in 2011 were facilitated through online search. What is Search Engine Optimization? Search Engine Optimization, commonly abbreviated as SEO, is the process of improving and promoting your website in search engine results. The primary benefit of SEO is receiving targeted click traffic looking for what you have to offer. By marketing your website in search results you can achieve almost limitless reach, unsurpassed relevance, and unbeatable ROI for your ad dollars. How can I get my website to appear in search results? Search engine technology is smart and complex. However, you don t have to be an advanced programmer to know the basics. By using this guide of essential best practices, your website will get indexed by search engines and start sending targeted traffic in a relatively short amount of time. Here s where to start: Create unique and interesting content Offer users quality products, information, and services. Avoid duplicating content from other areas of your website or elsewhere on the web. Keep in mind your users needs, language, and locations when developing online content. Organize your content and make it easy to read. Search engines recognize the needs of users and rank webpages based on relevance, user interaction and votes from other websites. Ultimately, build a website around user needs with great content and the search engines will reward you with good rankings. Choose the right keywords Think like your customers. What words would they use to describe your product or services? Stay targeted and relevant in your approach to keyword selection. Choose keywords based on how closely related they are to your content, products, or services, and avoid targeting search phrases based on broad themes with disproportionately high search volume. Keyword research begins with creating a list words that represents your products, services, or content and then expanding this list by using the Google AdWords Keyword Tool. For advanced analysis, run your keywords through Google using search operators to determine the competitive landscape of each keyword. The best search operators for measuring the competition in search results are exact match, allintitle, allinanchor, and allinurl. Build a database of keywords and filter down to the most relevant selections and then assign unique keywords or phrases to each webpage. Utilize concise and unique page titles The page title of a webpage is the most important first-step to properly optimizing your content for search engines. Use this tag to accurately describe your webpage s content. Start with the most competitive keywords in the 2012 Accelerate Media, Inc. Page 1 of 5

2 beginning of the page title and the least competitive towards the end. Also, when possible you should avoid using extraneous words, spaces, and character symbols. A highly effective method for targeting multiple keywords that are closely related or have the same meaning is to craft a long-tail phrase starting with the most competitive terms and ending with the least competitive. This is also known as keyword proximity. The results of your keyword research should guide this effort clearly. Remember to keep your page titles brief at seventy characters or less with spaces. Avoid duplicating exact copies of page titles across other webpages. Here is an example of a page title displayed in search results: Here s what the title tag looks like in HTML: <title>water Gardens, Water Gardening, Ponds and Backyard Pond Designs</title> An important benefit to using precisely targeted keywords in the page title is shown above in the bold text. If the keyword in your page titles matches the search query entered in the search engine it will subsequently be displayed in bold text. Users are far more likely to click on the closest match to their search query which in turn will increase click-thru-rates to your website. Describe your content accurately via meta description tags The meta description tag contains a description of your webpage and is displayed just below the page title in search engine results. Use this tag to summarize what the page is about for both users and search engines. Include the most important keywords about that page in the tag and utilize a call to action or other actionable information. Here is an example of the meta description tag as displayed in search results: Here s what the meta description tag looks like in HTML: <meta name= description content= Aquascape is the leader in water gardens, water gardening, ecosystem ponds and backyard pond designs. Create your water garden with Aquascape! > As with the page title, a key benefit to using targeted keywords in the meta description tag is illustrated above. Keywords in the description that match the search query are shown in bold text. Users are far more likely to click on the closest match to their search query which in turn will increase click-thru-rates to your website. Structure your page copy through use of keyword-rich headings Headings organize content on your webpage and make it easier for users and search engines to understand. There are six sizes of headers, H1through H6, and each one should be used according to the hierarchy of your content. A best practice for SEO is to utilize a keywords in the headers based on the structure of the content starting with the most important target keyword from the page title in the H1 heading. As your content flows further down the page, the flow of the page title should correspond with the structure of your content and headings. Optimize your videos According to Forrester Research, online video is 53% more likely to generate a first page Google ranking than through traditional on-page optimization techniques alone. Google, the world s most widely used search engine, also owns the world s most widely used video search engine: YouTube. Be sure to treat your video content as you would a webpage through traditional on-page SEO. Utilize brief, descriptive video titles (as with page titles), keyword tags, and video descriptions. Also include a link and a call-to-action in your video descriptions. Upload videos to your own branded YouTube channel and consider using the YouTube API to display videos, feeds, and comments on your 2012 Accelerate Media, Inc. Page 2 of 5

3 website. It s also important to link to videos from related content and navigation appropriately using keyword-rich anchor text. To garner external links to videos, promote them via online sharing, bookmarking, weekly newsletters, social media updates, twitter posts, etc. Optimize your images Images, like video and traditional webpages, get crawled and indexed in search engines. Help search engines and users understand more about your images and webpage content by utilizing a unique, keyword-focused image ALT attribute. Here s what the image alt text attribute looks like in HTML code: <img alt= new-zealand-vacation-deals source= images/vacation-in-new-zealand-01.png When deciding where to keep images on your webserver, remember to store image files in specially categorized directories and use common file formats with consistent naming conventions. Finally, make sure you supply an image XML sitemap file and submit it to Google Webmaster Tools. Create properly structured folders and file names Improving the structure of your URLs will help search engines understand more about your webpages and thus will make them easier to crawl. Also, by including the keyword that best represents what the page is about in the URL, you ll further improve webpage ranking and usability. Remember that URL s are also displayed in search results. Furthermore, your top-level site content viewed as being the most useful to users by search engines may be displayed as sitelinks below your organic listing (this can be a big boost to click-thru rates). And when users see a URL that has easy-to-understand keywords closely matching their query, they re far more likely to click and remember the URL for return visits. Here s an example of an optimized URL: Remember to use consistent naming conventions when creating folders and file names. Doing so will avoid potential duplicate content issues and make your website easier to navigate. Also, avoid using underscores in URLs and instead use dashes to separate words. Make your website easy to navigate Search engines are designed for speed. Just as important is it for a search engine to find and crawl your website quickly, it s just as important for users to find what they re looking for in the shortest amount of time possible. Keep your website s most important content no more than 1-2 clicks into the navigation and easy-to-find. Keep file sizes under 150K (under 100 is best). Make sure all of your public pages can be found via a primary navigation menu, footer navigation (typically used for secondary pages such as privacy or terms of services ), and HTML sitemap. Also, utilize breadcrumb list features on your website to make navigation simpler. By keeping your navigation organized and structured optimally, you ll allow search engines crawl your content more efficiently, highlight your most important pages, and help users find the information they need faster. Use properly anchored links across your website Link to your webpages from within your site content, navigation, sitemap, etc. using properly anchored text links. Properly anchoring links internally across your site will help search engines understand what your content is about while improving usability and passing PageRank to critical pages. Use concise links with the exact keyword the linked page is about. For example, if your page is about how to install a pond then a properly anchored links would appear like this: How To Install A Pond in 20 Steps. Create a sitemap for users and a sitemap for search engines The HTML sitemap serves two basic purposes. It s a navigation tool for visitors, and most importantly, it s a guide for search engines to index your website content. Additionally, you should create a XML sitemap of your website content and upload it to an owner-verified profile in Google Webmaster Tools. Be sure to include a 404 error page to help visitors in the event a non-existent or deleted webpage gets requested. And remember to check your GWT account regularly for indexing stats, HTML suggestions, errors, and more. Use a robots.txt file Utilize a robots.txt file to help search crawlers find and index only the most important content on your website. Robots.txt can also disallow crawling and indexing content you don t want published in search results or made available for public use. Also, when using robots.txt, remember to implement security measures for any disallowed content as the general public can see the content of your robots.txt from an Internet browser Accelerate Media, Inc. Page 3 of 5

4 Create a mobile version of your website Most marketers and agencies would agree that early adopters of mobile advertising are poised to win in the digital space. Internet-capable smartphone and tablet ownership is on the rise. According to Nielsen, more half of all US consumers own a smartphone and approximately 84 million have media and app-ready Android and ios devices. 80% of customers will abandon a website from a mobile device if they have a bad user experience. Yet only 33% of search advertisers are reported as having a mobile-friendly website. Is your website ready for the mobile revolution? Promote your website the right way Google s PageRank algorithm is built primarily upon the democratic nature of the web. That is, if a number of trusted individuals (we ll call them registered voters ) vote (or link) for a webpage, that webpage will be ranked prominently. If your website receives more quality votes than others, then you will rank higher in search results. Simply put: the key to good rankings is links. But remember that PageRank is not so much about quantity as it is about gaining quality links from trusted sources. For more information on building links, read the SEOMoz Professional Guide to Link Building. Don t be tempted by tricks, linking schemes, or other black-hat tactics. The last thing any business wants is to wake up one morning to find your entire website removed from search results or buried ten pages deep. Yet this has happened to countless webmasters, large corporations including BMW and even Google-owned web properties for violating search engine policies. Link exchanges, stuffing hidden keywords into webpages, buying text links, spamming blogs these tactics are shortsighted and can be bad for your website s health. The right way to promote your website is by creating unique, quality content that people find useful and promoting it the right way: blogs, articles, distributing a whitepaper or thought-leadership, digital PR, interacting online with your audience, relevant websites, local places listings, and news editorials are just a few ethical bestpractices for generating natural, valuable inbound links. Create A Google+ and a local (Google Places) page Search engines including Google and Bing have gone great lengths to map social graphs as a method for influencing how to display search results to specific users. From what we ve seen in search to date, and from recent Google product development, Google+ user data combined with personalized search, images, videos, search history, location information, and information gleaned from other social platforms is the future of search algorithms. Stake your claim now by creating a Google+ page as well as a local places page. Fill out your information accurately and include important services, keywords, and business information. Share information, images, videos, links, etc. on your Google+ page. Build a network of circles around your customers, vendors, friends, families, etc. Build your brand authority via social media On-page SEO is good, but it s only the beginning. If you truly want to build your brand online and achieve the best possible search rankings, it s important to start conversations and build relationships with your audiences through social media. There are a several places you could start: 1. Facebook. Create a page and promote it through s, ads, etc. Get fans and likes by keeping your page updated with useful information, by asking questions, launching contests, etc. 2. Twitter: post and share tweets about your company, other companies, interesting topics, links etc. Always keep your audience and customers in mind. Retweet posts from your peers and customers that you feel are of value. 3. Pinterest. If there is a visual component to your business (such as photos of products, places, events) then start posting and repining images on Pinterest. 4. YouTube and Vimeo: upload and share videos. Build a network of viewers and subscribers by sharing, following, and communicating with other members. Just as important as building your brand through social networking is the SEO value as search engines index videos quickly. Additional steps to improving your online success Launch a pay-per-click ad campaign. Organic rankings are not the end-all. Advertisers on Google typically receive a 7:1 return on investment on search marketing. A recent Google study of 400 advertising cases showed 89% of clicks were lost by organic listings alone after paid ads were removed. Additionally, advertisers experienced increased click-thru-rates as high as 50% in instances where both a top 1-3 paid listing was displayed with a corresponding organic listing. Pay-per-click is the most scalable, measurable, and effective advertising product available today and unlike SEO, you can have ads up and running on search engines in some cases within a few hours. Remarket to your site visitors The average shopping cart abandonment rate is roughly 72%. Ouch. However, all is not lost. This targeted list of users already aware of your brand and products represent a remarkable opportunity to increase sales and conversion rates through remarketing. Remarketing (or retargeting) is an advertising technology that allows you to 2012 Accelerate Media, Inc. Page 4 of 5

5 segment audiences from your website visitors and then targets them with follow-up advertising (text, display, banner ads) that can be tailored to their interests, recorded actions, and specific needs. Remarketing creatively to your site visitors can boost conversion rates as high at 600% at costs 75% less than those associated with other forms of digital advertising. Display a prominent call-to-action across your entire website and advertising assets Every advertisement, landing page, organic listing, paid listing, etc. should display a targeted call-to-action. Compel users to take action in as few steps as possible to boost conversion rates and improve return on investment. Remember to support claims of marketing claims such as discounts, awards, or other differentiators with corresponding information on the click-thru or landing page. Utilize social bookmarking and sharing features across your websites most important content Consumers don t care about you; they care about their friends. It s for this reason that shared content online leads to online and offline sales. Give users the opportunity to tell their networks about your brand, products, and great content via social sharing and bookmarking tools. Run a/b, multi-variant testing of your website content, landing pages, and ad variations Using Google Analytics and content experiments you can measure the overall performance of your advertising and website content to improve bottom line results. Remember that search results are dynamic and the digital advertising space is constantly evolving. Add to the equation a constantly shifting competitive landscape that requires careful monitoring and agility to keep pace with demanding performance goals. To Get the Data is to have an advantage over the competition. Constantly evaluate your search engine rankings, backlinks, and advertising performance for opportunities to improve ROI Create tests, run experiments, analyze traffic and performance patterns, monitor your rankings and results. Analytics is the best way to improve return on investment and generate better online results from all of your marketing investments. For free analytics software and information on improving website performance through data analysis and testing, visit Need expert help? We ll do the heavy lifting. Over the past decade we ve helped dozens of business generate millions of dollars in revenue from search engine marketing and digital advertising. Contact us today for a customized marketing consultation custom-tailored to your specific business, industry, and target audience. Accelerate Media, Inc. Randy Mauldin - President, Digital Marketing Consultant Direct: info@acceleratemedia.net Web: Helpful links and resources for online marketing Google Analytics - Google Webmaster Tools Google AdWords Keyword Tool Google Robots.txt Guide - Think Insights with Google - SEOMoz: The Beginners Guide to SEO - SEOMoz SEO Marketing Tools - Beginners Guide to Landing Optimization Ways to Optimize Video for Search - Kiss Metrics Social media & digital marketing guides - Copyright 2012, Accelerate Media, Inc. and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is provided for information purposes only and the contents hereof are subject to change without notice. This document is not warranted to be error-free, nor subject to any other warranties or conditions, whether expressed orally or implied in law, including implied warranties and conditions of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. Accelerate Media, Inc., its owners and employees specifically disclaim any liability with respect to this document and no contractual obligations are formed either directly or indirectly by this document Accelerate Media, Inc. Page 5 of 5