One of the things we constantly have to do as SEO experts is give recommendations to companies on how they need to change their site so that they can be better optimized.

The sad thing is that a lot of the things we recommend should have been done during the Web development phase the first time around.

No matter how much the SEO world tries to get the information out there, a lot of Web developers don’t understand the basic concepts of SEO. This in turn leads to sites being developed that an SEO team will later have to tear apart and fix.

So whether you’re designing a new site in-house, using some kind of template site-building system, or hiring an outside firm, here are 18 things that you’ll want to make sure are in place before you launch your site. It will keep us SEO guys from giving your site an overhaul later. By following these guidelines you’ll have a much more search engine friendly web design from the beginning.

1- Perform Keyword Research Before Developing the Site

SEO starts with keywords. And if you’re planning to market your site in the search engines, you should know what keywords you want to rank for before you even start building the site. Make sure this is done FIRST.

Here are some other posts that talk about how to properly do keyword research:

• Keyword Research Gems from PubCon
• How to Create a Huge Keyword List
• Use All the Tails in Your Search Marketing Strategy

2- Put Non-www to www Redirects in Place

It amazes me how many sites load with and without the www in the URL. The problem with this is that it creates an automatic duplicate of your site, and can waste a lot of link value as people link to both versions. Decide which version of your URLs you want to use, then 301 redirect everything else to the preferred version.

3- Use a Static, Keyword Based URL Structure

Dynamic URLs can cause a lot of problems if not handled right. So rather than going through all of the headache that they cause us SEO-types, just set your site up with good URL rewrites so that you don’t have dynamic URLs in the first place.

More posts about URLs:

• Checklist for Changing Your URL Structure
• 3 Common URL Problems and How to Fix Them
• Absolute URLs – Better Safe Than Sorry?

4- Have Unique URLs for Each Product/Service

Even if a product or service can be found multiple ways on the site, make sure that there is only one unique URL for each product or service your company offers. This helps to eliminate unnecessary duplicate content problems.

5- Include Redirect Capabilities

You never know when you’re going to want to take a page down and redirect it to something else. The mistake a lot of sites make is that they just take a page down when they don’t need it any more. When this happens you lose the link value that page may have gained while it was live. So do yourself a favor: make sure you can 301 redirect that old page to a new page that can use the juice.

6- Create a Custom 404 Page

Having a custom 404 page makes it so that if someone lands on a 404 page, they at least know they’ve reached the right site. Without a custom 404 in place, they may just assume the site is down and move on to your competitor’s site.

Here is an example of a custom 404 page:

7- Include Keyword-Rich Alt Attributes

Alt attributes are very easy to overlook. But if you use them the right they can be another signal to the search engines to tell them what a page is about. One quick tip on this one: don’t abuse this attribute by using a keyword phrase on every single bullet point image or stuffing a bunch of keywords into the attribute.

8- Make Room for Sufficient Content

Sometimes designers and developers get carried away with the look and feel of the page and forget to include room for text-based content. That’s what the search engines read, so you have to make sure there is a logical place for that content. Ideally, plan on having at least 150-200 words of optimized content on any page you want to rank well.

You should also make sure that your content is structured right. Have one H1 tag at the top of the main content, and then break out other sub topics with H2-H6 tags as appropriate. Make sure to use your keywords in these headings and in the content, but once again don’t overdo it.

9- Set Up Internal Linking Structure

I think that internal linking is one of the most commonly overlooked things for most sites. In fact, Ken Lyons wrote a great post about it that goes into more detail than I can in this post: Want More Link Juice? Here’s an Easy Way to Get It

10- Decide on a Consistent Title Structure

A site should use the same title structure throughout the site. Pick your convention and stick with it. A good format to follow is to have a phrase that includes main keywords for the page and describes what the page is about, followed by a separator (- or | are common), and then your brand name. For example, “Professional SEO Services for Organic Website Optimization | SEO.com”. Keep these titles to under 65-70 characters so they don’t get truncated in the search results.

11- Include Meta Descriptions on Every Page

Since most of the search engines can choose to use your meta description as your snippet in the search results, you should have a unique one written for every page. Include the main keywords and a call to action to encourage clicks. DON’T just make this tag a list of keywords.

12- Allow Inclusion for Other Meta Tags (canonical, robots, etc.)

If you’re using any kind of tracking codes or other things on your site that create duplicate URLs, you’re going to want to be able to include a canonical tag on those pages. Also, depending on how your site is built you may need to include other meta tags like a robots tag and others. Make sure your site’s back end allows for this when necessary.

13- Incorporate Social Media Sharing Buttons

In case you missed it, social media is a pretty big thing right now. I’m not a big fan of the generic ShareThis button, but you need to have some kind of social media sharing buttons on your products and other important pages. Do some research to decide which social networks are best for your site and then stick with those.

More general information about social media:

• 4 Ways Any Business Can Benefit From Social Media
• So Your Industry Is Boring – Don’t Let That Keep You Out of Social Media

14- Install Analytics Tracking

If you don’t have any kind of analytics tracking installed, you have no way to tell where you traffic is coming from, what’s working, and lots of other crucial information. Pick a solution and get it installed. Popular ones include:

• Google Analytics
• Omniture
• Mint
• StatCounter
• And a lot more…

Make sure that the software you go with will allow you to block your office IP address, track conversions, ecommerce revenues generated through different online sources, and anything else that will help you to understand what is actually affecting your bottom line.

15- Set up and Verify Webmaster Tools Account

Through Google Webmaster Tools you can find out a lot about how Google sees your site, and can give them indications on how to handle certain parameters, submit your XML sitemap, and be notified of problems they find with your site. Bing’s Webmaster Center is coming along, so it’s worth it to go ahead and verify that one as well.

16- Follow Web Standards for HTML, CSS, and Database Programming

The more you follow standards, the easier it will be for someone else to come along later and make changes or modify the site. It’s a real problem when a site’s backend code or database is so complex that it has to be rebuilt later in order for it to be changed.

17- Generate an XML Sitemap

It only takes a few minutes to do it, but once the site is live make sure you create and XML sitemap and submit it to the major search engines through their webmaster tools accounts. It’s even better if you can set this up so that it automatically updates and pings the search engines whenever a change is made.

18- Create a Robots.txt File

When you create your robots.txt file make sure that you are disallowing any pages or directories that you don’t want the search engines crawling. Standard examples would be login pages, search results pages, and shopping cart pages. You should also include a link to your XML sitemap as well. Also, make sure you test this file in your Google Webmaster Tools account to make sure it is working correctly.

Here’s a great site that talks more in detail about how to create a robots.txt file: About /robots.txt

If you follow these 18 guidelines you’ll launch a site that is in great shape as far as SEO is concerned. If you’re an SEO, feel free to add anything else to this list in the comments.

18 Simple SEO Items Commonly Missed in Web Development is a post by SEO expert Dan Patterson. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

In his recent post “A Turning Point in the Field of SEO”, Adam Audette talked about creating the best user experience, and applying SEO to that experience.

In my mind, part of giving the user the best experience is to help them to find what they are looking for. Many sites show up great in the search results, but once the visitor clicks on their site, the visitor has no idea what they are supposed to do. And so the site gets a visitor, but the visitor takes no action. By combining website conversion principles with SEO, we can create a better user experience and help improve a site’s bottom line.

Standard SEO KPIs Don’t Go Far Enough

Traditionally, most of the KPIs (key performance indicators) for SEO focus on increasing rankings and just getting more traffic to a site. Some of the more common KPIs for SEO that are frequently discussed in the industry include the following:

• Number of first page rankings
• Number of keywords driving traffic to the site
• Number of pages getting traffic
• Increase in number of visitors/pageviews over time
• Decrease in bounce rate
• Increase in search engine crawl rate
• Etc.

All of these are important metrics to see if your SEO campaign is successful in gaining more visibility in the search engines. You have to measure these metrics to know if your efforts in site optimization and link building are working to get more traffic to the site.

The problem is that too many SEOs stop there; they are just concerned with increasing rankings and getting traffic. Eventually you have to move on to the metric that your client really cares about the most: how is your SEO campaign affecting your client’s bottom line?

The Most Important KPI

In the end, the only thing that a client cares about is how your SEO efforts are affecting their bottom line. ROI is the most important KPI. The client just wants their $2.

You can make all the excuses you want, but in the end if the client doesn’t get their $2 from your efforts, you won’t have them as a client for long.

This is why it is so important to understand that conversion has to be a factor in our SEO efforts. All the traffic in the world doesn’t mean much if it doesn’t convert. When you look at things this way, it changes the way you approach keyword research, recommendations on how you change a site or page, and more.

Applying Conversion to SEO

When you mix SEO and conversion, you are really adding conversion principles to the entire site, rather than just a landing page like you would with PPC. The whole site then becomes optimized in a way that not only gets traffic, but leads the visitor on to the next step in the conversion process. Below are some steps you can take to optimize a site not only for SEO, but also for conversion.

1. Define Each Page’s Conversion Goal

   Each page on a site should lead to some kind of a conversion or micro-conversion. The kind of conversion you choose will depend on the type of keywords that drive traffic to any given page.

   For example, if most of the keywords that drive traffic to a page are informational in nature, you can focus your conversion goal on things like a Newsletter Signup or White Paper Download, since these actions help the visitor to reach their goal: to get more information.

2. Create Appropriate Calls to Action

   This is where you really start using conversion principles. Once you’ve identified the kind of goal that is appropriate for the page, you need to make sure that the page has a way to convert.

   For example: If you’ve decided that the best goal is a white paper download, make sure that you have the calls to action positioned in a way that will likely lead to a conversion.

3. Set Up Goal Tracking

   In order for you to know what’s working, you have to have proper tracking in place. In Google Analytics, and any other quality Web statistics software, you can set goals to track what is working and what isn’t. Set up a goal for every possible action that someone can take on the site, and test this frequently to make sure it is working. If you have an eCommerce site, make sure you have eCommerce tracking in place so you can see the kind of revenue different keywords are generating for your site.

4. Take Action on the Data

   As time goes on and you gather data, you’ll be able to see which keywords and groups of keywords are actually generating good results. You should then adjust your SEO strategy to focus on those groups that are not just bringing the most traffic, but are generating the most conversions.

   It is important to note here that you should also look beyond just tracking individual keywords. Instead, take the time to consider keywords in groups. This will help you to take the long tail into account so you can decide if you need to expand your keyword reach in an area that is working particularly well.

   You should also take what you learn from your PPC efforts and use that knowledge on the rest of your site as well. By using PPC you can get a quick feel for what kinds of keyword groups are working, what conversion tactics are working, and more.

By combining these conversion ideas with your SEO efforts you’ll find that you are able to do more than just deliver traffic to your clients -– you’ll be able to help them get results that actually help their business grow. In other words, they’ll get their $2.

'I Want My $2!' — The Power of SEO with Conversion is a post by SEO expert Dan Patterson. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

We read a lot in the SEO world about things like keyword research, analyzing your competitors, and other things to get traffic to your site. But I don’t see information very often about deciding who your target audience is and how to make sure your keyword choices will actually reach them.

This is one way to take your keyword research to the next level, and it’s well worth the effort. So rather than trying to guess whether your SEO or PPC ads are appearing in front of the right people, here are some tools you can use to make sure.

Google Trends

How It’s Useful: If all you’re looking for is a basic search volume trend line and a few regional ideas, this is your tool. Google Trends will show you the keyword search volume trends on Google since 2004. You can narrow it down to specific years and months or to specific countries if you’re planning to target your search marketing campaigns that way.

Use this tool >

Google Insights for Search

How It’s Useful: Google Insights for Search shows similar trend data to Google Trends, but takes it a step further and shows you even more detail on regional interest levels and additional search terms that are related to your keywords. This can help you to avoid using terms that are not as popular as others in your target area and really see where your target audience is geographically located.

Use this tool >

Bing xRank

How It’s Useful: Bing xRank has a long way to go to catch up with the amount of detail provided in Google Insights for Search, but at least it gives you an idea of the search volume trends on Bing. I would only use this tool to make sure that searcher trends match across the two search engines.

Use this tool >

Quantcast

How It’s Useful: Quantcast can be a very helpful tool to see the relative traffic and visitor demographics for your own site and your competitors’. It is especially useful if the sites you are looking at are Quantified. If the site is Quantified you will see more accurate traffic and demographic information. If not, you can still get some good sample data to better understand the visitor demographics.

Use this tool >

Compete

How It’s Useful: Compete is a good tool for analyzing the kind of traffic your competitors are getting. With a Pro account you can also get ideas about their visitor demographics. To use this tool effectively you only need to look at it for sites that are closely related to yours. They work off of sampled data, though, so take it for what it’s worth.

Use this tool >

Alexa

How It’s Useful: Similar to Compete, Alexa will give you an idea of the kind of traffic a competitor gets and an insight into their visitor demographics. You can also use Alexa to get some ideas about the keywords driving traffic to a site. Like Compete, this tool will only be useful if you know which sites are targeting the same market as you, but unlike Compete you get more information for free with Alexa.

Use this tool >

Detecting Online Commercial Intent

How It’s Useful: This is a very simple tool that analyzes the keywords searchers are using and which ones will likely lead to a transaction or conversion. Just type in a keyword and the tool tells you the degree of probability for commercial or non-commercial intent. This can help you focus on the keywords your potential visitors are using that will most likely lead to an improvement in your bottom line.

Use this tool >

Demographics Prediction

How It’s Useful: If you already have a good handle on your target audience’s demographics, you can use this tool to make sure that your keywords actually fit with those demographics. This way you won’t accidentally target keywords that really target women when you meant to target men. I would make sure to compare the data from this tool with other tools to make sure you’re getting a good sample.

Use this tool >

I know there are other tools out there that also offer a lot of demographic and keyword data, but these are some great ones to start with. This post doesn’t even look at the ones that have to do with social media. If you know of some other tools that you like to use, please add them in the comments and explain how you use them.

8 Tools to Better Understand Your Target Audience is a post by SEO expert Dan Patterson. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

In SEO there are a lot of little things we can tweak to help a site rank better. This includes improving a site’s URL structure by making it more SEO friendly. The problem is, if you do this incorrectly your rankings could drop significantly and it could take a long time to make a full recovery.

Use the checklist below to first make sure it’s worth it to change your URL structure. If you decide it is, the rest of the checklist will help you to make sure you update everything you should. This will help to reduce your ranking drops (or at least the length of time those drops last).

Make Sure You Are Actually Changing to Something Better

Sometimes it is a good idea to change your URL structure, but sometimes you’re better off leaving things alone. Here are some examples of when it might be a good idea:

Switching from a dynamic URL structure to a static URL structure

The problem with a dynamic URL structure (example: www.siteexample.com/page.php?cat=231&prod=55234) is that you can end up with lots of different variations of the URL getting indexed. This can potentially create a huge duplicate content problem and split your link value. Changing your URLs to a static structure will give you one URL for each product or page on your site. This makes things a lot cleaner and helps to avoid splitting your link value between multiple URLs.

Just changing from dynamic to static isn’t enough of a reason to change your URL structure, though. You still need to make sure that you’re changing to URLs that are more descriptive and actually SEO friendly.

Making your URLs more meaningful/SEO friendly

I see a lot of sites with URLs that don’t explain what the page is about at all, even those with static URLs. For example, what does this URL tell you about the page: www.siteexample.com/store/prod1.html

If your answer was “Not much,” you’re right. Sure, you might be able to assume that it’s a product page, but you don’t know anything about the product.

If your site currently uses this kind of structure, it could be worth changing your URLs to make them more SEO friendly and meaningful to your audience. In other words, use some keywords. Use an appropriate keyword phrase in your URL and it will improve your SEO efforts and make the URL more user-friendly for your visitors.

When to leave things alone

Just as there are situations when you should consider making changes, there are also situations when you should think about holding off. For example, if your site is already ranking really well, you may want to leave your URLs alone.

Sure, there are “ideal situations” in SEO where everything is perfectly optimized, but if you already rank well, you could be better off leaving things alone. This is where consulting with a qualified SEO can be extremely valuable since it is a very case-by-case thing.

If you decide you should proceed with changing your URLs, the rest of the checklist items can help you to lessen the duration of any ranking drops you experience.

301 Redirect Old URLs to New URLs

If you’ve done any reading about SEO, you’ve likely heard about 301 redirects. A 301 redirect is what you use to signal the search engines that you have permanently changed the location of a URL.

So if you’re going to change your URL structure, you have to make sure that you put 301s in place to redirect all of the old URLs to the new URLs. Otherwise, you’re going to send all of that previously accumulated link value to pages that give a 404 error and you’ll basically lose any link value those pages had.

Keep in mind that links that are 301ed lose some of their link value. This is one reason why you can almost always expect a drop in rankings when you change your URL structure.

Update XML Sitemap and Resubmit to Webmaster Accounts

Once you’ve updated your URLs and put your 301 redirects in place, you should also update your XML sitemap and resubmit it to the search engines through the various webmaster tools accounts. This alerts the search engines to the changes in the site and says they should come crawl it again.

Doing this can help your site to get re-indexed faster, which can help your rankings come back faster. The sooner the search engines realize you’ve made a permanent change the better!

Update All Internal Links

Probably the most time-consuming task of updating URL structure is making sure that all of the internal links in your site are updated to point to the new URLs.

You may be thinking, “I set up 301 redirects to take care of this. Why should I update all of my internal links as well?” It’s a good question. Here are a couple of reasons why you should do it

• Maintain all your internal link value. Remember what I said before about links that are 301ed losing some value? There isn’t a lot you can do about external pages linking to you, but you can retain all of the internal link value if you update the links.
• Avoid visitor confusion. If a visitor comes to your site with a slow Internet connection, it’ll be even slower when they click on a link that just redirects them. If this happens, they will likely just leave your site.

When you’re updating your internal links you should start with your navigation, footer links, and HTML sitemap. From there you’ll need to go through and clean up all of your contextual links.

Google Webmaster Tools has a tool that can help with this. Just go to ‘Your site on the Web’ and then ‘Internal links’ and you’ll see a page like this:

From here you can enter the URL you want to find links to and the tool will give you a list of the pages that have links to that URL. You might not find everything this way, but it is a great place to start.

Is It Worth It?

There are plenty of situations where cleaning up a site’s URL structure can really help it rank better. But before you go through all the trouble, take some time to evaluate your site’s structure to determine if it is really going to be worth it. Personally, I’d look at everything else I could change before I completely change a site’s URL structure.

If your site already ranks well and has an okay URL structure, you may want to leave it alone. Also keep in mind that almost any time you make URL changes, you’re going to see a drop in rankings. It’s hard to say how long this will last, because even different pages on the same site can be affected more than others.

Once you have made the above changes you should track your rankings frequently. Also keep an eye on search results to see when the search engines show your updated URL. This is a good indicator that things are starting to iron themselves out.

If you’d like to learn more about good URL structure, here are a few videos to watch from Matt Cutts at Google Webmaster Help:

Checklist for Changing Your URL Structure is a post by SEO expert Dan Patterson. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

I’ve been hearing a lot over the last year or so about long tail searches and all that. So today I wanted to talk briefly about why the long tail is important, but also why it should only be part of your overall search marketing strategy.

Understanding the Keyword Cycle

Let’s briefly discuss what head terms and long tail terms are for those of you that are not familiar with this concept.

People search for things in a variety of different ways, and they generally go through a cycle that looks something like this:

• A person starts looking for a new laptop, but they don’t really know what’s on the market. So they start their search with a head term like ‘laptop’
• As the person learns more about the topic, maybe they decide that they are most interested in a ‘Dell laptop’, so they do a search for that short tail phrase hoping to find out more about this brand.
• Now they’re getting an idea of what the price range is, but they want to see if they can find a better deal. So the person starts using long tail terms like ‘Dell laptops for under $1000’, ‘cheap Dell laptops’, etc.

Does this process sound familiar? It should, because we all do it! The less we know about a topic, the more we tend to use head or short tail phrases. The more familiar we are with a topic, the more likely we are to start searching with medium and long tail phrases.

As you can probably guess, the shorter terms generally get a lot more traffic. But, because they are more general in nature, they tend to not convert very well. The long phrases get fewer searches, but tend to convert better because this type of person has a better idea of what they’re looking for. Here’s a sample of a very common graph showing this relationship:

Benefits of Short and Long Tail

Both short and long tail keywords have their place in your search marketing strategy. One mistake that a lot of companies make is only going after one or the other. But a complete strategy will take advantage of both. Here is a quick summary of things to consider with both of them:

Head and Short Tail Phrases

The lure of traffic is a big reason that companies go after these terms. The truth is that if you can get a good ranking on short terms you will get a lot of traffic for it. Sure, you may not get as many conversions from these terms, but they help to build your brand, which will in turn lead to more sales later.

In summary, head and short tail phrases:

• Generate a lot of searches
• Don’t have a high conversion rate
• Can be good for branding purposes
• Are generally more competitive

Long Tail Phrases

As you can see from the graph, there are a lot more long tail phrases than there are head and short tail terms. Cumulatively, you can get a lot of traffic this way, even though individual long tail terms may not generate much traffic by themselves. But because they generally convert better, you’ll want to rank well across the board for these phrases.

In summary, head and short tail phrases:

• Don’t get much traffic individually, but cumulatively can make up a large portion of your site’s traffic
• Convert better overall
• It’s estimated that 20% of searches have never happened before, so it’s impossible to optimize for all of them

Use All of the Tails!

By having a good position on shorter terms you are putting your company in front of a shopper while they are at the beginning stages of their search. But don’t stop there! The goal here is to get your site in front of the searcher during all stages of their search cycle.

Let’s look back at the example of the person searching for a laptop. What if your company came up in a majority of the searches they did, both short and long tail? Do you think they’ll notice this and consider your site as one of the more relevant ones for that topic?

This is one reason why it’s important to have a complete keyword strategy. You have to consider both the long and short phrases. You need to get your site in front of as many people as possible to get conversions, and you can do it across the board by incorporating both short and long tail phrases in your optimization efforts.

Optimizing for the Long Tail

The problem with optimizing for the long tail is that there are so many of them. And, being that an estimated 20% of searches are new, you can’t optimize for a majority of them anyway!

So what can you do to incorporate these long tail phrases into your site’s optimization? Here are a few tips:

• Use a good keyword tool to get an idea of what the known long tail phrases are.
• Watch your analytics for additional ideas of where you are getting traffic and conversions from.
• For each optimized page use your 1-3 main phrases in the copy, but also include long tail variations of them.
• Vary your anchor text when you’re building links with long tail variations.
• If your site has a blog, write content that is based around long tail phrases. Then link with those long tail phrases back over to the main page of your site that is optimized for the base phrase.

The good news is that ranking for long tail phrases is usually not too hard. Keep an eye on your analytics to see what’s working and tweak it from there. As you do this, you’ll get a better idea of the kinds of terms that are being used in your industry.

Use All the Tails in Your Search Marketing Strategy is a post by SEO expert Dan Patterson. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

see more Epic Fails

As I’ve said in a previous post, SEO can be broken down into a couple of main categories: Content, Architecture, and Links. I think most people understand the importance of building content and getting links, but there are a lot of larger and poorly built sites that struggle with some fundamental problems their URL structure. This can lead to a lot of problems, including many duplicate content issues.

Here are three of the most common URL problems that I have seen on different websites. If your site has one or more of these problems, take a look at these solutions and get them fixed as soon as possible.

Problem #1: Non-www and www Versions of Site URLs

If your site has a non-www and www version of all your URLs, you’re going to be splitting link value for the same content between two URLs. Rather than capturing 100% of the link value on the page you want to rank in the search results, you could be doing a 50/50, 60/40, or some other kind of split between the two URLs.

The Fix

There are a couple of things you need to do to fix this:

1. Decide which URL style you want to use, www or non-www.
2. Set up a 301 redirect so that any links to your non-preferred URL style will go to the right style. This way you don’t waste link value by splitting it between two URLs.
3. Set your preferred domain in Google Webmaster Tools so your search result listings are consistent with your style preference.
4. Make sure whenever you build links to your site that you use the preferred URL style.

Problem #2: Duplicate Home Page URLs

This is a close cousin to Problem #1, but is especially bad because it’s your home page.

It is possible to have a lot of different URLs that all go to your home page content, especially if you haven’t fixed your www and non-www duplication, which can result in a lot of unnecessary duplication. For example:

• http://www.mysite.com
• http://mysite.com
• http://www.mysite.com/index.html
• http://mysite.com/index.html

These URLs will all lead to the same content. If you have links going to all four of them you will see a four-way split in link value. There are a lot of sites out there that have fixed their non-www and www problems, but I can still find multiple versions of their home page.

I’ve even come across sites with different extensions (.php, .html, .htm, etc.) that bring up the same page as well. This leads to even more duplication and potentially wasted link value.

The Fix

The fix here is very similar to the first one. Here are a few tips:

1. Set your main home page URL to be http://www.mysite.com. 301 redirect everything else to this URL since it is the most basic (If your preferred URL style is non-www, then do http://mysite.com)
2. If you have to set up different versions for tracking purposes or some other reason, set a canonical tag to show the search engines which version you want showing up in the search results.
3. Make sure when you build links to your home page that you link to the correct version.

Problem #3: Dynamic URLs

This is a fun one that a lot of not-so-SEO-friendly shopping cart programs run into. Once you start including all sorts of variables and parameters in your URLs, the opportunities for duplicate content and wasted link value are endless.

Allow me to illustrate. All of the following URLs could lead to the same content:

• http://www.mysite.com/somepage.html?param1=abc
• http://www.mysite.com/somepage.html?param1=abc&dest=goog
• http://www.mysite.com/somepage.html?param1=abc&dest=goog&camp=111
• http://www.mysite.com/somepage.html?param1=abc&dest=goog&camp=111&id=423

Now what if I start rearranging the parameters? Well, they’ll still show the same content. So, as you might imagine, this can create a lot of wasted link value.

There are other causes for the dynamic URL problem. A lot of companies use these parameter-based URLs for statistical purposes. We just want to make sure that you don’t shoot yourself in the foot from an SEO perspective.

This problem also happens with sites that give their affiliates a unique ID to use in their links. You could have 100 affiliates linking to the same page, but all of the URLs will be different because each affiliate has their own unique ID.

The Fix

1. If possible, make sure that your site is using SEO-friendly base URLs. It’s better to have a base URL that will lead to the content rather than a URL that relies on a parameter. For example: http://www.mysite.com/unique-product.html is much better than http://www.mysite.com/category.php?prod=123 where some generic category page is really the base URL.
2. Set a canonical tag that tells the search engines to use the base version of the URL. That way you can still use parameter URLs like http://www.mysite.com/unique-product.html?param1=123&param2=423 to get your data, but the search engines will consider the basic version as the official one.
3. An even better way to handle this is to capture the data on the server side and then redirect the visitor to the correct URL after you have captured your data. A lot of affiliate networks like ShareASale and CJ do it this way, and you can to. The visit basically goes like this: Visitor clicks on links with parameters -> Visitor goes to site, server records parameter data and 301 redirects them to the right landing page – >Visitor barely notices the switch because it happens fast.This way you can get all the data you need, make sure all of the link value goes to the right page, and your visitor still sees what they were after.

What Problems Does Your Site Have?

URL problems can come in combinations. For example, you could have a non-www and www problem along with dynamic URLs, compounding the problem.

Look over your site and see if you have any of these problems. If you do, decide what fixes you can make. Once you have these structural problems fixed you’ll find that your link building efforts will be much more valuable.

3 Common URL Problems and How to Fix Them is a post by SEO expert Dan Patterson. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

I think it’s safe to say that everyone is familiar with the Hokey Pokey. You know, that song where you put a body part in, take it out and then shake it all about. Then in the end, you put your whole self in to finish the song.

Surprisingly, this song relates really well to doing search engine optimization for your site. The problem is many people are so focused on the foot, head or arm of SEO that they never get around to putting their whole self in and getting real results!

So let’s break down the SEO Hokey Pokey so you can make sure you’re doing all of the essentials to get your site ranked for your main keyword phrases.

You Put Your Head In…

Let’s start our SEO Hokey Pokey with the head. This would include everything that goes in the head section of your website. Here are a few things to consider for this section:

Title Tag

As you’ve probably heard, this is one of the most important parts of your site for keyword usage.

You want to make sure that your titles are unique for every page and use the most important keywords. A good format to follow is this: Descriptive Keyword Based Title | Site Name or Brand.

Keep your titles to around 65 characters or else they will be truncated in the search engine results pages (SERPs).

Meta Tags

When it comes to meta tags, the most important one for search engines is the meta description. This is what most search engines will use as your description in the search results pages. Include your keyword phrases for that page and a call to action. Limit its length to around 165 characters.

For the meta keywords, either leave them blank or keep them very simple. This meta tag is not as important as it used to be, and if you put your best keywords there, your competition will easily know what your keywords are.

There are other things you’ll want to include in your header in certain situations, but the essentials really are the title and meta description. Get those right and you will have this part down. Put your head in!

You Put Your Foot In…

The foot is your foundation, and for this analogy we’re talking about the foundation of keyword-optimized content and crawlable site architecture.

If you want your site to rank well for certain keywords and phrases, you have to make sure you’re using them in your site. Otherwise, your site won’t look relevant to those phrases and will not rank well. Use your keywords in your text and link from other pages of your site with the right anchor text.

When it comes to architecture, you have to make sure that your site is set up in such a way that it is crawlable by the search engine spiders. If it isn’t crawlable, it does not matter how good your content is, no one will see it! Avoid Flash sites, JavaScript navigation bars and anything else that would impede the search engines from crawling from page-to-page.

Your foundation has to be strong, so put the time in to get it done right! Put your foot in!

You Put Your Backside In…

Your backside in our Hokey Pokey analogy is all the behind the scenes, or back-end things that go into your site. Here are a few to check on:

• Do you have a robots.txt file set up to disallow search engine spider access to parts of the site that you don’t want indexed, or that can’t be indexed?
• Do you have an HTML and XML sitemap to help the search engine spiders find all the pages of your site?
• Is the content management system (CMS) or e-commerce system you are using creating search engine friendly URLs?

A lot of the backend stuff will depend on the way your site is built, whether done page by page or with some kind of CMS or e-commerce system. Make sure you’re using one that can create a search engine friendly site. Then take the time to get your robots.txt and sitemaps created properly. Put your backside in!

You Put Your Arm In…

I’m sure you’re dying to know what the arms are in this analogy. Well, they’re the links you get from other sites!

You see, if you are going to get good rankings, you have to reach out and get links from other sites. I’m not going to go over all of the different strategies on how to do this, but this is going to be the bulk of your ongoing SEO work.

Here are a few articles from the SEO.com Blog that will teach you more about link building:

• Using Articles for Link Building
• 10 Link Building Strategies For New Website Or Business Owners
• The Value of Deep Linking
• Link Building – Finding the Right Site

Sadly, this is an area where many people either don’t put in enough time or just don’t get the right kind of links. I’ve seen a lot of sites that are very well optimized, but they are missing this critical piece. Learn how to link build and then take the time to do it! Put your arm in!

You Put Your Whole Self In…

SEO is the combination of a bunch of little things that give you a result in the end. You can’t just focus on one or two of the essential tasks and expect to get great results. Just like the Hokey Pokey, you have to get to the point where you are putting your whole self in to get results.

If you’re new to SEO, I hope this analogy helps you understand what the essentials are. If you’re an experienced SEO, now you have a dance you can do while you work! Now do the SEO Hokey Pokey!

Turn Your Site Around with the SEO Hokey Pokey is a post by SEO expert Dan Patterson. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

I’m a fan of Firefox mainly for the additional functionality you get from using plugins. In fact, it’s always frustrating when I am on someone else’s computer, and I don’t have access to my own set of “tools” that I use on a daily basis. Simply put, if you aren’t using Firefox, you’re missing out on a more effective way to work.

Below is a list of some of my favorite SEO plugins. I have also included a short list of web developer plugins that have some crossover into SEO. I know there are other tools out there, so if you have some additional plugins you like to use, please add them in the comments!

Plugins Specifically for SEO

SEO for Firefox

This one is a standard tool for most of the SEOs that I personally know. This plugin gives you a ton of additional information when you do a search on Google. You can see a site’s PageRank, age, Yahoo links and other data that can help you when analyzing your competitors.

It also gives you access to a handy little tool called SEO XRay. This sub-tool will show you the meta information, H tag use and internal and external links on a page. There are so many ways to use SEO for Firefox, it’s no wonder that it’s a standard tool! Aaron Wall (SEOBook) did a great job with this one!

Get it here: SEO for Firefox

Rank Checker

This is another great tool from Aaron Wall. If all you want to do is a quick ranking update, Rank Checker is the way to go. This tool is usually quick, and you can export your findings to a CSV document if you want to compare them with previous rankings.

As with any rank checking tool, it is not always 100% accurate. However, it is still a great free way to keep up on all of your keywords.

Get it here: Rank Checker

SearchStatus

Do you ever get tired of the Google Toolbar? If you’re like me, the only reason you really use the Google Toolbar is to find out the PageRank of the page. Well, with SearchStatus, you can get PageRank, Alexa Rank, Moz Rank and Compete Rank in your status bar. There are many other things that this tool does, but that’s what I mainly use it for.

Get it here: SearchStatus

SEO Link Analysis

I consider this plugin to be one of the essentials in my toolbox. This tool works when you go to the Yahoo Site Explorer or into your Google Webmaster account looking for back links. Rather than just seeing what sites are linking back, you can see the anchor text and the PageRank of the page linking back. You can also find out if the link is still there or has a no follow attribute.

This tool is great for spying on your competition. Go to the Yahoo Site Explorer and you will very quickly find out what keywords your competition is targeting. This makes it great for site analysis and competitive analysis.

Get it here: SEO Link Analysis

Helpful Web Development Plugins

If you’re going to do SEO, you need to know some of the basics of web development as well. Because of this, I thought it might be helpful to list a few plugins that you can use mainly for web development, but also have a crossover into SEO.

Firebug

I have loved this plugin ever since I first found it. As an SEO, I find that I am constantly helping to fix web development problems as part of the job. This tool will let you go through a site and find the different elements so you can see where the problems are in the HTML or CSS of the page. You can also make changes to a live site to see what would happen if you tweaked certain things.

Get it here: Firebug

HTML Validator

By having your HTML valid, your site is more likely to look the same in the different browsers. This tool will show you where the problems are in your code that could be causing inconsistencies from browser to browser. It also gives you suggestions on how to fix them.

Get it here: HTML Validator

Web Developer

This tool has similar functionality to some of the other tools above and is very handy. I use it frequently to turn off JavaScript so I can see how a site is handling its main navigation. Most web developers that I know of use this plugin.

Get it here: Web Developer

Add to the List!

Now it is your turn. Do you have some favorites that I did not include on this list? If so, please add them in the comments below!

List of Great Firefox Plugins for SEO is a post by SEO expert Dan Patterson. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

Social media is all the rage right now. You see it in blog posts everywhere. You see Twitter feeds on news shows. In the last month my mother and several uncles joined Facebook! Simply put, social media is all over the place. But is it useful for the average business?

While not all businesses will use social media the same way, I am convinced that all businesses can make good use of social media. Here are 4 ways any business can benefit from using social media.

1- Get to Know Your Audience

About a year ago I went to Blog World Expo, and one of the points that really stuck with me from that conference is this: use social media to find your audience and then hang out with them. Social media is full of groups, fan pages, and other things that make it relatively easy to find an audience that is already interested in your topic or industry.

But with all of the different social media sites, how do you find out where your audience is hanging out? Here are a couple of resources you can use:

• Use search.twitter.com to see what people are talking about that relates to your topic/industry. See what they’re linking to and mentioning. This can lead you in the right direction.
• Get a Facebook account if you don’t have one already and look for relevant groups and fan pages. Watch for multiple groups/fan pages for the same topic, and also watch to see how engaged the members are.
• Forums are more old school, but they can be great for finding other sites that people are using to hang out. In the end it may be the forum itself is the hangout, or they may direct you to other places.

Once you’re confident that you’ve found the popular hangouts for your industry start engaging with your audience. For many businesses Twitter and Facebook are great places to start since they are so universal, but you’ll also want to look for the niche hangouts.

2- Managing Your Reputation

Social media is a great way to keep an eye on the conversations that are happening online and respond to them. In fact, many companies have employees dedicated to watching the online conversations about their company and addressing them.

Here are a few tools you can use to monitor your reputation online so you can take any appropriate action:

• Once again, you can use search.twitter.com to keep an eye on any conversations going on in the world of Twitter that relate to your brand.
• For general monitoring of sites, news, and blogs you can always set up Google Alerts for your brand and main keywords to see what is happening online.
• For monitoring blogs specifically, you can use Technorati or Google Blog Search. Both can help you monitor what bloggers are saying about your brand or industry.
• If you’re really serious about tracking your reputation you could get an account at Trackur. Their pricing isn’t bad and it can be a great solution for companies looking to check in on the conversations happening online in a quick and easy way.

Watching and managing your company’s reputation is one way that every company can and should use social media. If you notice negative conversations happening you can respond and put out any fires before they get out of control.

A great example of this is Comcast’s use of Twitter. They have turned their Twitter account into another extension of their customer service division. For some great stories about this just do a Google search for ‘Comcast twitter’.

3- Promotions

Promotion is nothing new to the internet, but it hits new levels with social media. If you push the right message through the right channels you can reach a lot of people.

The key here is that you have to already have a lot of connections, especially with people that are willing to push the information to their followers as well. Twitter’s Retweet (RT) feature is very useful for this. If someone finds a story, blog post, or promotion interesting, they can just pass it on by doing a simple Retweet.

To be successful in promoting things through social media you have to have a plan and connections. Just sending out a tweet to your 30 followers won’t cut it.

Here’s another great article about using Twitter for advertising: Is Twitter Really an Effective Internet Marketing Tool?

4- SEO and Traffic Benefits

Being that we’re an SEO company, I naturally have to talk about the SEO and traffic benefits of being involved in social media. Social media can be a great traffic generator. Admittedly, it doesn’t always generate the kind of traffic that will convert into a lot of sales but it does increase buzz, recognition, and authority for your site.

Social media is also a great way to have a lot of links built to your site. As a page is promoted on different networks people are going to be linking to it. These links will include tweets, bookmarks, and even blogs. All of these links can help improve the authority of your site and lead to higher rankings in the search results.

Putting it All Together

As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, not all businesses will use social media the same. But the fact is that all businesses can take advantage of social media in one way or another. Here are a few places to start:

• If your site doesn’t have a blog, you should start one. Blogs are where you’ll generate the content to be promoted on the social media networks. It is also a great way to interact with your customers.
• Start a Twitter account. Having a Twitter account will give you a place to interact with your audience and also promote the articles from your blog and from other sources that you find interesting. You don’t want to be a Twitter spammer just pushing your own stuff. Show that you can be part of the community.
• Create a Facebook fan page. Facebook is one of the giants in the social media sphere, so you need to have a company presence there as another way to promote your content and interact with your audience.
• Set up profile pages on a few social bookmarking sites such as StumbleUpon, Digg, and Delicious. This will give you a place to create links to your content. Make sure you also bookmark other content from your industry. Also make sure to create links back to your site in your profile.

There is always more that can be done, but these are four places to get started. For additional reading, here’s a great case study from Business.com on how they have been using social media: B2B Social Media – The Business.com Case Study.

4 Ways Any Business Can Benefit From Social Media is a post by SEO expert Dan Patterson. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

I heard something on the radio a few weeks ago that stuck with me and made me think about the basics of SEO. The line went something like this, “You have to have the fundamentals down before trying any of the fancy stuff. ” So before you go out and try to do things like PR sculpting or any of the other advanced techniques you hear about, get the basics down.

SEO can really be broken down into three essential areas: Architecture, Content, and Links. These are the basics of SEO that you need to understand and get right first. Let’s take a look at some key points to understand in each of these main areas.

Architecture – Can Your Site Be Crawled?

One of the first problems that a website has to address is whether or not their site can actually be crawled by the search engine spiders. You can have the best content in the world, but if the search engine spiders can’t get to it you won’t reap the benefits! Here are some things you can do to help your site be more crawl-able:

1. Avoid things like JavaScript or Flash navigation. Both of these kinds of navigation are not crawled very well by search engines at this time. This could change in the future, but for now it’s best to just avoid JavaScript and Flash navigations.
2. Keep your site’s architecture as flat as possible. Don’t have tons of levels in your architecture. Keep pages as close to the root as possible. In other words, mysite.com/folder/product is much better than mysite.com/category/subcategory/other-folder/product.
3. Stay away from parameter strings in URLs. By having parameter strings in URLs you could have multiple versions of the same content and will have to learn how to properly use the canonical element. You can avoid this by not using parameters. Instead, have a static URL for each page whenever possible. For example, mysite.com/productname.html is much better than mysite.com/?prod-id=abc123&cat-id=def456.
4. Use internal linking appropriately. Whenever it makes sense, link to other pages in your site from within the content of the page. Don’t just rely on your navigation to get people (and search engine spiders) to where you want them to go. Typically the greatest missed opportunity for optimization is links to and from web pages within your own site. An example of internal linking for variations on the keyword “swimwear” can be found here, here and here. Notice how different uses of this phrase are linking each to the home page. This is a case where the website is clearly optimizing these phrases for the page linked to. (More about internal linking.)
5. Sitemaps are your friends. Make sure your site has both an HTML and XML sitemap. (More about sitemaps).

Content – Is It Optimized?

Once you have your website’s architecture set up the right way, the next step is to make sure that your content is well-optimized to help your site rank for your main keyword phrases. Here are a few basic guidelines to follow:

1. Don’t target too many phrases per page. You may have a list of 50 keywords you want to target, but you should only focus on 2-3 main phrases per page. Create other pages around additional phrases as needed.
2. No spammy stuff! Don’t do any keyword stuffing, alt stuffing, meta spamming, or any other spammy techniques. They don’t really work well anymore anyway.
3. Use your keyword phrases in titles, header tags, etc. By using your keyword phrases in your titles and header tags you can give them more emphasis.
4. Use your keywords in your content. Don’t just rely on your titles and header tags. Don’t overdo it; make the text read naturally but make sure you include your keywords and variations of them in the content.

Links – Getting Juice from Other Sites

Setting your site up the right way is one step, but getting traffic to your website takes a lot more than just using keywords on your pages. The other big key to getting a good rank on the search engines is to get other sites linking to you. By getting these links you are showing that your site has credibility and is worth ranking well. Here are a few quick tips to keep in mind when you’re building links:

1. Use a variety of techniques. There are a lot of things you can do to build links: directories, articles, social bookmarking, forums … the list goes on and on. Mix up what you’re doing and get a variety of link types coming into your site. (More about link building)
2. Spread your links over a lot of domains. It’s important to get a lot of links, but it’s also important to get a lot of links spread over many domains. If you follow tip #1 this shouldn’t be much of a problem for you.
3. Use keywords in your anchor text. One problem that I’ve seen over and over is that someone will build links to their site using either their name, their business name, or their URL. This is nice if that’s what you want to rank for, but if you want to rank for a keyword phrase you have to use that phrase as the anchor text of your link.
4. Use a variety of anchors. Don’t just use the same keyword phrase over and over again. Mix it up so that you aren’t spamming one phrase too much. This will help your link building look more natural.
5. The work is never done. Don’t think you can just submit to a bunch of directories and your work is over. SEO is an ongoing process.

While these tips don’t cover everything you need to know about the three main areas of search engine optimization, this is enough to get you started. Spend some time looking over your site to make sure that you are doing these basics. Then, if you want, you can try to get a little fancy.

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Learn the Basics Before You Try Anything Fancy! is a post by SEO expert Dan Patterson. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.