• Won’t require intra-office diplomacy worth of Kissinger.
• Requires only a single configuration or code change.
• Will result in big gains for almost every page of my website.

Here are my favorites:

Server Compression

Before you do anything else, make sure your server is using HTTP compression. With this type of compression, your server compacts files using the lossless GZIP algorithm. That can reduce transfer sizes by 50% or more. Then, your Web browser decompresses the files upon arrival.

That speeds page load times and, since GoogleBot supports GZIP, speeds crawl times, too. That’s all good for crawl efficiency. Plus, a faster-loading site means fewer bounces, another SEO win.

Note: You should always test HTTP compression, thoroughly, before you deploy it. I’ve used it on 200 or so sites now, and have had it cause weird bugs twice. A error rate of 1% isn’t terrible, but it’s definitely something you want to check.

There are lots of ways to check your server’s compression settings. I like to use Google PageSpeed. It’ll give you a warning if you’re not using HTTP compression.

You can also just use a CURL command, like this:

curl –header ‘accept-encoding: gzip’ -I www.mysite.com

Replace mysite with yours, and then check the result for ‘Content-encoding: gzip’:

GZIP's on: Woo hoo!

If you aren’t running server-side compression, get it set up. It’s a great, site-wide performance booster.

Response Codes

I won’t belabor this one—I wrote about server response codes and SEO a few months ago. Just make sure your server is delivering the right response when things go right or wrong. If it isn’t, fixing response codes is another great site-wide win.

Put The Brand Last

Title tag 101 here, folks: If you’ve got a strong brand for which you know you’ll rank #1, change your title tag template to put that brand name last.

They may deny it, but search engines definitely give more weight to phrases that come first in the title tag. Every time Google insists that’s not the case, I go back and test it, and every time the results are the same. Put your key phrase first and you rank better.

Most enterprise sites use a content management system. Edit the default title tag in one place, and you re-order the title tags throughout the site. Another easy win.

Remove Fat Javascripts

If you’ve got a 60+ line embedded javascript on every page of your site, put it in a .js file instead. Then include it using a script statement:

A good javascript include. Not surprising: It's SearchEngineLand's page source.

That may not seem like much. If you clean up 2-3 instances of embedded javascript, site-wide, you’re only removing 180 lines of code, right?

Well, yeah. But 50-60 lines of code means about 4kb. Remove three of those and you’ve reduced page transfer size by 12kb. That’s a solid performance upgrade.

By the way, you can do the same thing with embedded CSS.

Set Up Site Verification

OK, this isn’t a quick SEO win, exactly, but it’ll set you up for the next round. Get verification set up for Google and Bing Webmaster Tools. You’ll get great, direct feedback from each search engine about stuff to fix.

Take off the tin foil hat, first: There’s nothing the search engines learn from site verification that they don’t already know. Verification is there to make sure other people can’t get at that data. By verifying, you get access to crawl results for your own site. Do it.

Lazy Wins, FTW!!

I’m a lazy guy. I like making one change and watching the traffic roll in. If you’ve got other lazy wins, leave ‘em below!

If only it were this easy

But that’s not easy. Instead of hundreds of links, you may be looking at thousands, or tens of thousands. Or more. In my experience, a moderately-popular enterprise client can have 30,000-40,000 links from 2,000-3,000 domains.

You need a process, and a few tools, if you’re going to complete this task and maintain your sanity. You have to automate what you can and reduce the steps necessary for any required hand-filtering.

Do We Have To…?

The first question I usually hear from this type of client is: “Why do we even have to check our link profile? We’re a big company. We’ve accumulated lots of links over the years. We’re fine, right?”

Maybe. Maybe not. I’m not just spreading FUD here. Google has made it crystal-clear that they’re cracking down on all manner of ‘over-optimization’, both on- and offsite. Unless you know every SEO tactic that’s ever been used on your site, you need to audit your link profile.

The Tools

To run an enterprise-scale link profile audit, you’re going to need a few tools:

1. A link database. SEOMOZ’s Open Site Explorer or MajesticSEO’s database will work. Using both will work even better. ahrefs has a new tool that’s worth a look, too.
2. Microsoft Excel. Say what you want about Microsquish. Excel is still the most kickass toolset an SEO can have. Google Spreadsheets is awesome, but Excel still has the edge. If you somehow don’t already have it, get it.
3. WHOIS data. You’ll want access to the WHOIS database, either via scripting (see the next item) or through a paid service. The ability to perform bulk WHOIS lookups will save you a lot of time, so paying a bit extra for a service like whoisxmlapi.com could make sense. It’s cheaper than therapy.
4. A Web crawler of some kind. Screaming Frog or Xenu will do the trick.
5. A scripting language. Yes, I said it again. you need to know a programming language. If you don’t, OK, but this would really be a good time to learn.

The 19-Step Process

Here’s how I go about it. Of course, this is not the only way. It’s probably not even the best. I tend to find these shortcuts and design this kind of stuff on the fly.

On the other hand, this process lets me sift through 30,000+ links in less than 3 hours. Which means more Skyrim time – a win-win.

1. Create a ‘whitelist’. That’s a list of domain names that are 100% (cough OK 90%) legitimate link sources.
2. Grab the basic link data from Open Site Explorer and Majestic. Import both into Excel.
3. Combine the two URL lists, including SEOMOZ Domain Authority and/or Majestic ACRank so that you have a single list of all linking URLs. Filter out any duplicates.
4. Pull a list of unique domain names from that list. I use Python to do this. You can use Excel’s Text to Columns feature, too: Split the text up at each “.”, remove any folders and queries, and you should have a list of domain names.
5. Remove any whitelisted domains.
6. Run a WHOIS query on each domain name. Be sure to get the hostname, registrant name and status, at a minimum. Store that in Excel, too. I use Python to perform the bulk lookup. You can also send a list of domains to a paid service and they’ll do it for you.
7. Grab the IP address of each domain. You can use NSLOOKUP to do this, if you want to get all geeky about it. There are a few tools you can add to Excel, or you can script it in Google Spreadsheets. None of this is trivial, I know. It’s the price of success – you wanted your terrifying in-house SEO job for a Fortune 100. Time to pay up!
8. Use Vlookup to combine the domains, WHOIS results and Majestic/SEOMOZ/ahrefs data. It’s important that you have all of this in one place.
9. Now, look for sites that share common registrants. Ignore the private domain registration companies. Yes, that’s a lot of them. But you’ll be amazed how many link networks still operate ‘in the clear’.
10. If you find groups of sites owned by a single person or company, flag them. Why? Because multiple sites under a single owner may be part of a link network.
11. Compare IP addresses, the same way you did registrants. If you have collections of sites under the same IP address, flag those, too.
12. Now you should have a list of flagged domains.
13. Grab those domains and run your Web crawler, fetching the home page of each domain. I use Python for this, saving the HTML for each page for the next few steps.
14. Check the results for phrases that are a dead giveaway for spam: “High pagerank,” “Link building,” “Upgrade your link” and “Free link” are some of my favorites.
15. Get a word and link count for each page. Compute the ratio of words to links. I use Python and BeautifulSoup (an HTML parser for Python) to do this.
16. Pull all this data into your domains list.
17. Score your domains. I use a holistic 1-10 scale: The more ‘spam factors’ in evidence, the higher the score. So a page that’s part of a 10-domain portfolio, has spammy-sounding phrases on it and has a low ratio of words to link will get a really high score.
18. Sort your spreadsheet by score. Then do a quick check of the worst offenders. If they’re spam, get those links removed.
19. Repeat this process as necessary.

Getting Fancy

A few additional, easily-automated steps you can try:

1. Use natural language processing to compare 5 blog posts on any given blog. If they have little or no relation to each other—one’s about pharmaceuticals, and the next is about vacationing in Miami, for example—that could be a spam blog.
2. Check the writing grade level. Super-low or super-high may mean badly written, spun content.
3. Use an automated grammar checker like Queequeg and get an error count. More errors means a higher likelihood of spun content.
4. Check for blog sites using default templates. That’s a sure sign of a spam blog.
5. Check for big collections of footer links. Then look for sites that are interlinked into ‘wheels’ or whatever the link sellers are calling them now.

Accumulate Knowledge

As you do this process, save your data. Keep a list of the best and worst domains, site owners and IP blocks. It’ll make future audits far easier.

Prune, But Also Plant

Of course, don’t neglect authority-building. Your content strategy, social media strategy and branding will help you grow your authority profile even as you prune back your low-quality links.

None of this is easy. But almost all of it can be automated. Put in the time now and you can stay ahead of future Google warnings, improve SEO and build a lasting information asset for your company.

Welcome to IT - please enter at the door

So, how do you get the IT team to work with you? Work with them.

Make A Case For Growth

Why is IT treated like garbage? Same reason SEOs are: We’re both seen as a cost center, not a value generator. So try something like this:

• Figure out the total ‘universe’. Dig up the total search numbers for your space – the available ‘clicks’.
• Then, get the total number of non-branded organic visits to your site.
• Find the difference between the two.
• Calculate the percentage of organic search visitors who become customers…
• …and the average value of those customers.

With those numbers, you can figure out the total potential sales floating around out there, unrealized. Go to the head of IT. Show them the potential. Information Technology could have revenue attributed to their work.

If they won’t listen to that, move up the food chain, politely, a bit at a time. You may eventually find someone willing to listen. I say ‘may’ because I’ve had 50/50 success with this technique.

Sometimes, folks just ignore the evidence. That’s probably not their fault. Chances are they’re ignoring it because they don’t trust it. They don’t trust it because they’ve been taught, more than once, that SEO is a bunch of hooey.

Which brings me to the next technique…

Build Trust

Find the one, really easy win. A single title tag change, or a tweak to server response codes. Get that one thing done.

Then, track the hell out of it. Know when traffic goes up for that page, and by how much. Know how much revenue that generates.

Next, do it again with another small change.

In between each of these small changes, go do some link acquisition, or whatever will make your bosses happy.

Eventually, this will get folks trusting you, or make it crystal clear that it is hopeless, or demonstrate (yikes) that in this case SEO is not a good investment. At least you’ll get some clarity.

Change Your Name

If everyone’s so dead-set against ‘SEO’, try a few different names for it. Hold on, I’m not being snarky, or cynical, or trying to be funny. This can actually work, because sometimes it’s all about semantics.

Everyone’s been hard-coded that SEO = waste. You need to remap the connection. Reintroduce SEO as one facet of a long-term lead nurturing campaign, working alongside PPC, media buys, etc.

Partner up with the PPC team and do your presentations together under ‘Inbound marketing’. Work with the editorial team on content visibility. Or, work with the IT team on site performance.

It’s All About Creativity

I know what a lot of folks are going to say after reading this: “Ian, I was hired to do SEO, not to run the diplomatic gauntlet.”

Wrong. You were hired to do both. As is anyone hired into a large organization. It’s all about creatively building relationships. Go and build ‘em.

Feel free to rant, or (even better) post positive stories about making SEO work in big, traditional companies below.

Face it: You can talk about executive buy-in, cultural shift and managing expectations. But if the C-Suite doesn’t see a return on investment, SEO is dead within the enterprise.

So you need a way to measure and justify SEO activities.

To do that, you must deal with two challenges:

1. Attribution: SEO generates organic clicks. Visits that start with organic clicks often end with exits. Especially on big sites that aren’t always retail-driven. Somehow you have to close the attribution loop.
2. Illustration: Whatever data you deliver has to speak to the reader in 5 seconds. If it doesn’t, you’ll fail.

These are the gating problems for SEO in any big organization. Everything else falls into line, if you can solve them. Demonstrate that SEO generates $$ and:

• SEO becomes an IT team priority;
• The creative team gets clear direction from the top;
• Content suddenly becomes a worthwhile investment;
• You continue to get paid.

Small Organizations, Too

I know what you’re thinking: Ian, you just described the issues any company faces, big or small.

Well, not exactly. The CEO of a small company has the luxury of going by gut feel now and then. Chances are, she’ll meet the SEO team periodically, peek at the rankings and the traffic reports, and make decisions based on how she feels about SEO efforts.

In a big organization, though, the CEO can’t do that. She doesn’t have time to look at the SEO campaign. For her, SEO is a line item: Dollars out, dollars in.

In a small organization, good SEO data clinches an ongoing argument. In a big one, it is the argument.

Attribution: E-commerce

Say you’re running an e-commerce site. You sell pliers. All of your customers search for ‘pliers’, see you in the rankings, click your organic listing and then make a purchase right away. That’s an easy analytics problem: The first click generates the sale, which is an easy conversion to track.

In that case, attribution is a cinch, because each sale is 100% attributable to your organic search result. In rainbow-farting unicorn world, all your analytics are like this.

In reality, they’re not. Your data’s messy as heck. A typical sale may happen like this:

1. Frank finds you via a blog, visits your site, and leaves.
2. Frank searches for your product by name, clicks on a paid search result, visits your site, and leaves again.
3. Frank searches for your product by type (‘pliers’), finds your organic ranking, visits your site, bookmarks the page and leaves.
4. Later, Frank clicks the bookmark and makes his purchase: $300 for gold-plated pliers

If you’re using first-click attribution, the blog gets all the credit. If you’re using last-click attribution, ‘bookmark’ or ‘direct’ gets all the credit. SEO (and PPC) are left out in the cold.

You need to prove that SEO was part of this transaction path. Lucky for you, analytics providers know your pain:

• Google Analytics’ multi-channel funnels let you see where other channels ‘assisted’ in a sale.
• Coremetrics shows 30-day attribution for all channels, so that you can see sales attributable to clicks in the last month.
• Omniture and others have varying levels of support for attribution, as well. Some require manual setup, some don’t, so talk to the provider (and get proof!) before you choose one.

With full attribution, you can see where organic search impacts paid, for example:

Overlap between organic and paid search

The above diagram alone might persuade a VP of marketing that, no matter how many sales they get from PPC, they still need SEO, too.

But you still have to persuade the CEO. And there’s another problem.

Attribution: The Lead-Based Site

Up to now, I’ve talked about e-commerce. But what if your site’s totally based on lead generation? If someone visits your site, fills out a form, ends up in SalesForce or Siebel CRM software, and then goes to a completely different team at the company, attribution gets harder.

If visitors just pick up the phone, it gets even more difficult.

But you can still do it.

To make this work, you need three pieces of data:

• The number of Web leads that become customers.
• The average lifetime value of a customer (LTV).
• The referring source, even if it’s a phone call.

If you’ve got a form on your site, track each form completion as having generated a lead. Then the math is:

Leads generated * lead-to-customer conversion rate * LTV = value generated

So, if you generated 10,000 leads, and 10% of those leads become customers, and each customer has a $100 lifetime value:

10,000 * .1 * 100 = $100,000

If 10% of those leads came from SEO, then SEO was worth $10,000 in cold, hard cash.

If this is all generated via phone calls, then you don’t have a form to track. Instead, set up multiple phone lines (you’re an enterprise, you can do this). Change the phone number on your site based on the referrer (organic, paid search, etc). Then track calls as they come into your CRM software. Now you can track each call as a lead, and use the same formula.

A lead-based site is trickier than an e-commerce site. But it’s still totally possible to track and justify an SEO investment. You just have to do the math.

Illustration: The CEO’s Attention Span

I’m a CEO. I have the attention span of a spastic gnat. Between clients, finances, meetings, and whatever I choked down for lunch rumbling its way through my digestive tract, I may or may not have 5 full seconds to give your data.

And I manage a teeny, tiny little company.

If you’re going to make a strong argument to the CEO of a big, big company, think about speed limit signs:

Designers make these signs communicate their message while you whip by at 60kph or 50mph. They’re simple. They’re clear. They grab attention. That’s it.

Do the same with your SEO data. You did all the work on attribution. Now, illustrate it. Use the simplest possible diagram, and whatever you do, don’t rely on a spreadsheet, ’cause no one’s going to read it. I’m no artist, but I’ve found something like this can work:

A simple chart showing last-click and assisted SEO sales

It works because:

• The numbers are right there. Total sales. Last click sales. ‘Assisted’ sales. Worst case, you need provide a key as to what those values mean.
• It’ll work if projected. My smallest font size is 30 points. So if someone decides to grab my chart and throw it into (gasp) Powerpoint without asking, it’ll still be readable.
• It tells the whole story. I could leave out the total sales. That would be prettier. But I don’t want to make anyone do any math.
• It saves the explanation for later. Don’t worry about specific keywords, or SEO changes, or the like unless you’re asked. Do provide that data to the VP or marketing or your direct supervisor/client.

It Ain’t Easy

Yeah, this is pretty complicated. It requires math and stuff. But, if you want to earn the big bucks on the big sites, you need to work on it. Get going, and justify!

Response codes impact every page, image and file on your website.

A visiting search engine bot figures out what to do based on those codes. Incorrect response codes can cause:

• Indexation problems;
• Duplicate content;
• Site performance problems;
• All manner of other site higgledy-piggledy.

Enterprise SEO is all about big, site-wide wins.

Response codes are just that: They’re easy to set up. They have a broad impact. Seems like a slam-dunk to me.

And yet, when I checked 1,000+ large sites—’large’ meaning ‘more than 5,000 pages’—only 30% got their response codes right.

Thirty. Percent.

With that, I dust off my response code tutorials, and write this quick guide to response codes for enterprise website developers, SEOs and anyone else who will listen:

The Big Three Response Codes

There are three response codes you want to know the most about:

• 404. Page not found. If a file simply doesn’t exist, your server should deliver a 404 status. You can use a 410 response if you want Googlebot to retry the bad URL less frequently.

• 301. Page permanently moved. If you’ve permanently removed one URL and replaced it with another, use a 301.

• 302. Page temporarily moved. If you’ve removed something and will be putting it back, use a 302.

There are others: 200 means ‘OK’. Hopefully, you’ve got that one squared away.

Page Not Found Responses

Most important: If a browser or bot visits your site and attempts to load a file that does not exist, it should get a 404 response.

404 is how a server says “Uh, that file isn’t here.” It’s not a bad thing. It’s the right answer when someone clicks a broken link, or a page is just gone.

You can get tricky with redirection if you want to try to preserve link authority of a deleted page. But the default answer for a missing page should be 404.

The problem: Many sites deliver 302 temporary redirect, 301 permanent redirect or, even worse, 200 ‘OK’ response codes. This leads to massive site duplication and terrible crawl efficiency. Visiting bots spend their time crawling worthless content.

Possible causes and solutions:

• .NET loves to take over control of 40x errors, replacing them with a 302 redirect to a friendly error page. That’s nice. But totally wrong. Turn off .NET’s 404 handling and let IIS take over, instead. You can still have a friendly error page.
• A misguided developer may have thought that redirecting all ‘not found’ errors to your home page helps users. It doesn’t. It’s totally confusing, like going into a revolving door and coming out at some random location. Provide a friendly 404 page that explains something went wrong and provides options.
• Someone may have set up a redirect page that uses a javascript or meta refresh to then reroute visitors to a ‘best guess’ page. See the previous item—same problem.
• If your site’s on PHP, it may be using header('location: /'); die();. Try something like header("HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found");, instead.
• Your site just delivers a 200 ‘OK’ code no matter what. I have no idea why you’d do this, but I’ve seen 100-200 sites that do. Change it.

A 410 response is OK, too. It causes Googlebot to more quickly remove a URL from the index, and to retry the URL less often. You can read up on 4xx codes, and just about every other status code, on the W3′s Status Codes definition page.

What Kind Of Redirection?

Redirects are a powerful SEO tool. They let you consolidate authority in the right places. But you have to do ‘em right.

A 301 code tells a visiting bot or browser that the page it’s loading is gone, forever, and the URL of the replacement page. Use this to consolidate authority and resolve basic canonicalization issues.

A visiting search bot will transfer some of the authority of the old URL to the new one. It will also eventually stop visiting the old URL, replacing it with the new one.

A 302 code tells a visiting bot or browser the page it’s loading is gone, but only temporarily. A visiting bot will keep returning to the old URL, checking to see if the page is back.

The problem: As near as I can tell, large sites randomly mix 302 and 301. They lose authority in some cases, and force bots to crawl permanently-removed content again and again.

Possible causes and solutions:

• IIS 6 and earlier didn’t have a nice, clear button that said “Make this a 301 redirect”. Instead, you must check “A permanent redirect for this resource”. By default, that box is unchecked. So the default behavior is a 302, temporary redirect.
• You’re writing redirection into your Web application, but you left out the status code. Some servers are configured to default to a 302, temporary redirect if you don’t set the status code to 301.

It’s Not That Hard

No matter how complex the server infrastructure, getting the big three response codes —404, 301, 302— right makes for sitewide wins. If you’re running a big site, look to your response codes. Get ‘em right. It’ll boost SEO, performance and user experience.

The nofollow tag is bad, bad, bad for SEO campaigns.

The only time you should use it? If you’re selling links or doing something that could be interpreted as selling links, and want to avoid getting banned.

The Story

I’m not going to cover the entire tragic tale of the nofollow attribute.

The short version: Google introduced this thing called the link rel=nofollow tag. They implied that the tag would keep authority (PageRank) on the linking page instead of passing it via the link, thereby making stuff like comment spam ineffective. About a year later, though, Matt Cutts told the world that nofollow does not ‘keep’ authority on the linking page.

That caused all sorts of hysteria in the SEO community. SEOs were using nofollow to ‘sculpt’ PageRank on their sites. A typical SEO might add the rel=nofollow attribute to 50% of the links on a page, in hopes of sending 50% more PageRank to the other pages. Instead, they were actually lighting their websites on fire. In the bad-metaphorical way.

The Nerdy Explanation

Basically, nofollow now ‘burns’ PageRank. Here’s the explanation from the Google Man Himself, Matt Cutts:

Q: Does this mean “PageRank sculpting” (trying to change how PageRank flows within your site using e.g. nofollow) is a bad idea?

Matt Cutts: I wouldn’t recommend it, because it isn’t the most effective way to utilize your PageRank. In general, I would let PageRank flow freely within your site. The notion of “PageRank sculpting” has always been a second- or third-order recommendation for us. I would recommend the first-order things to pay attention to are 1) making great content that will attract links in the first place, and 2) choosing a site architecture that makes your site usable/crawlable for humans and search engines alike.

For example, it makes a much bigger difference to make sure that people (and bots) can reach the pages on your site by clicking links than it ever did to sculpt PageRank. If you run an e-commerce site, another example of good site architecture would be putting products front-and-center on your website vs. burying them deep within your site so that visitors and search engines have to click on many links to get to your products.

There may be a miniscule number of pages (such as links to a shopping cart or to a login page) that I might add nofollow on, just because those pages are different for every user and they aren’t that helpful to show up in search engines. But in general, I wouldn’t recommend PageRank sculpting.

The short version: Using nofollow, even in comments, will reduce the effective PageRank of the linking page.

NoFollow doesn’t preserve PageRank. It burns it. Bzzzzt.

The Muggle Explanation

This is the better explanation for us mere mortals:

• Every page on the web has votes. PageRank records those votes, in part, by tracking links. Links = votes.
• Many other things provide votes, too, but links are really, really important.
• If you ‘nofollow’ a link, it doesn’t preserve the vote. It just shreds it. Here’s an example:

In this first example, site A’s home page has 4 votes. It links to 4 pages—3 pages on site A, and 1 on site B. None of the links have ‘nofollow’, so it passes all its votes.

In the second example, some smarty pants decides to try to hoard PageRank by nofollowing the link to site B. But all that happens is site A spends the PageRank anyway, but passes nothing. The PageRank of subpages on site A doesn’t go up. That 1 vote is just gone.

Doing this internally is even worse, because you’re burning PageRank and costing votes to your own site.

What To Do Instead Of Using No-Follow

If you really want to do PageRank sculpting — meaning you’ve already been cranking out great content, have your site delivering pages in 5 seconds or less, and generally have your SEO house in order, then here are a few ideas:

• Have decent navigation on your site. Every single department in the company doesn’t need a link. You don’t need to have fly-out and drop-down menus on every page. This isn’t just an SEO thing. Usability studies increasingly show that drop down navigation causes confusion in site visitors. See the next bullet for an alternative.
• Go hub-and-spoke. Instead of providing links to every sub-category on every page of your site, provide links to major categories. Then provide links to relevant sub-categories from within the major category.
• Consolidate links. Don’t have two links where one will do. For example, put your privacy policy and terms of use on a single page called ‘Legal’, and link to that, instead. That means fewer links per page.
• Fix broken links. Fix busted internal and external links. That will avoid any PageRank leaks.

The Long & Short Of It

Friends don’t let friends use nofollow. Like rel=canonical, it’s a bit of HTML created by search engines, for search engines. It serves no other purpose. Unlike rel=canonical, using rel=nofollow can do real damage to your SEO efforts.

Tell me if you’ve heard this one before:

Site Owner: I want to rank higher in the search engines!

SEO: OK, you’ll need to fix a few things… produces a list

SEO: And you’ll need to start a content strategy. That means 10-20 pages of new content per month, minimum, plus work to promote it.

Site Owner: OKAY! I’m on it. Site owner goes away.

…

Two months later:

Site Owner: SEO, you totally ripped me off. I haven’t seen any improvement in my rankings.

SEO: Did you make all the changes?

Site Owner: Yes.

SEO: Did you start work on the content?

Site Owner: Yes.

SEO: Can I see?

Site Owner shows SEO their site. It has 70 pages of new articles.

SEO: Wow, that’s great… Wait a minute. This article is only 150 words. And the author used the wrong ‘your’ five times. And this article is almost identical to these other five…

Site Owner: So?

SEO: Well, this isn’t exactly great content.

Site Owner: Hey, you told me to get new content. You didn’t say anything about great content!

Search Engines Aren’t Garbage Disposals

I suspect that most people see search engines as a sort of content garbage disposals. You feed them a random assortment of leftovers, hard-to-identify and vaguely smelly things, and the occasional rotten egg in one end, there are some grinding and crunching sounds, and you’re all set.

Well, they’re not garbage disposals.

Half of SEO is a long list of things you must do to make yourself visible, help search engines classify your content, etc..

But, in the pre- and now more importantly, post- Panda world, the other half of SEO is all about differentiating yourself from competitors with great, unique information.

You know… Marketing.

No More Garbage

You have to stop serving garbage to your visitors, and to search engines. Here’s a couple ideas to get you started:

1. Write stuff that hasn’t been written before. There are already 999,999 articles about SEO and title tags. Try something else, or a new spin on your topic.
2. Be interesting. Put some thought into how the article is put together. Use visuals where it helps. Use humor, even.
3. Hire quality writers to write quality stuff.
4. Ask your visitors and customers what they’d like to read. Then write it.
5. Follow production best practices. Use good line spacing and typography. Place subheads to organize your story and make it easier to scan. A 500-word article vomited onto the page with zero formatting makes it look like you don’t care. If you don’t care, you don’t deserve to rank.
6. Brainstorm and maintain a list of headlines you can assign to writers.
7. Assign target topics and phrases to specific pages on your site. Think through how you’ll interlink new content with those pages to build authority.
8. Integrate content into your site. You probably won’t make much progress if you hang a bunch of lousy articles off your site like some kind of growth. Content has to be in the flow of a normal visitor’s movement through the site.

In short: think about it. Make content strategy part of your overall Internet marketing strategy and invest in it. You can’t outsource your writing to eLance for $5 per article and expect progress. Nor can you somehow automate or fake your way into the rankings. Yes, there are always the lucky few who manage it. But it’s not the norm.

But It’s Hard/Expensive/Time-Consuming!

I know, huh? If you want to gain a top ranking, you have to work for it, and invest, and really dedicate yourself to it.

But have some perspective: 20 years ago, the minimum required to reach a national audience was $250,000, a fantastic sales letter and a lot of luck. Now, you can reach a national audience with a well-coded website, one decent writer and a good idea. That’s nothing short of miraculous.

So switch your content strategy from garbage to gourmet. It’s worth the effort.

Frankly, I’m stunned how often web teams resist doing it.

Here’s a list from easy to not-so-easy, of 29 ways you can get things running faster on your website:

1. Put your images on a separate domain. Services like Amazon S3 make this very easy. Open an S3 account. Point a subdomain like ‘blah.yoursite.com’ at the S3 storage. Put your images there. Web browsers can load from multiple domains simultaneously, creating the impression that your site is faster. Plus, you’ll use less of your own server’s bandwidth and CPU. Every little bit helps.

 

2. Or, just put your images on Flickr and use them as your separate domain.

 

3. Compress images using the right file type. Use ‘lossy’ compression—JPEG—for photos and images with lots of colors. Use ‘lossless’ compression—PNG and GIF—for line art and images with only a few colors.

 

4. Resize images before you upload them. Don’t resize images using height and width! Resize them using Photoshop, or Fireworks, or whatever. Forcing people to download a 1,000-pixel-wide image to fill a 150-pixel-wide thumbnail is just cruel.

 

5. Learn to write decent code. The average enterprise content management system (CMS) or shopping cart spits out nasty HTML code. Clean it the heck up. You are in charge, not the server. Any server can generate clean code with a little tweaking. So tweak.

 

6. Put your CSS in separate .css files, not embedded in each page.

 

7. Split up your CSS. Create one stylesheet that holds only styles used on every page of your site. Then create separate stylesheets for each unique page layout: Your home page, a typical article page, a typical product page, etc. Load only what you need on each page.

 

8. Learn to use CSS. If you can use <p> instead of &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<font color=“blue” style=“font-size:10pt;font-weight:bold;”>, you’ll end up saving a lot of space. And, people like me won’t laugh at you.

 

9. Put your javascript in .js files. Don’t put it embedded in each page. It’s just… dumb. If you embed javascript, then every visiting browser, including Googlebot, has to download that code every time it hits every page. If you put it in a .js file, on the other hand, then Googlebot ignores it, and visiting browsers cache it.

 

10. Split up your javascript, same as you split up your CSS.

 

11. Defer javascript loading whenever possible. You can do a Google search for ‘deferred javascript’ and get some great resources for this.

 

12. Chuck the Flash. Just do it. There are plenty of other ways to animate elements on the page. If you must use Flash, then use it only in small nuggets on the page.

 

13. Set up GZIP compression on your web server.

 

14. Minify everything: HTML, javascript and CSS. Save a non-minified copy of everything for editing purposes. Don’t use a server-driven, ‘on the fly’ solution, though. That just increases server overhead and, at really high traffic volumes, will slow things way down.

 

15. Minimize redirects. The statement ‘301 redirects are good for SEO’ does not mean ‘5 consecutive 301 redirects are better than 1’. Don’t use 301 redirects unless you have to. Fix before you redirect.

 

16. Fix canonicalization issues. ‘Fix’ does not mean ‘use rel=canonical’. It means ‘make sure every page on your site has a single address’. That will improve caching performance, reduce memory usage and speed things up.

 

17. Invest in decent hosting. If you’re hosting at JimmyBob’s House of Hosting for $5/month, don’t expect to break any speed records. Unless you’re a serious geek, you’ll want to spend money on a decent hosting setup. I’ve seen great performance out of some shared hosting packages (multiple sites per server). But for the fastest possible setup, you’ll want one or more dedicated servers.

 

18. Set up caching on your server. If you’re using WordPress, use a plugin like W3 Total Cache. If you’re using another tool, learn it and its caching capabilities. Your server does include caching, or can. Unless you bought it from pygmies who used to work at the chocolate factory down the road.

 

19. Go static. If you’re building your site on PHP, ASP or another scripting language, chances are all of your site pages are in PHP, ASP or the relevant language. Some pages, though, like ‘About us’ and ‘Privacy’, change so rarely that you can likely make them totally ‘static’ .html pages. By doing that, you eliminate one set of calls to your server’s CPU. That’s a small but instant performance gain.

 

20. If you’re working in .NET, learn to compress the VIEWSTATE variable. That sucker takes up a lot of room in your code. Even better, get rid of the VIEWSTATEW variable until you need it.

 

21. Correctly configure your server’s memory management. I won’t try to explain this. If it doesn’t make sense, hire someone, or talk to someone, or at least write down “I didn’t configure my server’s memory management.” That way, when your server starts crashing every time traffic exceeds 200 visitors, you can save the poor schmoe elected to fix the problem a lot of time.

 

22. Put your database on a separate server. If you’ve got a busy site, then you need to put your website on one server and your database on another. Database transactions eat up a lot of server oomph. You want that happening away from your web server. Otherwise, you end with the web and database software in a tug of war for server resources.

 

23. Learn to use JOINs. Say you’re programming a database-driven site. You need to display, I dunno, all products in 3 categories. You can either: a) Write a snarl of nested loops, thereby driving your server into a state of hysteria and causing local authorities to dump seawater on your hosting location; or b) Learn to use a SQL JOIN statement, and avoid all that hassle. JOINs are faster. If you use them right. Please.

 

24. Learn to use stored procedures. More database Kung-Fooery. Learn it if you don’t know it. Stored procedures are compiled by the database server and run a lot faster than plain old SQL scripts.

 

25. Don’t use SSL unless you have to. I’ve argued myself hoarse on this one. If you want to have some fun, come up to me at a party and ask about it. Then watch all the veins in my forehead bulge as I launch into a spittle-infused diatribe about SSL, CPU cycles and other geekery.

 

26. If you’re on Apache, load only the modules you need. I know. Duh. But most folks leave the defaults set, and that may include modules you don’t need.

 

27. If you’re on Apache, learn to use AllowOverride, when you really need DNS lookup, and other tips like FastCGI. Read this to learn all the nerdy goodness. Your server will thank you.

 

28. If you’re on Internet Information Server (IIS), learn performance logging. Then learn your way through the fun, fun, world of IIS tuning. Actually, it’s not that bad. You can start with this Technet page. Just remember to check which IIS version you’re using.

 

29. Learn to use a server accelerator like Squid, or to use Apache or nginx as a caching proxy. Caching proxies and accelerators are designed to do nothing but store your web server’s dynamic pages and deliver them, really quickly, to the public. We’ve seen sites perform up to 3x faster with a Squid server in place.

 

The list goes on. A site is never ‘fast enough’. What’s important is that you continuously make it faster. You’ll see better returns, happier visitors and higher rankings.

If you’re a big company, you’re likely going to have 5+ copywriters going like gangbusters producing articles for your site, guest blog posts and link bait. Even if you don’t, you still have the content that currently exists on your site: Product descriptions, ‘about us’ pages and whatnot.

If you’re a small company, you probably have to outsource your copywriting simply because you don’t have time to do it yourself. That means at least one other person doing writing for you. And, even if you’re doing it yourself, you need to stay consistent.

In either case, people with many other priorities are going to write stuff that’s essential to your SEO campaign. How do you keep everything inline with your SEO goals?

You need an SEO style guide.

I’ve done a few of these. They usually have three parts: keyword preferences, linking guidelines and <TITLE> rules.

The Right Words

I’m not a fan of telling writers “Use this phrase XX times per article!”

It leads to content that reads like it was written by chimpanzees.

But you can limit choices a little bit, by suggesting the use of specific phrases in reference to specific products/tools/services. The “Recommended Terms List” is the result. Here are a few examples from various style guides:

Helmets: When referring to “bike helmets“, please use the phrase ‘bike helmets’, rather than ‘brain buckets’ or ‘lids’ or ‘bicycle helmets’.

Cell phones: When referring to “cell phones” please use the phrase ‘cell phones’, not ‘cellular phones’, ‘phones’, or ‘handsets’.

Cars: When referring to a specific car for the first time, please use the make + model combination. For example, “Chevy Camaro”.

This list shouldn’t lead to lousy copy—I’m not telling writers to stuff keywords. I’m just telling them which keywords to use when they have to. In that way, the Recommended Terms list will keep the team on track, or remind you of your goals when you sit down to write.

Linking Standards

On most sites, the writers are the ones who write and publish content. That means they’re responsible for links.

Consistent linking is essential if you’re going to maintain good canonicalization and avoid the unsightly embarrassment of duplicate content. Speaking as a writer myself, though, I can tell you that consistent linking is the last thing on my mind when I’m trying to make a deadline.

Make it easy by presenting simple, easy-to-follow standards for internal and external links. For example:

All product links should be in this format:

http://www.thesite.com/products/12345.html. Replace 12345 with the correct SKU.

All links to articles should be in this format:

http://www.thesite.com/articles/url.html

Replace url with the contents of the ‘URL’ field in the content management system.

All links to other sites should use target=“_blank”.

Get the idea? This gets everyone into a routine for linking. At a minimum, it gives you something to point to when your boss freaks out because everyone’s using different link types and they’ve thrown your site into a state of rankings higgledy-piggledy.

Title Standards

The title tag continues to be the strongest on-page ranking factor. That may change, but it hasn’t yet. So you need to make sure all writers have certain rules for writing title tags. Some random examples:

• Never put our brand name first.
• Always provide the full name of the interviewee.
• Keep the title tag to 70 characters or less.

These may be eye-rollers for experienced SEOs. But again, if I’m sitting down to write, the title tag that will eventually be on the published version of the article is just not something I’m thinking about.

Provide guidance and you’ll spend a lot less time hand-editing title tags at 1 AM.

The Real Point: Document, Document, Document

It’s easy for us SEOs to frown at writers when their pesky prose screws up our carefully crafted SEO plans. But keeping things consistent is our responsibility, not theirs. So document everything, provide a style guide, and work with your team to make sure everyone understands it.

That way, you can spend more time on future strategy, and less on editing past copy.

• 3% of the time: “No problem, I’m on it.”
• 75% of the time: “But I don’t have anything to write about.”
• 22% of the time: “No one wants to hear about my product/service. It’s boring.”

I’ll ignore the obvious replies, like “If it’s so boring, why does anyone buy it?” or “Then why can you talk about your product for 2 hours at a party?” I understand how tough it can be to come up with material. When you spend all your time working in your business, day in and day out, it can start seeming routine, mundane and so second-nature, you can’t imagine what people would want to know.

Here’s a list of a few ways I come up with material, and how I present them to give the most bang for the SEO buck.

1. Q & A / FAQ Sections

My favorite option can seem like a cop-out, but there are potential clients and customers out there with questions. Answering those questions can give you instant content.

Put a simple form on your website and invite folks to send you their questions. Then write a short article/post about each one. You’re not giving away your products or expertise for free! Your customers will still work with you, no matter how detailed you get.

In fact, in my experience, the more detailed you get, the more likely the reader is to hire you, because they realize just how much work they’d have to do. I’ve been blogging and writing articles for over 10 years now. Somehow, folks still hire me.

Get the most SEO value

To get the most value out of Q & A sections:

• Link from your answers to relevant services pages on your site, as well as to other answers.
• Check the phrasing of the question. Make sure the question uses the most common phrasing. If it doesn’t, edit it.
• Occasionally do a Q&A roundup: a single article, post or page on your site that lists all of the questions relevant to one topic.

2. Post Specifications

If you sell products, post your product specs, in HTML format. Link to the specifications from the relevant product page. That way, folks who want more information can drill down.

Get the most SEO value

• Do the specifications in HTML format! It’s tempting to use PDF, which indexes fairly well. But you want total control over title tag, in- and outbound links, etc. You can link to a PDF ‘printable’ version.
• Rewrite any paragraph text. If you’re using the manufacturer’s standard specification sheet, rewrite any detailed text ensure the page is as unique as possible.

3. Transcribe Videos & Podcasts

I’ve written about this before. Send your videos and podcasts off to be transcribed. Then post the transcriptions to your site as articles, or post them on the same page as the video or podcast in question. If you do any internal training sessions of 15 minutes or more, record those and get them transcribed, too. It’s like you’re writing without having to write.

Get the most SEO value

• If you’ve transcribed a video or podcast, be sure to place the transcription on the same page. That could boost the video’s chance to rank in universal search, too.
• Edit the transcriptions for readability. Sometimes the spoken word is riddled with slang and incomplete sentences that work perfectly when you’re speaking live. Tweak the language for a few choice key phrases, too.
• Link like with like. If a transcription relates to a product, link them together. Same with services, Q&A items and specifications. Don’t just throw content up on your site—make use of it.

4. Write About The Funniest Thing That’s Ever Happened In Your Business

Don’t be mean, but write about the silliest, funniest thing you’ve ever encountered in your day-to-day work. I don’t care if you’re a plumber, a purveyor of rubber gloves, a toothpaste manufacturer or a cashier at a grocery store; something funny has happened to you at work.

Example: I worked as a technical writer. What the heck would I write about?

The story: I was once sitting around with my colleagues, joking about what tech writers would’ve done during biblical times. The phone rang, and someone else answered it. She put the person on hold and burst out laughing. “Ian”, she said, laughing so hard she was crying, “It’s someone named Moses.”

And it really was.

It doesn’t always have to be directly relevant.

Get the most SEO value

• Try to tie the event in to your work somehow. In my case, I was at work, so the tie-in is pretty easy. But there’s almost always some relevant moral or lesson you can extract.

5. Write About The Best Thing To Happen In Your Industry

This is an easy one. Pick a recent event (in the last month – up to a year) that you feel has done a lot for your industry. Write that sucker down. Tell people why you think it matters. Solicit their comments.

Get the most… Oh, you get it by now.

• Be sure to contact other pundits in your industry. Get a discussion going. You’ll build links, and you might just learn something at the same time.

6. Rant

I don’t know much about this one (cough, lying… cough, cough). If something infuriates you, write down why, and how to fix it.

The only note I’ll put here: Do not publish right away. Ever. Let your rant sit, safe and sound, for 24 hours. Then reread it. See if you were offensive or downright nasty. If you were, rewrite or start again. Being a schmuck is not an SEO strategy.

The Bad News…It’s Still Work

Writing will always be work. But with practice and a sense of purpose, it gets easier. Hopefully, some of the above ideas will prove helpful. If you have other tips, leave them below in the comments. Or, even better, write your own set of strategies on your own website!