The Free Dictionary definition for optimize:

op·ti·mize:  To make as perfect or effective as possible.

My long-standing definition of Search Engine Optimization (SEO):

“Making your site the best it can be for users and search engines.”

SEO is both as simple and as difficult that

Making something optimal by its very nature is going to be hard work. Being the best you can be at your job, your schoolwork, your relationships, or anything else is not easy. Very few people, if any, will ever be optimized, or perfect. The same is true for websites. But that shouldn’t stop you from attempting to be optimized.

Let’s step outside of the online world for a moment and look at a real life situation where it pays to be optimized. My hope is that this analogy will help you have a better sense of what it means to be optimized.

Now that my kids are older, my husband and I frequent a little pub down the street from us. During our time there, I’ve quietly watched how the bartenders work, as well as listened to what patrons say about them.

What I’ve noticed is that when it comes to bartending, the more you meet the exact needs of each customer, the more money you will make in tips. In other words, it pays for a bartender to be optimized. While most bartenders try to be the best they can be, some are better at it than others.

Rule #1: Optimization shouldn’t turn people off

As it applies to a bartender: Take the bartender who has a great sense of humor, but can be sarcastic at times. While thick-skinned patrons (like me) find her extremely witty and amusing, others don’t. These folks didn’t come to a bar to be teased, thus, making this bartender not truly optimized. Or take the bartender who can never quite pour a full beer and doesn’t notice that your glass is empty until 10 minutes later. He or she is far from being optimized.

As it applies to your website: Is your website stuffed full of keywords? Is it extremely slow-loading and/or all Flash? Is it optimized for search engines, but not people?

If you answered yes to any of those questions, you’re turning people off and therefore, your website isn’t optimized.

Rule #2: You can’t fake optimization

As it applies to a bartender: Take the one who is super-duper nice to everyone. While you might think she is an optimal bartender, she’s not; her extreme niceness comes across as phony to many. While it does fool some, and may even be optimal for them, she’s not optimized because she’s only pleasing one segment of her clientele.

As it applies to your website: Are you creating doorway pages/domains? Are you writing about “the history of whatever”? Are you using automated software to scrape articles off others websites and then mixing up the words? Are you hiring someone to write hundreds or thousands of low quality articles?

If you answered yes to any of those questions, then you may be faking your optimization. While it may appeal to some search engines for a time, it’s certainly not optimal, nor will it provide you with long term results.

Rule #3: Optimization is hard work

As it applies to a bartender: The optimized bartender is not necessarily perfect, but she is authentic. Everything she does on the job is to be the best bartender she can be. She works her butt off to please each and every customer the way they want to be pleased, which is no easy feat. Every patron is different and what’s optimal for them won’t necessarily be what’s optimal for another. If a patron likes to be flirted with, she can do that, but not so much that they think she wants to date them. On the other hand, she would never dream of flirting with a guy who was with his wife or girlfriend.

The optimal bartender treats both genders equally, and quickly learns their drink preferences, where they like to sit, little tidbits about their family, etc. She also discloses bits of personal information about herself and family, but not so much as to be always talking about herself. She’s humorous and can be self-deprecating, but in good quantities. And by the end of her shift, you know she’s exhausted (it’s often exhausting just watching her!). You can bet that this level of optimization is hard work.

As it applies to your website: Like patrons at a bar, every website is different. While there are basic strategies and tactics most websites need, there’s no SEO formula that will work for each and every one. Are you spending time every day making your website better? Are you being authentic and putting yourself out there in your blog or newsletter? Are you thinking about each and every potential customer, client or user of your website and making sure your website has exactly what they need? And are you working your butt off to do all this?

If you answered yes to those questions, you are probably tired! But you’re also on your way to having a successful website and business online. Congratulations! But first, go take a nap–you deserve it, and will need it before the real work begins!

I recently read an article by Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz, entitled “Terrible SEO Advice: Focus on Users, Not Engines” that could potentially set SEO back at least at decade, in my opinion.

In the article, he apologized to his audience of budding SEOs for having ever told them to do what’s right for their users. In fact, he called putting your users first, “utterly false and tragically misleading.”

If you listen to this advice, your SEO will be fatally flawed from the get-go.

Here’s why I feel that the advice, thoughts and recommendations in that article could have set SEO back many years. It can all be summed up in a simple piece of SEO logic that goes like this:

• The goal of SEO is to bring targeted search engine visitors to your website and ideally convert them to take some action.

• The goal of the searcher is have their problems solved, needs filled, or questions answered.

• The goal of the search engine is to show the best, most relevant website to their users — the searchers.

Agreed?

Which leads us to the bottom line:

• The sites/pages that should win in the search engines are those that best solve the searcher’s (user’s) problem, fill their needs or provide them with the information they are seeking.

Granted, not all search engines are created equal, nor are they technically perfect or even close to being able to judge the best, most relevant websites–but that is their ultimate goal. Somewhere down the road, they will be able to do that despite the best efforts of search engine spammers. Google has come a long way in this regard which is why they are leaps and bounds ahead of their competitors.

Ignore the needs of the searchers at your own peril

If you ignore the needs of the searcher, you are (in reality) also ignoring the needs of the search engines. Do this at your own peril and only if you enjoy chasing your tail, as well as the latest algorithm of the day.

In fact, in Rand’s update to the article he said:

“My argument in this post centers specifically around the practice of search engine optimization and the idea that tactics which are engine-focused (like XML sitemaps, anchor text, link architecture, webmaster tools usage, etc.) can be ignored because they’re not “for the user.”

This is confusing at best!

Certainly descriptive anchor text is helpful to users, isn’t it? Which link is better for a user: the one that says, “click here” or the one that says “click here for more info on green widgets”?

The same can be said for link architecture. If you bury a specific page by making a user click 5 levels deep to find it, surely it can’t be a very important page of the website, right?

On the other hand, XML sitemaps and the use of Webmaster tools or nofollowing internal links for PR sculpting are indeed things that one would do just for a search engine, and offer no value to a human visitor. But guess what? They aren’t, in my opinion, any value to SEO either (other than as diagnostic tools). Imagine that!

Forget what search engines tell you to focus on

Rather than focusing on things that search engineers try to claim are important (so they can gain more of your website’s data) you should be ensuring that your websites keep on answering searcher questions and filling user needs so that the search engines have no choice but to show them to their users.

You should also make sure your websites convert those highly targeted visitors into customers; not by concerning yourself with how many times any particular keyword phrase is placed on the page regardless of whether it makes sense, but by remembering that real people will be reading your content.

You should be spending your time making sure that your website provides those searchers with exactly what they’re looking for.

In other words, make sure your website fits the searcher’s original search query (those pesky keyword phrases you researched) to a tee. After all, you’re not doing keyword research for search engines as Rand suggests, but because you need to get into the mind of your target audience.

As for link building, anyone who was in SEO before Google came around, spent plenty of time building links to their sites. Not for search engines, mind you, but because it’s how you market a website. Fancy that. It’s still the reason why you should be doing it today.

SEO is confusing to many. It’s shrouded in mystery, often has a bad reputation and is not generally understood by traditional marketers. Heck, it’s not even understood by website developers nor some who sell SEO as a service.

Yet SEO is nothing more or less than an additional marketing channel for your business. Let me explain, with a story.

We have a client who had not had any SEO work performed until they hired our company. They’re not in a hugely competitive space, but they do have competitors. We originally researched and found all the keyword phrases that people looking for the type of product this company manufactured would type into the search engines, and we optimized the website for those keywords. Within a few months, they began seeing search engine traffic for those keyword phrases (and numerous variations of them), and traffic continued to grow each month.

Since this company is a manufacturer and doesn’t sell their products directly, it’s difficult to measure conversions at the keyword level. For this site, a conversion would be a search for a local dealer and/or a phone call, rather than any direct contact with the manufacturing company. Over the next 2 years, however, targeted keyword traffic continued to go up, more phone calls were coming in, and the company’s dealers were getting more leads than ever before. Until they implemented a redesign.

We knew they were in the process of redesigning and provided them with information on what to watch out for during a redesign. We also asked to be kept in the loop during this critical stage. About a week before they were ready to go live, they showed us the new site.

Most of the SEO work we had done was gone!

Title tags were missing and the content had been completely rewritten without regard to the keyword phrases that had been carefully selected for each page.

We scheduled a call and gave them the bad news. They spoke to their developers and were able to retrieve the old Titles and Meta descriptions. In addition, they were keeping the same basic site structure and page URLs. But they were not keen on rewriting their content with keyword phrases in mind at this time. Unfortunately, most of their new content had been shortened from the previous version and was not as descriptive.

Would the lack of keyword phrases in the content really make a difference?

That’s a tough question because you can never be positive what the search engines will do with any particular page. They did now have the same Titles as before and we knew from experience that sometimes Title tags alone can work wonders with the search engines. So my answer to the client was that they would most likely lose targeted search engine traffic for the previously optimized keyword phrases since they were no longer in the content. I provided the caveat that I couldn’t be 100% sure of this, but I recommended that they didn’t risk it and that we re-optimize the content before going live.

They decided to move forward with the un-optimized content and take the risk.

We continued to monitor their analytics very closely to look for declines in traffic. After the first month, there didn’t seem to be much of a difference, and in fact, traffic overall was up. We were hopeful that perhaps the Title tags and their links would prevail and all would be fine.

But by the next month. targeted keyword phrase traffic was substantially down (even though all-around traffic was up). We provided them with a report on this and voiced our concern. The month after that, keyword traffic continued to decline, while traffic for their brand name was up.

Is brand traffic all you want?

We decided to meet with them to explain our concerns. While it’s great to have lots of traffic for your brand name because those people will be your best converters – you don’t need SEO to achieve that. Your other marketing channels should do that for you. They had been doing a great job of getting the word out about their company as a whole, thus, the increase in brand traffic.

But what they and others who don’t implement SEO on their sites are missing out on are those people who don’t already know their brand. That is, the people who know they want a product or a service that solves their problem or fills their need, but don’t know who offers it.

SEO is the marketing channel that brings potential customers to your site who want what you offer, but don’t know how to find you. These are people that will browse through the search engine listings of websites that show up for the product or service they’re looking for, and choose one to purchase from. If your site only shows up for your brand name, you’re not even in the game; the sale will likely go to one of your competitors who have an optimized website.

If you only want to serve the needs of people who already know your brand and aren’t interested in new customers, then you don’t need SEO. But if you want to use every marketing channel at your disposal, SEO is one of the most cost-effective marketing channels to bring in people who don’t already know about you but want exactly what you offer.

(Hat tip to my High Rankings colleague Pauline Jakober who explained to our client this concept of SEO as being just another marketing channel, which inspired me to write this article.)

…and how it relates to your business and your SEO.

As I write this, I’m on vacation in the Russian River Valley of Sonoma County, CA.  While this won’t be 100% organic SEO as is usually the topic, I’ll try my best to tie some of my vacation experiences to the SEO world, and to business in general.

With that said, here are 3 things I learned from my vacation that kinda sorta relate to business and SEO:

1.  If you’re planning a vacation, don’t over-schedule your workload and remember that “real” life will often get in the way of your best laid plans.

I knew I was going on vacation for quite awhile before I actually went, so why did I schedule reports to be done during the week I’d be gone? That left me having to either get them done before I left, or tell the clients I needed more time. I chose a combination of both, doing some in advance, and having others have to be late. While I could have worked super hard the week before I left for vacation, I was also in the midst of some important family issues, which made it difficult to concentrate on work.

2.  Customer service is the most important thing you can offer as a business, online or off.

We got a flat tire on our Hertz rental car the 2^nd day we were in CA. No biggie as we weren’t in a hurry to get anywhere and were still near our hotel.  We figured we’d call their roadside assistance and they’d speedily come on down and fix things up for us. Yet when called, they said we had to exchange cars at an airport (which we were no longer near) and if we went and patched the tire ourselves, we wouldn’t be reimbursed for any expenses. What the what?

In our poorer days, we always used the lesser known rental car agencies. I assumed using a big company like Hertz would provide us with all sorts of extra customer service; apparently not. In the future, I’ll be going back to some of the smaller companies that I used to rent from, as well as telling everyone I know (in person, on Twitter, and in articles) to do the same. It’s what today’s social media geeks do when they’re not happy with their customer service experiences.

While it could be difficult to prove, it seems to me that a bunch of negative Tweets and negative reviews cannot be good for your SEO. In fact, it’s what keeps online reputation management (ORM) companies very busy. While Google may not directly take social media chatter into account in their ranking algorithms, surely, it has to have an indirect effect. And if it doesn’t at the moment, chances are, it will in the future.

3.  Every industry has its black hat / white hat debates.

During a wine tasting at the excellent Applewood Inn where we stayed, we learned that winemakers have industry debates about making wine using manufactured yeast you buy from a catalog vs. “natural” wine-making using the yeast that grapes already produce on their skins. I heard the story of a wine-maker from the Dutton Estate Winery who uses the natural method as much as possible. He was once at a class on wine-making and they were adamant that you were supposed to use the manufactured yeast rather than attempt the natural methods. Needless to say, he spoke up in protest.

Remind you of a common SEO debate? To me it sounded very familiar to our industry debates regarding the formulaic approach to SEO vs. the holistic approach that I advocate. I imagine hundreds of different industries have their own version as well.

4.  Free breakfast is good.

I’m just sayin’!

I’ll probably have other stories that can somehow be analogized to SEO before the vacation is through, but I should get this article posted before Search Engine Land fires me for it being so late!!

(editors note: I would never fire Jill for being late, but perhaps for not inviting me along wine tasting:)

If you’ve read any of my articles on SEO over the years, you know my pet peeve. It’s the wasted time and money spent to perform useless SEO parlor tricks that have little-to-no effect on the bottom line.

With the latest brouhaha over PageRank sculpting, the boondoggle nature of many techniques that pass for SEO has become clearer than ever. A “boondoggle” is defined at Wordnet as “work of little or no value done merely to look busy.” If that doesn’t sum up PageRank sculpting via nofollow links for the past year, then nothing does!

And I’m not only talking about PageRank sculpting. That’s just the most recent and most obvious example, since Google Spam Czar Matt Cutts’ claim that they pulled the rug out from under nofollow links ages ago. I’m talking about all the useless SEO tactics that have been bandied about over the years.

Two of the oldest are the “fixing” of the Meta keywords tag, and the submitting of URLs to search engines. Gimme a break. When’s the last time a Meta keyword tag “fix” or a search engine submission ever brought additional website visitors?  Yet these types of offerings are the backbone of many SEO firms’ services.

It’s no wonder that many outside of the industry think SEO equals “voodoo” or “black magic” or worse, spam.

A lot of SEO is just that

Some of the reports and proposals I’ve seen provided to clients by SEOs are often laughable. I saw one the other day that claimed the search engines couldn’t follow image links and the client would have to redo their website to use text links instead. (Search engines can, of course, follow image links perfectly fine and always have been able to…sure hope that client didn’t pay for that advice!)

Even the creation of XML sitemaps are for the most part, a boondoggle. For large ecommerce sites, these might provide some value, but they are certainly not a necessity for most sites, despite what some SEOs would like you to believe. Sitemaps are popular among SEO companies because they sound all cutting-edge techie and super-duper Googley, yet they’re easy to generate. In other words, the SEO can baffle the client with bullcrap and charge money for something that is likely to be unnecessary, and unlikely to have any effect on targeted traffic and sales.

And don’t get me started on H1 tags. Old school SEOs swear by them, and often suggest if you don’t have keywords in them, your page is doomed. Yet, take them off a page and you’ll be hard pressed to see rankings or traffic changes from Google. Try it yourself. Remove the H1’s from your page, and use a different HTML tag for your headlines. Leave it that way for a few months and check if you see anything other than the normal fluctuations you’d see anyway. Put the H1s back in and watch what happens…that’s right, nothing!

Unfortunately, our industry is beset with people who are making unnecessary changes to client websites based on unfounded theories that at best produce the teeniest boost to the site, and at worst – “fix” problems that never existed in the first place.

Here’s another example. A few years ago, SEOs started recommending rewriting perfectly good URLs just because they didn’t have keywords in them. While in theory, this is good practice if you’re redeveloping your site and the URLs have to change anyway. Keyword-rich URLs do look nicer and appear to be more relevant in the search engine results pages. But years ago, it could take anywhere from a few months to half a year to obtain good rankings on the new URLs. Google was placing a lot of emphasis on URL age and authority at the time, and were also more suspect of redirects than they are today. So starting over with brand new URLs (even with 301’s in place) was often causing more harm than good.

Today, Google does a better job of indexing the new URLs and also in passing the popularity of the old URL on to the new one so it’s not as traumatic as it once was; however, it’s still not something I’d recommend doing just for the keyword factor. Yet it’s often one of the first things mentioned by SEO companies as necessary to the SEO process.

Not all SEO is a boondoggle

This is not to say that all SEO is a waste of time. Far from it. Compare the value of boondoggle SEO techniques with simply making smart Title tag changes. Now there’s something that can indeed lead to long-term measurable results in the search engines. Other techniques that make a difference when done correctly are the flattening of the site architecture (for real, not through nofollow attributes), the descriptive naming of internal anchor text, as well as the rewriting of content to better speak to the target audience. And of course, having a link-worthy site and getting the word out about it to the proper channels will always be worthwhile.

Client involvement is key

Don’t get me wrong, this is not an SEO is dead article. SEO is alive and well if you focus on the things that matter. Part of the problem is that the things that matter are often a lot of hard work that need client involvement, whereas the boondoggles can often be done strictly through the SEO company. Most clients are too busy to get involved, which is why they’re outsourcing their SEO in the first place. But a professional SEO company cannot get long-lasting, needle-moving results for a client that isn’t willing to help.

A few months ago, I was quoted by Google’s Matt Cutts as saying that “website developers keep SEOs in business.” I honestly do believe that and have for a long time. While I don’t mean to say that ALL website designers/developers believe or do all of these things, you’ll likely encounter many who have done or believe in some of these.

As long as there are developers and designers who believe in any of the following, there will always be a need for SEO consulting:

1. They think SEO is impossible.
2. They think adding words into a Meta keyword tag is SEO.
3. They develop navigational menus that are invisible to search engines.
4. They think one-word keywords are what you optimize for.
5. They ask the client to provide them with website copy.
6. They have the client provide them with what pages they want on their website.
7. They never heard of keyword research.
8. They think SEO is voodoo.
9. They never heard of SEO.
10. They think SEO is submitting to search engines.
11. They think SEO is submitting an XML sitemap to the search engines.
12. They put the same Title on every page of the website.
13. They design sites completely in Flash.
14. They think SEO is creating mini-sites.
15. They show search engines one thing and real people something else.
16. They use outdated content management systems.
17. They think SEO is a scam.
18. They find it easier to use paid search.
19. They think link building is linking all their client’s sites together.
20. They add hidden links to their own site in their client’s code.
21. They have no clue what their websites look like in Google’s text cache.
22. They create all graphical sites.
23. They still think there’s a reason to use frames.
24. They create duplicate URLs for the same content.
25. They prefer to say they can’t change something, rather than figure out how to do it.
26. They take weeks to make simple changes to a website.
27. They recycle information from one client’s website to another.
28. They try to optimize for highly competitive keywords only.
29. They bury important pages deep within the website.
30. They put the good stuff behind password protected pages.
31. They think SEO is all in the H1 tag.
32. They think SEO is keyword stuffing.
33. They think SEO is putting keywords in invisible text.
34. They think SEO is putting links in a footer.
35. They think SEO is about creating doorway pages.
36. They think SEO is having a certain keyword density on your pages.
37. They think SEO is a magic formula.
38. They are scared by the word “algorithm.”
39. They think making websites usable for people is somehow different than making them usable for search engines.
40. They put “welcome” in Title tags.
41. They think SEO will take care of itself by having a blog.
42. They think changing a few words on some pages now and then help SEO.
43. They think frequent respidering magically increases rankings.
44. They think SEO is all about the long-tail.
45. They think SEO is only optimizing the home page.
46. They believe it’s easier to tell client’s SEO doesn’t work than to learn it or outsource it.
47. They think a beautiful website will be naturally found in Google.
48. They optimize for just one main keyword phrase.
49. They mistakenly put robots=noindex, nofollow on the site.
50. They forget to fix the robots.txt file to allow indexing once the site goes off the development server.
51. They think ranking #1 for the brand name is SEO.
52. They change all the URLs during a redesign and don’t 301-redirect them.
53. They think moving content above navigation will increase rankings.
54. They use graphical headlines rather than HTML (or a workaround).
55. They don’t put up custom 404-error pages.
56. The remove old URLs from the server instead of redirecting them to their closest counterpart.
57. They link “home” buttons and logos to /index.php rather than to www.example.com.
58. They hide links to their client’s sites on other client’s sites.
59. They use drop-down menus as the sole navigation of a site.
60. They optimize for keywords nobody is search for.
61. They don’t set up analytics.
62. They create forms where the thank-you page is the same URL as the form itself, thus making it impossible to measure conversions.
63. They create custom blogs without pinging mechanisms.
64. They don’t understand the importance of site architecture as it effects SEO.
65. They believe if you build it, they will come.
66. They think SEO is something different for every search engine, and therefore do nothing.
67. They believe that removing HTML tables will increase rankings.
68. They think SEO is about bolding keywords.
69. They create websites with URLs having 10 parameters.
70. They love Splash pages.
71. They think SEO is all in a keyword-rich domain.
72. They change domain names for existing sites without understanding the consequences.
73. They use auto-submission tools.
74. They add all kinds of Meta tags to pages, that have no use, i.e., “revisit-after,” “robots=follow,index” etc.
75. They think listing keywords in comment tags will boost rankings.
76. They create sites where cookie acceptance is mandatory.
77. They “hide” links in <noscript> tags.
78. They use session ids in URLs and don’t stop search engines from indexing those URLs.
79. They use 302-redirects instead of 301.
80. They unnecessarily use AJAX because it does cool stuff, without understanding the search engine implications.
81. They put “click here” in anchor text.
82. They use image navigation without descriptive alt attribute text.
83. They believe that “clean code” equal SEO.
84. They think adding keywords in a list at the top of the page is SEO.
85. They believe that keyword-rich file names are the key to SEO.

Did I miss any?

I’ve previously discussed why rankings are a poor measure of success, but only touched upon how to instead use web analytics to measure SEO success. My hope is that once you have a good grasp of what to review and how to use that info, you’ll be more inclined to wean yourself (and your clients) off rankings reports once and for all!

For purposes of this article, let’s assume that you’ve already optimized your website for a number of keyword phrases across a variety of pages within your website. Let’s also assume that you’ve kept a list of those phrases handy, as you’ll need to refer back to them. In addition, let’s assume you’re using Google Analytics since more companies appear to be moving in that direction.

While heavy-duty analytics programs can be quite daunting at first because there’s so much data provided, for SEO purposes you can concentrate on just a few key areas when starting out. The place to start is the “traffic sources” section—more specifically, the “search engines” and the “keywords” sub-sections.

Clicking on the search engines sub-section will show you all the search engines that brought visitors to your website. If you’re running AdWords campaigns, be sure to click the “non-paid” link so that you can differentiate your organic traffic from your paid (you will have had to previously linked your Adwords account with your Analytics account in order for this to work). If you’ve done a decent job with your SEO, you’ll likely see most of the search engine traffic comes from Google, then Yahoo, then MSN with a bunch of smaller search engines trailing behind.

You can see how you’re doing with your keywords in all the search engines as a whole by then clicking the “dimension” dropdown box, and setting it for “keywords.”

This will show you all the keyword phrases that drove traffic to your website. As above, if you’re also doing paid search campaigns, be sure to click the tab that says “non-paid” so that you’re only looking at organic traffic.  Depending on how many keywords are showing up, you may want to change your settings to show you 100 rows at a time (or more) so that you can have a good snapshot. By default, you’ll see the keyword phrases that have brought the most traffic at the top.

Are you seeing the keyword phrases (or some variation) for which you originally optimized? If they are not readily apparent, scroll down to the bottom and put an exact phrase or a word from one of your optimized phrases into the “find keyword: containing” box. Searchers use a variety of phrases at the search engines so you’re likely to see numerous related phrases that go beyond the exact ones for which you optimized. This is a good thing, and something that you don’t get from ranking reports.

For example, when reviewing the keyword phrases driving traffic to one of our clients’ websites, I found over 100 variations of one phrase for which we optimized, and they were all highly relevant to what the client offers.

Next, you’ll want to see which pages of your site are bringing keyword traffic and whether they are the specific ones for which you optimized. To view this, click on the “content overview” section and then on the right hand side of the page, under “landing page optimization” click on “entrance keywords.”  This allows you to view specific stats for each page of your site.

The first screen is the entrance keywords for the page that receives the most pageviews (typically your home page), but you can click to other pages via the drop down box that says “content.”

If you don’t immediately see a page for which you are interested in viewing entrance keywords, you can type a word that you know is in the URL of that page in the search box that’s contained in the content dropdown. So if you’re looking for a page that has a file name of /green-widgets.php you can type just “green” or “widgets” into the search box and you’ll see all pages that have that word in the file name.

Now you should be able to see all the entrance keywords for that page. Are they ones (or variations of) those for which you optimized?  If so, then your SEO is taking hold! If not, you’ll want to determine why. Perhaps it’s just too soon after your SEO work was completed. Perhaps they’re highly competitive phrases which will need more anchor text links pointing in.

Rankings don’t always equal traffic, and vice-versa

Something interesting that I’ve noticed a lot lately is that while my optimized pages are getting good search engine traffic for their optimized keywords, they may not show up in Google when I do a spot check of rankings. This is especially true of newly optimized pages. It seems that this could very well be personalized search in action. While I might not see the pages ranking in Google, others obviously are as the web analytics don’t lie. Had I been relying on rankings reports to measure our success, I would be thinking that not much was happening yet.

Of course, the best indicator of SEO success is conversions. Those can be measured via your analytics as well, so you’ll want to be sure to have all your forms’ thank you pages set up as conversion goals. That way, when you’re viewing the “traffic sources -> keyword” data, you can also click the “goal conversion” tab and learn very easily which phrases convert for you.

For those keyword phases that you find convert very well, you can work on additional optimization efforts to gain even more traffic. For phrases that don’t convert well, you may want to think about why they’re not converting. It’s possible that they’re simply too general, and thus you’re pulling in people who are just in the research phase, or it might be that they don’t accurately describe what you offer on your website.

Don’t forget about old-fashioned conversions!

In addition to using your web analytics, don’t forget to take note of any increases in emails and phone calls. That’s the best way to know if your SEO campaign is going as planned. Our clients typically call us up very happy within the first month or two to let us know that their phone has been unusually busy all of a sudden. This usually makes them happier than any ranking reports we used to send!

It seems that once a year for the past five years or so, a search engine representative will stand up at a conference and announce that they are now indexing Flash. Website designers jump with glee, and SEOs lament that all the work they did educating their clients on why they need to curb their use of Flash will be for naught.

Think of it this way, if Flash were a food, it would be an herb or a spice. Let’s say it’s basil. While basil is great in pesto, it’s not something that you’d typically make an entire meal out of. You use it to add flavor to your tortellini. And yet designers across the world—as well as CEOs who want to appear cool—want huge chunks of their websites in Flash. Sigh.

Of course if the search engines truly are indexing Flash this time around, then what’s the problem?

Flash sites certainly can do some neat tricks. People can interact with them in ways they can’t with a typical plain-Jane HTML website. Interaction is certainly good, as it can make a site “sticky.” And people pass around fun websites to their friends so they can make the little balls spin, or play with the cool virtual cubes. This is great for some websites which are looking to entertain people.

If, on the other hand, your company wants people to actually understand what you do when they come to your website, how does playing with the spinning balls further this goal? I don’t personally find it endearing to have to guess what’s behind each ball or cube when I mouse over it and it makes a funny sound or explodes and perhaps shows a single word or cute saying. If I’m looking to kill time, I might visit your site. But if I’m wondering if you’re a good fit for my needs at the moment, I don’t want to do a puzzle to figure this out. Instead, I am likely to seek out your competitor that provides me with information, rather than games.

As you can tell, I’m not a fan of cool Flash sites for a typical business. But what about those that have a more basic Flash site that does indeed provide information? For them, I would ask, why Flash? If you don’t need to allow your visitors to interact with your website, then why not just use HTML with Flash accents? Because even if the search engines are indexing the information contained in Flash (more on this in a bit), there are other reasons not to use it. First and foremost, not every browser has Flash installed. In fact, currently on an iPhone, Flash shows up as a little blue cube. Second, many Flash-based sites use only one URL for the entire site. Besides the search engine implications of that, it is also a nightmare for bookmarking, as well as for most web analytics programs.

So, even if search engines are indeed indexing the information in Flash, my recommendation is still to not design your entire website with it.

With that out of the way, I just rolled up my sleeves and started looking at how Google is currently treating Flash and whether websites can do just as well in the search results even if important information is contained within Flash.

Guess what? Most Flash is still highly invisible in Google.

To test this, I went directly to some Flash sites, and pasted exact words contained within their Flash into Google (using quotes) and most of the sites did not show up in the search results. Upon review of the source code of two sites that did show up I found that one was using the phrase I looked for within their Meta description (see… meta descriptions actually DO count for something with Google, despite what some will tell you). The other site had lots of text within the code beneath the Flash so that search engines and browsers without Flash would have some meaningful info. While that’s a good alternative, the info they had was very different from the info contained in their Flash. That’s a bit of a dangerous game to play with the search engines if you ask me. If that info is good enough for search engines and iPhones, why isn’t it good enough for your most important users?

The other thing I noticed was that even on pages that used Flash sparingly, if they had words in the Flash files, a search for those exact words would not typically pull up the HTML page that the Flash was embedded on. However, when performing a search for the exact phrase plus only .swf filetypes (which is what most Flash files use as an extension), the Flash files themselves do show up in the results. This tells me that the Google reps were kind of telling the truth about Flash being indexed, but that it doesn’t do website owners much good in a real world setting.

Google searches for the brand names of Flash sites do bring up the sites in the search results (note that their brand is typically in the Title tag). So if that’s all you care about, then using all Flash shouldn’t be a problem for you. However, if you’re interested in showing up in the search results for people who may not have already heard of you, i.e., those seeking out exactly what you offer rather than your brand name, then you may want to rethink the cool factor and go for the smart one instead!

I recently appeared on Vanessa Fox’s new Webmaster Radio show, “Office Hours” where we discussed some of the simple things business owners can do to increase search traffic to their website, but which are often neglected. During the show, Vanessa answered a bunch of frequently asked questions, and her answers often started out with something like, “People don’t like it when I say this, but there are no specific numbers or formulas for that, because it depends on a variety of factors to determine relevancy.”

I know exactly what she’s talking about and was glad to hear her answer the questions that way, because “it depends” is often the only way you can answer SEO questions. In fact, it’s so common that “it depends” has been said 357 times on various High Rankings Forum threads!

To show you what I mean, here’s a list of SEO questions that I get asked all the time, along with what the answer depends upon, and then a quick answer based on the various factors that might be involved:

Q. How quickly will Google re-index my pages after I’ve SEO’d them?

It depends on: how popular your site is, how often Google’s spiders typically come around, how deep in the site the changes have been made, and more.

The quick answer: Anywhere from 1 day to 6 weeks.

It depends on: how long you had your previous rankings, how competitive they were, if you’ve done anything to purposely deceive the search engines, how long rankings drop has existed, etc.

The quick answer: Do nothing and give it a few weeks to see if your rankings come back. In most cases, they will.

It depends on: who’s doing it, their knowledge and skill levels, as well as the types of keyword phrases you’re targeting.

The quick answer: SEO done correctly by a knowledgeable and skilled SEO consultant can be highly effective in increasing the targeted traffic to your website. But SEO done by someone who’s just read about it…well…not so much!

It depends on: whether your content management system (CMS) does this as the default and it would be difficult to change, or how much time you have to create separate Titles and headlines.

The quick answer: Typically you’d want your Title tag and your main headline to be different because they serve different purposes. But if it’s a major undertaking to ensure this doesn’t happen, it’s not a deal breaker as far as SEO is concerned, assuming you have some control over what they say.

It depends on: whether your current URLs are getting indexed and found, whether you’re currently in the midst of a redesign, how awful your URLs currently look, how easy it is to implement within your CMS, and whether you can easily 301-redirect the old versions to the new ones.

The quick answer: If you have to change all URLs anyway because of a website redesign and CMS change, then sure, make clean, keyword-rich URLs that look nice in the search results. But if there’s nothing really wrong with your current ones other than you don’t like the way they look or you think you need to add keywords to them, it’s probably not worth the hassle that goes with such a major change to the structure of your website.

It depends on: how many keywords phrases people would type into the search engines to seek out what your company provides and how many pages your site has.

The quick answer: If everything else is in place, you can typically target anywhere from 2-5 keyword phrases on any one page of your website. Multiply that by the number of unique, optimizable pages on your site and you should have a rough estimate of how many potential keyword phrases you could target.

It depends on: whether you want to brand the blog as part of your main website or brand it as a separate entity, and whether you want people to be able to easily remember the URL.

The quick answer: Whether it’s in a sub-directory or subdomain doesn’t make too much difference, although if it’s in a subdomain you may have more chance of it showing up in the search results at the same time that your main domain also shows up, than if it’s in a sub-directory. On the other hand, the average person doesn’t think to type in subdomains if they’re trying to go directly to your site and are more likely to remember something like yourdomain.com/blog than blog.yourdomain.com. For SEO purposes, none of these things really matter, so it’s more of a business/branding decision.

It depends on: how many words it takes to say what you need to say.

The quick answer: There is no specific number of words a page should be for SEO purposes.

In January of 2008, I issued my predictions for the upcoming year in the SEO industry. Now that it’s a year later, let’s look back and see how I did.

My first prediction was:

SEO Becomes a Top-Of-Mind Priority in Larger Companies

I predicted that more large companies and big brands would realize the value of baking SEO into their website redesigns, rather than first redesigning and then trying to “wedge” SEO into their new site. I also felt that more of these companies would hire SEO consultants to work with their online marketing managers to help with this task and make sure it was done correctly.

Did this happen?

It’s difficult to say for sure, but judging from the calls, emails and clients our SEO agency received this past year from companies who were redesigning their websites, I would say that SEO was certainly top-of-mind for them. In fact, consulting on those types of projects was one of our main service offerings in 2008. I anticipate that this trend will continue through 2009 and beyond.

My second prediction was (and I quote):

“Success measures will continue to evolve and focus on the metrics that matter. SEOs have traditionally measured success by tracking the rankings in the search engines for various keyword phrases. Emerging factors such as personalized search, geo-targeted search and multiple search engine datacenters mean that no two searches show the same results.”

Did this happen?

While I’m not familiar with how every other SEO agency measures their success, I do know that the “rankings are dead” mentality has finally started to catch on in the industry as a whole. It seemed to take Bruce Clay talking about it at PubCon in Nov. 2008 to get it to really start to sink in to folks.

Since I’ve been discounting search engine rankings as a true measure of success for many, many years, it’s great to see the industry as a whole taking this to heart. I suspect in 2009 agencies may be able to finally do away with rank checking software on a grand scale.

Certainly, Google itself has had the most impact on this by ensuring that no two people will always see the same search results, and by making their free analytics program so robust. Once people use Google Analytics for awhile, they start to learn how to measure the success of their SEO campaigns in a manner that is much more helpful than rankings.

My third prediction was:

Greater SEO Education Opportunities Will Emerge

There’s no question that this prediction certainly came true. While we already had a plethora of large search marketing conferences such as SES, SMX and PubCon, additional smaller conferences/seminars emerged for those looking for more personal attention.

We saw Search Engine Guide hold spring and fall “Small Business Marketing Unleashed Conferences.” Then, just in time for Halloween, the folks from Search & Social held a mini-con called “Scary SEO.” It must have been a success as they’re planning another mini-con in the spring of 2009. The SEOMoz gang offered an “expert seminar” in 2008 that got rave reviews from the attendees. At High Rankings, we began offering personalized SEO Training in Feb. 2008 to a limited number of participants on a monthly basis and had no problem selling out each month. We’re continuing those 1-day classes into 2009 as well as offering more advanced, half-day website marketing workshops on specific topics of interest.

Besides all the in-person SEO education that took place in 2008, there were more ways than ever to learn SEO in the comfort of your own home or office. In addition to the already existing online training programs offered by the SEMPO Institute, MarketMotive expanded their online search marketing training to include a certification program, and SEOBook’s Aaron Wall began offering online SEO training courses.

I believe that SEO education will become an ever-increasing portion of companies’ budgets in 2009. With the ROI for SEO being one of the highest of any marketing initiative, it just makes sense to de-mystify it within the corporate culture. With the ongoing recession and budget cutbacks that inevitably come with it, many companies will be keeping their SEO in-house as a cost-cutting measure.

What Else is Happening in 2009?

For 2009, the trends from 2008 will continue. In addition, companies who previously tested the social media waters and felt that it didn’t work for them may try it again, but in a more structured manner. Those companies who understand that social media marketing can’t be faked, will reap huge benefits from their participation, but many companies will still not quite grasp this concept.

Online reputation management will become more important than ever in 2009, especially as Google’s SearchWiki component gets noticed and used more often. It’s going to be critical for all companies to carefully monitor their reputation online, and have a plan of action in place for responding to criticism swiftly and honestly.

How about you? Did your predictions from last year come true? What do you foresee the trends for 2009 to be?