Even with the continuing improvements in organic search for discovering your content, it still takes time for search to find it all. It takes patience on your part, and in many cases, the content found in a crawl has inadequate context to the needed, relevant keywords that make it discoverable to searchers.

Wouldn’t it be cool if a webmaster could just identify a list of content pages you wanted the search engines to crawl, telling them “these are the most important content pages on my site,” and in some cases, even offering a little bit of keyword context to it?

Well, great news! Maybe you missed the memo, but you can use a Sitemap to submit your list of content URLs to the search engines.

Better late than never, but still sweet news, right? What’s that? You already know about Sitemaps? Yeah, well ok, that’s good.

How Well Do You Really Know XML Sitemaps?

But, are you aware of the many different types of Sitemaps you can use, what the differences are between them, what each one’s intended role is, and why you are probably still not doing it right? Ah, now we’re talking. Let’s sit down and have a little refresher talk about Sitemaps.

Sitemaps go back to the mid-2000′s. Google started the idea in 2005; then, other search engines quickly joined the effort, and a common industry supported XML schema was developed in 2006.

Most Sitemaps are not intended for human reader consumption. Rather, they are designed to be consumed directly by search engines themselves. This is a big difference from your standard webpage!

Note that placing a URL in a Sitemap is considered to be a hint to a search engine. Some people mistakenly believe it is a command to the search engines to index that URL. If only, but not so!

While you may not get all of your URLs indexed from your Sitemap, it’s well worth the effort to create one because it’s much more efficient and effective than waiting for your new site to be fully crawled organically. And, organic crawling is no more promising for indexing, anyway. Each search engine will determine whether or not to index your page after it has been crawled, Sitemap or not. Just think of your Sitemap as your detailed, requested crawling list for search!

Often, Sitemaps are a jumbled mess, and search engines have a hard time parsing non-standard or invalid code, as well as managing URLs that return either HTTP 404, 301 or 302 rather than return HTTP 200.

Bing used to measure the number of non-200 links in the Sitemap, and if it exceeded 1% of the number of URLs submitted, the Sitemap was abandoned. I’m not sure if that is still true today; but frankly, it makes a lot of sense to ensure all of the links in your Sitemaps, which are crawler feeds directly to search, are as clean as possible. More about that later.

Submitting Sitemaps

Unlike the robots.txt file, which has a standardized name and default location (in the site root) and thus, is always read by search when a site is visited, Sitemaps have no standardized name or file location, so they are not read by search by default.

They need to be properly submitted to search for that to happen. You can place a reference to your Sitemap file in your robots.txt file if you wish, but the most authoritative method of submitting your Sitemap is via the Webmaster Tools of Google and Bing.

Of course, you already have search engine Webmaster Tools accounts, right? (It’s a really good idea.) Besides, the search Webmaster Tools also test and reveal any errors in your submitted Sitemap files, and that can be very helpful for optimizing your site’s indexation in search.

XML Sitemaps

The standard XML Sitemap file can use any name you choose to give it and need not be stored at the site root (although that is a reasonable place to put it). The file itself must be a UTF-8 encoded text file, which means URLs that include some special characters must use entity escaping, so the URLs in the Sitemap can be correctly parsed by search. Sitemaps can be saved in uncompressed form and presented as .XML files, or can be compressed in gzip format and presented as .GZ files.

The XML Sitemap protocol has a set of defined XML tags, some required, some optional, that allow webmasters to define a set of information about their pages, including the URL, the date the page was last modified, the expected content change frequency on the page, and the rated priority of the page relative to the other pages listed in the Sitemap.

View more XML tags at Sitemaps.org

While some of the optional tags are of little value to search, I know that Bing considers the <priority> tag to be of particular value when assigning their crawler budget. This is not to say that assigning the top value, <priority>1.0</priority>, to every URL in the Sitemap will be of extra value to you. When every day is Christmas, there’s nothing special to any of it, right? Do it right and tell search which URLs in your site are the most valuable to you.

XML Sitemap files have size limitations. They can go up to 10 MB in file size or contain up to 50,000 URL entries. As this size limitation is a problem for enterprise-size sites, the Sitemap Index file is a refinement on the Sitemap XML protocol that enables one Sitemap Index file to reference the URLs of up to 50,000 separate Sitemap files, each of which can list up to 50,000 URLs, for a total possible URL identification of 2.5 billion links (that’s just big enough for most sites these days!).

XML Sitemaps feed the general Web index of the search engines (one of many indexes they maintain – more on that later). This is the most important index to feed, of course, but it’s far from the only game in town. Read on for more.

HTML Sitemaps

HTML sitemaps, aka content archives, are actual webpages that include links to all of the pages in your site. If you have a small site, you might have a one-page HTML sitemap. If your site is an enterprise publishing site, the HTML sitemap is likely designed as content archives, perhaps organized by section, then by publication date (broken out by year, month, then day).

Note that having an HTML sitemap is not a substitute for creating an XML Sitemap for your site. It is a webpage (or series of pages) on your site. Search may eventually crawl all of the links listed there (or maybe not), but it definitely doesn’t regard these pages as a feed.

One valuable aspect of an HTML sitemap is that it links to all of your published content. If you are a large news site and your pages only list the 24-48 hours of news stories, after which time those pages no longer are linked to by the active pages on the site, an XML Sitemap will supply the URL links to be crawled, but that’s not really good enough.

By also using a content archive solution, in this case, you provide at least one link in the active site to each published page. Heck, it even helps your human readers find favorite, older stories. If you don’t have an HTML sitemap content archive, consider how search engines may view your older pages when they see you don’t think they are valuable enough to link to them yourself. Not so good.

Side Note: Have you noted the capitalization difference of XML Sitemap versus HTML sitemap? This is intentional. Capitalizing the S in an XML Sitemap versus not doing so for a HTML sitemap allows users to quickly and consistently understand what is meant when the word is written. Good for you to have noticed!

RSS Feeds

Sitemaps can also be created in other formats, such as RSS feeds or Atom feeds, and it is recommended you create one, especially if your site publishes more than just a few new pages every day.

So why would you do this if you’ve already created an XML Sitemap for your site?

Ah, a good question that deserves a good answer. You see, search will typically visit your site and read your XML Sitemap file on a daily basis (more or less, especially if you consistently publish a lot of new content over time).

But, what happens to that newly published content before the next search site crawl? Not much, at least by way of the XML Sitemap. An RSS feed, however, is the perfect tool for feeding the Freshness Index of the search engines because it is read by search far more often every day. You publish, they crawl. It’s that simple.

Tips for creating your site’s RSS or Atom feeds

• Make sure it contains no more than 500 URLs or up to the last 7 days’ worth of published content links. It’s a freshness update, not your XML Sitemap, so keep it lean and fresh.
• Make sure the URL of the RSS/Atom feed does not change over time (same for your XML Sitemap, for that matter).

The use of date stamps or other incremental notations within these files can cause the URL of the feed to change each time it is generated, and search is very unforgiving about managing ever-changing file names.

News Sitemaps

If you are a blogger who writes about timely events on a regular basis, or perhaps you run a news website about your locality or specific community, you should consider creating a Google News Sitemap. The News indexes of Google and Bing are closed, meaning they don’t crawl the Web randomly looking for content. They crawl their list of approved sites that publish original content that offers value to their readers.

Now, with personalized search these days presenting Universal SERPs that display News modules at the top of the organic SERP listings for many queries, getting into the News index can be a great opportunity to increase the visibility of your content.

Note that Google and Bing don’t want your self-serving sales pitches, your random daily thoughts on street sweepers, or the like. They want valuable content that readers will want to see.

Getting into the News indexes is a bit complicated, so I refer you to start with the Google News Publishers Get Started page. Go through the technical requirements, and pay close attention to how to create a customized Google News Sitemap, which is an addition to the standard XML Sitemap protocol.

But, unlike XML Sitemap for the general Web index, you can (and in some cases, must) add metadata about the news content in the page. This data helps Google identify the relevance of the story.

I also highly recommend that if you do pursue getting into Google News, add the <meta> news keywords tag to your news story pages. Unlike the old <meta> keywords tag, which neither Google nor Bing use anymore to establish keyword relevance, the <meta> news_keywords tag is very much used by Google to establish keyword relevance for news stories (but, not by Bing, sadly).

As an example of its utility, Google cites the famous newspaper headline from the 1929 stock market crash, “Wall Street Lays an Egg” as a text string with almost no keyword relevance to its story. A Web news story using <meta> news_keywords can still use such creative titles, but also feed Google with the actual relevant keywords to help it be found in search queries.

I also recommend that you carefully consider the type of news content you publish. Google doesn’t want to see you republishing syndicated news feeds. They already have that stuff, and you’ll be rejected if your application doesn’t account for that. If your news site publishes both original/heavily edited content as well as syndicated feed content, be sure your Google News Sitemap does not include links to the feed content pages. If you get rejected, you cannot reapply to get into the Google News index for 60 days or so.

Once you have your Google News Sitemap ready, submit it to Google Webmaster Tools, and then apply for admission into the Google News Index. Your application is hand-curated by Google staff, so be careful and thorough in your preparation. The application process is a survey, and they will confirm your answers before allowing you in.

To get into Bing News, you need to send an email request to bns@microsoft.com. Your thorough preparation for Google News should help speed things along with Bing News – they even accept Google News Sitemaps! The application process can take several weeks to process (they get to it when they get to it!).

Be thorough, be patient, and if your content is worthy, your efforts will be rewarded. But note: once in, keep up the good work, or you’ll be kicked out.

Video Sitemaps

If your site publishes original video content, search wants to know about it. This is an especially hard content type to index by crawling, as the much needed metadata about the video content is not always available in the page on which it is found. Help search help you by creating a Google Video Sitemap.

Also based on the XML Sitemap protocol, the Google Video Sitemap protocol adds important metadata about each video to help it become relevant to search queries. There are many XML required tags, as well as many optional (and a few “depends”) XML tags to be filled in for each video listed.

Be sure to review the protocol specs carefully and create your video Sitemap. Once created, simply add it to your Sitemaps lists in your search engine webmaster tools accounts.

Note that Bing supports Google Video Sitemaps. Also note that both Google and Bing support media RSS (mRSS) feeds (based on RSS 2.0) for videos.

Mobile Sitemaps

If your site has created a large number of webpages dedicated to serving mobile device browsers, and you are not yet invested in responsive design (where all pages are simultaneously desktop and mobile-device ready via CSS3), then you might want to consider feeding the Google mobile index your dedicated mobile URLs with a Google Mobile Sitemap.

Like others before, the Google Mobile Sitemap is based on the XML Sitemap protocol and adds new tags, identifying listed URLs as mobile content. This one is pretty simple to implement, but note that the industry is quickly moving away from dedicated mobile URLs that duplicate the same content found in URLs for desktop browsers in search indexes, migrating quickly toward using single URLs that work visually and contextually in all presentation modes, from a widescreen desktop monitor to a smartphone.

Image Sitemaps

Google maintains a large image search index, and it is always interested in discovering more great image content. If your site is rich in images, especially original content, and your goal is to get as many of your images indexed as possible, you should consider creating a Google Image Sitemap.

Like the Mobile Sitemap above, the Image Sitemap is an add-on to the standard XML Sitemap protocol. You can publish your image information in your XML Sitemap or create a dedicated Image Sitemap and use a Sitemap Index to capture it as part of your Sitemap feeds to Google. There are only two XML tags that are required, but if you want to provide more metadata about your image content, you can do that as well.

Note that including your site’s images in an Image Sitemap will help define the most important images on your site to Google. They don’t promise to index all of the images you list in the Sitemap or include all of the extra metadata you optionally provide, but they’re more likely to do so if you provide this data in a dedicated feed. They will certainly prioritize indexing the images noted in an Image Sitemap over those not listed in your site.

The images are identified with custom XML tags in the Sitemap within the section of the source webpage’s URL. Note that you can list up to 1,000 images per URL on your site. Even if you choose not to publish an Image Sitemap, you should review Google’s image publishing guidelines to optimize image indexation from your site.

Building A Sitemap

Unless you have a very small site and you want to hand-curate your own Sitemap, you might want to think about automating your Sitemap creation.

Most content management systems (CMS) today offer some type of Sitemap creation tool, even if it’s only XML Sitemaps for the general Web index. If you are a WordPress user, there are many great plugins available for generating Sitemaps for your website.

Bing recently announced a new tool for creating XML Sitemaps for both IIS and Apache web servers. It works as an ISAPI filter by logging the URLs of all outbound pages served on a daily basis, generated by HTTP requests from both end users and third-party search crawlers. It maintains a super-clean, error-free Sitemap Index for your site, adds new differential URL updates every day, removes 404s as they appear, and runs in the background taking up very little in the way of server system resources. A full website Sitemap is generated in just a few days, and is easily maintained automatically. If you want to know more about it, check out the Bing Sitemap Plugin doc.

Learn about the many ways that Sitemaps can enhance the value of your site to search, then put them to good use. If you have great content, search wants to know about it. How much better does it get than to spoon feed the engines with your content URLs in a Sitemap?

Since moving to the Pacific Northwest 20+ years ago, I’ve become a bit of an amateur oenophile (it’s hard for me to escape it when the small city in which I live, Woodinville, hosts over 90 wineries and tasting rooms). I’ve also learned the proper process for not just tasting wine, but fully experiencing wine. (Hint: it’s more than glug, glug!)

Image via Shutterstock

The subject of wine tasting recently came up for me when I decided to register for SearchFest 2013 in Portland, Oregon on February 22.

While Woodinville may be the wine capital of Washington State, featuring big reds such as Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, and Syrah (not to mention a few whites such as Chardonnay & Riesling), I admit I am most intrigued by the fussy but brilliant Pinot Noir.

We don’t really do Pinot Noir in Washington. For that, you need to go to the Willamette Valley, just south of Portland, Oregon. So, while I am ostensibly going to Portland for SearchFest, it is at least partially an excuse for me to take another weekend wine tasting trip in pursuit of the holy Pinot vino.

So, I can hear folks starting to ask the question, “where’s the SEO stuff, Rick?” Well, it’s right in front of us. I assert that we can experience wine tasting in the same terms that search engines taste and experience the websites we optimize.

Allow me to be your tour guide to the beautiful world of wine tasting and SEO.

Step 1. Wine Tasting: First Impressions

With a fine wine that has a lot to give (Two Buck Chuck just doesn’t make the cut here), you start with a small pour in a proper glass. Pinot Noir (or Burgundy) glasses have broad, deep bowls with thin rims that narrow at the top. This allows you to get the best impression of the wine, making it accessible for the optimal experience.

And while it may seem stuffy and pretentious to some, holding the glass by the stem or the foot (rather than by the bowl) is actually the right thing to do. Why? Because doing so won’t introduce your body heat to the wine, which can adversely affect the quality of the tasting experience.

So, let the wine introduce itself to you. Tilt the glass over a well-lit background of white and take a long look at the wine. Is the color basically red, purple or even slightly brownish? Is it transparent or inky opaque? Filtered or unfiltered? Does the color go to the edge or is the meniscus clear? A clear meniscus is a sign of an aged wine, which with reds, can be a very good thing.

SEO: Robots.Txt File

For search engines to first experience a website, they also need clear access. An SEO’s job is to ensure the robots.txt file, the HTTP header, and the <meta> robots tags allow search crawlers to experience all that a website has to offer, while blocking off elements of a site that could spoil the experience.

Step 2. Wine Tasting: Aroma

While the glass is still, bring it up to your nose and inhale deeply. What do you get? Sure, you smell wine (smart aleck!). But do you smell fruit? What kinds? Perhaps cherries, red or black berry, citrus, or even ripe stone fruit? Do you detect floral aromas, vanilla, smoke, or green vegetal notes? The initial aromas may be muted if the wine is “tight” (more on that in a moment).

Some wines will offer odd aromas as well, such as musty wet newspapers (this spoiled wine is “corked”) or perhaps even what is called “barnyard” (a euphemism for manure, an aromatic trait common in French Burgundy, and yes, some people actually enjoy that! But not me).

SEO: Sitemap

To begin the assessment of all that a website has to offer, a search crawler needs to find a Sitemap file, listing all of the varied and valuable content found within the site. As an SEO, you need to ensure the site has a valid XML Sitemap, that the file uses valid code, contains all valid links (not spoiled URLs that return HTTP 301, 302, or 404 responses), and is current with the latest published content.

But it doesn’t stop there. Unlike robots.txt, you can’t rely on search engines to automatically find the Sitemap and ingest it. You need to identify it, either by listing it in robots.txt or, preferably, by submitting it in the Webmaster Tools of Google and Bing. Note that Sitemaps are not mandates to index, just requests to crawl. It’s an initial whiff of the scope of a site for search, but there’s still much more to go.

Step 3. Wine Tasting: Does It Have Legs?

Does the wine have legs? What, you’re not familiar with the wine legs? To see the wine’s legs, hold the wine glass by the stem, hold the foot of the glass down on a smooth surface, and vigorously move the glass in small circles to swirl the wine in the glass’ bowl.

After a few seconds, stop and look at the sides of the glass as the wine settles down. The heavy, clear drips that form are the alcohol slowly oozing down the sides of the glass. The more prominent the legs in size and in number, the more alcohol there is in the wine. It’s a factor in how “big” the wine is.

SEO: Page Load Speed

Evaluating how big a webpage is can be a ranking factor, so evaluate key pages on the site for page load speed. Is the page lean and mean, super-fast to load (< 1.5 seconds), or is it sluggish?

Be sure to check for embedded JavaScript and CSS style code that contributes to page bloat, unnecessarily large or high resolution images, tons of small static images that could be converted into CSS Sprites, support for HTTP Compression, and a myriad of other factors that can make or break your site’s user experience for speed.

For more information on optimizing for page load speed, check out these excellent resources from Google and Yahoo. Big can be good sometimes, but it can be detrimental as well.

Step 4. Wine Tasting: Bloom

You just swirled the glass, aerating the wine, helping it to open up. Take a second deep inhale. Did the aroma change? Are the original aromas still there? Is it still tight, or are there new and deeper aromas?

There should normally be a night-and-day difference between the first, non-aerated whiff to this vigorously aerated one, especially with a good wine. A little oxygen here is your friend. But, if there was no change whatsoever, the wine has probably been open for a while, is now fully oxidized, and will taste flat. Most of its volatile compounds are gone. Not so good.

SEO: Site Crawlability

As the search engines engage and interact with your site, will they find your page content is easily crawlable? Is there a decent amount of non-linked, accessible text content on the page or is the content all tightly compacted in image files, rich Internet application technology (such as Flash), or perhaps hidden away, embedded within <script> tags?

How about your use of keywords in the key page metadata fields, such as the <title>, <h1> and <img> alt text tags? Do they fulfill the job of describing the page content or does it fall flat, failing to open up to the crawlers? The search crawlers will miss the full experience of your site if the content is so tightly buried.

Step 5. Wine Tasting: Taste

Has your anticipation built up to the breaking point yet? You’ve been patient long enough. Take a nice sip but don’t immediately swallow. Swish it around in your mouth across your tongue.

Those volatile compounds that you (hopefully) enjoyed in the previous steps can be developed even further by pursing your lips, touching your tongue to the bottom of your upper front teeth, and slowly sucking in a little air, almost slurping the wine. Sure, it’s a bit inelegant, but fine winemakers will appreciate your effort, respect your knowledge of wines, and love you for doing it with their wines.

Some folks actually even “chew” the wine while sucking in air to get the full effect of the volatile aromatics the wine has to offer. If you’re lucky enough to enjoy a balanced, aged red wine, doing what may appear silly in print will allow you to maximize the experience of tasting a great wine. Trust me, if others laugh or giggle but then glug down a beautiful wine, they never really tasted it at all. Feel free to giggle back at them.

Now that you’ve tasted the wine, did it match its aroma or did it surprise you? Is it properly balanced between fruit, tannin (or astringency), and acid? An imbalance might indicate that perhaps it’s too young or maybe past its prime. Do the flavors progress and develop on the tongue?

Finally, does it have a nice, long finish? The descriptors people use for wine tasting can be, well, descriptive, and they can be downright silly. To each his own, I guess.

SEO: Quality Content

Finally, after everything else, we get to the meat of the website experience for search crawlers – consuming the body content! For the sake of the site, you want page content to be primarily text-based, high quality and of high authority on the topics it covers.

That’s the big experience search engines are looking for as they delve deeper into the site. The more informative the content is for people, the higher it will be regarded by search.

Step 6. Wine Tasting: Buy!

The purpose of a winemaker or a wine shop in hosting a wine tasting party is to sell wine!

Certainly, they want to educate potential customers about the qualities of the wine they offer, but this is all just sophisticated marketing, building value to sell their product. If you like what you had (and don’t feel pressured to say you do when it’s not to your taste), consider buying a bottle or three.

SEO: Conversions

Convert! The purpose of most websites that employ SEOs is to convert site visitors into customers. The whole point of optimizing a site for search is to increase discovery of the site via search.

But if you optimize the site for humans first, not only will they respond positively once they visit your site, search engines will respond because they truly value sites that are interesting to people.

Wine Tasting & SEO Make A Fine Pairing

Humans tasting fine wine and search engines consuming a website are quite analogous activities. But, I can only wonder if search engines get as happy over an authoritative, text-based website as a human does over a glass of fantastic Pinot Noir. I’ll mull that thought over after Searchfest as I hit some of my favorite (and a few new) wineries in the Oregon Willamette Valley. Who’s coming with me?

Image via Shutterstock

As a result, they are used to digging into source code issues, optimizing individual landing pages for content and metadata, running a variety of detailed, hands-on social media campaigns, running deep analysis on their customer’s Web analytics data, and much, much more. You’d think these would be great skills to have in the enterprise.

Well, for the most part, you are right. But, not exactly so. When websites scale up to the enterprise level, the typical work that one SEO might do for a small customer running a modest website is typically divided up and performed by many large, separate teams of people.

Sure, you’ll want to have a solid understanding of that work because it gives you context to the quality of the deliverables these teams produce. It’ll help you evaluate whether the work they produced is what you want it to be or not. But as an enterprise SEO, you won’t likely be doing that work yourself.

Whose Work Is It, Anyway?

In fact, you won’t likely be doing a whole lot of tactical SEO work at all. OK, I hear the few random voices out there screaming, “Hey, I do SEO work for an enterprise site, and I do all of that!”

Well, every work situation is different, but in general, I stand by my words. To assert otherwise implies either you don’t know or understand the scale I am referring to when I say “enterprise” (think Big!), or you are in one of the most woefully under-resourced organizations in the world. (I trust it’s not the latter because, like trying to drain the ocean with a garden hose, you’ll be hard pressed to accomplish anything significant. Heck, even Sisyphus eventually got that giant boulder rolled up to the top of the hill from time to time!).

More likely, if you are doing SEO for a site with several million unique published pages, your organization’s Web team will be scaled to meet the challenge, including entire teams dedicated to development, content development, and reporting (and likely other facets of the work as well).

In fact, the site may be broken up into departments, each one with its own development, media, and marketing teams! Worse yet, where SEO sits in your enterprise organization may not be an optimal place to get even the minimal support you’ll need to move that mountain.

So how can you be successful as an SEO in such an environment? You need to understand your role, what is expected of you, what you can hope to accomplish, and most importantly, know how you can accomplish those tasks. Yes, you certainly need a variety of SEO skills and education as fundamentals, but probably even more important than that, you need excellent interpersonal and communications skills.

Communication, Huh?

Why are interpersonal and communication skills so important, you ask? Well, for the most part, your job as an enterprise SEO will be a small piece of the enterprise website pie (potentially very small). Most likely your role will be predominately strategic in nature rather than tactical.

And in fact, the tactical part of your job will likely be conveying the strategic challenges of the other teams who actually do the tactical implementation of the work you identify, not to mention the strategic interpretation of the reports created by the data teams for executive management!

In terms of the classic cross-organizational RACI matrix, where the roles of project members are categorized as either Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, or Informed, enterprise SEOs are often accountable for the work without being responsible for doing the work.

Image via Wikipedia, used under Creative Commons

Dotted lines org charts rule here. To succeed in this role, you need to have excellent people skills. After all, you won’t get people to do the work you need done if you treat them with condescension or disrespect. You need to understand they have other work to do, and that you are (typically) not their manager.

So, even though SEO is likely an executive-sponsored organizational goal, the workers upon whom you will rely to do the work needed to move the needle on improving search click-throughs, page views, time spent on site, conversions, online revenues, and other key metrics will get their bonuses, raises and promotions by doing the work their direct managers ask of them.

You need to accommodate the needs and goals of those folks, find what motivates them, help make their jobs easier, and most important, publicly share the successes you earn through SEO work with them.

6 Point Success Checklist For Enterprise SEOs

While this is a short list (there are certainly more things to consider), here are a few of the things I think every prospective enterprise SEO should be prepared to do (and none of this is tactical SEO!):

1.  Training & presenting

As the enterprise’s SEO strategy person, you know more about the topic than the people doing the daily work of developing new site features, creating new content pages, and building up online communities. You should be prepared to offer training sessions or workshops for each of these teams, helping them understand, in the terms of the work they do every day, how SEO considerations can be seamlessly integrated into their daily workflow.

If your enterprise doesn’t already do such training, volunteer to start up such a program. In the meantime, offer lunchtime brown bag sessions dedicated to one basic concept and leave time for Q&A.

2.  Writing documentation

When the training is over, offering a quick reference guide or 1-pager SEO cheat sheet as a takeaway is great reinforcement of the ideas conveyed.

You can also create an internal intranet website with links to your training session PowerPoint slide decks, cheat sheets, and other documentation on about the what, how, why, when, where, and even who of SEO in your organization. Of course, all of that has to be written. You might even consider making short training videos, too!

3.  Working with others

Ultimately, the enterprise SEO role is a people-person role. You’ll need to engage with other people and teams to do the work you define as needed to improve the site’s performance as you’ll rarely have a chance to do it yourself (it’s hard to scale you!). To be really successful with this, keep the next few steps in mind. 

4.  Being empathetic with others when their priorities are not SEO

Respect the hard work these folks have to do that has nothing to do with your SEO needs. If they are sitting around with nothing to do (and even if they’re not, it’s not your place to call them out on that!).

If you can get them to be on your side in the efforts to get SEO tasks done, to improve the way they write page metadata, or learn to include you in new Web project planning meetings (where your work will have the greatest impact instead of looping you in just before the product ships when you can barely put an SEO Band-Aid on senseless, gaping Web optimization wounds), your work will be far more successful.

5.  Making others great!

Focus on making the other people successful, and you’ll earn their trust. Make your emphasis how SEO will make them successful, and when good things happen, make a big deal of giving public acknowledgement of their vital contribution.

If your focus is self-centered, you will always find it hard to get others to work toward goals that are important to you. And just to set expectations, please understand that when you make others great, it may not be reciprocated. Some people may not thank you for your help in meetings. They may keep the kudos without sharing credit with you.

That’s fine. As long as your manager knows what work you’re doing, you can live without the reciprocated kudos. Indeed, your selflessness may itself be the key to your organizational success. In a healthy organization, others will notice the value of your work, rest assured.

6.  Being a great technical resource, but don’t BS folks

This is paramount. You are the designated expert in the field, and people expect that you will know it all. Of course, you and I both know that you and I don’t know it all. And, that’s OK.

To be the most valuable resource, in the long run, it’s far less important to deliver information instantly than it is to deliver it accurately. When you are not certain about a question, promise to get them the right answer ASAP rather than giving them a glib, wrong answer immediately.

Why? When they take your bad info to their team and it is revealed to be wrong, they’ll be embarrassed, they’ll blame you, and as a result, they’ll probably refuse to work with you in the future. It’s ultimately self-sabotage. Don’t do that!

Successful Enterprise SEOs

To be a success in enterprise SEO, you need to be a lot of things. You need to be smart, well-versed in the field, willing to learn, and resourceful about where to get the best technical information (which typically changes over time).

You need to be ready to work with the many people it’ll take to get the job done. Show them respect (even the few who might not deserve it!), give them the tools and information they need to succeed, and when success comes, let them (and their managers) know of their good work.

Don’t be insincere about it – false praise is in the same realm as condescension. But, when the job is done well, make them great. Your enterprise SEO career will get the same bounce as the website on which all of your teams work.

In the Puget Sound area of Washington State, the Seattle SEO Network holds a pair of monthly meetings: one for Pro SEOs to exchange ideas and help each other learn, and another to bring together SEOs and local business people starting in the world of online marketing who might not know a <title> tag from a local search citation.

Having volunteered my time for much of my professional career with industry user groups, I attend the Seattle meet-ups when I can (which unfortunately means not often enough). Still, it’s always great to meet new people and hear new perspectives about today’s online marketing challenges.

At a recent meeting, one of the new attendees asked an excellent question of the pro SEOs in attendance. He said he had repeatedly heard the generic recommendation to “publish great content”.

But what he really wanted to know was this: what is “great content” exactly?

The question is not as simple as it sounds. The range of answers generated by the SEOs in the crowd was impressive and interesting. I thought I’d share some of them here with you in case one of our newer readers might be interested in the answer.

Defining great content depends on your point of view. What does it consist of, how is it used, and how to measure its value, are just some of the perspectives to be considered. Let’s take a look at how this breaks down.

What Does Great Content Consist Of?

First of all, great content is something that can be easily read by a person browsing your website. But that’s not where it ends. In fact, that’s where it starts!

Great content also has to be easily read by a computer, such as a search engine crawler. Since crawlers are generally not very intellectually flexible entities, we need to spoon-feed them content that they can technically consume, and more importantly than anything else, this needs to be in the form of text.

But when I say text, I don’t just mean the appearance of letters and numbers on the screen. I mean good, old fashioned ASCII text in the page. Text content shown by means of rich Internet application (RIA) technologies like JavaScript, Flash or Silverlight may make for fancy pants presentations, and it usually helps designers look unduly impressive in the eyes of unsuspecting clients, but more often than not, at least in terms of search crawlers, it’s actually a disaster.

As you may know, search engines can’t reliably read content buried in such types of rich technology. Same goes for text presented within images, videos, animations, and the like. All of that important text is buried in binary files.

Now truth be told, Google does occasionally employ optical character recognition (OCR) technologies in an effort to decipher the buried secret messages these otherwise inaccessible technologies are hiding, and they are also making progress (albeit slowly) on reading some bits of JavaScript, but it’s definitely not an optimal way to feed the beast.

The beast wants text, so instead of using RIA or graphics for pretty text, use CSS technologies to make your text look fancy while keeping the page easily digestible for a search crawler.

Click here to view the embedded video.

One big piece of advice: if you really are a true fan of flashy, blinky, loud, colorful, and otherwise cool RIA content, do a favor for your site and your end users who are not fans of the flashy, blinky by making your RIA content accessible by down-level users. These users include those who choose not to install browser plug-ins, those who surf with old or incompatible browsers, and to the point, those who are simple search crawlers.

The process of providing a lesser, secondary experience for these users is known as graceful degradation, and while it’s a bit more work to do (and certainly less sexy than flashy, blinky), it’s also critical for getting the content of that page reliably indexed in search.

Content Is The Secret Sauce

What’s in Search’s Secret Sauce?

While you’re thinking about page text, don’t forget the search secret sauce: writing on-page metadata, aka content about the content on the page.

If you ignore writing great, unique, and optimized text for <title> and <meta> description tags, you’re missing an invaluable opportunity to define the theme of the page for both human users and crawlers.

Same advice goes for <h1> tags and <img> alt text. The <title> and <meta> description are typically used in the search engine results pages (SERPs) list (<title> text being the blue-link text, and the <meta> description text serving as the descriptive snippet beneath the blue link text).

The <h1> serves as the on-page headline for the page, and the <img> alt text is where you can define the content of the image in text form (and aim to make the alt text relevant to the page instead of just a generic image description).

Best of all, the text in the tags <title>, <h1> and <img> alt text are valued by search engines as high quality sources for defining keywords for the page.

Bottom line: Write great content for human consumption, but think of your primary readers as humans who rely on using computer screen reader applications. If you write great text content for people that is readable by computers, you and your readers all win!

How Is Great Content Used?

Great content serves a very important purpose: it informs the reader about the topic of the page. When great content is smartly developed and used strategically, it easily accomplishes the following tasks:

• Helps people understand the topic
• Demonstrates your unique expertise or angle on the subject
• Makes people want to come back and read it again
• Makes people want to link to it so other people can access it from their website, blog, social network feed, etc.
• Compels people to do the following:
  • Buy something on the site
  • Download a document, a file, or an app
  • Write a review or endorsement
  • Subscribe to a site’s RSS feed
  • Follow the author’s Twitter account
  • Generate a Like on the author’s Facebook page
  • Submit the page to StumbleUpon or Reddit
  • Submit their email address to subscribe a periodic newsletter from the same author

Great content is what the Web was originally designed to facilitate. Write what you know, make it compelling, and people (and search engines) will respond accordingly. It may take time, of course, but even viral content starts with an initial post.

But How Do You Create Great Content?

Great content is, well, great! Of course, that can also be a relative thing. It’s like the old story of being in the woods with a bunch of your coworkers when you accidentally encounter an ill-tempered bear. When the chase begins, you personally don’t need to outrun the bear (good luck with trying that). You only need to outrun the other people you’re with.

Sure, that’s a grizzly (pun intended) tale with a morally ambiguous message, but that’s why I made the other people your coworkers. Business is business, after all!

If the lack of great content is what separates your site from your competitors in the SERPs, then you’re not likely to ever surpass them by corner-cutting moves. You’ll need to invest in developing that great content you know you need. Hey, if getting high page rank was easy, anyone could do it!

So what is this elusive great content you need to create? Read what you have on your site’s pages and ask yourself the following questions (or better yet, ask someone who is not biased toward your site so you’ll get an honest answer):

• Is the content informative?
• Is it authoritative on the subject matter?
• Is it interesting?
• Is it well-written (complete sentences are important, but so is approachable writing rather than being stodgy)?
• Is longer content broken up into well-organized sections by headings?
• Does the content make good and interesting use of visual elements?
• Is the writing free of embarrassing spelling errors or remedial grammar problems?
• Is it written appropriately toward its intended audience?
• Is the content free of industry-insider jargon, focusing instead on terminology your readers would use (and search for)?
• When appropriate, does the content show your unique voice or even a sense of humor?

If you answered No to any of the above, think about your approach and redo it.

How Do You Measure The Value Of Content?

To be sure, while offering the best possible content is always a laudable goal, often the resources for making that happen are very hard to come by. If your site is in a small niche market, take a close look at your online competition in search. If those sites are dull, boring, and uninteresting, you might get away with being just a little better than them. At least for a while.

If the bear is really hungry, in time, an ambling trot in your part may not be enough. Nor may be a half-hearted attempt to post a lazy, “slightly better than the competition” paragraph on a few pages. Sure, it’s a start, but it’s only a start. Corner-cutting optimizations are a tough way to achieve success, especially in the long run.

But what if the online competition is heated, competitive, and you’re up against top-ranked pages? Just understand that search engines, like people, really like great content.

So often websites are conceived as vehicles to promote a business, sell a product or service, or show off some technical handiwork, and writing page content is typically a last-minute (or last-second!) addition. It’s considered drudgery, mere junk to fill a void on the page. These are horrendous mistakes that completely miss the point of the Web, especially if a site owner wants it to be found (and ranked well) in search.

Creating great content should be part of the design process at the beginning. Use the website to tell your tale, show what makes you and your business special. This is the essence of great content.

Images from Shutterstock, used under license.

They seem to believe that the world is easily whittled down into discrete segments that occur in a vacuum. That cause and effect are absolutes. That if you work hard, you will get rich. If you are nice, you will be successful. I suppose those folks sleep well at night. They live lives of quiet harmony and bliss, always doing what they believe is expected because that will always result in great achievement. It must be nice.

We SEOs generally don’t live in that world. We don’t believe that all you need to do are tasks X and Y to sell all of your inventory. That if you write a blog post to an expected standard, you will win the Pulitzer Prize (darn shame, that one!).

And more to the point, that if you optimize your website until you are done (whatever that means), there is no more work to be done, all of your visitors will convert, and all of your pages will rank #1 in search. In short, we don’t believe in perfection. Maybe that’s why I don’t sleep so well!

I have a good friend who’s a great SEO. She tells me about a recent meeting she had with an important, new client who represents a large online business.

The person she met with was the client company’s online marketing manager. She had done an initial audit of the client’s top 50 pages, identified several common problems across the pages, and had developed a list of recommendations on what they needed to do to get more unique visitors to their site from search (their target metric).

The client reviewed the recommendations list carefully, then stated that they only had a limited budget for SEO work (who doesn’t?). The client then asked the big question: if they only implemented recommendation #1, how many more unique users would that produce? She wanted a hard and fast number. How many more UUs would recommendation #1 produce, compared to recommendation #2?

Since they had an internal target number of new UUs they needed to achieve on a monthly basis (from executive management), how many would each of the recommendations produce, and what would each one cost so they could pick and choose which ones to implement in order to get to that exact number for the lowest investment cost? The client wanted specifics. As if there were honest specifics to offer.

Does this discussion sound familiar to you? If not the exact scenario, at least the theme? That we, as SEOs, can say with an absolute degree of certainty that doing task X will produce results Y? If I personally knew the answer to that question with certainty, my own rates would be far higher than they are today.

Why There’s No Certainty In SEO

The truth of the matter is that we cannot say with certainty how many new users will result from a particular optimization task (and yes, I know there are consultants out there who will happily give specific numbers, but their claims are as legitimate as Nessie photos). For the rest of us, legitimate, quantifiable certainty eludes us on many levels:

• We cannot know with certainty what Google truly wants as dictated in their algorithm, especially today – and tomorrow. We can make (hopefully) very good educated guesses, based on tried-and-true, successful campaigns in the past, but as they say in the financial industry, past performance does not guarantee future returns.
• We cannot know with certainty what Google’s next new, black-and-white animal-named, non-penalty, algo update might include, or what it might target.
• We cannot know with certainty what the competitors in the same space are doing to optimize their own websites, links, social media campaigns and content.
• We cannot know with certainty what the next big, external, local, regional, national, or world events might happen that influence our target market or industry, nor how much our target market even really wants the products or services we have to offer. After all, there’s not always a bottomless market for green widgets (or green widget management services).

In short, there are far too many variables at play here. The belief that SEO task X will instigate exact result Y (such as specific numbers of new UUs on a website) within such a multi-dimensional framework as the behavior of individual Internet users referred from results pages of search engines, whose algorithms, which take into account several hundreds of ranking factors, are literally changed several hundred times each year, is, well, absurd.

But Bean Counters Want To Know

Now, I do have to say I understand my friend’s client contact’s position in the matter. The marketing manager wasn’t likely being an absurd, difficult jerk just to make my SEO friend’s life difficult.

If that marketing manager was smart, she was likely anticipating the very same question being asked of her from her company’s executive management, and she wanted to get an answer that would satisfy them, or at a minimum, demonstrate that she was clever enough to ask about the issue on her own. I get that execs, especially the business bean counters, want demonstrable return on investment for their consultant fees paid.

But when that want becomes a requirement exhibited in a demand for specific results, as in “SEO task X will produce exactly 50,000 new UUs; task Y will add another 25,000 UUs; and task Z adds yet another 10,000 UUs, totaling the targeted 85,000 new UUs per month in the new quota,” someone eventually will have to recognize that someone else is pulling those numbers out of a hat. Eventually the truth is revealed.

It’s hardly different from quotas on sales teams. Setting a quota does not guarantee it’ll be met. It only means you have established the bar height you wish to achieve. You still need to invest the right number of resources to get to the bar. If people work hard but the economy tanks in your market, best of luck to the sales team when annual reviews come around. But if the economy unexpectedly flourishes in your market (or you manage to get a viral media frenzy started, which generates tons of free publicity), well, then, quota targets may be moot.

The hard but honest message to convey to clients is that there is uncertainty around the level of expected success that will be seen in an SEO campaign. Of course, there are SEO-compliance problems that can be identified and smart solutions to be implemented to remedy them. You can (and absolutely should) be creative with extending the client’s message to new markets, or change the marketing messaging to one with a stronger, more appealing tone, or promote new applications for an established product or service.

Expansion is the target, and spreading the word of that big news is the mission. But in terms of quantifying the predicted level of success by one particular optimization method, certainty is just not possible.

Well, there actually is one certainty that we can tell the clients they can count on. If they unwisely choose to not invest in SEO for optimizing their marketing campaign efforts for new audiences through search, this will guarantee failure.

While the client rests, their competition will continue to optimize their websites, create new social media campaigns, reinforce their traditional marketing campaigns with online support, and more. SEO is not a one-and-done job. It is an on-going series of identifying problems, implementing corrective measures, examining real-world results, and refining those efforts by starting the loop all over again.

The Hard Truth

If the world were as simple as “do X to get Y,” all of us would be rich, all products would be great, all marketing efforts would be perfectly successful, and, of course, this column would win the Pulitzer Prize. But superlatives can’t be universal, so if all that were true, none of us would be rich, all products would be the same, all marketing efforts would result in mediocrity, and there would be no prizes to be won.

It’s the unexpected and unknown variability in the world that leads to successes and failures, that allows for someone or something to stand head and shoulders above the crowd. That’s why we as SEOs are here, to help our clients rise above that mediocrity. The lack of certainty is a hard message to sell to our clients, but that’s the honest, real world truth. And, unfortunately, I won’t bother dusting off a spot on the fireplace mantle for that Pulitzer Prize, either. Too bad for me.

I’m talking about losing track of what’s truly important in an SEO campaign. Getting lost in the woods, and not seeing the forest for the trees.

There are those who have learned a tiny modicum of knowledge about SEO; perhaps they picked it up years ago and decided they had figured it all out. But now they focus all of their time and energy chasing after the wrong things.

Most of us have had clients or worked for IT managers who only care about certain “aspects” or key performance indicators (KPIs) within an SEO campaign. They ask us as SEOs to give them regular updates on how the campaign is performing in pursuit of certain (read misguided) goals that they feel are most important for SEO.

Heck, sometimes even a few SEOs can lose sight of important priorities and fall prey to the easy temptation of obsessing over what’s not important. They lose sight of the real goals of SEO by chasing meaningless indicators or pointless statistics. Allow me to provide just a few examples:

1.  Klout Scores

Is there any serious SEO out there who thinks this matters one hoot? Yes, I too have heard the tales of ad agencies asking prospective employee candidates about their Klout scores, using their knowledge of it (or worse yet, the actual score) as an evaluation criteria for hiring.If only the score had any legitimate value.

For example, I know a very good SEO who’s learned how to significantly boost his Klout score via Facebook and Twitter activity.

The specific Facebook activity that has earned him so much “klout” is his participation in a Facebook game, where he interacts with other online players, who “Like” his gameplay and his collection of meaningless, digital doo-dads.

The vast majority of the Likes associated with his Facebook account come from this gameplay, and he’s definitely noticed a positive correlation between his accumulation of these game-based Facebook Likes and his growing Klout score. Talk about gaming the system!

This same SEO also is a big user of HootSuite. He has set up HootSuite to automatically tweet any update received from a dozen different feeds, all related to SEO. He actually rarely goes into HootSuite anymore, and even more rarely manually retweets any particular message he receives. It’s all automatically managed now, and since setting this up, his Klout score has gotten another significant shot in the arm.

So does any of this activity increase his genuine expertise in SEO? The Klout algorithm seems to think so, which is just another reason why I think Klout is more of a meaningless game than anything else. Make no mistake, I respect the hell out of this person’s mad Web design and deep SEO skills. But Klout’s measurement of this kind of industry activity is fundamentally flawed, which makes all Klout scores a joke.

2.  Google Toolbar PageRank Score

Does anyone still care about Google Toolbar PR scores? Hell yes they do! Some folks obsess about them.

When was the last time you heard an SEO not brag about being involved with a site whose PR score is 7 or better? Perhaps it was about their own site or a long-term client site – it doesn’t matter to them. No one cares about or bothers to mention PR when their site score is between a 0-3, but when the score goes past 5, all of a sudden they become true believers – and braggers!

“Hey look at me! My site is now a PR 7!” Yeah, well my dad can bowl better than your dad. And I drive a BMW. So nyah.

Even Google’s Matt Cutts has suggested we all worry too much about a generic PageRank score and should focus our concerns and efforts elsewhere (such as content). A PageRank score from the Google Toolbar really only has relative value, not specific value. It’s pretty safe to assume a PR2 site will not outrank a PR7 site within the same industry niche for the same keyword query.

But start taking away some of those qualifying caveats, and the whole ballgame changes. Then add to the mix that we all get personalized SERPs these days, in addition to the SERP enhancements associated with Google Authorship Markup, and a top SERP placement is no longer actually all that meaningful – except for bragging rights.

3.  Google SERP Rank

Speaking of bragging rights, this is a good follow-on to the previous bullet item. Some folks absolutely cling to the belief that the whole damn enterprise hangs on whether or not their SEO can get them a Number 1 SERP rank. Right. Nothing is more important than that. And Superman was based on a true life story.

As I just said, personalized SERPs mean that what’s Number 1 for you may not be Number 1 for me, nor Number 1 for folks in other geographic areas or demographic groups. And even if you get that Number 1 rank, was it for the keyword you really wanted, or just any old keyword, a funky long-tail special that gets little to no traffic, or is so tangentially related to what you have to sell that it doesn’t convert at all?

Furthermore, as mentioned above, if you are Number 1 but your SERP listing is basic, and the next two SERP links beneath yours employ microformats for an enhanced SERP page, or they use authorship markup to show the author’s photo and his or her name linked to their other related published content, are you sure that coveted Number 1 link is really going to produce for you?

To make matters even worse, there are also local search results, branded results with sitelinks, blended SERP results for videos and images, and much more that can distract, if not ruin the desired effect of your long-sought Number 1 rank.

4.  Link Exchanges & Paid Links

Can you actually believe in these days of Penguin that people still seek out reciprocal links or, worse yet, still want to buy paid links via junk directories or fake blog networks? Yeah, and while you’re at it, you might want to try stuffing that <meta> keyword tag, too. I hear that also really works well. I recently got the following email (names have been changed to protect the foolish):

“Dear Sir / Madam

“I am currently in the process of building links for <Company URL>. As you probably know the link exchange between two websites helps both your site and mine to rank highly in search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN.

“If you are interested in the link exchange please choose any category you like: <URL on his site> and let me know. I will add your link within a jiffy.

“If you are not interested in reciprocal links I can also offer 3 way links…”

The email goes on with markup code samples. I especially love how it ended:

“ps. If you are not the person dealing with link exchange please pass on this email to your link manager or webmaster”

Yeah, I’ll get right on that – with my webmaster (me).

So What Should We Do Instead?

Dogmatically pursuing any and all of the above is largely a waste of time and energy, especially when the obsession blinds you to what should be the primary efforts of your activity as an SEO.

So what should we as SEOs be chasing instead? Hmmm. Let’s think about this for a moment. What’s more important than the pursuit of illegitimate or irrelevant scores, meaningless KPIs, or boneheaded, self-destructive SEO strategies? I propose the following for starters:

• Conversions
• Revenue
• Customer contacts
• Improved business reputation

So much of SEO has become an obsession with winning the game, but with so much new minutiae to learn and master on a daily basis, we often lose sight of why we play this game in the first place.

We shouldn’t really care about moving the needle on scores. Instead, we want to move the needle on business revenues. We should strive to earn higher conversions, optimize conversion funnels, and generate more Web-originated revenues.

We want better customer engagement – but not simply for the sake of chatting with customers. We want to actively build customer and brand loyalty, improve (or defend) business, brand and product reputations, define creative new thinking regarding our products and services, and of course, expand our markets to new people and opportunities.

These are all truly meaningful business goals related to search engine marketing. Don’t get lost in the woods. Chase what matters. Find your customers, help them understand your products, facilitate their purchase process, and ensure they are happy. There’s a thousand and one things you can do to make this come together, but obsessing on meaningless activities will not help you meet your real business goals.

Scenario #1: 

I was driving to the grocery story along a two-lane curving road when I came up on a fellow in dark clothes, standing in the shade, probably 30 or more feet away from the side of the road.

He was standing near some bushes, holding what appeared to be a loose-leaf sized sheet of brown corrugated cardboard.

The “sign” appeared to be blank – at least, I didn’t see anything written on it (written with a ball-point pen, perhaps?), and he was so far away from the road that I actually didn’t even see him until just before I passed him.

Upon my return trip from the store, I passed him again from the other direction and realized he had a stand selling fresh Bing cherries (hidden away from traffic view behind the jutting bushes).

Unfortunately, it was too late – I had just bought some of these early summer delights from the grocery store! Too bad for him that he didn’t let me know what he was selling when I was ready to buy.

Scenario #2: 

Continuing on the way home, I drove by one of the large, famous wineries in Woodinville that holds concerts on their beautiful grounds during summer afternoons.

As I was driving toward the winery, I saw a fellow standing on the sidewalk right next to the road. He was smartly dressed, very visible in colorful clothes, and held up a neon green sheet of paper containing a concise message written in large black text that read as follows:

I NEED TICKETS

Unfortunately for him, I didn’t have concert tickets to sell. (Or perhaps he was really trying to sell me.)

But let’s assume he really did need tickets, and if I did have extra tickets to sell, I was easily in a position to respond. I saw him long before I got up to him. I was able to read the concise message on his high-contrast sign well before I passed him, and he was wisely positioned in a location where a driver could pull over to make a quick, convenient sale.

What I saw here was a great demonstration of one person who did and another person who did not know how to market themselves to their intended audience (in this case, people in cars passing by).

SEO Is Just One Part Of Web Marketing

How many of us really think about how potential customers see us as we market our products and services on our websites? It’s really very similar to these two street marketers.

So often we as SEO’s see sites that are the digital equivalent of scenario No. 1 from above. The webmasters of these sites often bury their sales pages deep in their site, making them hard to find.

When they are found, they provide little useful information on the page about the item for sale. Worst of all, these pages often all but hide the web control, button, or link you need to click to actually buy it!

These are the same pages that usually ignore the value of descriptive metadata, and the page’s non-existent content, short (or omitted) headlines, and the images (if any) do little to support the marketing effort in search.

It almost seems as if these webmasters faithfully believe that their audience simply “knows what they want” and will “know what to do” once they arrive on the right page. This faith in their customer base is honorable, and it may be true for their old regulars, but frankly, that’s no way to expand the business and develop new customers.

Instead, you need to tell ‘em what you’ve got. And by that, I mean tell both humans who visit to your site as well as the search engines that crawl your site.

Let’s take a look at a few ideas on how you can improve your chances in getting those drive-by potential customers to stop at your site and buy from you rather than drive on past and conduct their business somewhere else.

Page Metadata Helps Put The Brakes On At The SERPs

For old school SEOs, page metadata is where we live. To bring searchers to your products pages, you need to describe what it is you’re selling. And unlike human users, search engines like to look in the metadata tags.

To make your pages relevant to search queries, you need to add unique <title> tags, <meta> description text, and evocative <h1> headlines to your pages, using descriptive, targeted keywords.

But just as importantly, to drive searchers to click your link in the SERPs, you need to write compelling metadata text that shows up as the SERP’s blue link text (the <title> tag) and the blue link description snippet (the <meta> description tag text). If you don’t get click-throughs, you won’t get conversions!

Taking our offline example to online, as a searcher, which of these SERP listings stands out most to you?

As an SEO, you need to consider this point of view as you add metadata and write on-page text and <h1> tags.

Now I hear the din of distant arguments stating that the <h1> tag is not metadata, as this tag’s text is displayed on the page. Yes, but as the <h1> is supposed to be a descriptive line of text defining the theme of the page, I lump this tag into the whole “data about the page content” category – i.e. metadata.

Keyword-optimized and compellingly written page metadata will help search engines understand what’s on the page, build relevance for searches, improve the discoverability of the product in search by users, and boost the click-through rate for your links in the SERPs. Old school SEO.

Add Descriptive Information On The Page

So now you’ve gotten search users to your page. Good start. And what do these people want to know about your products?

Brainstorm time. Step into their shoes (or think about what it is you want to see on a webpage when you are looking for something to buy online).

Most successful e-commerce sites offer the following types of information in the body text of their products pages:

• Product’s official manufacturer and model name (which is good keyword fodder, anyway)
• Size or dimensions
• Weight
• Color
• Material type
• Date of manufacture (for products where freshness is important)
• Other related product specs and features
• Warranty information
• Price (for the sake of all things good in this world, put in the price, including a shipping and sales tax calculator. If you try to make me chase down the price, I’ll simply run away)
• Detailed product descriptions (at least a good paragraph, perhaps more)

Sites that don’t anticipate the needs and questions of their visitors by providing this information will find it very hard to convert them into customers.

Now, Add More Information

In addition to the basic descriptive information on the page, the best e-commerce sites make extensive use of multimedia content to augment the product information available. This includes presenting multiple product images (including a detailed zoom-in view to see fine details), How To videos, installation and setup information, and more.

At MozCon 2012, I saw a brilliant and inspirational 15-minute talk given by Jeff McRitchie of MyBinding.com. He’s made a couple thousand short and sweet informational videos for his admittedly non-sexy product inventory – paper binders, shredders, laminators, and more.

He’s worked out a fast and low budget way of creating a massive video inventory, and he’s noted that when site visitors watch the videos, his conversion rate for that product goes up fivefold! Brilliant!

Endorsements

What else would a potential customer want to see? Product reviews, of course!

To make your product pages really sing, enable customer reviews on the page. You can also offer customer testimonials and even links to third-party reviews, such as those in online magazines and review websites.

One hot tip I heard at MozCon 2012 was about the use of customer reviews on your product pages: actively select the specific product reviews you want to show by default on your pages, choosing ones that make use of strong keywords, are written in detail, and are persuasively positive. Let your customers be your best advocates.

Make Buying The Product Brain-dead Easy

Now that you’ve given your site visitors all the information they need to make their purchase decision, let them clearly see how to do it!

Make your “Buy Me Now” control a high contrast color to the rest of the page, perhaps as a button image or some other control that is clear, obvious, and very conspicuous. Be sure to put it above the fold (and if the page is long with descriptive content, repeat it at the bottom of the page as well).

Stop Your Customers From Driving By

Frankly, the discussion of optimizing your pages for conversions could go on for pages. But the core of the matter is it’s just like those two guys trying to sell something to drivers passing by on the road.

Is what you’re doing on your website going to be noticed in a glance? Are you hiding your message or is it pleasingly visible and clear on your page (and in your metadata)? Are you telling potential customers what they want to know, including how to buy your product?

If not, your customers are driving right on by, spending their money on that product from someone else. Tell ‘em what you’ve got, and you’ll be the one they stop for.

Photo used under Creative Commons license courtesy of Flickr user garryknight.

Unfortunately, it now appears, at least to some, that even some of the old stand-by, tried-and-true SEO techniques of the past are now suspect, not only in their efficacy, but in their viability.

We now work in the age of Pandas, Penguins, and more. There are penalties and there are algorithms, all set up to take us down a notch or three – and who knows what’s coming next? What do we as SEOs tell our clients (or our employers) to do now?

I submit to you that Chicken Little is only a moral folktale, and that the sky is in fact not falling, at least not for SEO. Indeed, the common thread running through all of these changes is that running a website for the benefit of the site owner rather than for the site reader is a problem.

As a result, the differences between blackhat and whitehat SEO remains as clear as ever (and Google’s recent actions only drive that point home ever more clearly). If you as an SEO have a brand to build, a site to optimize, and a message to convey, how to be successful online is as straightforward today as it has ever been.

The problem we face is the new potential repercussions of old SEO shortcuts or “cheats.” I have always advocated that the smartest, best long-term strategy for a business branded website is to develop the site for the human reader, not the search engine. Search engines spend a huge amount of resources of time, money, and energy to figure out what people want. They do everything they possibly can to act as human analogues.

Of course, algorithms are not humans, and computers have a hard time interpreting non-text content and assessing nuance. In light of that, I will make a slight caveat to my SEO creed: Develop your website for the human reader who uses a computer screen reader with their browser.

A site that does this should pretty much cover the failings of the search engines’ computer algorithms in their Data-like (or is that Kryton-like?) quest to become, well, more human.

Pursue Your Quest For Goodness

Despite the release of recent Google algo changes that continue to shake up the SERPs, I still believe that no SEO ever went wrong by getting these fundamentals right…

1.  Developing descriptive metadata and body text with keywords. 

Help both the human searcher and the search engine figure out what your pages are about. Figure out which keywords are most relevant to your page, and then use them in places that have the most punch.

By developing descriptive, relevant text for your page’s <title>, <meta> description, <h1>, and <img> alt text tags, and by ensuring those same words are used again in the body of the page, you help develop relevancy to those keyword queries for your content.

• Caveat: But don’t go overboard. Use natural language as much as possible. No human wants to visit a site listed in the SERP whose blue link text and descriptive snippet are nothing but a keyword dump. Write compelling text fort humans and you will be rewarded with page views.

2.  Creating interesting, crawlable content.

Humans search the Web for great content. Make yours interesting, informative, expert, creative, perhaps even humorous. Show off the one element that makes your site different from everyone else – you!

• Caveat: This is where the computer screen reader SEO credo amendment from above comes into play. Search engines are merely computers, and computers have a hard time interpreting non-text-based content. Sure, a photo gallery is a photo gallery, but a page supposedly about ancient Roman gold coins should have more than just images or a video.  The multimedia content is good stuff (because people find it appealing, search engines want to understand it). Help the crawlers understand that interesting content by employing text-based, graceful degradation strategies.

Furthermore, don’t bury important text content within images, videos, or other binary files. Put it instead on the page as styled text so it can be easily and reliably read by the crawlers!The lack of high quality content is what is getting sites busted in Google Panda. Feed Google some great content – they’ll appreciate it, as will your readers.

3.  Improving architectural issues for site crawlability.

This includes such straightforward advice as canonicalizing your URLs, using permanent (301) redirects when redirects are needed, minimizing your folder depth to no more than three subfolders from the root, and using keyword-based folder and file names.

Also, create a custom 404 page to keep customers on your site when inbound links are broken, post a valid robots.txt file to make the search crawler more efficient, and publish valid XML-based Sitemaps and RSS feeds to tell the search engines about your most important content pages. Lastly, ensure your site is optimized for page load speed.

• Caveat: Be careful with your architecture changes. You don’t want to lose page rank on existing pages by carelessly changing URLs without careful planning. You also want to make sure any changes to your robots.txt are heavily scrutinized. When I worked for Bing, one of the biggest problems the Webmaster Team saw with crawling problems was the unintentional blockage of the crawler through careless robots directives, especially when wildcards are involved. If you suddenly block a large portion of your site, those pages will fall out of the index.

4.  Building relevant links with authority sites.

Link building used to be easy, right? Just submit your site’s URL to a few hundred of your favorite directories to earn inbound links, and voila! When that stopped working so well, folks tried paying link farms, blog networks, and other large aggregation of junk sites to link to them, figuring “a link is a link.”

Well, search engines never liked such falsified signals, and Google Penguin simply seals the deal.

Today, think in terms of quality (judged by industry authority) rather than quantity. I don’t know what ratio search engines use for good links equating to junk links (and there may not be one anymore).

Just identify the niches of the Web that are relevant to your site’s target audience, find the most significant players in those niches, and then contact the webmasters about linking to your site. I’d highly recommend having some of that interesting content previously discussed ready to show them – that’s what’s likely to interest them.

• Caveat: Don’t send spam email to webmasters asking them to link to your site if there’s nothing there worth linking to. Get your expert content in place, and then you have something to promote.

5.  Engaging with customers via social media. 

Speaking of promoting your website content, use social media to build your community. Unlike link building, in which you are primarily appealing to authority sites, use social media to connect with your fans and potential customers.

Get into the habit of regularly publishing posts or tweets that are interesting to your people. And no, your latest sale or newsletter subscription drive is not really interesting to anyone but you. Become the expert in your field, where people learn to go for your industry’s news, developments, and helpful information. Develop your brand as a trusted authority with great posts.

• Caveat: Don’t invest in a social media effort if you don’t have the resources to maintain it. There’s nothing more frustrating for a user than a sudden flash in the pan and then fizzling out by neglect. Be consistent, and of course, be professional. Potential customers are watching you. Getting them to buy is hard – discouraging them from buying is all too easy to do.

6.  Avoiding malicious webspam. 

If your primary intention with an optimization campaign is to fake out the search engines, you’re on the wrong track from the start. If you think hidden text, rich snippets spam, cloaking, and paid links are worthwhile efforts, you’ve missed the boat.

Sure, legitimate inbound marketing is hard work and takes time to come to fruition, but in fact that is the point. Its benefits are long-term, organic, and valuable. Optimize for people to win. Optimize to fool search algos to destroy business websites and brand names.

• Caveat: Nope, there’s no caveat in this one. If your business model is to burn through the first thousand domain names as fast as possible, then fine, go play. But if you have long-term, online business development goals, just say “No.”

No SEO ever went wrong by doing the right thing for end users. You won’t automatically be successful by being as pure whitehat as the driven snow. You need also brains, great content, hard work, and a compelling product/service/website. But a nice whitehat is always in fashion in search.

If you’ve heard about Google authorship markup, but have been confused as to how to get started with it, you are definitely not alone. I’ve been writing about this topic since August of 2011, and have worked to get this process up and running on three separate blog sites (Search Engine Land, Internet Marketing Ninjas, and The SEO Ace– all coincidently, sites that publish my content!).

I’ve learned a few things along the way, right and wrong, but I’ve gotten it properly set up and now my goofy mug usually graces the Google search engine results pages (SERPs) when you search for content I’ve written.

More importantly, the content I’ve written on SEO has established me as a known author on that topic. And while I don’t have specific insight into how Google’s algorithm works, it’s a safe assumption that when the Google crawler discovers a new piece of SEO content written by me, my existing author rank has some influence on the page rank of that new content (assuming it’s up to snuff). So how do you get in on this? I’m happy to show you.

Normally I’d start off with some contextual information on why it’s important for all content creators to establish their own author branding in Google, but this post will be long enough as it is (this process isn’t exactly tic-tac-toe, my friends, so please stay with me).

For good introductory information on Google authorship markup, check out a couple of my previous posts, How To Create Your Digital Footprint With Links and Configure Authorship Markup for Google.

The Authorship Process

What you need to know is that Google needs to complete a circuit of verified trust between it and an author’s published content. For you to participate in this program, you need to have two things:

1. A verified digital identify owned by Google that links to your published content (a Google+ profile)
2. Your published content needs to reference you as the author and link back to the verified digital identity

As of this writing, Google supports three methods of verifying that trust. The methods approved by Google include a 3-link, a 2-link, and an email verification method. Let’s define these methods:

1. 3-Link Method. The 3-link method is used with sites that host content pages that link to an author biography page on the same domain. All of the content pages link to the author biography page, the author biography page links to the author’s Google+ profile, and the Google+ profile links to the author biography page, as shown below:
2. 2-Link Method.The 2-link method is for content pages that do not link to an author biography page. Instead, they typically contain a mini author biography snippet at the bottom of each post. These posts link directly to the author’s Google+ profile, and the Google+ profile links to the home page of the publishing site, as illustrated below:
3. Email Verification Method. The email verification method can be used when the author does not have control over author biography content anywhere in the content page (but its use is not limited to that scenario). In that case, an author byline links to an email address using the same domain name as the content page, and that email address is registered and verified in the author’s Google+ profile, as shown below:

The above set of descriptions were all high-level overviews; there are many details that must also be addressed. But as you can see, all three methods share the same requirement: a verified digital identify in the form of an author Google+ profile. Let’s first cover how to set up the author’s Google+ profile for authorship markup.

Setup Your Google+ Profile For Authorship Markup

If you have any existing Google account (Gmail, Google docs, Google Webmaster Tools, etc.), then you already have at least a stub Google+ profile. Perhaps yours is already somewhat filled out. But Google authorship markup mandates specific data requirements in that profile, so let’s get it set up right.

1. Browse to https://profiles.google.com/.
2. Sign in to your Google account (or create one if necessary).
3. When prompted, upload a clear facial, head shot photo to the profile. No abstract art, no cartoons, etc.
4. Click Continue until Finish appears, and then click Finish.
5. Click Continue to Google+, click Profile, and then click Edit Profile.
6. Click +1’s, select the Show this tab on your profile checkbox, and then click Save.
7. Click About, click Other profiles, click Add custom link, and then add labels and URLs for each of your other social media account profiles, such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Quora, etc. Click Save when done.
8. You may optionally complete the sections about your occupation, employment, and other pertinent information pertaining to your areas of expertise. While these ancillary elements are not required for authorship markup, they can often contribute an added degree of credibility to an author, which builds up your reputation as an authoritative source on the topics you cover.
9. When you are done completing your Google+ profile, be sure to click Done editing to save all of your changes.
10. Copy the 21-digit ID number used in the URL of your Google+ profile. You’ll likely need it momentarily.

Note:You’re not completely done yet with your Google+ profile edits, so leave that browser tab open.

Setup Your Published Content Pages For Authorship Markup

Which steps you’ll take to set up your content pages and finish configuring your Google+ profile depends on whether you’ll be registering content pages using the 3-link method, the 2-link method, or the email verification method (which depends upon how your Web content was published).

You may end up using several methods if you publish content on multiple sites (but only one method is needed per site). Pick and choose the sections below that apply to your situation.

3-link Method On Sites Using Author Biography Pages

Assumptions for this method:

• The author biography page is located in the same website domain as the content pages that link to it.
• Each content page link to the author biography page includes the author’s name in the anchor text.
• You have access permission rights to make source code edits on these pages.

Follow these steps:

1. On the author biography page, add a link for the author’s Google+ profile using the anchor text “Google+” (omit the quotes).
2. In the anchor tag code for the Google+ link, add the anchor tag attribute rel=”me”. The following is an example of such tag source code (be sure to use your own 21-digit, Google+ profile ID number):

   <a href="https://plus.google.com/111111111111111111111" rel="me">Google+</a>

3. In each content page, edit the existing link to the author biography page by adding the anchor tag attribute rel=”author”. The following is an example of such tag source code (be sure to use the URL to your author biography page in the href attribute as well as your name as the anchor text):

   <a href="{AuthorBiographyPageURL}" rel="author">Author Name</a>

4. In your Google+ profile, click Edit Profile, and then click Other Profiles.
5. Click Add custom link, and then add a label and the full URL for the author biography page.
6. Click Save when done, and then click Done editing.

If you have no more content profiles to add, skip to the section titled Verify the Google authorship markup code is valid.

2-link Method On Sites Using Author Bio Snippets At End Of Each Post

Assumptions for this method:

• Each content page contains a boilerplate author biography sentence or paragraph snippet that contains a link to the author’s Google+ profile.
• You have access permission rights to edit the author biography text snippet.

Follow these steps:

1. In the author biography snippet, add a link to the author’s Google+ profile using the anchor text “Google+” (omit the quotes). The following is an example of such tag source code (be sure to use your own 21-digit, Google+ profile ID number):

   <a href="https://plus.google.com/111111111111111111111?rel=author">Google+</a>

2. In your Google+ profile, click Edit Profile, and then click Contributor to.
3. Click Add custom link, and then add a label and the full URL for the publishing site’s home page.
4. Click Save when done, and then click Done editing.

If you have no more content profiles to add, skip to the section titled Verify the Google authorship markup code is valid.

Email Verification Method

This method is very helpful to authors on sites in which they can’t edit any anchor tag code, but its use is not limited to that scenario. As long as its criteria are met, email verification can be the primary method used for establishing authorship verification.

Assumptions for this section:

• The content page must include an author byline that starts with the word “By ” followed by the exact same author name used in the Google+ profile.
• The author name is linked to an email address that uses the same domain name as the site hosting the content.

Follow these steps:

1. Browse to the Google+ page Link your Google+ profile to the content you create (you must sign in to your Google account to complete this procedure).
2. Type or paste the email address used in your content’s byline link into the Step 4 text box, and then click Signup for Authorship.
3. Look for a verification email from Google sent to that email address. Once received, click the link within the email to verify you own the email address. Google will then automatically add the verified email address to the Work section of your Google+ profile. It will also add a link to the domain name used in the email address in the profile’s Contributor to section.

If you have no more content profiles to add, skip to the section titled Verify the Google authorship markup code is valid. However, if your content is published on a WordPress blog, read on.

WordPress Sites Require Additional Configuration Work

By default, WordPress strips out all of the “rel=xxx” anchor tag attributes used in Google authorship markup. As of this writing, there are a number of WordPress plugin solutions that override this limitation. However, they typically remove more than just the rel=xxx anchor tag attribute limitations in links. If your site hosts a number of authors whom are not fully trusted, this solution may expose the site to a security risk.

In its Authorship support article, Google itself links to a post that specifically advocates the use of the WordPress plugin Allow REL= and HTML in Author Bios. However, that non-configurable plugin solution, which opens up WordPress to allow any HTML in author biography pages, states unequivocally:

 ”WARNING: CAN BE USED FOR EVIL! Make sure you trust authors!”

I don’t know about you, but as a publisher, I wouldn’t be comfortable with that solution.

It’s clear why Google has no safer solution to offer for WordPress. As of this writing, WordPress itself has no specific, core solution to enabling the anchor tag attributes required for authorship markup.

On top of that, each theme in WordPress has its own potentially unique PHP source code. And as a secure, code-based solution for one theme is likely incompatible with other themes, Google’s tacit endorsement of the plugin is the lowest common denominator solution available to mass audiences, even if it does expose a security risk.

In this section, instead of endorsing Google’s de facto endorsed plugin to enable the “rel=author” anchor tag attribute code needed for authorship markup, I will recommend using the dynamic URL variable to achieve the same rel=author link connection to Google+. That means I’m going to focus on using the 2-link method, which means applying an author biography snippet at the footer of each content page.

You may need to determine how to enable author biography snippets in your theme. Some themes use the content written in the user profile Biographical info text box, whereas others allow author information to be added as posts are written in the WordPress editor. Check your theme’s documentation for its specific implementation.

WordPress & The 3-link Method: Sites With Author Biography Pages

Unfortunately, there is no clear, secure and universally compatible WordPress solution for both single author and multi-author blogs that employ author biography pages. A solution would need to modify the link in each content page to the site’s author biography page to include the “rel=author” anchor tag attribute and, in addition, create a link to the author’s Google+ profile in the author biography page using the “rel=me” anchor tag attribute.

Webmasters for single-author blogs can follow the advice and insert the custom code snippets found in Joost de Valk’s blog post, rel=”author” and rel=”me” in WP and other platforms. That works well for single-author blogs.

Alternatively, for those who don’t want to fiddle with or have the resources to do custom PHP coding and are not interested in applying potentially risky, generic plugins that may open up potentially large security holes in your sites, you might consider either consulting with a clever PHP/WordPress theme developer for a custom code solution, or perhaps changing to a WordPress theme that already has published, working custom code solutions available.

For most WordPress users, I recommend using a WordPress theme that enables author biography snippets at the end of each post and using the 2-link method for authorship markup. That is the best secure, universally-applicable solution available in WordPress.

WordPress & The 2-link Method: Author Biography Snippets On Each Post

A number of WordPress themes enable authors to create custom biography snippets in their WordPress User Profiles, which are shown at the bottom of each post. For themes that don’t support this feature, site administrators can add this specific feature with the WordPress plugin WP Biographia.

By including a link to the author’s Google+ profile using rel=author code in the biographical snippet in each post, no author biography page is needed, eliminating the need for rel=me code. Follow these steps to make this 2-link method work:

1. Log in to the WordPress site.
2. From the Dashboard, click Users, and then click Your Profile.
3. Scroll down to the About Yourself section. the Biographical Info box, add a few brief lines of text to serve as your online biography snippet, then add a link to your Google+ profile using the anchor text “Google+” (omit the quotes). The following is an example of the tag source code (be sure to use your own 21-digit ID number):

   <a href="https://plus.google.com/111111111111111111111?rel=author">Google+</a>

Note: The above procedure assumes the location of the author biography snippet is the User Profile. If your theme allows for author information within the built-in post editor, add the link from Step 3 there.

Verify The Google Authorship Markup Code Is Valid

Once you have the Google+ profile and your content pages configured using either the 3-link or the 2-link method described above, you need to validate your work. Google makes this easy to do.

1. Browse to the Google Rich Snippets Testing Tool page.
2. Type (or paste) the URL of a content page in the text box and then click Preview.
3. Review the results for errors.
4. If using the 3-link method with an author biography page, type (or paste) the URL of the author biography page in the text box and then click Preview.
5. Review the results for errors.

In both cases, you should see lines displaying the following data:

Extracted Author/Publisher for this page

author

linked author profile = {URL to your author biography page, if used, or a link to your Google+ profile} google profile = {URL to your Google+ profile} author name = {Author Name} Verified: Authorship markup is verified for this page.

If any of the above author results contain red text, that indicates something is not configured correctly. Carefully review the steps above to debug the work. Note that the email method is automatically verified when you use the Link your Google+ profile to the content you create tool to register and then verify your email address.

Note: Google also recognizes the attribute rel=”publisher” to identify the site that originally published the content it contains. However, the rel=publisher attribute only needs to be used on the site’s home page.

According to Thoughts from Geeks blog, if it’s used on content pages in addition to rel=author code, rel=publisher takes precedence over rel=author. In that case, any authorship rich snippets will not be displayed in the Google SERPs.

In Summary

That’s Google Authorship Markup in a nutshell. One huge, complicated nutshell, filled with caveats. But given Google’s active pursuit of verifiable, trusted expert content to improve the quality of their search results, author rank will only increase in importance as this technology becomes more widely adopted. And as that happens, well-configured author pages containing consistent, valuable content will likely see even greater lift over time, and any existing author rank may well influence the ranking of new content on the same topic produced by that established author.

Ultimately, Google’s desire to identify high-quality sources of original, expert content is a good thing for content authors. You won’t be lost without it, but you may benefit from taking the time to work out the configuration details of implementing Google Authorship Markup on your website or blog.

I have been a fan of the show over the years, and for most of the show’s incredible, 30+ season run, I have been an opportunistic viewer. I usually just caught it when I ran across it playing while channel surfing. In the past year or so, however, I’ve been recording the show on my TiVo and now I am an offline regular.

I enjoy watching the crew of regulars start a new project. It always goes something like this: They look over the old house, typically in a state of dilapidation (at least to some degree).

They examine the fundamentals of the house, including its foundation and structural elements, the navigation path through the house (including how many levels there are in the structure), the layout of the rooms, the plumbing and HVAC systems linking the rooms together, the design and presentation of the rooms, the decorative elements used (including color and artwork imagery), the home site’s landscaping design, and the ability to easily maintain the house once the renovation is complete.

They also rely on the newest tools and technologies available to renovate the house, bring in specialized, industry experts to consult on the projects, and most importantly, do all of the work within the homeowner’s budget (which means sometimes making hard compromises). Lastly, they use the show to tell the story of the renovation and how they optimized the home’s usability and value.

Do you see what I do? This show is the perfect metaphor for doing a full-blown SEO site review and redesign! And why not? I can see it now. They could use the same cast and do a show called “This Old Website.” I think I’d watch that show! Call PBS — here’s my pitch:

They’d start off finding a website that is no longer performing well, uses an inefficient design, is not easily extensible, is hard and costly to maintain, and looks like it was designed back in the early 1990s (ancient history in Web time). They’d talk with the site owner to determine renovation goals. Then it’s time for the This Old Website team to make things better.

Tom The Foundations Expert

The series would begin the site review with Tom Silva, their foundations and framing expert, examining the website infrastructure, looking over the antiquated foundation, er, web platform. He’d look at the CMS (assuming there is one!), any ecommerce and blog platforms, and determine how easily the existing site can be updated.

He’d examine the URLs for keyword-friendly file and folder names, not GUID-based gibberish. He’d check the URLs for use of concatenated words, mixed case letters, underscores and other special characters, as well as dynamic URL parameters that can easily lead to content duplication in the search index.

Tom would advise keeping the site structure shallow and wide as content buried in deep directories will likely not get much attention from search crawlers. His budget-conscious eye would likely recommend migrating a Linux-based Apache web server and a PHP-based WordPress blog platform, and he’d plan out a site URL mapping and migration strategy to minimize any loss of page rank in a platform change.

He’d advise that these platforms are time-tested with plenty of tools available for easily maintaining the site long after the renovation has been completed.

Norm The Master Carpenter

Next, they’d bring in Norm Abram, their master carpenter, to review the site metadata and keyword usage. He’d check on the length and keyword optimization effectiveness of the text in <title>, <h1>, and <img> alt tags used to define the theme of each page. He’d note that a title of “Page 1″ is a sure sign of a shoddy workmanship from past site renovations, and that a missing <h1> tag or omitted <img> alt text is a lost keyword development opportunity.

But he’d also advise that investing time and effort into building out <meta> keywords tags is not a cost-effective use of SEO resources. He’d then check on how well the <meta> descriptions are written. While they don’t generate any keyword relevance to speak of themselves, he’d say that a concise (160 characters max), compelling <meta> description is what converts impressions to clicks among searchers in the search engine search results (SERPs).

Norm would also evaluate whether or not the site is easy to crawl and start by looking at page source code validation issues. He’d explain that pages with serious code validation problems may not necessarily suffer page rank problems based solely on that issue, but they may in fact suffer from crawler abandonment problems, which can limit indexing.

Search crawlers are typically not as forgiving as full-featured Web browsers with invalid source code, and if the crawlers struggle to interpret the meaning of the code on the page, the site’s crawler budget may be used up prematurely. He’d also check for the use of temporary 302 redirects when a permanent 301 is needed for transferring link juice to a new URL.

Lastly, he’d also help properly set up the site’s robots.txt and sitemap.xml files to ensure all of the content pages were properly crawled. He’d look for content blocking robots conflicts (between robots.txt and <meta> robots tags), incorrect use of wildcard characters and non-standard coding. Optimizing crawler efficiency is important result of a site renovation, he’d say.

Richard The Plumbing Authority

Then comes plumbing expert Richard Trethewey. He’d look at the internal links between pages to ensure they are well-interconnected rather than in little silos. He’d examine the external links to other sites to be sure they are relevant to this site and there weren’t too many such links on the page, which might make the page look like a spammy link farm.

He’d check to see that the links all use absolute URLs, and that there are no links to be crawled buried in <script> tags or on Flash or Silverlight content, which can be unreliably crawled.

Richard would also review the site navigation used. He’d recommend a crawler-friendly navigation system using styled text links rather than images. And finally, he’d make sure the internal plumbing of the home page was properly canonicalized, channeling all of the link juice to the various URL versions over to the canonical URL via 301 redirects configured in the .htaccess file.

He’d also review the site for the use of <link> rel=canonical tags when needed, as well as <link> rel=prev and <link> rel=next pagination tags for multi-page articles.

Roger The Landscape Maven

Next up would be Roger Cook, the landscaping guy extraordinaire. He’d look at the overall thematic design of the site, ensuring the theme was applied consistently across all pages in the site. He’d also develop the master keyword list for the site and the targeted keyword lists per page, and confirm there are descriptive, keyword-rich anchor tag text used across internal site links.

He’d then check for potential page load speed problems across the site by reviewing page length and total page size, sizes of image used, whether JavaScript and CSS were minified, ensuring that HTTP compression is enabled, and reducing the number of HTTP calls where possible.

Roger would review the site design plans to ensure that any use of script or rich Internet application (RIA) technologies used to present content would be minimal and would involve graceful degradation strategies. He’d also look for pages that are too ad-heavy and content-light above the fold to avoid any related Google index penalties.

Finally, he’d even add a special flourish by adding a custom 404 error message page (with the page template applied, of course).

Kevin The Program Host

Lastly, there is host Kevin O’Connor, who took over Bob Vila’s original role. He’d look at the storyline of the site. He’d make sure the content there is rich, interesting, and accessible to the targeted audience. He’d put unique story content on each page, and ensure there is sufficient content there to enable search crawlers to discern the theme of the page.

His content would include enough technical detail to keep the audience interested, but not so much as to lose their interest or skimp and make the content so thin so that there is no real story to tell. He’d ensure great content was created for every page the site owners wanted to be found in search.

Kevin would make sure that if the site was a local brick-and-mortar, the business address and phone number was easily found on the page and was listed in text form (rather than buried inside an image). He’d lastly generate an RSS feed so both end users and search engines could subscribe to new content as it was published.

Expert Specialists Brought In

They’d also bring in specialists, such as page designers who would look at the use of artwork and color on the pages. Web security experts would review the site and the web host for both malware vulnerability and web spam concerns, such as hidden text, keyword stuffing, cloaking.

Social media networking experts would advise on how to create a site-relevant social media networking plan. Authorities on local search and geo-location strategies would also be consulted.

The team would also have consultants come in and demonstrate how the latest tools and technologies can really make a difference for maintaining and optimizing a site. Also, specialists would advise on link building strategies, the old, trusty method for improving a site’s page rank, which never goes out of style or becomes ineffective.

Norm and the gang would employ tools like WordPress plugins that enable easy application of blog page metadata for each new page created. And to help the site owner better maintain and build upon the site renovation work, the site would be registered with the Google and Bing Webmaster Tools and with a web analytics package.

Lastly, they’d also apply Google Authorship Markup strategies for blog pages to begin earning author rank value.

At the end of the series, the site owner would marvel at all of the changes put into place. Not only would the site be more easily crawled, users would find much better, more compelling content, easier navigation between pages of the site, and a faster load time, making the site a joy to use, which translates into higher search engine rankings, greater user awareness, longer visitor time on site, and most importantly, an improved conversion rate that pays for the cost of the renovation many times over.

Yep, I’d watch that show. What a minute — that’s a show that many of us produce every day of the week. No wonder I like it so much! But let’s see if we can get Tommy, Norm, Richard, Roger, and Kevin onboard. I think they’d be naturals in the business!

Image used under license, courtesy of Shutterstock.com