An SEO Checklist

How to have a discussion about search engine optimization with your web developer By David Byers, Web Developer Strand Marketing, Inc. February 6, 2009

aving your companys website appear as high as possible in the listings of major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN Search may seem like magic. However, with persistence and vigilance on the part of you and your web developer, success can be achieved. With these tips in hand, consider a discussion with your developer about search engine optimization (SEO). Please note that this is a guide, and it should be taken as such. SEO is an evolving eld. Overall, your goal here should be to empower your web developer with the tips, tricks, tools and time to be able to implement a successful SEO strategy. Understand also that your sites design, particularly if it involves Flash, may prohibit some SEO techniques. If you are confused by any of the terms or phrases that appear in this article, a lexicon of common terms appears at the end. To help you visualize some of the techniques, there is a screenshot of an example website at the end as well. SEO and SEM Theres a dierence between Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM). The two are easily confused because the goal is essentially the same: higher ranking of your web pages. Search Engine Optimization is the process of developing your website so that it is easily indexed by the search engines. Search Engine Marketing is dened by the activities in which you participate in order to increase your overall web presence. For example, making sure you have distinct page titles and meta tags would fall under the realm of SEO. Being active in an online community, and participating in forums and blogs about your industry would fall under the realm of SEM. Our account management team can further explain the various ways to integrate SEO and SEM strategies. The Discussion Lets start with the home page. Load your companys website in a browser and ask your developer the following questions. Some of these discussion points will refer to visible elements on the web page or in the web browser. Others will refer to elements in the programming code that make up the web page that may not be visible without examining the code itself. The visibility of each of the elements being discussed will be noted. Visible Elements These rst questions relate to elements you can visibly see on the web page when loaded in a browser window. 1. When you are on the home page of your website, is there a title on the window that not only contains the name of your company, but also a short description of what your company does? As a recommendation, make your page title 50-70 characters long and include the name of your company as well as

Empower your web developer with the time to be able to implement a successful SEO strategy.

tips, tricks, tools, and

some pertinent keywords for your industry. 2. Does the home page contain plain text with a description of the websites contents? This should be similar, but not identical to the description meta tag and/or the page title. The overall message should be the same, but using dierent verbiage. Does that description contain 3-5 instances each of several keywords relevant to the websites content? Is this area of plain text above the fold, or does the user have to scroll to the bottom of the page to be able to nd it? We recommend having a paragraph of plain text (as opposed to text appearing in graphics or in Flash animations) near the top of the page discussing what your business does for its customers. Non-Visible Elements The next questions relate to elements that exist in the programming code and may not be visible to the naked eye without examining the code itself. 3. Do you have meta tags embedded in the code? Meta tags are HTML programming code that is designed to be visible to search engines that are indexing your website, but not to the naked eye. The two most important meta tags are: a. Keywords. Does your website have a keywords meta tag? Are the keywords and phrases in the tags relevant to the content of the website? Are there 30-50 keywords and phrases on the home page? b. Description. Does your website have a description meta tag? Is the description relevant to the content on the website? Is the description too long, or too short? Ideally, your website description should be around 255 characters long. 4. Do you have any pages on your public facing website that should not be indexed by the search engines? For example, does your website contain pages that are given only to specic clients or administrative functions that should only be accessed internally? If so, does the website contain either a robots meta tag or a robots.txt le to tell the search engines not to index a private area of a website? Next, lets move on to the interior pages of the website. Questions 1 and 2 relate to visible elements, but arent necessarily located on the page itself. 1. Is the address of the page located in the root of the website and named with a plain English, dash delimited name? For example, is your about my company page located at http:// www.mycompany.com/about-my-company.html or is it using a cryptic address with more foreign characters than a middle eastern crime syndicate? 2. Is the page accessible via an address that does not contain

Meta tags are HTML programming code visible to search engines, but not to the naked eye.

that is designed to be

Search engines may ding your results if

variables? Take a look at the address of a typical page on your website and see if there is a question mark in the address. For example, a page located at http://www.mycompany.com/ index.html?jsessionID=1234567890. The characters after the question mark (in this example jsessionID=1234567890) are passing dynamic data to the page. Search engines may ding your results if they think the content on the page is being dynamically generated. A much more search engine friendly approach is to have distinct landing pages that perform any dynamic processing without exposing the variables. For example, a landing page for About My Company would be better o simply as http://www.mycompany.com/about-mycompany.html, without any additional variables or extravagant and obscure characters. These questions relate to elements you can visibly see on the web page when loaded in a browser window. 2. Does the page have a title that ts the description of the content on the page? Similar to the title on the home page, interior page titles need to be more specic to the content of that particular page. The titles of individual pages do not necessarily need to include your company name. It depends on what you are trying to market; your name or what you do. 3. Does the page contain keywords and/or the page title near the top of the page in an HTML H1 tag, with its visual characteristics modied by CSS, if necessary? An H1 tag is a kind of an HTML tag that was originally used to represent the banner headline at the top of the page. Search engines look for an H1 tag to be near the top of the page that represents the title of the content on that page. H1 tags aesthetically are not very appealing, so these tags are frequently modied using cascading style sheets in order to obtain a more consistent website appearance. 4. Does the page contain plain text that contains 3-5 instances of several keywords relevant to the websites content? Is that plain text above the fold? The further down on a page that your information is, the lower it exists in the code and the search engines translate that positioning to mean that the information isnt as relevant or important as it may actually be. This question relates to elements that exist in the programming code and may not be visible to the naked eye without examining the code itself. 5. Revisit meta tags. a. Do each of the interior pages have a keywords meta tag? Are the keywords themselves relevant to the content of that page? Are the number of keywords appropriate? Ideally, interior pages will have 10-20 key words and phrases. These should be similar to the sites keywords

they think the content on the page is being dynamically generated.

and phrases, but more focused to the context of the page. Are the interior page keywords stepping on the overall site keywords? If youve got the same list of keywords as your home page, the search engine will likely downgrade your ranking. Interior page keywords need to be more focused than the broader keywords of the home page, and specically relate to the content of what is appearing on the page. b. Do each of the interior pages have a description meta tag? Is the description relevant to the content of that page? Is the length of the description appropriate? Ideally the description will not be longer than 255 characters. Is the description excessively stepping on the home page description? 7. Links, links and more links! The last SEO consideration relates to the frequency other websites link to yours. One of the ways that search engines will rank your page is based on how popular you are. For example, if a search engine indexes your site and nds that three other websites are linking to it, it will assume that your site is somewhat of an authority on the subject matter. If, however, the search engine nds another website that has three hundred sites linking to it, they will assume that site is even more of an authority on the subject matter and rank it above yours. Creating link relationships between like minded sites is important. It can also be a double edged sword. Is getting a higher ranking in the search engines worth sharing a link with your direct competitor? Not likely. This is where social networking and blogging come in. Its important to be active on the web. Log on to industry specic websites that relate to your market and post messages in their forums. Send out press releases with links to your website. Set up a MySpace.com or FaceBook.com web page for your business. The more socially active your company is online, the more likely your search engine rating will increase. Also, there are some miscellaneous things to consider to ensure proper SEO. Has the site been viewed in multiple web browsers and platforms? Some web browsers render web pages dierently, so your web developer should preview the website using Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Apple Safari, and Opera web browsers on a Windows based PC, and using Apples Safari and Mozillas Firefox web browsers on a Mac. Does the site contain a privacy policy, or a statement of how visitors personal information will be collected and used, identiable to search engine robots? All of these steps will help improve your SEO. Finally, whatever you do, be patient. Search engine rankings and listings are updated constantly, but it takes time for your website to creep upwards in rank. If you make changes today, expect to see denitive results in 1-3 months. Dont react until you know

One of the ways that search engines will rank your page is you are.

based on how popular

what youre reacting to. Building a search engine friendly online presence is not a one-night-stand its a relationship. Give it some time to nurture. Again, there is no guarantee when it comes to ranking higher in organic search engine listings. The use of these techniques will ensure you are doing your part to cooperate with what the search engines are looking for, which will inevitably yield better organic search engine results. While you are waiting for those results to come to fruition, consider having your marketing team establish a paid keyword listing campaign that works within your budget. Paid listings will assist your organic listings by providing you more links, more click-throughs, and inevitably a more popular web presence for your company. The clients to whom we provide this service consider it an invaluable addition to assuring their websites are search engine optimized.

Building a search engine friendly

online presence is not a one-night stand... its a relationship. Give it some time to nurture.

Lexicon
Here are some of the phrases used in this article, an explanation of each, and why they are important. SEO This is an acronym for Search Engine Optimization. SEO is a series of practices and techniques to help make your website more accessible to indexing by search engine robots. The goal of SEO is to improve your organic listing in each of the major search engines. SEM Similar to SEO, SEM is an acronym for Search Engine Marketing. SEM is more of an overall online presence strategy designed to improve the visibility of your websites to search engines and consumers alike. SEM works hand in hand with SEO. Organic Listing Two types of results appear when you search for something online using a search engine; organic and paid. The rst of these, organic listings, is when your website appears in the bulk search results naturally, without having to pay for placement. Paid Listing In conjunction with organic listings, search engines oer paid listings to ensure that your website is listed in special paid listing areas when your chosen keyword(s) are searched for. Search Engine Robot A search engine robot is an automated program that has been created by the search engines to automatically index websites. The amount of resources necessary to manually index every website online would take hundreds of man-years. These automated programs scour the web, nd as much information about a website that they can, and report back to the search engine. Tags The term tags refers to the programming code in an HTML document that collectively composes the page. Websites are made up of pages. The formatting on these pages is created by programming HTML tags. Tags are the invisible parts of the code that tells the page center this line of text or make this font bold or insert an image here. Meta Tags Meta tags are a specic type of tag that provides information about the page, but doesnt perform any formatting. For example, a meta tag could contain a description of the page. Another meta tag might dene the geographic region the website is for. Another could have the programmers credit as the author of the page. Meta tags are very important for SEO because it is in these tags where the keywords, description and how frequently to re-index the website information is provided for the search engines. Keywords Keywords describe to the search engine the relevant words or phrases that dene your product or service. Keywords and phrases are unique, but they can repeat a lot of the same information. For example, marketing and high-tech marketing are two separate keywords. When you are coming up with your key words, Ive found a good way to do it is to write a short essay about your business, then go back through what youve written, and compile a list of all of the nouns, adjectives, verbs, and adverbs. In relation to meta tags, you should have 30 to 50 keywords and phrases to describe your business. Any more or any less could hurt your search engine optimization. Search engines have also become smart enough to account for pluralized keywords. For example, a website on Greek mythology that has the keyword deity in its meta keyword tag will likely get picked up on deity and deities. Description This is pretty straightforward. The description is a paragraph describing your business. In relation to meta tags, your description should not exceed 255 characters. Any more could hurt your search engine optimization. The description is placed in a meta tag in the header portion of your HTML pages. Page Title The page title is displayed at the top of the browser window itself. Its not located on the page, per se, but along the border of the browser window. Privacy Policy A website privacy policy is a page that contains a statement to visitors of the website that explains what kind of personal information is collected by your company and how that information is intended to be used. Browsers are programmed to automatically search for privacy policies on websites. Some browsers will display an icon if a privacy policy is not found on a website. Search engine

robots specically look for privacy policies and will modify your page rank based on its existence or absence. Commercial businesses that accept any online feedback from customers should have a clearly dened privacy policy on their website. Above the Fold This is a classic term used by newspapers to describe the part of the paper you would see on a newspaper rack before you picked it up and started reading it. The concept was to put the most pertinent information above the fold so that it would help generate the sales of the paper. In web terms, above the fold refers to the portion of the webpage that can be seen before the user needs to scroll down in order to view more of the page. The further down on a page that your information is, the lower it exists in the code, and the search engines translate that positioning to mean that the information isnt as relevant or important as it may actually be. Embedded Links An embedded link is a clickable web address. When you send out documents, such as press releases or copy updates, to media outlets, always include them and, if possible, ask to leave them kept as embedded. These links are what help you become popular on the web.