A Christmas Present for SEOs: 10 Tips to Pick the Low Hanging Fruit

It's very late on Christmas Eve, and I can hear our hosts, my cousin-in-law, and his girlfriend snoring in the next room. Their new dog is curled up on the couch, grumbling and huffing through his wet nose, one eye barely open. Mystery Guest crashed out an hour ago after we finished watching the new Muppets Christmas Special (I love Statler and Waldorf). Here in Ocean Beach, CA, the streets are quiet, the rain's stopped and it's just the sounds of surf and the occasional drunken reveler wandering home from the bars on Newport Ave, filled with Christmas cheer.

To help share in the spirit and get you through the next 3-4 days sans new posts (although Scott does have a Whiteboard Friday video ready and waiting if the Seattle ice storm lifts enough for him to get into the office), here are ten SEO tips that take relatively little energy but often produce great returns.

#1 - Re-point Your Self-Cannibalizing Pages

Nearly every site has multiple pages targeting their top keywords. Oftentimes, you'll find pages from your site ranking on page 2, 3, 4 and/or 5 of the search results, earning you virtually no search traffic and splitting up your potential relevance and ranking value. Try a search like "keyword site:yourdomain.com" to see a list of the top pages the engine has identified on your domain for that term/phrase. Once you've got that list, consider 301 redirecting #2-3 or 4 to #1, thus boosting #1's ranking potential. If you have to, you can always rebuild those other pages with different URLs.

#2 - Find Your Most Important Pages & Place Links to URLs that Need It

Using non-specific queries like "inurl:domain site:domain.com" or "intitle:brand site:domain.com" (the latter of which only works if you have your brand name in the title of every page) will show you a list of many of the most important pages on your site according to the search engines. While it's not always in perfect order, it can be a great way to see which pages are considered valuable. You can then take this list and point links from those important pages to URLs that need a bit of link juice or anchor text boost to move into the top 5/10. For less competitive terms and phrases, this system almost always results in an extra bump.

#3 - Add Alt Tags to Images on High Ranking Pages

Go through your web analytics and find the top 20-30 pages bringing in search traffic. Now go to those pages, create/include relevant images (if you don't already have them), title the image files with the keyword term/phrase and optimize the alt text. A great number of popular search queries have some image traffic, and although it usually takes a while to get your images ranked, it can be a terrific additional source of traffic (though you should be prepared for the reality that far fewer of these searchers will convert).

#4 - Create a Sitemaps.xml File (and Verify it with ALL THREE engines)

Sitemaps are starting to become nearly ubiquitous, but we've seen a lot of sites ignoring Yahoo! and MSN - a big mistake! You can seriously boost your search traffic referrals from these engines by not only submitting, but verifying/registering your sitemaps with them. Yahoo!'s registration is here, and MSN/Live's is here. 

#5 - Move Keywords to the Front of Your Title Tags

It's so simple, but it really does work. Try taking some pages where you rank #10+ and move the keyword term/phrase to the very front of the title tag. We've been amazed to see some results where this brings boosts of 5+ ranking positions in the engines right away!

#6 - Target Plurals & Other Grammatical Forms All on One Page

Don't split up different conjugations or plurals of a keyword term/phrase onto multiple pages until you've first tried targeting them all on your most optimized and well-linked-to URL for that keyword. The search engines themselves have actually come a long way on this issue, and what used to require multiple targeting can now be better achieved with canonicalization (and the coalescing of link juice).

#7 - Suggest a Link through Wikipedia's Discussion Pages

Wikipedia itself still uses nofollows on external links, but the second-order effect of being linked-to by Wikipedia and seen as a reference resource by their community (and the many bloggers who use it as a place to find links) is remarkable. You can earn a lot of good links and relevant traffic through Wikipedia, so to get around their stingy linking-out policy, don't embed the link yourself - suggest it! Go to the discussion page for the target topic and suggest a couple good links that can back up unsubstantiated points or provide data. When the editors take notice, you'll have a far better chance of staying listed in the long run, even though it can take longer to get up there initially. 

#8 - 301 Redirect Your 404 Pages

Google's Webmaster Tools  (and, very frequently, your own site's log files) will give you a list of 404 error pages that were accessed on your site. Don't just improve your 404s and try to fix your links - redirect those URLs and get the link juice you were losing over to pages that badly need it. There's no reason to simply plug a leaky faucet when you can re-route the water to a thirsty friend!

#9 - Invest in Your Page 2 Rankings

Using software like Enquisite (or your own search referral analytics - though it takes some manual labor), you can see which keywords you're currently ranking for on page 2 of the SERPs. This is the epitome of low-hanging fruit - pump up those pages with some extra on-site optimization, internal and external links and see the difference between page 2 vs. page 1 traffic.

#10 - Add Long Tail Modifiers to Keywords on High Ranking Pages

Those pages that are ranking well and earn you great search traffic are frequently a terrific opportunity to earn even more. Do a bit of keywords research and find 4 and 5 word phrases that extend the 2-3 word phrases you already rank for. If possible (and relevant), place a few instances in Hx tags, in bold on the page and in the HTML text and watch as you earn even more traffic from these extended queries.

And now it's time for me to catch some desperately needed zzzzs. Merry Christmas to all and to all a good night!

p.s. If you enjoy these and have a PRO membership, don't forget about the 150+ tips here.