Search Engine Friendly URLs

When developing a website, you can save yourself a lot of problems down the road by planning ahead before moving full speed into the site development process. One of the first site architectural issues to consider is how your URLs will read. This is especially important for e-commerce websites that quite often have long complicated URLs. But having good URL structure is still no less important for static websites.

Here are a few things you can do to give yourself search engine friendly URLs:

Domain Names

Its easy to think that all the good domain names are taken. Sure, the easy and obvious ones have been snatched up years ago, but that doesn’t mean there still aren’t any good .com domain names left that are perfect for your business or blog.

The starting point, however, is to realize that you do need own your own domain name. Most businesses have figured this out already but a lot of bloggers haven’t. That’s because it takes a bit of work and some small fees. First you have to purchase the domain, then host it, pay the monthly hosting fees, install the blog, etc., etc. Not quite as easy as signing up for a blog service and pounding out your first blog post all in ten minutes.

If your blog is nothing more than a personal diary then the free blogging services may be all you need. But if you’re looking to build an audience, sell a few products, or make a name for yourself, getting your own domain name is the way to go.

Whether you’re a business, a blogger, or something in between, selecting your domain name can be a trying process. Those of you who have searched for the “perfect” domain name know what I mean. You go through dozens, if not hundreds of different options looking for just the right one. When looking for domain names for your business or blog, here are a few guidelines:

Heading tags are certainly no magic solution to building keyword relevance. They are merely one more baby step to creating a well-rounded optimization of a page. Adding heading tags using your keywords may or may not make a difference in your keyword rankings, but nonetheless, balanced against the rest of the page, using a heading tag properly, with keywords, is going to benefit your visitors, if not the search engines.

On the search engine front, at the very least, the Heading tags (H1, H2,… H6) can be used to tell the search engines the hierarchical structure of your page’s content.

When developing content, it’s pretty easy for visitors to see how the page breaks down, but search engines need a bit of help. The heading tags are that help.

One of the big misconceptions about SEO is that everything we do is designed to increase search engine rankings. This isn’t (or shouldn’t be) true, and there is no simpler example of that then the Meta Description tag. Even though this description tag doesn’t weigh all that heavily into the search engine ranking algorithms, it is still a very powerful part of an effective optimization campaign.

Like the Title Tag, the Meta Description tag will often show up in the search results. Generally what you see in the SERPs is the clickable title link and then the description tag or page snippet just below it. If the description is pulled in to the results, it becomes a very important part of helping entice visitors to click on the link into your site.

On-Page Optimization

A website can do just fine online without SEO. PPC, social media and other properly implemented off-line marketing efforts can really help a site succeed online with little or no SEO. But unless and until you begin to SEO your site it will always under perform, never quite reaching its fullest potential. Without SEO, you’ll always be missing out on a great deal of targeted traffic that the other avenues cannot make up for.

Google
December: 72.25%
November: 71.57%
Change: +0.68

January 2009: 72.09%
Change: +0.16

Yahoo
December: 14.83%
November: 15.39%
Change: -0.56

January 2009: 17.81%
Change: -2.98

Bing
December: 8.92%
November: 9.34%
Change: -0.42

January 2009: 5.44%
Change: +3.48

ASK
December: 2.54%
November: 2.65%
Change: -0.11

January 2009: 3.31%
Change: -0.77

Data scoring techniques tend to change over time making past data inaccurate. As always, information here is for entertainment purposes only.

Source: HitWise

When you’ve been writing about SEO as long as I have you sometimes feel that you’ve run out of things to say. We forget that there is always someone new just learning about SEO and hasn’t had the chance to read every article ever written on the topic. Not many people have that kind of time on their hands.

In light of that, I wanted to spend some time going back to the basics of SEO.

I recently was invited to speak to a group of beauty bloggers being hosted by L’Oreal in New York City. Most of the attendees write their own blogs or were responsible for the blogs for the company they work for. A good share of them also sold products through their blogs. Many of the illustrations I’ll use in this series will be directed toward that audience, however they can be applied across the board to any industry, including those selling products or services.

Google
December: 67.3%
November: 65.4%
Change: +1.9

January 2009: 62.8%
Change: +4.5

Yahoo
December: 14.4%
November: 15.3%
Change: -0.9

January 2009: 16.2%
Change: -1.8

Bing
December: 9.9%
November: 10.7%
Change: -0.8

January 2009: 11.2%
Change: -1.3

ASK
December: 1.7%
November: 1.8%
Change: -0.1

January 2009: 1.9%
Change: -0.2

AOL
December: 2.5%
November: 2.8%
Change: -0.3

January 2009: 4.0%
Change: -1.5

Data scoring techniques tend to change over time making past data inaccurate. As always, information here is for entertainment purposes only.

Source: Nielsen Online

Google
December: 65.7%
November: 65.6%
Change: +0.1

January 2009: 63.0%
Change: +2.7

Yahoo
December: 17.3%
November: 17.5%
Change: -0.2

January 2009: 21.0%
Change: -3.7

MSN / Bing
December: 10.7%
November: 10.3%
Change: +0.4

January 2009: 8.5%
Change: +2.2

ASK
December: 3.7%
November: 3.8%
Change: -0.1

January 2009: 3.7%
Change: +0.0

AOL
December: 2.6%
November: 2.8%
Change: -0.2

January 2009: 3.9%
Change: -1.3

Data scoring techniques tend to change over time making past data inaccurate. As always, information here is for entertainment purposes only.

Source: comScore

To be more accurate, SEO should be called WO, or WSO: Website Optimization. That’s what I do, I optimize the website in order to help it gain more exposure, increase traffic and get more sales.

But what are we optimizing the website for?

I’d love nothing more to see a backlash over the vast amounts of free crap available online and the sites that provide it. Searchers and internet users would begin to demand quality and search engines wouldn’t reward those sites with the greatest amounts of crap over those with smaller amounts of quality content.

I love that the Internet is free and there is tons of free content available at my finger tips. Sites such Search Engine Guide provide a lot of free content to their readers and make their money by selling ad space. The idea is this: the higher quality of content, the more traffic the site will receive, the more visitors will click on ads, the more ad space can be sold for, the more money can be made.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t always work that way. Enter MFA sites.

Google
November: 65.4%
October: 66.1%
Change: -0.7

January 2009: 62.8%
Change: +2.6

Yahoo
November: 15.3%
October: 15.4%
Change: -0.1

January 2009: 16.2%
Change: -0.9

Bing
November: 10.7%
October: 9.7%
Change: +1.0

January 2009: 11.2%
Change: -0.5

ASK
November: 1.8%
October: 1.7%
Change: +0.1

January 2009: 1.9%
Change: -0.1

AOL
November: 2.8%
October: 3.0%
Change: -0.2

January 2009: 4.0%
Change: -1.2

Data scoring techniques tend to change over time making past data inaccurate. As always, information here is for entertainment purposes only.

Source: Nielsen Online

Google
November: 65.6%
October: 65.4%
Change: +0.2

January 2009: 63.0%
Change: +2.6

Yahoo
November: 17.5%
October: 18.0%
Change: -0.5

January 2009: 21.0%
Change: -3.5

MSN / Bing
November: 10.3%
October: 9.9%
Change: +0.4

January 2009: 8.5%
Change: +1.8

ASK
November: 3.8%
September: 3.9%
Change: -0.1

January 2009: 3.7%
Change: +0.1

AOL
November: 2.8%
October: 2.9%
Change: -0.1

January 2009: 3.9%
Change: -1.1

Data scoring techniques tend to change over time making past data inaccurate. As always, information here is for entertainment purposes only.

Source: comScore

Sometimes SEO is just like that, but the opposite. A lot of time and energy is spent on the “exterior” (search engine rankings) while ignoring the interior (building a great website.)

After spending dozens of my free-time hours just getting this new site set-up, I can totally see why people would just rather pay someone else to do it for them.

Google
November: 71.57%
October: 70.60%
Change: +0.97

January 2009: 72.09%
Change: -0.52

Yahoo
November: 15.39%
October: 16.14%
Change: -0.75

January 2009: 17.81%
Change: -2.42

Bing
November: 9.34%
October: 9.57%
Change: -0.23

January 2009: 5.44%
Change: +3.90

ASK
November: 2.65%
October: 2.62%
Change: +0.03

January 2009: 3.31%
Change: -0.66

Data scoring techniques tend to change over time making past data inaccurate. As always, information here is for entertainment purposes only.

Source: HitWise

I’m just a small business owner that happens to blog on a few times a week. But since my source of income is my business blogging takes a back seat to business needs. Most small businesses can’t afford to hire a full-time blogger or ghost writer so they have to work blogging into their many business-owner duties. And because those duties are so heavy on the business owner, blogging generally falls by the wayside as more pressing matters are attended to.

Many small business owners are out there thinking “Blogging? That’s just one more thing to add to my already over-booked work schedule. No thanks.” I feel you.

But “that” doesn’t always go away no matter how much “it” gains in popularity.

Remember radio? Of course you do. We still listen to radio. Sometimes even listen to it on old fashioned radio tuners instead of over the internet or via satellite. But didn’t you hear? Radio is dead. Radio “died” with the invention of the TV.

An argument can be made that as soon as I take on these clients I need to learn everything I can about their industry so I can market it properly. This is also true. But no matter what, I’ll never be an expert at cost segregation. Nor do I believe my clients want me to be. They want me to be an expert in SEO and that takes enough of my time as it is.

And this is why clients need to be involved. I can do the keyword research, weed out the junk, and help them organize them into strongly optimization groups. But I still need the client’s help telling me what’s good and what’s not. How am I to know that “net present value equation” is a good keyword while “net present value annuity” isn’t. The client, that’s how.

Unfortunately you can’t know how well your SEO’d title tags will perform until you make the edits, wait for the search engine to index the page, and check the results. Depending on how deep your site is and the frequency of the search spiders coming back, even the most basic changes can take several days to a week to show in the search results.

When dealing with ecommerce sites you don’t often get the luxury of making changes on a page by page level because everything is pulled from a database into templates. Generally it is counter productive to implement site-wide changes until you know how those changes will work. The last thing you want is for all your pages to drop in rankings at one time because you tweeked the global template for a new title or description.

I’ve had a copy of Always Be Testing: The Complete Guide to Google Website Optimizer, on my shelf for over a year now and had just recently gotten around to reading it. I picked it up once, read 10 pages, put it down, and “more important” books came along.

Once you get past the first few chapters, which read like a Google Website Optimizer infomercial, Testing is an important book on not just the necessity to test, but the how-to and the what. It’s the latter part that makes Testing such a great resource.

Obviously the authors can’t tell you everything that you need to test, there’s just too much for that, but they do provide some great examples along with questions and ideas for you to start thinking in the right direction.

You don’t have to be a testing expert for Testing to make sense. Aside from a few math-geek pages the book is remarkably easy to read, understand and get yourself into implementation territory.

This gives them a lot to worry about, making sure they are doing it right and that the results will be all they had hoped for. And hoping it doesn’t break their budget in the process.

Every small business owner wants to get the most value for the money they spend on their marketing efforts. Simply put, the ROI must be there. But even with a good SEO and a good campaign outline, you can still break your budget–or render your SEO campaign ineffective–when you let your worries get the best of you. Worrying about smart things is smart. Worrying about the other stuff, well, that just sets you up for failure.

Here are five things you should stop worrying about if you don’t want to blow your SEO budget over the top:

Google
October: 66.1%
August: 64.6%
Change: +1.5

January 2009: 62.8%
Change: +3.3

Yahoo
October: 15.4%
August: 16.0%
Change: -0.6

January 2009: 16.2%
Change: -0.8

Bing
October: 9.7%
August: 10.7%
Change: -1.0

January 2009: 11.2%
Change: -1.5

ASK
October: 1.7%
August: 1.7%
Change: +0.0

January 2009: 1.9%
Change: -0.2

AOL
October: 3.0%
August: 3.1%
Change: -0.1

January 2009: 4.0%
Change: -1.0

Data scoring techniques tend to change over time making past data inaccurate. As always, information here is for entertainment purposes only.

Source: Nielsen Online

Google
October: 65.4%
September: 64.9%
Change: +0.5

January 2009: 63.0%
Change: +2.4

Yahoo
October: 18%
September: 18.8%
Change: -0.8

January 2009: 21.0%
Change: -3.0

MSN / Bing
October: 9.9%
September: 9.4%
Change: +0.5

January 2009: 8.5%
Change: +1.4

ASK
October: 3.9%
September: 3.9%
Change: +0.0

January 2009: 3.7%
Change: +0.2

AOL
October: 2.9%
September: 3.0%
Change: -0.1

January 2009: 3.9%
Change: -1.0

Data scoring techniques tend to change over time making past data inaccurate. As always, information here is for entertainment purposes only.

Source: comScore

Slogging through SEO forums, blogs and article sites can provide a great deal of good information, but it can also leave the small business owner confused on what—or what not—to do.

Those that choose to hire an SEO provider can push some of their SEO decision-making burdens off onto someone else, but some then open the door to a whole new set of worries that can circumvent their online success, even with a successful SEO working for them.

Spending nights worrying about your SEO campaign can eat up a lot of energy that is better applied to other, more important matters. While every business owner needs to be fully aware of the progress being made by their SEO’s efforts, they also need to trust that the SEO knows what is needed for them to succeed. For that to happen, here are a few things the business owner need to stop worry about. Failure to do so can kill an SEO campaign in its tracks.