MarketingSherpa reports that over 90% of Fortune 100 sites are not optimized properly despite in-house optimization. This isn't surprising because SEO requires a considerable investment in personnel and technology to do the job right.
SEO consists of a variety of activities and techniques only some of which will be appropriate and cost-effective for a given site at its stage of development. Some relate to the design of the site (e.g., information retrieval design), others to the template(s) for pages and the HTML TITLE and META elements and some are virtually standalone (e.g., link popularity).
How a search engine indexes and summarizes your website's pages is up to you to a significant extent. However, just as there are many different search engines and directories, there is more than one technique or method available to accomplish that.
- Within the site's marketing strategy and promotional plan, determine the target market or audience characteristics and select the search engines and directories which are most likely to be used by them. Determine the key information sought by those people and the pages or content sections which are the most suitable to use in search engines (i.e., only a subset of the site's pages are optimized because not all pages are suitable for entering the site).
- Research and selection of the keywords to be used in the promotion of a site's pages generally and interms of the specific pages selected in the previous phase. This includes the identification of high-traffic keywords and selection of case, singular/plural, and tense for each keyword phrase. In a similar fashion, research and select appropriate categories for submission to each directory.
- Revise existing pages to be optimized for the search engines. This is an iterative process that may involve many versions for each page. This includes a detailed review and alteration of the title, description, keywords, headings, comments, image ALTs, and link tags, and the text appearing in the body of the page. It also includes the insertion of popularity linkage technology to improve search engine spider navigation and rankings. This may involve adding visible text to various pages consistent with current design.
- Implement such specialized techniques as doorway and landing pages, cloaking and search engine specific pages if necessary and appropriate bearing in mind the risk of such techniques being considered spamming.
- Review page content to suggest keyword density, frequency, and distribution throughout your content. In some cases it may be appropriate to create additional site pages focused on specific content. In many cases, it will be appropriate to revise content structure to comply with search engine and directory requirements.
- Implement techniques required or appropriate to support the site mapping and traffic reporting which facilitates the search engine spider crawling of sites which dynamically generate pages from databases, use frames or consist of a very large number of static pages.
- Implement an appropriate procedure to identify and track the sites that link to your site (popularity) and rank their relevance and importance. Implement a reciprocal linking program to increase the number and importance of sites linking to yours. Make link recommendations with regard to sites identified as linking to top sites for your site's keywords and that are candidates for adding links to your site.
- Submission of new or revised pages to each of the selected and monitored search engines and directories. This manual process is performed according to a schedule which often requires submissions and re-submissions on a regular basis. Directory submissions are with your prior approval. For a given directory, the procedure consists of selection, preparation, application, follow-up, revision or adjustment, re-submission, maintenance and reporting. Directories such as Yahoo!, LookSmart, and Open Directory Project have specific guidelines for good placement.
- Prepare ranking reports at a frequency appropriate to your requirements. The reports show the ranking of your site in the monitored search engines and directories. Rankings will show where the top ranked page from your site appear in the top 50 positions for the selected search engines and directories.
- Prepare for online access competition ranking reports on a regular basis showing the ranking of the competing web sites in the monitored search engines and directories for each keyword.
- Review ranking reports to determine if your site's pages require revisions or re-submission and if so, revise and re-submit as necessary. This includes the performance of all above services should rankings be significantly lowered during the contract period.
If you interrupted your reading of the essential SEO concepts (the previous page in this section) to learn what the basics of SEO, then you can now return to that departure point.
