What do you have that varies from your competitors? SEMNE’s “Determining the SEO Health of Your Website” with Jill Whalen, CEO of High Rankings

Speaker: Jill Whalen, CEO of High Rankings
http://www.highrankings.com/

http://www.semne.org/meetings/determining-the-seo-health-of-your-website#

How search Engines Work

2 components
Crawler: fetch the pages, trouble if can’t see
Algorithm: Relevancy, what others say about you, what you say about yourself

Be sure site doesn’t impede spiders

Google’s text cache: see what’s indexed
    Menu links (Java menus can be a problem, not just Flash)
    Headlines
    Content
    Anyone can use this, doesn’t need any technical skill

Site operator
    Shows: how many and which URLs indexed
    Duplicate content issues
    URL problems, not getting indexed
    See what title tags look like
    Pages indexed that shouldn’t be

Http Header checker
    Check bad URLs
    Check redirects

Randycullom.com/headerchecker

Keywords & content issues: what to look at
    Keywords targeted
    Site architecture
    Anchor text
   
Keyword phrases
    Only 1 phrase? Biggest waste of SEO, every page should target a bunch
        Shouldn’t strictly target 1 keyword for 1 phrase
Use a few related phrases
    Only highly competitive phrases
        Only works if you’re an established site with a lot of marketing $s
        Other, easier phrases to get
    Phrases that aren’t relevant
        This traffic doesn’t convert
    No phrases
        Designers who have no SEO clue may haven’t incorporated keywords

Use: adwords.google.come/select/keywordtoolexternal
    USE EXACT MATCH, much more accurate

Title tags
    Unique to each page: don’t repeat them, should be custom
    Focus on main phrases: don’t throw in extra words that don’t matter
        Optimize 3 phrases per page

    10-12 words make for good title tag
    Keyword stuffing: too much is not a good thing

Site architecture
    Are important pages in main navigation
        Don’t bury things, make sure you have internal links
    
Anchor text
    Are navigation links descriptive
    Are there call to action within website: use keywords to describe page pointing to

Content
    Unique to each page
        Uses main keyword phrases
        Stressing the benefits
        Not keyword stuffed
        Is content indexable, found by search engines
        Don’t hide content behind graphics, people want to read content
            Be proud of it
            Your copy makes sales, not pretty pictures

SEO isn’t about stuffing keywords, it’s about writing naturally

Popularity components
    Is the site
        Link-worthy? Is there something worth linking to?
        What do you have that varies from your competitors?
        Linking to/from own properties where it makes sense

        Using other forms of marketing and PR
           
Measuring success
    Just looking at rankings?
        Don’t look at rankings anymore
        No 2 ranking are the same: personalized, geo-focused
    Have analytics
        More important than rankings
        Have Google analytics installed correctly
    Measuring conversion
        Put thank-you page as a goal in analytics
        See which phrases are providing conversions

Firefox keyword extension

Try not to use any one word more than twice in menu and titletags

Use PPC to see what’s converting best and integrate that into web pages

Companies assume people know who you are
Can’t exclude people who don’t know what you do
    Who you are, what are you all about, are searchers in the right place?