SEO Design & Organic Site Structure (Mark Jackson)
7 habits of highly effective web design:
Be Proactive: Keyword research, competitive analysis, creating a search engine friendly information architecture, search engine friendly web design, content.
Begin with the End in Mind: What are the goals? More sales / leads. Higher rankings / More SE Traffic, More registrations for newsletters, Better Branding (Better Looking Website). Incorporate keyword research, refer to competitive analysis, develop a strategy for information architecture.
Put First Things First: Prioritize important things rather than “urgent” things. Plan for the end result rather than addressing immediate pain points.
Think win/win. Content is good for users and search engines. People are searching because they are researching. Good content will get naturally linked to with proper promotion of the content. Blogs are great for this.
Building Content: Write content that is engaging to read and conducive to your SEO strategy. Use opportunities for internal linking. Avoid marketing “fluff”. Call it what it really is. Add a blog to help target your “tail keywords”.
Seek first to understand then to be understood. Refer to Analytics before creating information architecture. Understand user behavior. What current rankings / traffic do you have? Make sure that these pages still exist in the new Information Architecture. 301 redirects for all URLs/Pages.
Synergize. All these things go into the creation of an SEO Friendly Website and more importantly a Successful Website Strategy.
Sharpen the Saw. Post launch checklist. Check rankings against baseline rankings report. Check Analytics against baseline analytics report. Check Google Webmaster Tools for broken links or other issues. SEO is an ongoing process. Keep refining efforts through additional keyword research, change in competitive landscape, new content, new linking strategies.
SEO Design & Organic Site Structure (Lyndsay Blahut)
Where do I start? Create a plan. Identify stakeholders. Benchmark reports. Use a checklist for your on-page optimization.
Your SEO Design Plan: Take an inventory of your pages. Talk to your designer / developers. Benchmark your current success (or lack thereof). Give a general timeline but don’t overpromise. Keyword research.
Use a checklist…for every page on your site; to long what changes you made and when ; keep track of your targeted keywords for that page. Basic information: Description of page, URL, Data Analyzed, Date suggestions made, Who did them.
Checklist: The Title Tag…is there one? How long is it? Does it include your keywords? Your company name?
Metatags (Description, Keywords, Robots).
Header tags (Use H1 for the most important copy on your page). Use H2 (subheaders). Headers can be any size, font, color, etc. thanks to CSS.
Flash: Any on page? Is there any valuable content withing Flash? Use CSS instead of Flash whenever possible.
Images: How many images are on the page. How many are using relevant ALT tags? Is there content in your image that could be done in CSS?
Sitemaps: Is this page included in your site’s Site Map? Is this page included in search engine site maps? Google Site Maps, Yahoo Site Explorer, etc.
Robots.txt: Have you verified that you are not blocking robots from crawling this page? Google Webmaster Tools has a robots.txt checker.
Links: Check that all your links aren’t broken. Menu links should be checked extra carefully especially if they’re rollover or pop-up menus.
Duplicate Content: Use robots.txt or the Robots meta tag if you need to block extra pages.
Other tips: Always check to make sure your pages work in all the popular browsers (Firefox, Internet Explorer, Chrome, Safari). Use your analytics to check what browsers your visitors use. Use CSS over images and flash whenever possible.
SEO: A Linear Approach (Alan K’necht)
Don’t put important content in Flash. Web 2.0 – Mashups, Ajax can’t be indexed.
Search Engines like Words and they value the words at the beginning of the code more than at the bottom. The linear approach to words: Go to a 2 tier web development strategy…separate content from presentation, organize content logically, use CSS to control positioning.
Newspaper Philosophy: Where are the headlines? Where is the table of contents?
The Linear Approach to Words: Important elements must come first. Ensure these elements contain your targeted keyword phrases, Graphics & Ajax & non-essential code at the bottom, Use CSS to position everything.
Search bots are browsers. They see things their own way (linear, bad code might be confusing). Test for bots.
Testing the linear approach: Use Firefox with Developer plug-in. Turn off all CSS and see how HTML promotes your content. Do important words / phrases come first? How far through the code does a bot have to go before it finds the valuable copy? Does your code validate at the W3?
Aaron Wall: SEO’s <3 Site Structure
Large Site: Break It Down. If it seems complex, then break it down. Any section can act like a site. Can start as a directory then build it out later.
On page duplication as a tax. Searchers are fish (Page text is a fishing net). Each should be unique (Page title, on page heading, internal anchor text).
Map it out: Assign keywords to each URL.
Learn from competitors: Look at their navigation, see how content is organized, find their top keywords.
Creating duplicate pages. Duplicate page types (printer friendly, many sort options with the same content, near duplicate (shoe size or shoe color), pagination. Tools: Xenu Link Sleuth, Website Health Checker, Google Webmaster Central.
Market Content Feature: Make brand look better, makes it easy for people to find your best content, makes people more likely to link at your site, for new sites, sell ad inventory to yourself.
Types of links: Sitewide navigation, Internal Section Navigation. In content links: If people scrape your content, they may link at you. Have your documents translated, many links will stick. Automated linking.
Automated internal linking. Keeps user on site, gives them relevant content, adds keyword rich text to page, flows page rank and anchor text.
Redistributing Page Rank. Rel=NoFollow on administrative pages, demote poor performers, promote seasonal offers early, use analytics data to see what pages performing better than expected. Send it more Page Rank be featuring it higher, look at rankings and see what is close to the top.
Switch it up: Hard to get links to commercial offers. Recycle link equity: After doing a promotion, add a bunch of links into your well-linked pages, pointing at the commercial parts of your site. Hold contest or promote feature content on a URL then change the content of that page.
Capture forgotten link equity.
Todd Mintz knows PPC…knows Social Media…knows SEO…knows Blogging…knows Domaining…and knows them all real well. He runs growth marketing for )and is also a Director & Founding Member of SEMpdx: Portland, Oregon’s Search Engine Marketing Association, and he can be found here on Twitter and Facebook.