Advanced SEO Tips and Resources

Waves of change have swept over the search marketing sector in the past year, prompting shifts in the methods, business, and practices of search engine optimization. Although many things have been altered, expanded, or modified, the general search engine market remained essentially unchanged.

Google remains the most popular search engine and continues to drive more traffic than the other search engines combined. Another thing that has not changed is the greater volume of site traffic generated by organic search placement compared to any other form of online advertising.

There are six or seven advanced public search engines, but the vast majority of SEO attention is naturally given to Google. Many of the tips offered in this piece, while useful for other search engines, are written with Google in mind. We are also considering alternative file formats and different ways visitors might discover websites, aside from pure search.

The most visible changes can be seen in the variety of search formats and the search results returned by major search engines. However, the most significant changes are taking place in the philosophies and practices of search engine optimizers.

As the search environment has changed, so too have the techniques and tools used by search marketers. More time is spent improving website content and navigation to appeal to both live visitors and search engines. There are also new metrics that measure the success of a search marketing campaign, all of which are far more complex than simple search engine rankings.

Since the introduction of the Jagger Update at Google, we’ve been doing a few things differently and have updated our expectations for both our clients and ourselves.

Organic search engine placement now requires more work on our part and that of our clients or their web admins. Content needs to be updated regularly, navigation simplified, and shared analysis of on-site traffic is increasingly important. Top 100 websites, especially around their main entry points, have become production pieces that require a greater degree of strategic planning than general, annually updated brochure sites. Creating that content needs to be considered a standing business expense, although it should be more than made up for in long-term advertising savings.

Along with that greater effort, we strongly advise our clients to integrate their PPC campaigns with their SEO campaigns, though not necessarily in the hands of the same person. SEO and PPC are two unique arms of search engine marketing.

Many SEOs spread their time crafting both paid and organic campaigns for clients, though each requires unique and highly developed skill sets. PPC offers guaranteed placements for a fee but needs greater attention and monitoring, along with different levels of analysis. We have set caps on the number of PPC campaigns we can run in conjunction with organic placement campaigns and have taken measures to outsource and recommend overloads.

The key here is to have the PPC and the organic SEO teams working together on several aspects of the client’s website. As the client said, we need to stop thinking of search engines as the main show in website marketing. This might sound like a self-defeating statement coming from a search engine optimization specialist.

However, search, as a tool, is no longer confined to the search engines we’re familiar with. Think about a paid ad generating site visits from a third-party website. The transactions that brought the visitors were not conducted on a single search engine, but rather on one or more search engines, in conjunction with a third-party website that facilitated them.

Now, think about social commentary and viral marketing. Internet users, like most of us offline, tend to rely on first-person recommendations. I told a friend about a service that worked particularly well for me.

They try that service and tell their friends about it as well. It works that way with almost any industry, from restaurants to airlines, moving companies, and magazines. Now, try to imagine your network of friends and contacts. How many of them know each other or might connect through a third or fourth party?

Imagine the impact of giving users the ability to tag their search experience with comments. During the Christmas sales rush, Yahoo Shopping experimented with user-compiled shopping lists —a sort of global gift guide that utilized social networking and comment tagging to cross-reference search results.

(If you are interested in Stereo Speakers, you might also be interested in StacyB’s Audiophile StacyB’s List.) Yahoo’s Flickr photo service has seen fantastic growth through global networks of friends exchanging images they have tagged with their comments.

Similarly, the appearance of Blogs has substantially expanded the online marketing environment. It is estimated that by the year 2010, there might be as many as one billion Blogs published online. While most are personal diaries, blogs have lasted long enough to be more than a fad and are evolving rapidly as users learn to modify and improve them.

Businesses are increasingly turning to Blogs to communicate with customers or to respond to inquiries. Newsgathering organizations are using Blogs to fill the gap between TV broadcasts and the Internet by posting everything from breaking news, information podcasts, video clips, and reporters’ notebooks to recipe ideas, shopping tips, and paid-search advertising.

There are significant advantages That Blogs offer search marketers. The ability to link Blog entries together to form an information thread network provides search marketers with several tools beyond improving the knowledge base.

We can help clients establish communication centers from which they can link to information supplied by suppliers, distributors, and clients on their websites or blogs. An essential goal for search marketers is to help our clients provide users with a clear path to the information they need.

Clear paths tend to be followed by many people, a trait that today’s search spiders account for. Blogs, if maintained properly, can be an essential component in a winning website structure.

The second important feature of Blogs is RSS, real simple syndication. Anyone who expresses interest can subscribe to your blog and receive instant notifications of updates or messages. Search is going to be a facet of all information applications and many electronic appliances moving forward into the next decade.

The major search engines are each working to make deals with major appliance and electronics manufacturers to provide store results to users in planes, trains, and all automobiles, as well as in our kitchens, living rooms, on mobile phones, and possibly even on display screens and shopping carts.

In other words, search will be a greater part of our daily lives, which brings us back to search engine optimization for websites. That’s still important if the traditional search engine rankings are less important.

Building a good website structure is critical. Search engines have changed radically over the past ten years to the point that we are now in a period of what appears to be constant change and evolution. The most essential elements of SEO today, more important than writing a perfect keyword-rich title tag, are ease of navigation, clarity of purpose, and relevant links (think of links as information threads).

Keywords are important, make no mistake about that, but search engines have moved far beyond simple keyword and context measurements.

Search engines have significantly improved their ranking algorithms over the past two years, particularly in recent months. From the earliest years until about five years ago, search engines looked for keywords in several areas or elements of a website, including incoming and outgoing links. Rankings were determined by the arrangement of keywords and the number of incidents of those keywords found on or around the site.

For the past five years, Google has set the standards that SEOs work to achieve, but over the last six months, those standards have subtly changed and will continue to change for the foreseeable future.

What made Google different five years ago was its method of using a standard keyword-based spider that also took into account the number of incoming links to each site. That led to a number of techniques based on creating artificial link densities by building link networks, portal sites, and other tricks aimed at gaming Google.

After a series of algorithm updates aimed primarily at preventing “black-hat” manipulation of its rankings, Google has moved well past the basic premise of PageRank and its simple, democratic explanation.

We believe the Jagger Update is just one of many algorithm shifts that are leading Google away from pure link context to include shared incidents of semantic intention found between linked documents.

Where we used to view a website as a collection of similar documents, often of a common file type, found within a distinct URL, we are now examining far more complex layers of diverse web documents strung between several URLs. Again, think of links between documents as information threads that spiders follow. As much as possible, these threads should be more than just useful links between relevant sites; they should help complete whatever story the live user is experiencing. Your site visitors are looking for something, at least, that’s what Google and the rest want to think. Google is especially interested in how visitors use your site, how often they return, and how often they use links that leave your site.

Google has just reopened Google Analytics on a limited, invitation basis. Overwhelmed by massive user interest when it released its modified Urchin site statistics program, Google Analytics provides a detailed look at how visitors use your site. We strongly recommend that clients sign up for Google Analytics as soon as it becomes available. We will be happy to assist with interpreting the extracted data. One of the features of the free software package is the integration of AdWords and AdSense support, which shows how your ad campaigns are performing and how ads displayed on your site are performing.

While Google is making it easier for search marketers and advertisers, its primary goal is to increase revenue by boosting click-through rates and collecting user data from the millions of websites that use its service. It has also provided SEOs with a dashboard view of the key factors that affect a site’s ranking.

The practice of search engine optimization has become more challenging in some ways, but easier in others. SEO has come a long way since its early days in the mid-1990s. A decade ago, the 1990s were considered secretive and manipulative cowboys-roughneck mercenaries who would (because they could) do just about anything to get a site ranked in the Top 10 on the major search engines of the time.

The search marketing sector has doubled or perhaps tripled in size in just twenty-four months as new practitioners were hired by established SEO firms or formed their own businesses. Many of those new practitioners have spent that time absorbing and adding to the massive volume of information that makes up the SEO sector’s knowledge base.

SEOs are coming of age, professionally speaking, and are very good at what they do. Their skills will be a valuable asset to the sector in the coming year as the search business expands far beyond the desktop and into everyday life. Change is good.

# Advanced SEO Tips