Best Practices: SEO That Works

SEO in the broadest sense works when you carefully consider and plan your campaign.

This means having a good understanding of:

• Your offering
• Your unique selling proposition
• Your competition
• The resources that can be used for your campaign
• Best SEO practices

This section will help you achieve clarity on these points, and provide a best practices SEO checklist.

Create an Elevator Pitch
A good way to begin planning your SEO campaign is to create an elevator pitch.

An elevator pitch is a one-or-two sentence "story" that makes your offering and target audience crystal clear. So named for something one could deliver between stops on an elevator, one of the most important aspects of the elevator pitch is its succinctness.

A good elevator pitch is dramatic, tells your story, and can be used for sales purposes. Most important, if your elevator pitch is right, you should be able to use it to understand the most important keywords to use from an SEO perspective.

Know Your Competition
Learn from your competition. Compile a provisional list of keywords and phrases you want to target with SEO. Then Google, Google, Google these keywords like crazy.

Examine the results of these searches carefully. On the one hand, the search results from your targeted keywords should be related to your offering. If there's no connectionif the sites you come up with belong to completely different realmsthen something is wrong and you should reexamine your SEO campaign premises.

On the other hand, your site and pages need to be at least as good as the competition's offerings. Otherwise, SEO or no SEO, you won't pull ahead of the competition in natural listings.

What can you learn from the competition? How can you improve upon it?

Use AdWords as an SEO Tool
As core SEO becomes simply one of the tools used to advertise destinations on the Web, it makes sense to supplement pure SEO with targeted CPCCost per Clickprograms, such as that provided by Google AdWords.

AdWords should be used as an auxiliary to SEO programs, not as the primary focus of an SEO campaign. Attention should be paid to distinguishing within AdWords between content and search ads.

As an auxiliary SEO tool, the best approach with AdWords is oblique: don't target your primary SEO keywords (you can rely on SEO for this) as much as conceptually related topics that might draw visitors who might otherwise overlook your site. For example, a relationship and dating site might use AdWords to target people interested in Meg Ryan movies such as Sleepless in Seattle.

Work with Consultants
SEO consultancies have become big businesses, and many of them are reputable outfits that will help you put implement the practices outlined in this article.

But beware: this is also an arena that tempts shady operators. Review SEO success claims with some degree of skepticism, and make sure to verify claims whenever possible. Remember, if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

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Avoiding SEO Pitfalls

Googleand other major search enginesurge you to avoid overly aggressive SEO practices when you build your site. Google has actually taken the trouble to spell out SEO practices it regards as naughty (the list can be found at http://www.google.com/webmasters). You should pay attention to this list as if it speaks the mind of every major search engine, not just Google. Google's position that building sites that get highly ranked is simply a matter of providing useful content isn't totally off-the-wall, although it assumes a world where everything always works.

According to Google, good search-engine-citizen web sites do not:

Employ hidden text or links
For example, users cannot read white text on a white background (and will never even know it is there). But the search engine will still parse this text. This rule comes down to making sure that the search engine sees the same thing that users view.

Cloak pages
Also called stealth, this is a technique that involves serving different pages to the search engine than to the user.

Use redirects in a deceptive way
It's easy to redirect the user's browser to another page. If this is done for deceptive purposesfor example, to make a user think they are on a page associated with a well-known brand when in fact they are on a web spammer's pageit's frowned upon.

Attempt to improve your PageRank with dubious schemes

Linking to web spammers or bad neighborhoods on the Web may actually hurt your own PageRank (or search ranking), even if doing so provides inbound links to your site.

Bad neighborhoods are primarily link farms or link exchangessites that exist solely for the purpose of boosting a site's inbound links without other content. Web spammers are sites that disguise themselves with pseudo descriptions and fake keywordsthe descriptions and keywords do not truly represent what the site contains.

Practice keyword loading
This is the practice, beloved by SEO "experts," of adding irrelevant words to pages (the page can then be served as the search result based on a query for the irrelevant words that actually don't have anything to do with the page content). Proper keyword usage highlights your legitimate content but does keyword load.

Create multiple similar pages
Google frowns on the creation of pages, domains, and subdomains that duplicate contentalthough obviously there are places to legitimately duplicate content.

Present "doorway" pages
Pages created just for search engines are sometimes called doorway pages. (The term doorway page covers a variety of techniques that are used to substitute one page for anothereither by redirection or actual substitution of pages on the web serverwhen the first page is optimized for specific keyword searches, and the page to which the user is actually sent has little or nothing to do with that search.)

Pages that lack content
Google frowns pages that lack original content, such as a page that exists simply to present affiliate links.

Create domains with the intention of confusing users
Likely you've landed on a site with a domain name that's confusing because it's sharing the same name with a different domain suffix (for example, http://www.php.org, which combines a redirection with the deception, rather than the legitimate PHP language site, http://www.php.net), or because of a slight spelling variation (http://www.yahho.com rather than http://www.yahoo.com, http://www.goggle.com instead of http://www.google.com).

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SEO Analysis Tools

You'll find a wide range of SEO analysis tools available to help you optimize your web pages and sites. From the viewpoint of your pocketbook, there are two kinds of SEO analysis tool:

• Free tools: these free tools generally tackle a single piece of the SEO puzzle, such as generating good keywords, understanding how Google operates on specific sites and keywords, checking who links to your sites, and displaying rankings in multiple search engines at once

• Commercial SEO analysis software that must be licensed for a fee.

Free Tools
There are a myriad of free SEO tools available, and even many sites that list these free tools (the compendium sites are generally supported by advertising, and must therefore practice good SEO themselves to be successful!).

Some good sites that list (and provide links) to free SEO analysis tools http://www.trugroovez.com/free-seo-tools.htm, http://www.webuildpages.com/tools/, and http://www.seocompany.ca/tool/11-link-popularity-tools.html.

Some of the most useful (and free!) single-purpose SEO tools are:

• NickeBot: a keyword discovery tool that helps pinpoint the right keywords for optimization, http://www.nichebot.com/.

• The SERPS Tool: the SERPS (or Search Engine Positioning) tool helps you discover your ranking across Google and other major search engine in one fell swoop, http://www.seo-guy.com/seo-tools/se-pos.php.

• Meta Tag Analyzer: checks meta information for errors and relevance to page content, http://www.seo-guy.com/seo-tools/se-pos.php.

These tools can definitely be time savers, particularly if you have a large amount of content you need to optimize. The price is certainly right!

Individual tools also can serve as a reality check: by running your pages through one of these tools you can get a pretty good feeling for how well you have optimized a page. However, you should bear in mind that there is nothing that one of these tools can do for you that cannot also be done by hand given the knowledge you have learned from this article.

Individually, SEO analysis tools available on the Web can help you with your SEO tasks. However, to get the most from these tools you need to understand underlying SEO concepts, as explained in this article, before you use these tools.

Over time, as you progress with SEO, you will probably accumulate your own favorite SEO analysis toolkit.

Commercial SEO Analysis Software
Commercially-licensed SEO analysis software is unlikely to prove worth its cost unless you are in the business of performing SEO for numerous web sites and a great deal of content, or for a major enterprise. If the advertising for this kind of software claims too much, beware!

Essentially, the closer a commercial SEO product comes to true enterprise web analytic capability, like that provided by Google Analytics or WebTrends, the more likely it is to provide valuebut only to larger enterprises. So it's fairly rare for software labeled specifically for SEO purposes to be worth the licensing feeyou can either do the job yourself manually, or a free tool is available.

If your need for SEO analysis falls into the enterprise category, I'd suggest you start with Google Analytics, http://www.google.com/analytics/, or WebTrends, http://www.webtrends.com/, even those these products are not specifically aimed at SEO.

If you do want to look into licensed SEO software, some of the better known commercial SEO analysis products are:

• Keyword Elite (keyword analysis) and SEO Elite (automated SEO analysis) available under commercial license from Top Software, http://www.topsoftwaredownloads.co.uk/SEO.htm.

• Clicktracks: a variety of commercial analytic packages that show how visitors react to your site, and provides SEO analysis for those sites, http://www.clicktracks.com/.

• SEO Administrator: a suite of SEO analysis tools, http://www.seoadministrator.com/.

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