Paul Sizemore

Paul Sizemore  //  

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Oct 25 / 7:46pm

Aggregated Data Portals and SEO

Portals present data from lots of different sources, and can provide the user a great place to see what's going on around the web. From an SEO perspective, portals are considered by a lot of people as SEO spam.

If you have a portal, your SEO tactics need to be at the top of their game, because so much is going against you from the get go. Since portals often don't provide any unique content, search engines typically see them as low on the trust scale.

If you maintain multiple portals on multiple key words, SEO can be problem. There are lot of concerns, from hosting them all on the same server IP block, thus looking like a link farm to maintaining unique content on each domain. One of the best strategies is to look as each portal as a separate site, and make sure that they are presented that way to all the SEO indicators. Use unique sitemap.xml files, use unique naming conventions, use unique IP addresses, even use varying geographic locations for the servers. All these factors will divest your portals, and reduce negative impacts.

The line search engines draw between a useful portal and search spam is very narrow, and you really have to understand SEO to be successful in the portal space. The more key performance indicators you can pull away from dynamic to human driven, the more useful the portals will be, and the more significant your standings will be in the search engines.

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Oct 25 / 1:05pm

Best practices / SEO governance in the development and build phase

One of the best SEO tough points for a site is the build process, to make sure things are done right from the beginning. A lot of times that's not an option, but when it is, take it. Make sure the tags, DOM structure, links, navigation structure, images and content are exactly what the engines want.

With any SEO effort, you need to define your goals and create a plan. Once that is done, you can apply build decisions to those goals and plans.

Content is one of the most important features of the site, and luckily that can be fast tracked along side infrastructure build of the site. In most sites, the content is going to be marketing driven, so the deliverables can be separate from the resources needed for the infrastructure build. This will allow faster time lines, and a more efficient build, provided there is strong communication. The infrastructure build team needs to be sure the marketing/content side knows of any limitations to the content, from a length point of view.

Tags are also very important, and need to be governed by SEO concerns. Any meta tags and title need to be exposed to the content owners in a CMS or change process. This will enable the needed strong consistency between the the meta data and the page content to remain on target with the page's keywords. The URL also needs to be owned by the content creator - they need to be able to specify it through a CMS solution or business process.

Images are also very important, the build team needs to try to limit the inline images to content related. Otherwise the images can be run in a CSS file in the background of a tag. This will increase the overall relevance of each of the remaining images, and if the file names and alt tags are appropriate, this could significantly help the SEO scoring of the page.

Hosting matters. Think trust again. If you host with a ISP that also maintains a lot of domains with low trust, or even fly-by-night domains that employ unethical practices, that will lower your SEO score. Also, it's important to host your site in the geographic area that you are targeting. Don't host your site in India if your users are in America.

Another strong concern is the navigation structure. You have to use internal links and links to external sources effectively. It's also very important from an SEO perspective to make sure the site is crawl-able, think how effective can a screen reader use the site. http://www.webbie.org.uk/index.htm

In conclusion, if you have a limited amount of SEO dollars in your budget, spend at least a portion of that during the build process to ensure strong natural and organic growth.

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Oct 25 / 12:03pm

Truth in content, creating content that spreads

A very big part of SEO is creating the right content for your site. You need to create content that builds trust, and engages people. You also need to create pages that gain search engine trust. Pages that score higher on the trust rankings are essential, because as the engines change their ranking methods, their goal is the same - to find and deliver to the user the best pages for the search terms.

If you take care to make sure the user has the information they need, the rankings will be easier.

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Oct 25 / 11:21am

Chartering an SEO plan

There are certain on page activities that can be done with out a SEO plan or strategy, such as crafting a strong DOM structure for the page, but to go beyond the very basics, you need to have a plan. 

A well thought out plan, based on business objectives, will help you evaluate new obstacles and aids as the SEO landscape changes. The landscape has moved beyond simple keywords and link building. 

The written SEO plan will communicate to the rest of the organization, and help them maintain best practices towards the goal. It needs to be simple, clear and measurable to be effective. I would strongly suggest following the organization's established project methodology, or as close as possible. This will help buy-in, and set strong organizational goals with a plan behind you. 

The Plan:

Step 1) Charter  /  Create a SEO project charter that will guide the organization through the entire project. 

Step 2) Chunk it out  /  Break the site into smaller pieces. Look for the pages that naturally can be sectioned together and generate the most results toward your business goals. Keep in mind it might be very easy to segment the product detail pages from the site because they are all run off one dynamic template.  After you have chunked them out, prioritize them according to the business goals. 

Step 3) Site Audit  /  Look at the segmented page groups and compare where you are with those page groups to where you want to be in accord with your business needs. In my opinion this is best done in a spread sheet with headings representing metrics like: inbound links, keyword in title tag and page content. Measure your key metrics to SEO success. 

Step 4) Assessment  /  Draw your conclusions. Where do you need work, where are you currently strong. How did you get to this place. You'll need to draw not only the current SEO situation together, but tie in all marketing efforts and budget. 

Create a plan based on your goals, and measure your way to success. 
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Oct 25 / 11:21am

Organic SEO, an overview

Organic SEO can take time, often up to six months, and is often a sound strategy. Most of the times, organic is not enough to reach your goals, you need to prime the pump with a little PPC. 

Ensuring the organic elements are optimized is essential.  This will ensure that the site is the best it can be, onsite, and allows you to confidently move to other areas of SEO. Also, this is most effectively started in the development and build process. So, this is the first business touch point with SEO. 

Web site content will be owned by the marketing department or agency. The content needs to be relevant to the links and meta data in the page, so it's essential that those are also owned by the content owner. 

Keywords are essential, too. It's easiest to optimize each page for one keyword phrase. Apple has been hugely successful by allowing developers to create 'an app for that.' Your site can be successful by creating a 'page for that.' One of the easiest ways to do that is run Google Analytics on the page, and see what keywords most often lead users to the page, then further optimize for that keyword. 

Citations are important.  Who links to you as an industry expert, and who do you link to? This is an even bigger part of organic SEO, and can carry your site very far into sustainable results. 
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