SEO has been a part of our world for many years now, same for SEM – both efforts solely geared for attracting traffic to your website from the search engines. One way through organically ranking for different keywords, the other by bidding for text advertisements that shows up for different keywords (most commonly known as pay-per-click). And now, a third very important technique to deliver new visitors to your site and that’s SCO – Social Connection Optimization (the acronym isn’t mainstream yet, so we just sort of made it up). In a nutshell, it’s designing your website so that it is easily connected to all the major social networks, like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

User data is coming in more and more frequently now and more studies are being conducted these days about how and why people are finding websites. In the past, they either remembered the domain name, they searched a term on a search engine or they clicked a banner ad or maybe a link on another site. Today, the social networks are sending more traffic to websites than ever before. And it’s at such a point now, that website owners who optimize their site for users to share information among their friends, or even discuss items about the website are winning the game today and setting themselves up for even greater success down the road.

Think about how much information we are exposed to on daily basis. And how much a friend or colleague’s advice or suggestion influences your decision about where to shop, what to eat, where to go this weekend, etc. That’s what’s happening more and more on the web with social networking growing at its rapid pace. Connectivity with circles of influence has never been easier and people are changing they way they absorb information – instead of sorting through all the advertisements and news stories on their own, they wait for the filter that is their social network.

This means that Social is the next Search and it’s an opportunity for the quick-minded website owners to reconfigure some of the ways they do business online. Not only should you use the search engines and click-thru advertising to drive traffic to your website, engaging and connecting with the social communities is just as important and vital to your future success.

Three things to do for SCO

1. Add the appropriate social connections to your website. Facebook Connect, Twitter sign-in, and LinkedIn links are easy tools to add – but they aren’t the only ones and many others are available to add. This may require high-level technical knowledge because of the use of API’s, so be prepared for that and use our team at lifeBLUE for tasks like these.
2. Continually make improvements and adjustments to the social usability on your site. Provide your site visitors with the tools to share your content with their social network. Let them sign-in to your website with their social accounts, avoiding an entirely new registration process.
3. And as always, study the data. Dig into the analytics and identify the best social communities that are working for you along with the areas of weakness that can be improved. Interact with the social networks and have a solid grasp on how much of your site’s information is being shared and really understand your own success – identify the things that you are doing that is translating into social networking GOLD … and keep it up because these social sites aren’t going away anytime soon.

What determines where yours or any website ranks on the search engines can often seem like a confusing, complex and frustrating list of variables and factors – then add that each search engine has its own rules and ways that it ranks all the websites out there. The algorithms are the Holy Grail of the search engine world and web designers, webmasters, SEO specialists and web marketing people can sometimes look like Monty Python’s band of merry men stumbling over each other as they embark on their own search for the algorithmic Grail. None of us know exactly what Google and Yahoo and the others use to put one site above another – we have figured out the critical factors but there remains many nuances that the major search engines use to rank sites.

As for some of those critical factors, the way that your site is structured matters quite a bit and that’s the point of this exercise. Site structure, studies indicate, matter between 30-40% of the total equation for how search engines rank your site. The remaining 60-70% is based off of what happens away from your site (backlinks, social weight, etc).

So, what can be done to structure your site in a way that the search engines will look favorably upon it?

Search engines send their spiders out every so often to crawl your site. The spiders or robots are undercover agents of Google, Yahoo and the rest. You don’t know when they’re coming, you just better hope they like what they see when they arrive.

They come to your domain name first (kind of like the street address or your house number). The more relevant, descriptive and easy to understand your domain is the better it is for SEO. If your domain includes an important keyword about your business and/or industry then you’re making the job of the secret agent that much easier.

Tags!! One thing crawlers and the general public can both see is the Title Tag – the short descriptive sentence at the very top of the browser bar. It probably includes the name of the company, location and a few important details. A well-written Title Tag is very important. Underneath the public’s eye are meta tags that include the Description Tag and Keyword Tag – the keywords are less important today than a few years ago but the description is important because it’ll give the search engine user a quick summary of what your site is all about.
Design the site so that the crawlers can report back to the engines about all the content of your site. They don’t like Flash because they can’t take notes on what the Flash graphics show and they don’t like images unless they’re tagged with descriptive text. Also, using headers (kind of like headlines in magazines/newspapers) help the robots understand your pages better. Headers (H1 and H2) keep things organized and help emphasize important sections or content.

Make sure the site flows smoothly without broken links or dead-end pages. You don’t want this to be the case for the public when they visit your site and you definitely don’t want these errors when the spiders crawl your site. Going page by page and checking all links should also entice you to optimize these interior pages just as much as the homepage is optimized. The search engines are indexing each page of your site and the more unique and interesting these pages are to the spiders the better. Use different titles, tags, content, etc. and think about ways to link internally from page to page within your site – the more internal links the better.

While adding keywords within the HTML code of your site doesn’t have much important nowadays, using those keywords within your site is very important. Keywords should be integrated into navigation, page titles, and especially the written content. Having keyword density throughout your site will pay dividends for you from an SEO perspective.

Structuring the folders and file names that exist for your site will help search engines better understand and rank your site. Try to avoid long and confusing URLs like http://www.yourwebsite.com/pages/1nnx/esc_a12600599.htm and use something more descriptive for your folders and file names.

This list of 7 key factors for structuring your website for the search engines is not perfect and it isn’t comprehensive. But it should give you a good idea of what may be missing on your site. We’re all at the mercy of how search engines rank site, but thankfully, we do know enough to control what is on our own websites and be ready with a welcome mat and cup of coffee for when the secret search engine agents come to visit.

In football, there are four quarters to a game – a beginning and an end – a winner and a loser – and usually another game right around the corner that you have a chance at winning or losing. A score is kept and it’s very easy to understand how points are awarded. Teams study their opponent and game plan against said opponent before even playing the game. And more times than not, it’s not just the skilled and flashy players that you see in the highlights that are the reasons for winning and losing. You have to look at what’s taking place at the line of scrimmage and the “big uglies” that block, push, tackle and hold all game that usually determines the outcome.

If the offensive line is pushed around then the quarterback is sacked, the running back can’t find holes to run through and it’s a low scoring affair. If the defensive line is beaten up, the ball zips right through them to the lighting-fast wide receivers running towards the goal line and the running backs have a field day breaking tackles and slashing their way around the field.

So for this exercise, we’ll equate the search engines to the line of scrimmage – and all the websites listed in the rankings as the linemen or the “big uglies” (no offense to the web designers, you do beautiful work.)

SEO or search engine optimization is like a football game that’s missing the game clock – meaning there is no end to the game, it’s ongoing and to have a chance to even lead the game and be at the top takes a relentless battle at the line of scrimmage where, thankfully, pushing, pulling, holding, and tripping is also penalized like in football. You should play by the rules or risk getting caught because of unnecessary roughness or just plain stupidity and illegal tactics.

It’s a never-ending battle at the line of scrimmage (search page) because, not only are the other linemen your direct competitors, you’re also competing against random websites that may include something similar to yours. Those sites might have a keyword that you have and out in the business world you are not really competitors at all. Unfortunately, search engines don’t know that and will lump you into the same group. That’s why optimizing your site on-page and off-page is so important for your business and it takes a lot of work to make that happen.

Try this to get an idea of what your website might be up against at the line of scrimmage: Go to Google and enter “fishing” as the search term, you’ll see the normal ranked sites at the bottom and the sponsored sites along the side – also notice this at the top “Results 1 - 10 of about 140,000,000 for fishing” and that indicates what you’re really up against. That’s 140 million webpages that Google has indexed as something related to “fishing”. Those are your competitors whether you like it or not if you have a fishing website (you better be using the best bait!)

And you can even narrow the search for more specific keywords and phrases like “framed prints” which isn’t as bad as fishing with only 5.4 million webpages within Google.

The important thing to remember is that SEO takes time, patience and constant work to take your site from the deep thousands or so within Google all the way to the first search page. Luckily, a majority of those 140 million fishing webpages are not being actively optimized like yours should be. So with some quality SEO work, you should see your site move up in the rankings and eventually be the “biggest ugly” of them all at the line of scrimmage pushing your weight around and leading this never-ending game.

There are so many amazing things about the web, and one of its best attributes is variety. Really, if you take a step back and think about all the websites that you visit day-to-day and even the thousands of others that you’ve maybe landed on for a brief time throughout these years – the variety and unlimited assortment of what’s on the web is tremendous.

Yet, here we are midway through 2009 - 15 or so years after the web arguably became mainstream and so many companies, individuals and organizations are still content with just having a website – without regard of it’s credibility, usability and search engine-friendliness. They still haven’t grasped the power of the web and what it can do for them from a business and personal standpoint. Just having a website was important back in 1999, and now in 2009 transforming that website into a full-fledged webpresence is critical.

Search Engine Optimization is the Foundation

Say you want to open a retail store. You find a nice location and start to move the inventory in, set up your displays and hire the salespeople. That’s good, but what about a sign out front to get the attention of other shoppers? Without a sign there will be no shoppers, they don’t know anything about your store and they don’t trust it enough to go inside. Plus there are many other stores around yours and they’ll just go to those instead. What if you’re renting space over in the distant corner and all the shoppers are on the other side milling about? Chances are they hang out where all the action is and wonder why in the world your store is hard to find.

Essentially, this is where SEO comes in to play for websites. If your site doesn’t rank on the search engines, either through organic methods or the pay-per-click ways, then you’re missing an incredible opportunity of attracting the people who are actively searching for you and your services.

SEO begins during the development stage of the website. It takes some foresight to build a site with interesting content and features that visitors will appreciate and that search engines will love. The main focus for SEO is advancing the goals of a website by improving the number and position of its organic search results for a wide variety of relevant keywords. Proper SEO strategies may increase both the number and quality of visitors.

Brand Image is Everything

First impressions are extremely important. When websites have approximately eight seconds to convince a web visitor to stay, the design and layout of your website must appeal to them.

Trust and confidence in your brand must be expressed clearly to those who visit, shop and link to your site. You may be asking them to purchase products and/or enter their personal information and if your site doesn’t exude professionalism and trustworthiness then you may be losing out on a number of opportunities. Most web users have inevitably received spam or heard the horror stories of online identity theft. For this very reason online shoppers have become hesitant and untrusting of online stores they are not familiar with. Anything you can do to ensure visitors you are not going to take advantage of them is going to make your audience more comfortable, therefore resulting in a more positive experience for both parties.

What Can My Website Do For You?

While the design and look of your website is more important than ever, just as important is how visitors navigate the site and jump from page to page. We’re in a short-attention-span world and if visitors get bogged down trying to find what they’re looking for on your site, then chances are they’re patience will run out quicker than the click of a mouse.

Connect and Engage

The Social Networks like Facebook and MySpace have allowed websites to be connected with their customers and new audiences like never before. Twitter gives individuals and businesses a quick and easy way to interact with their customers, fans, clients and the general public. And now if your website isn’t connected or integrated in some form to these amazing marketing tools, then you’re not fully aware of what a webpresence can actually accomplish for yourself or your business.

What is an SEO strategy anyway?

I remember wondering this and discovering mixed opinions and differing ideas on how to best define this often mentioned but rarely explained component of website ownership.

Particularly it seems to depend on who you ask. Bring the question to your technical team and get one perspective, and usually the most detailed one, request clarification from a company’s marketing team and receive another perspective but notice the response begins to lose some conviction, ask your business leadership team and in many companies get redirected back to the tech team. However, in this author’s opinion, an SEO strategy is most successful when all three business units above take an active interest and make a dedicated effort in their own ways.

By explicit definition, SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization.

From that we gather that something needs to be optimized to create some desired effect on search engines. Okay, but clearly we are not going to all this trouble simply to benefit some search engines. The actual desired effect is increasing awareness and traffic to your website. So what is the difference between SEO and traditional marketing?

Generally speaking – nothing at all. SEO is a succinct way to say marketing the website.

Some people may argue that this term only applies to making the site itself contextually friendly to search engine spiders. To which I respond, why then are one way and reciprocal links a corner stone of SEO strategy? It’s near common knowledge that good one way links are the most heavily weighed consideration by the Google system of ranking. So while some companies content may be relying on title tags and meta data, more ambitious organizations will take a more comprehensive approach and reap the benefits.

In my opinion, SEO can be divided into the following two main elements; content relevancy and online footprint. A website dedicated to cell phones should not rank anywhere on a search for sail boats. Just like a site dedicated to Wal-Mart would not rank as high as Wal-Mart.com itself. In this example, not only is the latter’s content most relevant to the search term – but Wal-Mart’s multimillion dollar marketing budget, solidifies their rank domination.

The keys to content relevancy are, understanding the nature of your content, defining and enhancing that content, and continuously expanding upon the content.

Search engines crawl your pages and certain pieces of data will receive greater weight based on how that data is defined. Definition occurs at the HTML level. The most heavily weighted words are obviously – the FQDN, or site name itself. A domain name will override nearly all other factors.

Other strongly weighted pieces of content include, your title tag, content wrapped in heading tags and a page’s meta description. Putting the right content in your url’s, titles, headings and meta tags is your method of communicating to the search engine what the content is and how importantly that content is relative to the rest of the page. On the low end of the spectrum would be content wrapped in paragraph tags or content not defined at all. Another example is providing accurate description in your image’s ALT attribute. A search engine spider has no idea what a graphics illustrates. However, by including descriptive text in the title and/or alt attributes you are able to inform search engines that your site contains those 100 pictures of Selma Hayek - which consequently improves your relevancy to any Selma Hayek searches. Equally important is making sure a search engine spider can navigate your entire site.

These are the fundamentals, or the basics. Slightly more advanced is the process of keyword analysis. With single product e-commerce sites identifying your keywords is straightforward. However, with a news or informational site even understanding your keywords becomes much more complicated. Regardless of one product or thousands of different product types, the battle over keywords and key phrases is highly competitive.

The first step towards implementing a successful SEO strategy is to understand your indicators. There are many, both public and private metrics, available that website owners rely on. Here we will discuss some of the most prevalent out there.

Google Analytics

Perhaps the most widely known analytics tool, Google Analytics, keeps it simple. At a glance, a person can see up to the minute traffic or view trends across months and years. Google Analytics also shows the percent of new traffic, the average time spent on site, the bounce rate (measure of users who leave right away without clicking) and average pageviews. One of the best parts is, you have the ability to graph everything, giving you a better visual representation, plus browser and user profiling.

In short, Google Analytics has been designed for user friendliness and simplicity. Also, it is totally free! The technical consideration involved is a required JavaScript snippet be included in any pages to be tracked. And while small, it will add some overhead to your page load time. Like all tools it’s not 100% accurate; a fact that becomes clear after you begin seeing the variances between tracking tools.

AWStats

AWStats is an example of a few programs which run locally on the server hosting your website. Although not as slick as google analytics, a logfile analyzer like this is going to provide the most detailed and accurate raw numbers available. Since this program falls in the realm of server management, typically the webmaster or IT are the only people who have access to it. This is probably a good idea for security reasons and business continuity. Reporting is available yet also considers most companies often keep these numbers confidential. Some other notable alternatives include Webalizer and W3Perl. Though not native, all these programs can be run on Windows Server.

Omniture

There is a handful of companies tracking general internet activity, and Omniture is a big time example. Through opt-in tracking cookies being distributed by major companies such as Apple (possibly iTunes / Quicktime) and Adobe (Flash), this Omniture has been comprehensively analyzing web traffic for greater than 10 years. Membership with them provides a suite of tools, similar to Google Analytics, but with greater depth in their reporting. There is more emphasis on keyword analytics and click-through ratios. Omniture’s staff of SEO professionals, are happy to sell you as large a customer service plan as your company can afford or requires. Working with a reputable SEO firm, or adopting their processes into your website, is perhaps the only way to comprehensively understand your site’s traffic.

Doubleclick vs Adsense

Website owners want to spend less buying ads and make more running them. Ad revenues and expenses are the only numbers some SEO marketers secretly even care about. To that end, the ad management company (or companies) you choose will provide the reporting and analytic tools by which you track those figures. The difference between Doubleclick and Adsense is like the difference between a Lexus and a Camry. Both cars are actually owned by Toyota, meanwhile both Doubleclick and Adsense are both in fact owned by Google. Also both programs basically do the same thing though Doubleclick offers the luxuries that come with greater cost.

Both ultimately allow you to purchase ad space, sell ads on your own site - and track the results online. Facebook has also moved into the game recently, offering PPC campaign deals to the public strictly on their site. And since they are number 5 on Alexa and with 30+ billion page views per month, facebook makes for an interesting side note at least.

Alexa

In short Alexa is the Nielsen ratings of the web. Surfers voluntarily install the Alexa toolbar which tracks Internet usage. Using that data, Alexa releases a near real time overall site rank list, up to the top million sites. These site rankings are not perfect. Certainly they are skewed by the disproportionate number of tech’s who run the toolbar. However, this imperfect list is still the best and most widely accepted measuring stick available.

Your site’s Alexa ranking should be taken with a grain of salt. Still, if you can get a handful of frequent visitors to install the toolbar – it can dramatically improve the score for small or new sites. A bustling side-project type website might find itself anywhere between 100k and 300k. The competition begins to stiffen as a site passes the 100k mark. In other words, the frequency of sites actually spending money to promote begins to increase. Meanwhile the top 1,000 places are mostly dominated by companies with infrastructure to support a web business of that size.

Summary

The task of reviewing this data is best if shared between a marketing decision maker and the webmaster. The accumulated information not only provides realistic perspective on your site but will likely drive your SEO strategy. The services described above are only the tip of the iceberg.

SEO programs, applications, websites and strategies are a thriving and highly competitive business that has become dense with experiments, theories and sleight of hand.

Any professional chef will tell you that a dish is only as good as its ingredients. Quality and freshness often can make the difference between a signature dish at a 5-Star restaurant or your mother-in-law’s “Chicken Surprise.”

A similar edict holds true for you and your Web site. There are many ingredients that go into making a great Web site, including cutting-edge design, efficient site applications and, perhaps most importantly, quality and fresh content.

In my 10 years of managing Web site projects, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen new Web sites with the latest bells and whistles - fancy Flash intros and dynamic menu systems that pop and zing at you from every direction – only to fail at getting any significant traffic. The reason these sites ultimately failed was simple. They neglected the most important ingredient of all – good content.

Users scour the World Wide Web constantly looking for something interesting. Once they find it, they need a reason to keep coming back. There is no better way of bringing people back to your site than updating it with fresh, timely content.

So what does that entail?

First, your content doesn’t just have to be text. There are many different types of content that you can utilize to make your site special. These might include pictures, videos, software downloads or a variety of other things. Take a look at some of the most successful sites on the ‘Net like YouTube or Hulu and you can see that you don’t have to have a degree in journalism to provide something that users want to come back to see. Find out what your users want to see and provide that to them. It’s that simple.

Secondly, your content needs to be relevant. In other words, it needs to make sense to your audience. If your site provides tips for the average golfer, obviously you don’t want to put up an article about the newest advances in bowling ball technology. But beyond the obvious, make sure your content is staying up with the times. You want your users to come to your site to find out the newest information so don’t play catch-up with old, irrelevant content.

Finally, your content needs to be organized and well-managed. Fortunately, almost every Web site owner these days has the option to use a content management system to create, organize and display their content. Make sure you take advantage of this. Using a Content Management System, or CMS, allows you or your staff to update and add new content to your site without knowing much about HTML or Web development at all. Most CMS software packages include a simple editing screen that allows you to easily manipulate your content. Additionally, a typical CMS will allow you to post articles from multiple users, approve them and then provide a publish date that might be days or weeks in the future. Work flow is dramatically improved and your users get access to the latest content in a timely fashion.

Creating a successful Web site isn’t easy. It takes a lot of planning and a huge time commitment from you. Planning out a successful strategy, including quality content, can play a huge part in that success. If you keep the basics in mind, including variety, relevant and well-organized content amongst other things, you’ll see your traffic numbers increase and see your user base continue to come back for more.

Today, we’re talking about poor old linkbait, a term that gets a bad rap in a lot of circles, mainly because of its name. It’s hard to argue that the word “bait” doesn’t come with a pejorative connotation. The word jailbait springs to mind, for example.

We like to think of linkbait as really just strategically placed, well-crafted content. The goal is to generate interest and, of course, incoming links to your website. There are dozens of linkbaiting techniques, from creating awards and contests to writing controversial pieces or character assassinations on high-profile people in the hope of stirring up controversy and, again, links. You’ll also see people create handy tools or put together “Best Of” and “Top 10″ lists.

We dabble in all of these techniques and more, depending on the needs of our clients. In reality, it’s an integral part of most in-depth search engine marketing campaigns. But cat-calls and hissy fits equating link bait with spam or “black hat” techniques are often overblown (and, if truth be told, just laughable efforts to generate links by bashing linkbaiting itself).

The reality is, good content is good content, and that’s all that matters online. It’s all about intent — if you’re offering something that people genuinely care about or find interesting, educational or controversial in an enlightening manner, you will garner solid links. And you will deserve to garner them. Most people will see right through linkbait that offers nothing.

And that’s an important lesson for all aspects of search engine marketing: It really is a two-way street. If you’re not thinking about content and campaigns with your existing and potential clients — as well as your competitors — at the forefront of the mind, you’re in trouble.