SEO Tips by Steve

Optimizing your website for Google is a frustrating task that will make you pull your hair out. However, topping Google search results is very rewarding. If you’ve ever had a site that appeared on the first page of Google results for high search volume keywords you know the amount of traffic, and potential business, you could experience. Yahoo would give you decent traffic also but now with their Paid Inclusion it’s all about how much you’re willing to spend. MSN is just plain weird. I’ve managed sites that rank #45 on Google for a particular term and rank #2 on MSN for the same keyword, although it’s rarely the other way around.

I’m an account manager at an internet marketing company / search optimization firm. I’m not gonna lie it’s a decent job and it teaches you every aspect of promoting your website online. I’ve analyzed a wide variety of e-commerce and lead gen sites but I’m not going to tell you that I’m an expert and that you should listen to everything I have to say, I’m just offering information that I think could be useful to others. With that said, I think flat out that Wordpress is the best content management system (CMS) currently available to fast-track your website into search results, but I’ll talk more about this in later posts.

Google currently weighs heavily the amount of inbound links to your site and the text used in the link, or the “anchor text” of the link pointing to your website. I’m saying like they overly rely on this to determine the ranking of each site for a particular keyword phrase. Your site could be full-out optimized to the max for a keyword, but if there is another site that has more links pointing to it with that keyword in the anchor text the other site will rank higher. A perfect example of this (although extreme) is with Adobe Acrobat Reader. If you search Google for “click here” the first page that appears is that of Adobe. But that page doesn’t even have the words ‘click here’ anywhere on the page? That’s because thousands and thousands of websites do this: “Click here to download Adobe Acrobat Reader and view this PDF” - Google sees this as all of these sites ‘voting’ for the adobe page, and telling the web surfer that the page they’re going to will be about ‘click here’. Google pretty much does this so that it’s harder for people to manipulate search results by keyword stuffing their page. They look to see how many other sites voted for your site, and what they say your site is about when deciding on where you will rank in the search results. It’s a weird concept but it makes sense the more you get into it.

So how do you get more links? And how do you control the anchor text of these links? See my post specifically about link building.

I’ve also found that Google loves it when you submit an XML sitemap in Google Webmaster Tools. They like to see that you keep it updated as well (updated lastmod dates). There is a help system in webmaster tools that answers common questions about how to create and submit an XML sitemap. Wordpress has a simple plugin that automatically updates your sitemap as you add new content and Google seems to eat it up.

I also believe that Google slightly favors websites that have installed Google Analytics, but this is just my opinion. I do recommend that you install google analytics on your site, the information it tracks provides very useful insight into where to focus optimization energy. We use Omniture at work and it has tons of extra features but to my knowledge is extremely pricey and it’s really only meant for use by large organizations.

Ok so hopefully you have a general idea of the direction I’m heading in with how to optimize your website for Google. This is a general outline and I will focus on specific areas of search engine optimization in upcoming posts.