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There are tons of people re-designing, re-tooling or completely re-vamping their websites right now.  With all of the new technology, easy set-up and programming-free options out there (not to mention cost-effective), many businesses are taking advantage.  The problem is that SEO is still an afterthought.  We still hear things like “we’re re-building the site right now, but we will contact you after that so we can start the SEO work”.

Woah there!  But we can still do some SEO work even while the site is under redesign or redevelopment.  Here are a few tips:

1.  Do your keyword research up front. While you are putting together content, page structure, or trying to figure out what CMS you are going to use, now is the time to start keyword research.  You want to determine the 4 or 5 main keywords that you will want to target your site for and methodically build pages, content and links around them.  We did a post a while back where we used several keyword research tools to help get you started.  As a rule of thumb, start with words that are not overly-competitive.  Choose words that are perhaps more long-tail vs. head terms (like choose “seo page analysis tool” instead of “seo”) and have smaller search volumes.  High search volume words (i.e. higher than 5,000 searches per month) can indicate healthy competition for that word or phrase.

2.  Keep the architecture simple. No need for 5 and 6 levels of navigation for most sites.  Two is usually good, with 3 for more complex sites with user-generated content or e-commerce.  The idea is that you want most of your pages accessible within 2 clicks.  That means it’s not only going to be easy for human visitors to find your content, but easier for the Googlebot too.  Create an XML sitemap, and use footer links kind of like how Rackspace does here to link out to deeper nested pages.  Always use “clean URLs” and trailing slashes in terms of URL structure – it’s good for SEO.  Also make sure you define your canonical URL, or primary URL, such as “www.site.com” and”site.com”.  Those are considered to be two different websites, and you don’t want Google to determine which one you prefer.

3.  Check your inbound links for anchor text enhancements. You could use SiteJuice 1.0′s Link Analysis module to find your most valuable inbound links and what anchor text was pointing to you.  You can read how the right anchor text will improve your search engine rankings on our blog.  We get them straight from Yahoo SiteExplorer, and while the new site is under development, you can try to re-target some of these links to the new pages with more descriptive anchor text.

4.  Make sure you re-direct all of the old pages. Many site owners forget this very important step.  Many times when you launch a new site, the old pages are still in Google’s index, but no longer available on your site.  In this case, a search result can have one of these “old pages” and link to a 404 error.  To fix this, you need to do a proper 301 redirect from the old page to the new page, or you can remove the page from Google’s index all together.

Good luck!

8 Comments »Tags: 301 redirect, anchor text, keyword research, new website SEO, site architecture

“SEO”, or search engine optimization has a few very common stigmas.  It’s either “too technical, and I wouldn’t know where to begin”, or “there’s too many snake oil salespeople and I don’t know who to believe”, or “I need a consultant and they are too expensive for me right now”.  We’re here to tell you that SEO is not as hard as you think, and you can do a lot of it yourself.  All you need to do is follow a few simple guidelines:

1.  Make sure you have the basic technical requirements in place. Ooooh…”technical” – you just scared me. Don’t worry, our SiteJuice product will be able to tell if your site has the basic technical requirements met, and if we find an error, we tell you exactly how to fix it (if you aren’t already signed up for the SiteJuice private beta, you should go ahead and do that now).  If you are using WordPress, there are some plugins you will want to use, such as the All in One SEO Pack, the Google XML Sitemap and Redirection plugins.  Those will allow you to set your SEO tags properly, submit your sitemap to the major search engines, and permanently redirect pages so you don’t have those pesky “404″ errors anymore.

2.  Choose your keywords carefully and be methodical.  Many websites make the mistake of either a) targeting too many keywords; or b) targeting really competitive keywords.  You want to choose keywords that are not so competitive to begin with, and work your way up to more competitive terms over time.  For instance, you don’t want to target your homepage for “internet marketing” just yet if you have a brand new website.  That term gets searched over 1 million times per month, and has thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of websites competing against you.  If there were five pizza shops on the same street, would you open another pizza shop, or a mexican restaurant?  Keyword targeting is kind of similar.  Once you have a short list of 5-10 keyword, write as much as you can about them, and monitor your rankings.  Once you appear on the first page for all of them, you can pick 5-10 new words, or try to move those initial words higher.   Read this article on Keyword Research Tools.

3. Consistently write good content. This is tough for a lot of people.  I just set up my mom with a brand spankin’ new website, and asked her to blog weekly about her business, which is easily something she can talk to you for hours about.  She was reluctant because she “didn’t know how to write well enough”, or “didn’t have time”, etc.  Don’t worry about any of that – just start writing and see if you can get some new traffic to your site.  It is almost certain that over time you will find a comfortable writing style and frequency.  Our blog generates nearly 50% of our traffic, so it’s a great way to get found by searches, and people will link to you if it’s good stuff.  Remember to write about the keywords you chose in #2.

4. Build links with the right anchor text. Once you have #1, #2 and #3 going, you want to think about how you can build links (a.k.a. “inbound links” or “backlinks”) to your website.  Google is looking for a diverse group of inbound links coming from trusted sites that have been around for a while.  This is why it’s not a good idea to purchase links from random companies or anything like that, since those can easily be flagged as spam and will end up hurting your rankings.  Getting links from sites or directories that contain the keyword you would like to rank for can boost your rankings significantly, depending on the value of those sites.  Read this article on The Power of Anchor Text in SEO to get a better idea of how to do this.

5. Have patience and give it time. There is no silver bullet in SEO, and if anyone is “guaranteeing” anything, they are either lying or picking really easy stuff to rank well for.  Give yourself a year of building good content and linking, and you will see results.  Expensive SEO consultants are a good idea once you have mastered all of the above, or you simply don’t have the time to manage it all anymore.

And that’s about it!  This is going to be just fine for 98% of the site owners out there who are competing for visibility in the search engines.  If you haven’t already, sing up to our private beta of SiteJuice 2.0, which will be released shortly after the 4th of July.

No Comments »Tags: anchor text, keyword tools, SEO basics

Anchor text refers to the text that is highlighted and underlined on a website that points to another website. For an image, the anchor text is contained in the alt tag, which is visible in the HTML.

Many sites have inbound links with general and non-descriptive text. This is no fault of yours, it’s just that the referring site did not understand the SEO value in pointing to you correctly.

Let’s look at an example of good and poor anchor text:

Poor anchor text
“Pear Analytics has software to help manage search engine optimization with a variety of plans and pricing.”

Better anchor text
“Pear Analytics, a company that builds search engine optimization software, offers a variety of plans and pricing.”

In the poor example, the site is pointing to us with our brand name. In reality, most sites will not have difficulty in ranking high for their company or brand name. If this link was from an especially good source, it would be a waste of inbound link potential. An even worse example of inbound link anchor text is “click here.”

In the better example, the site is linking to us with much a more precise and descript key phrase. This helps the search engine determine what the page is about, and the more inbound links with that exact anchor text, the higher we will eventually rank for that word or phrase.

SiteJuice offers an extensive analysis of your inbound links, ranking them from best to worst. You can easily see the anchor text pointing to you, and target text changes on the more valuable links.

3 Comments »Tags: anchor text, inbound links

What exactly is anchor text?

Well, anchor text is a common term we use in SEO to refer to the text links on a webpage.  These links are highly valuable in helping you rank for the search terms you desire.

The concept is fairly simple: make a list of the terms you would like to rank well for in Google or other search engines, and create links to your webpages with that as the linking text.  For example, if I want to rank well for “free SEO analysis”, then I would try to put that as linkable text on as many high authority and trusted websites as I could.  This is why if you were to copy the script for our free customizable widget for the Website Analyzer, you will see a link like this on the widget: a free SEO analysis by Pear Analytics.  The link brings the user to the page I want, and has the proper text in the link.  It is important that the copy on the page has to do with the anchor text as well.  Try to have the words in the link on the page somewhere, preferably in the title tag as well.  If you do any Google AdWords campaigns, you would be familiar with this methodology since this is the same general concept around the Quality Score (the ad has to be relevant to the page it is pointing to).

It works, and we proved it

Last week, my friend Nan Palmero wanted to know how he could rank high for the term “blackberry power user”.  If you know Nan, then you know that he really is the ultimate user of the BB.  At the time, he ranked somewhere on the third page of Google for this search term.  He frequently blogs for some big sites with lots of trust, like blackberrycool.com, mysa.com and others.  I found out that he was linking his name to his blog, so I asked him to go back to all of his old blog posts and change the anchor text from “Nan Palmero” to Nan Palmero, Blackberry Power User.  The next day he was on the first page of Google.

Try it, and let me know how it worked out for you.

2 Comments »Tags: anchor text, SEO