Links
There are three kinds of links we’ll discuss; inbound, outbound, and internal. When it comes to links, inbound links, or backlinks, are the most important since they are somewhat of a measure of the popularity of your site.

An inbound link is a link to your site from another site. In Googles own words: “The best way to ensure Google finds your site, is for your pages to be linked from lots of pages on other sites. Google’s robots jump from page to page on the Web via hyperlinks, so the more sites that link to you, the more likely it is that we’ll find you quickly.” Of course it can be difficult if not impossible for others to link to your content with any regularity or reliability.

Outbound links are links that start from your site and lead to another. It’s important to know that the quality of the sites you link to reflects on your site. If you link out to spamy or suspect sites, then that reflects negativly on your site and will lower your search position or even black-listed.

Internal links are links from one page to another page within the same Web site. These are another important part of your SEO plan for your site, as they will help ensure that a larger portion of your site is indexed. The search engine spiders arrive on your home page and then will start to work their way down the chain through links you have. If there are internal links, the spider will continue to mine information from the various sections of your site. So, the more robust an internal link schema you have, the bigger imprint on the search results you have the potential to make.

Metatags
Meta elements are HTML or XHTML elements used to provide information about a given Web page and are not obvious to a user visiting the site. Metatags are not nearly as important now as they were in years past. Originally, the meta tags where how search engines determined a page or sites relevance, but people began to use them for keyword stuffing and spamdexing. As a result, the search engines turned to looking at the actaul content of a page instead of realying on the meta tags so much. While they are not as important as they once were, they are still part of the SEO equation. There’s no guarantee that using meta elements in your Web pages will greatly improve your rankings, it’s still worthwhile to include them.

There are several meta attributes, but the two I wanted to mention are the meta description and the meta keywords. Below is the html code:
The keywords attribute: While most search engines give little, or no value to this meta element, its still worth the time to help emphasize your target keywords.

The description attribute: Unlike the keyword attribute, most major search engines support the description attribute. Many search engines, including Google, index and use the text within the element as the description text for display in search results.

Content
As we have mentioned in our previous posts, regular, relevant, and unique content is critical, not only to your readers, but to Search engines as well. The more frequently a site is updated the higher the probability search engine spiders will revisit the site sooner. For many sites this can be a challenge, but just having a news section on your site that is updated regularly is an easy place to start. Another way to get regularly updated is through RSS feeds.

Static URL vs. Dynamic URL
As mentioned in our Keyword placement article, the page URL is an effective place to use keywords. But in order to use them the URL needs to be “friendly.”

This is where it is important to understand the difference between static and dynamic URLs. A dynamic URL is created automatically by some script or with the help of the database and typically use characters like: ? = &. A dynamic URL may look like this: website.com/design.php?category=5&product=42.

On the other hand, a static URL is one that does not change and may look something like this website.com/design/portfolio.html. Although dynamic URLs can be crawled and indexed by search engines, static URLs are known to have a slight advantage for a number of reasons:

1. Static URLs typically rank better in search engines.
2. Search engines are known to index the content of dynamic pages much more slowly than that of static pages.
3. Static URLs look “friendlier” to end-users.

Google and other seach engines are making progress in determining which parameters can be removed from dynamic URLs, so if you currently have a site that generates dynamic URLs do not panic. Eliminating some of the parameters to make it look static would be a very time consuming effort and could cause more harm than good.

As you have probably gathered from reading this series of SEO articles, when it comes to optimizing your Web site for search engines, there is no one single, magic solution. It takes strategy, time, and patience to achieve high rankings. But once your process is in place, it’s really quite painless and as you can see from the examples we’ve shown, it can pay off significantly in a short amount of time.

There are several places where keywords and phrases are used most effectively to optimize any Web page. We’ll take a brief look at four of the most important elements, including title tags, header tags, content, and the page URL.

Title Tag
A title tag is what appears at the very top of a Web browser window, not to be mistaken for a header tag. This is arguably the most important on-page factor for search engine optimization. Whatever is written inside the <title> tag is the clickable link on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP). The title tag is also among the first set of words a search engine spider encounters when determining the type of content on the site. This may be one of the quickest and easiest ways to generate immediate and noticeable differences in your search engine rankings.

If you are working within the HTML code the TITLE tag will look like this: <title>Title of the document</title>. Most CMS systems automatically generate an appropriate title tag and an SEO friendly URL based on the content on the page.

Header Tags (<H1>, <H2>, etc.)
Placing your keywords within the headers is another critical place that carries a lot of importance.

If you are unfamiliar with HTML code, H1 indicates the most important heading on a page; usually it’s the topmost heading also. For example, the H1 heading of this post is “Keyword Placement for SEO.” More weight is given to keywords that appear within H1 tags, H2 tags get less, and so on down the chain.

Content
As you might expect, the search engines also scan your content for keywords. While the keywords in your body copy don’t have as much weight on their own as your title or headers – they do have an effect. Though keywords in your content don’t carry much weight individually in the search ranking, the search engines have very complex systems that increase your page rank even more when keywords in the various page elements match up.

Page URL
Your page URL is also part of this whole system. Ideally, the file name for the page will match up to your TITLE tag and H1 tag, along with some of the body copy. For example we can see our title, H1 and file name for this page working in concert.

Besides the basic placement of your keywords in those four page elements, there are a number of Dos and Don’ts that will help maximize your SEO return.

Do:
Optimize every page – Just like the cumulative effect of keywords in various elements on a single page, properly optimized pages across your site will improve its standings with the search engines.

Use accurate keywords for content – Write content that accurately reflects what is on your pages and keyword density will happen naturally.

Use synergy – If you use keywords properly in all your page elements, your search rank becomes greater than the sum of its parts – that concept is at the crux of SEO.

Keep the content flowing – Regular updates to your site content will result in more frequent visits from the search engine spiders.

Don’t:
Keyword stuff – Stuffing refers to a number of methods where one crams a page with all manner of keywords in an attempt to improve search position. In the SEO process of incorporating keywords into a page and a site, it is extremely important to remember that keywords can be overused and become detrimental to search engine ranking. Use keywords only as they are truly relevant to the subject matter and in a manner that makes sense to the average user.

Be scattered – Page elements, especially title header and body copy that seem unrelated will result in penalties from the search engines. Also no one will click on a link in Google if it is a collection of unrelated words.

Of course, this isn’t a comprehensive guide to all the elements of SEO, but we hope it will help those who are new to SEO get started on this simple but very powerful practice.

Related articles in Align:
• What is SEO
• How to Pick Keywords for SEO

At first you may think choosing a couple keywords to describe your site should be pretty easy, right? Well, yes and no. There are several factors to consider when selecting the most effective keywords for your site. To begin, it is important to understand that the most effective SEO strategy involves optimizing every page and not just your home page. When selecting keywords you can always start with more general keywords for your top-level pages and then be more specific on secondary pages. Optimizing every page is critical since they all generate traffic to your site.

When selecting keywords, you not only want to pick words that describe your content, you also want to think about words that would be used to describe your site. The Web is so densely populated with content that it is nearly impossible to obtain a top rating for a one-word search string, therefore optimizing your site using keywords, as well as specific key phrases is a much more effective approach.

Most searches are three words or more and when people search for answers, they often phrase their search terms as questions. Therefore, when thinking about your keywords and phrases think like your audience or potential customer and ask yourself “what search phrases will people most likely use to look for the content on this site?” or “what questions does this site answer?”

As we were selecting keywords for our own SEO strategy, our research made it apparent that it would not be wise to focus our keyword strategy on a broad subject like “graphic design” since the chances of users finding our site amongst over 65 million search results are slim. Instead, we used other, less competitive phrases that are most likely to be used by people trying to find us. Pairing “graphic design” with more specific phrases such as “association magazine redesign” significantly narrows down the search results and also provides a more accurate description of the services we provide.

If you are not sure where to start, or you to want refine your selected keywords and phrases, there are several helpful online resources to help, such as Google’s Keyword Tool. This tool lets you enter the URL of your Web site, or of any site related to your business, and suggests a list of relevant keywords based on the site’s content. It also shows statistics of the search popularity as well as the level of competition for the various keywords. Online tools like this are a great help, and I certainly recommend using them, but ultimately your own understanding of your pages and your audience should be the basis for determining your SEO strategy.

After you have brainstormed, researched, and selected your keywords, it’s time to incorporate them into your site. In the next post, we’ll look at how and where to use them, including placement within the title tags, header tags, URLs, and body copy.

Related articles in Align:
• What is SEO
• Keyword Placement for SEO

This is the first in a series of posts about SEO. Many of you reading this have probably at least heard of the term SEO. So what exactly is it? Is it just marketing a buzzword, or is it a worthwhile investment? In this post we’ll begin by briefly explaining what SEO is, and give a basic explanation on how it works. In the following posts, we’ll take a more in-depth look at how to implement a few SEO techniques.

SEO, which is an acronym for Search Engine Optimization, is the process of improving the placement or rank of a Web site in organic search results – not the ads. Typically, the higher the rank in search results, the more referral traffic you will gain from search engines.

It is important to understand what we mean when we say organic search results. The organic listings are the main listings you see when doing a search, while the paid links, or ads, typically run at the top or the side of your browser window. Not only are organic search results free, research has shown that consumer preference is placed on the organic search results rather than the paid links as people feel they carry a greater level of trust and authority. This is just another reason why SEO is critical to any online marketing strategy.

Search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN drive the majority of Internet traffic, and to better explain how SEO works it is important to understand how these search engines interpret the information on a Web site. Most search engines use computer programs, commonly called “spiders,” to search and analyze content on the Web. The information gathered by these spiders is crosschecked for validity, indexed, and stored in a database. The search engines use this information to determine the most relevant results for each search request.

Essentially, SEO is an of understanding how the search engines work combined with the knowledge of what users might search for when looking for your site. We’ll look at a few SEO techniques and go into more detail in our next posts, including optimizing the text, title and meta tags, images, link building and some do’s and don’ts when it comes to SEO.

In the meantime, if you would like to continue the SEO discussion or you would like feedback on another topic, feel free to join our LinkedIn group.

Related articles in Align:
• How to Pick Keywords for SEO
• Keyword Placement for SEO