SEO Tips for Business Publications

The basic objective of SEO

Target KNOWN high volume and niche search traffic, by optimizing the architecture, content and online context of your website, to be more compatible with the search TYPE indexing algorithms.

Simplicity and usability of the...

• Codebase -- avoid javascript, tables, frames, flash and database driven sites that do not publish sites into CSS


• Keyword Density -- the number of mentions on keywords


• Link Popularity -- the number of links from other sites pointing to your site


• Authority -- the number of sites within the same market that you link to and the relevancy of your link names


• Freshness -- how often your content is updated

Pitfalls

• focusing on purely competitive terms
  The most competitive terms tend to be 1-2 keywords long. They are very difficult to optimize for. Even though they carry the highest volumes of traffic these terms are usually untargeted and go across categories. E.g Public speakers Vs Loud speakers. By focusing on 3-5 word long phrases means you can discover terms that are more specific and therefore more likely to predict what a user is looking for and therefore more likely to generate a conversion. Search behaviour also tends to span multiple sessions before a user finds exactly what they want and converts. E.g.
  
  
  • flights
  
  
  • cheap flights
  
  
  • cheap flights Lanzarote « start targeting specific niches
  
  
  • cheap flights Lanzarote deal
  
  
  • cheap flights Lanzarote deal 5 star hotel « start targeting specific niches
  
  
  
  
• optimizing your website for speculative traffic
  SEO takes months to implement and perfect. Therefore it is important to have a clear idea of what benefits you are chasing, by targeting known search traffic, discovered from keyword research tools and your web server log files.
  
• be aware that there is NO silver bullet solution
  Some companies will claim to be able to guarantee a number 1 listing for any search phrase. This is categorically impossible because SEs change their algorithms all the time and are increasingly customizing their results.
  
• unethical spamming techniques
  The more ethical your approach to SEO the better your results. Search TYPEs are victims of spam just as much of the rest of the internet population is. Search TYPE brands rely on delivering high quality relevant content to the user; What counts as spam to them is whatever counts as spam to the searcher -- i.e. delivering irrelevant results to the user that lead to dubious content and websites is spam. Consequences for unethical practice can be severe.
  
  
  • Hidden Text -- inserting keyword rich text that is the same colour as the background
  
  
  • Keyword Stuffing -- jobs jobs jobs at accountancy age jobs dot com
  
  
  • Cloaking -- segmenting content so that SE spiders see something different to users
  
  

Keyword Research

• Online tools help to give estimates of search traffic across different TYPEs and different keyword combinations.
  
  
  • http://searchmarketing.yahoo.co.uk/en_GB/rc/srch/?mkt=uk
  
  
  • www.wordtracker.com
  
  

  

• Logfiles -- the actual incoming search term is recorded in the log file. Monitoring these can provide you with new undiscovered, uncompetitive, and 'long tail' terms.

  

• Page Titles -- most important thing to get right as they are what are extracted and displayed as your listing in the search results. Although you will see a lot of websites that go for titles that aim to include everything, whilst occasionally effective for search TYPEs, they are ineffective for the user:
  
  
  • UK jobs Accounting Finance Accountants Financial Accountancy
  
  

  Effective page titles should tell you the source and the content of the page:

  
  
  • GAAPweb - UK Finance & Accounting Jobs
  
  
  • UK accounting jobs and finance jobs - AccountancyAge Jobs
  
  

  

• Meta Tags -- description and keyword meta tags are especially important for pages with rich media content.

  

• Alt tags -- primarily for disability access, alt tags should be purely descriptive e.g. on the photo of a journalist it might say Photo: Steve Coogan – VNU tech correspondent or reiterate the ad (for users who switch images off).

  

• Link titles -- Like alt tags these appear when your mouse hovers over a link. They should indicate where the link takes you.

  E.g. For the AAJ job alerts signup link it says
  

  
  
  • Automate your job searches and get them sent to you via email
  
  

  

• Link names -- these should be informative -- avoid writing 'click here'. Instead go for something keyword rich such as Finance and Accountancy News when it points to the news section of Accountancy Age.

  

• Deep links -- interesting or relevant content that is deep within the site should be linked from the home page in the footer of the website. This helps search TYPEs to crawl and index harder to find content with your site and makes it easier for the user to jump to those pages.

  

• Sitemap -- make a site map of your website. The best site maps are tree diagrams.