How well your web site performs in organic search results depends upon a lot of factors.  Organic search results are the non-paid listings in Google and other search engines.  Your Search Engine Optimization strategy must take into account many different things to rank well.  People often associate SEO with getting the right keywords on your web pages.  Although that is definitely a part of the story, there are many different aspects of SEO to think about.  If you have a large web site or you blog on a regular basis, your keywords will in effect take care of themselves.  Each one of your blog articles or web pages is typically written on a specific topic and the keywords will just come naturally… organically if you will.

When analyzing your SEO strategy you need to consider your web site copy, metadata, alt tags, inbound links, and so much more.  Questions you might ask yourself are:

• Is your web site getting enough traffic?
• Does your site have any SEO problems that might actually be hurting your organic search engine rank?
• How popular is your web site in the social media realm?

If you are curious as to how your web site is doing on all of these fronts, there is a great little tool called Website Grader that will analyze your site and grade it compared to hundreds of thousands of other web sites.  The report generated by this tool includes 5 sections:  Content, Optimization, Social Media Promotion,  Lead-to-Customer Conversion and Analysis.

Part I:  Content

This section looks for a blog – if you don’t have one, you’ll definitely lose points.  A blog is a great way to build your site content, adding more pages to the search engines and increasing your odds for being found organically.  If you have a blog, you will also be given a blog grade based on traffic levels plus the number and quality of links that point to it.  This section also looks to see how many pages you have indexed in Google and rates the reading level of your web site.

Part II:  Optimization

This section looks at your Search Engine Optimization, including your meta data, heading tags and alt tags.  It will take off points if you have any SEO problems but will also let you know specifically what the problems are so that you can correct them.  This section takes a look at your domain registration, including how long your domain has been registered and how much time until it expires.  Newer domains are penalized by the search engines (because so many come and go) and domains that are set to expire in less than a year are also penalized.  You can’t control the former, but you can definitely control the latter by renewing your domain for longer terms.

The Optimization section also looks at:

• Your inbound links which are vital to your organic rank.  Rule of thumb:  the more links you have, the more important you must be.
• Your MOZ rank which indicates your link authority or how popular your site is on a scale of 1-10.
• Your last Google crawl date — You want Google to crawl your site as often as possible to ensure that your latest content shows up in the search results.

Part III: Promotion

The Promotion section looks at your social media performance, including how many del.icio.us bookmarks you have and who’s talking about you on Google Buzz.  You will also receive a grade on your Twitter performance, based on your number of tweets and followers.

Part IV: Convert

The real value of your web site is to help you to convert leads into paying customers.  This section looks to see if you have an RSS feed and a conversion form.  A conversion form is just a fancy way of saying contact form – which is the primary way to get leads from your web site.

Part V: Analyze

The final section analyzes your web site’s traffic rank and overall performance.  You will be given a final “grade” and you can even post on your web site or facebook page a badge with your grade.  If you click on the badge above, you will see the report generated for WebImageDesigns.com.

This can be a very simple decision if your company name is available: www.yourcompanyname.com

But what if it’s not available?  What do you do then?

If you are a start-up company, this should be part of the process when you are deciding on a company name.  Make sure the domain name is available and buy it now!  Don’t wait or it might not be available later.  If you are deciding between a few different company names, you may want to buy all of them until your decision is final.  At $10 per year, domains are cheap!  If the name you want is not available, then you may want to try variations on the company name until you find one with an available domain.

If you have an established business and your domain name is not available, you may need to get creative — but not too creative!  You want to choose a name that will be easy to spell and remember.  Always keep your customers in mind as you choose your domain name.  For example, most lawyers use their middle initial in their practice, but will clients searching for you remember your middle initial?  Most likely not. 

Play around with different options – many hosting companies will even make suggestions for you if the first domain you enter is not available.  Some options to consider are:

• Abbreviate your company name
• Add inc or llc to the domain name if applicable
• Separate words in the company name with dashes
• Choose a different extension, such a .NET instead of .COM

Another option to seriously consider is to use your keywords in the domain name.  If you sell widgets, then check to see if www.buywidgets.com is available.  The greatest benefit to this option is that your site will rank higher for the keywords that are found in your domain name.

Choosing you domain name is an important decision. Choose wisely.

On-page Search Engine Optimization is the modification of the pages on your web site to include your chosen keywords.  The keywords should appear frequently in your copy but not so often that it stops making sense to your readers.  Don’t try to jam all of your keywords on a single page.  Each page on your web site should focus on a different set of keyword phrases.

In addition to the body copy, the following elements of your website should include your keywords:

• Title Tag
• Page Headings
• Anchor Text (aka Link Text)
• Alt Text (aka Alternative Image Text)
• Meta Keywords
• Meta Description

Title Tag

Make sure the title tag is unique, 70 characters or less, and contains pertinent keyword phrases to match the page copy.

Page Headings

Utilize H1 tags on every page.  Put your keywords in this tag to let the reader and the search engines know exactly what each page is about.

Anchor Text

The anchor text is the text that is underlined when you hyperlink.  Use meaningful, keyword-rich text that describes the page to which you are linking.  This is especially important if you are linking to one of the pages on your own website. 

So instead of using:

Click Here to download our Internet Marketing Workbook

Use:

Download our Internet Marketing Workbook now!

Alt Text

Alt text provides information about your images to screen readers (for the visually impaired) as well as to the search engines.  If possible, use your keyword phrases to describe the images on your web pages.

Meta Keywords

Although some search engines do not look at the meta keywords tag anymore, it can’t hurt to list your top keyword phrases for the ones that still do.

Meta Description

Although this tag is no longer used to determine your page rank, the meta description text is often placed beneath your link in the search results.  Therefore you want to populate this tag with keywords and marketing text that appeals to the reader, enticing him or her to click on your link!

Check back next week for Part II of the Web Site SEO series:  Creating an Inbound Link Strategy.

STOP RIGHT THERE!  Don’t dump that old website just yet!  Have you considered that your old website may have built up some credibility on Google and the other Search Engines?  That your current web pages may already rank well for some of your important keyword phrases?  Whether you worked hard on your Search Engine Optimization strategy or you got where you are by sheer luck, you don’t want to lose everything and start from scratch.  Do you?

Of course not!  So you need to have a web site redesign strategy in place before you upgrade to that new site.

Website Redesign Strategy 

1. Install Analytics on your current web site.  If you are not already running Google Analytics or some other analytics program on your website, you need to set this up ASAP. 
2. Review Analytics – You need to analyze the statistics on your current website.  What are your most visited pages?  What keywords are being used to find those pages?  This is very valuable information!
3. Keep well performing pages intact – Determine which pages are performing well and bringing a lot of traffic to your site.  You want to be very careful not to make any drastic changes to the content on these pages because it might have an adverse affect on your SEO.
4. Create Permanent Redirects – There is a good chance that your new web pages will have new names, especially if you are moving to a Content Management System.  You need to set up 301-Permanent Redirects to alert the search engines that your pages have moved and that anyone looking for your old pages should automatically be redirected to your new pages.  The benefits here are 2-fold:
   1. Visitors to your site will not get frustrated with page not found errors and leave your site to go to a competitor’s website
   2. Your pages will retain their SEO page rank. Page rank from the old pages is transferred to the new ones.

So by all means, upgrade the look & feel of your website – but not at the expense of losing your page rank & SEO standings.

Social Media is here to stay and LinkedIn can be a very valuable business tool.  So don’t be an empty profiler.  If this describes you, then it’s time to join the rest of the business world & get on-board with LinkedIn. 

Your first step is to complete your profile.  Do this before you start to look for connections.  The more you put into your profile, the more likely some past connections are going to find you!

Dust off your resume and use it to fill out your current and past work positions.  You’ll be amazed at how many of your old colleagues are connected on LinkedIn and before you know it they will find you.  Same goes for your education.  List all of the schools you’ve attended and your old classmates will find you too.  This is why social media can be so addicting.  It’s fun to catch up with old friends and you’ll learn to make new friends too (sounds like the advice your mom gave you on the first day of school!)

When you write a summary describing your current position and specialties, make sure you include keyword phrases (think SEO) because not only will people be searching within LinkedIn, but your profile will eventually make it into Google too!

Once your profile is about 80%-90% complete, you can start searching for connections and groups – after all it’s the “social” part that makes it fun.  But don’t forget about completing your profile. 

Aim For 100% Completion!

The trick to getting to 100% is giving and receiving recommendations.  You need to write recommendations for others and ask them to do the same for you.  It feels good to say nice things about others and you’ll feel pretty special if someone says great things about you too.

Where do you start?  First make a list of all the phrases you think people are searching for.  If you are running any analytics on your website, take a look at the reports and see what keywords real customers have already used to find you in the search engines – some of these may surprise you.  If these are not already on your list, add them.

Armed with your list of keywords, it’s now time to use some tools to analyze your list.  Google Adwords (Google’s Pay Per Click Advertising Program) offers a free keyword tool to help you build your keyword list:

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Enter in your keyword list with each keyword phase on a separate line.  Click “Get Keyword Ideas” and Google will generate a list of suggested keywords based upon traffic over the last month and over past 12 months.  Look for similar phrases and compare the traffic data.  For instance, if you are a Family Law Attorney you may be quite surprised to learn that many more people (55,000 more in May of 2009) are searching for Divorce Lawyer over Divorce Attorney in Google.  That’s a lot of additional searches in a single month so you may want to revise your copy and keyword strategy to include this phrase.  Analyzing the results from Google Adwords and other keyword tools may open your eyes to some additional keywords that you may not have thought about before.  Remember, you want to focus on what your customers are searching on and not what you would search on.

WordTracker also offers a free keyword tool (http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/) but I don’t find this as helpful as the Adwords tool.  If you want to try WordTracker, I would recommend that you sign up for their free trial at http://www.wordtracker.com which is much more robust than their free keyword tool.

It is also important to see how many other websites are competing for your keyword phrases.  The free tools unfortunately don’t really give you much data in this area.  SemRush is an online tool dedicated to analyzing your competition.  WordTracker also includes statistics on how many site are competing for the same keywords.  Both offer free trials so that you can try before you buy.  You can also do some legwork on your own by typing your top keywords into Google and analyzing the websites of your top competitors.

One last thing that I’d like to mention is what the SEO world refers to as “long-tail keyword phrases.”  These are often hidden gems in the search engine treasure chest.  Long tail keywords are just longer phrases – 3 to 5 words long that are very, very specific to your product or service or even geographical location.  If someone types in a very long keyword phase, they are looking for something very specific and are ready to buy it now.  The great news is that there is typically less competition for these longer keyword phrases to being with, so your odds of being found are even higher.  So if you are a BMW dealer in Boston, you would be more likely to close the deal with someone who finds your website with a search for “BMW M3 Convertible Boston” than you would for “Boston Car Dealership.”

If you have additional ideas for how to choose the right keyword phrases, please share your ideas with us by adding a comment below.