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Archive for the ‘The Basics of SEO’ Category

Geek Joke of the Day:

So this SEO copywriter walks into a bar, grill, pub, public house, Irish bar, bartender, drinks, beer, wine, liquor. – (Author Unknown)

To an SEO hack the above joke may be funny (I laughed.)   To a website owner; not so funny because chances are your website has been optimized along the lines of the above joke.

If your content is filled with spammy keywords in an attempt to gain better footing with search engines your SEO company may not be doing all it should for you.

Ixnay the keywort stuffing. Google, still the reigning king of search engines, does not even use the meta keyword tag.  So adding a million keywords to this tag will not impress Google.  A lazy company (or one that lies) will over stuff this tag and call it “optimization.”

Fine.  So I will stuff keywords in my content Mr. Search Engine! Wrong again.  People are not robots and do not respond well to content like this:  “Our Vermont personal injury law firm attorneys are experienced personal injury lawyers helping accident and personal injury victims throughout Vermont including citym city, city, city….”

Even if a search engine is fooled by all this content trickery your readers will not. Readers who encounter keyword overstuffed sites usually just abandon them immediately.  They either think you are a bad writer (and therefore, bad business owner or attorney) or decide you care more about impressing search engines than you do about providing them with real information.

Look, I will be frank, honest, open, daring, direct. (See how annoying stuffing is?) Appellate lawyers are often highly respected for their excellent writing skills.  Do you really want to sound like an idiot on your website because your SEO company says “you have to do this to get search engines to pay attention?”  Answer:  No, nope, uh-uh.

So.  How do you effectively use keywords in SEO?

Follow these three simple steps:

1. Read Google Webmaster Guidelines – and follow them.  There is a reason Google is so open-book about how their search engine robots view, digest and spit out (in search query results) information obtained from your website.  Money.  Google wants people to use their search engine – they make a lot of money from sponsor ads and pay-per-click.  The more people who trust and use their engine, the more money they make.  The better they can index your website and spit it out in a a good search match that makes you money, the happier Google users will be.
2. Write content for people and SEO work for search engines.  Getting search engines to pick up and index your site is really not that hard (if you follow step #1.)  Getting readers to convert to clients and customers requires a lot more than SEO.  Think about it this way.  When you get junk mail in the U.S. mail do you read it all?  Which would you be more likely to read a postcard with random words repeated all over it, or one that provided clear information and a good call to action?
3. Do your research and address your human audience.  If your website is not performing sometimes it is because your site is not well optimized, or your lack the right content.  But sometimes it is simply because someone else with a competing website is doing a better job than you are.  Take time to research what sites are grabbing top spots and study them to see what they are doing better than you.  The second thing you need to research is keywords people search on.  I cannot tell you how many times I have explained to attorneys that attorneys search for legal terms – most potential clients do not.  While showing #1 in all the world for tort lawyer may sound cool, it will not bring you much, if any new clients from general searches because most people think “tort” is a delicious dessert.

The bottom line is that to take top spots you do not just have to improve your website, you have to be better than the competition.  Every time a website climbs a notch – someone elses’ has to go down a notch, rung, tick, slot, degree…

2010 has been a big year for algorithm changes made by Google. In April, there was Google Caffeine, followed immediately by Google Mayday in May. Then, another round of of algorithm changes in September Google kicked off Google Instant sending many webmasters into a panic. And now, in late October 2010, Google has launched yet another huge change in its Place Search product.

First, the way Google displays business listings has changed. In the past, business listings taken from the Google Places directory (which used to be called “Google Business”) would appear at, or very close to the top of search query results next to a small Google map. Up to seven businesses were shown when a local listing could be matched with a search query. Business owners that did not have websites could still have a business listing on Google and show up in search results.

But that has changed.

Three great places to get information about the changes are:

• Showing Up in Local Searches on Google – Google Place Search Algorithm Change
• Google Blog Post About Place Search; and
• Expand2Web – a great video explanation as well as tips on how to deal with the new changes.

Stem Legal recently posted a nice comparison of blogging options for lawyers.  Legal Blog Software Showdown offers a brief overview and recommendations for attorneys based on several factors including their budget, skill levels, and how much hand-holding they need from a blog service provider.

The only thing we would like to add to Stem’s article is that TypePad is not a viable option for anyone interested in having a high-ranking blog site.  TypePad continues to be light years behind in providing SEO tools – even with the upgraded subscription.  Forget access to hardcore (or even softcore) SEO tools with TypePad.

If you do not have a Google Webmaster Central account, you should.  If you have a Google Webmasters account, you should be using it.

Be sure to take advantage of their new speed tools. From your account, select your website.  Then:

Click Labs + Site Performance.

You will see a graph (if enough data exists about your website) depicting how fast your website loads in comparison to the general population of websites.

Under this graph be sure to read “Page Speed Suggestions.”  This will give you an overview of ways to improve your sites’ speed performance.

In case you missed the announcement, in April 2010, Google launched a new algorithm called “Google Caffeine” in which websites with slow loading pages can be penalized or even dropped from search engines.

If what you see makes no sense to you, contact and SEO / SEM professional to help you understand what needs to be done.   Just be sure to take any specific website cautions from Google seriously:  if Google is warning you that your website needs to be optimized for speed — do it!

It’s out!  It’s live!  It’s a free hour of website development and SEO strategy consulting from Google experts.  Before you hire an SEO company, take a little time to educate yourself.  This is a good video for general information about SEO from Google’s perspective.

About this video:  Google’s 2010 Site Review video is an hour-long site session hosted by Matt Cutts of Google.  If you are brand new to SEO some of this will be a little over your head but not so far as to intimidating.  If you are already a hard-core SEOer you will find Matt entertaining as usual, but probably not learn anything new.

The video takes actual sites submitted by businesses and reviews them for SEO, content, layout, security issues, breadcrumbs, Google tools, and links.  Also discussed, domain names, “trophy phrases” vs. long-tail keyword searches and much more.

Matt Cutts: “You don’t want search ranking, you want traffic.  You don’t really want traffic, you want conversion.”  Cutts dishes on Google strategies to help increase conversion rates.