…or 12-Steps to SEO
Marketing folks are being tasked with improving their website’s SEO rankings, and often don’t know where to start. Often they’ve end up being the adoptive parent of a child that hasn’t been shown enough love — and the result can be a sprawling, out of control, hard to manage spoiled brat!

To get out of bad habits/addictions/lifestyles, 12-step programs have been developed to help people develop a game plan to get them better. Why not a 12-step program for websites needing SEO help that marketers can understand? To make it more fun, I’m using Sports Illustrated’s 2008 Swimsuit Edition for a few examples of these twelve steps!

1. <title> tags appear at the top of the browser, and is the first information an indexing spider reads. Keep your titles keyword rich, short and robust. Keep in mind that browers can only display a limited title length, so anything longer doesn’t help the visitor determine page relevance. The title tag that Sports Illustrated uses is: SI.com - 2008 Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition. Note: All words in the title also happen to be keywords or keyword phrases.
2. Descriptions - use this meta tag to describe the contents of each page using keyword-rich words. Keep the character count to 160, and make sure it makes sense so people using search engines understand what the content will be on your page before they get there.
   Sports illustrated uses this description: The 2008 Sports Illustrated Swimsuit photo gallery. See other top models in the SI Swimsuit Edition at SI.com.
   >>Go to www.google.com or MSN Live Search and do a search on “swimsuit edition” (no quote marks necessary). Both Google and MSN Live Search have picked up the Sports Illustrated description exactly as it’s been entered in the meta tag — and that this page ranks first with both search engines on the keywords swimsuit edition. Interestingly enough, the word “swimsuit” on its own gives the same page the #1 slot at Google; at MSN Live Search “swimsuit” on its own drops to fourth, three after the Borat Mankini Swimsuit (gotta see that one…). Changing the search to “swimming suit” drops SI to lower, but still respectable 8th.
3. Keywords - make a listing of the most important keywords on each page. Don’t repeat them, and don’t use words that are unreleated. Keep the character count to 250 characters.
   Sports Illustrated uses these keywords: Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition, SI Swimsuit Edition, swimsuit model photo gallery, 2008, SI.com
4. <h1> tags - these are nearly as important as the <title> tag. Use the most important keywords that correspond to your content in the <h1> tag, if possible
5. <h2> tags - these give structure to your content for the spiders, and draws attention to the content sections on your page. Try to use keywords here as well.
6. Opening sentence of your content - this is extremely powerful, so make sure it is a good summary of your content. Make it keyword rich (and relevant).
7. Page content - don’t just throw keywords in. Make sure your content makes sense and consider if it makes sense for your reader. Throwing a bunch of keywords into the content doesn’t make sense unless the content makes sense!
8. Anchor text - it doesn’t matter if your links are inbound or outbound, the text for those links should be meaningful and contain keywords. Instead of the overused phrase “click here”, a phrase like “Desktop Calendar - Date a different model every month.” is much more meaningful and can contain keywords.
9. Image “alt” attributes - by putting text on the images, you can squeeze in more keywords AND increase the usability of your pages.
10. Link and images title tags - overlooked, but powerful. Make them descriptive and rich with keywords.
11. Bold text - they catch the attention of your visitor, and the Search Engines as well. Desktop Calendar, Swimsuit Cover and Swimsuit Edition are all SI examples.
12. Keywords in the urls - try to use name your pages using the most important keyword(s) on the page. Sports Illustrated uses urls like this one: http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/features/2008_swimsuit/

SEO is time consuming, and the best way to manage it is to pick a handful of your most important pages and apply each of the 12 steps — or as many as you can — to them, one after the other, step by step. And be patient: your pages won’t improve in the search engine listings overnight. But when they do, they will be AMAZING!

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This entry was posted on Thursday, October 30th, 2008 at 9:56 pm and is filed under Google, Internet Marketing, Web 2.0 SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.