May 2005
4 (Four) - Ten Step SEO
Posted by Aaron on 31 May 2005
Copywriting
Copy is effectively what legitimizes your pages to the search engines. You’ll see pages in the Search Engine from time-to-time that have very little copy, but my observations show this to usually give temporary success. Meaning, you my get a quick boost in the search engines, but over time those listings tend to drop out rather quickly. The goal of the copy on your page should be to keep each page focused on one or two topics/search phrases.
Use section headings in your copy that use and highlight your keyword phrase(s). In the actual HTML, use H1 tags around those headers. Avoid using common words like hompage, home page, www, web page, the, of, it, and, to, etc. in your section headers. Some engines may simply quit indexing a specific tag as soon as it runs across one of these words.
Keyword Density - As you get more experience writing SEO copy, you’ll undoubtly hear many people talk about keyword density (KD). This is basically the ratio of keywords to the rest of the copy on your page expressed as a percentage. So, if your page has 500 total words and 10 of them are your keywords - your KD would be 2%.
Contrary to what some may tell you, there is no magic KD percetage that will guarantee you top listings. KD is just one piece of the puzzle. Generally, shoot for a KD of around 5% and keep your keywords sprinkled throughout the entire body of copy (equally distributed), while also keeping the copy readable and valuable to the user. You can take it a step furthur by analyzing the top several ranked pages for a given keyword phrase and use that information to help you determine your target KD for that same keyword.
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Tagged as: SEO, Optimization Tips
3 (Three) - Ten Step SEO
Posted by Aaron on 26 May 2005
Meta Tags
Yes, contrary to what you may have heard, meta tags are still an important part of Search Engine Optimization. True, they’re not as important to your rankings as they used to be - and some pages rank well without them - but it’s still worth putting a little time into developing quality keyword and description meta tags. But, be careful, if you do it wrong they may hurt more than they help.
As a general rule I will write the meta description tag as an honest and informative description of the site and make sure that I am using my keyword phrases in that description. 2-3 sentences should be plenty - I usually aim for 180-200 characters (with spaces - this number is based on Yahoo’s recommendations for their Search Submit Pro product).
Important Note! The description tag is used by some engines and directories to formulate the site description under your listing. Again, like with your title tag, if you optimize for position but not for the user reading the listing - you will lose clicks. So, make sure your description is written to entice users to click on your listing.
As for Meta Keywords, don’t stress-out with them, just list your top 10-12 keyword phrases separated by commas. Simple as that. Just don’t “stuff” or repeat keywords in the title tag over and over again. That would do more harm than good, you would be better off not using them at all.
As far as meta tag order goes… Within your HEAD tag - list your title first, then your description meta tag, then the keyword meta tag. Anything else in your HEAD tag should go after these three elements.
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Tagged as: SEO, Optimization Tips
Google’s new “prefetch” feature leads to misleading server stats
Posted by Aaron on 25 May 2005
Here’s an article from HotelMarketing.com about Google’s prefetch (pre-loading pages from results pages before a user clicks on them) “feature” (they quote prefetch; I quote feature… I mean - come on, is there a real advantage here? If so, I’m not seeing it)
With Mozilla growing at its present rate (Firefox is quickly approaching 10% market share), it’s something to think about, although there’s really not enough information here to make a qualified assessment. I doubt the mainstream tracking suites will have much trouble updating their software to account for Google’s pre-fetching, but if you’re using old, cheap or free stats packages, you may want to dig a little further to determine if you need make adjustments.
Google’s new “prefetch” feature leads to misleading server stats
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Tagged as: Google, Search Engines
2 (Two) - Ten Step SEO
Posted by Aaron on 24 May 2005
Title Tags
Title tags are a VERY important part of an SEO campaign, more important than most people realize. The importance of a well thought out Title tag on each page of your site is two-fold.
A. A good Title tag is an effective way to optimize your page and improve your search engine rankings. Search engines will read keywords from your tag and use the tag to help set a theme for your page.
B. A well written title tag will encourage users to click on your site. If you take a look at Google and Yahoo search results, you’ll notice that the page title is the copy that the engines use as the link into your site. If you optimize your tags for rankings, but ignore this fact - you’re losing out on traffic.
The title should be the first tag in the HEAD section on your html code. I make sure that the Title uses my main keyword phrase as close to the beginning of the tag as possible. I then finish the tag with some enticing copy that trys to tell the user, who is looking at it in the search engines, that *this* is what they are looking for.
I try to keep the tag between 50 and 70 characters (including spaces) - this is based on Yahoo’s best practices guide for their Search Submit Pro product. Also, avoid using “stop” words like and, home page, the, etc. - these are just fluff words that the engines will ignore anyhow.
If you want to see Title tags that work, do a search for your keyword and take a look at what pages are at the top of the results. And, just as importantly, take some time to think about which titles make you want to click on them.
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Tagged as: SEO, Optimization Tips
Yahoo! Travel Submit
Posted by Aaron on 23 May 2005
Anyone using it yet? I’m sure others would love to hear your experience.
Yahoo! is giving away FREE clicks until June 15 with a $50 deposit. There’s no better way to test a campaign then free… Travel Submit allow you to submit individual offers that will display on Yahoo Travel. I have a few clients testing it right now. There is definitely a lot of traffic to be had, and with just a few advertisers participating at the present time, we’ve been able to generate a fair amount of traffic from the placements. Conversions have been modest, but there have been a few of them - so some offer tweaking may be in order.
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Tagged as: Travel Marketing, Yahoo, Online Marketing
1 (One) - Ten Step SEO
Posted by Aaron on 20 May 2005
Analyzing the competition
Analyzing your competition should always be the first step in tackling a new keyword phrase. And it’s important to remember that your competition is anybody with a top 10 listing in the search engine(s) you’re targeting. You may not consider BillsTravel.com to be a real competitor to your business, but if they have a top 10 placement for a good keyword phrase and you don’t – he’s getting customers that you’re not. So always consider anyone you see on that first page as a real competitor.
So, again, the first step is to analyze those pages. The logic here is simple. No one knows quite what the algorithms are that determine where your page is going to rank, so we want to determine what is working well so that we can “one-up” them. Sometimes you’ll find that your competition is savvy and that taking over a top spot will be a challenge, but many times you’ll find that outdoing them is fairly easy.
You’ll want to look at each of your competitor’s pages with an eye out for page elements that they have in common. Some of those things are Title tags, header tags with keywords, proximity of the words in your keyword phrase to each other, keywords in linking text, bolded text, long or short pages, etc. Then you’ll want to view the source of the page and look at things like the meta tags, image ALT tags, html code. You might find a page format that works especially well – maybe pages with left-hand sidebars, or pages without complex table layouts.
Cloaking – cloaking is when the page that the site is serving up is different from the page that the search engine sees when it crawls the site. This is done by software that serves up an optimized page to the SE when it is visited by the SE’s IP address, but serves up the regular pages when viewed by any other IP address. I don’t recommend using this technique, but you need to be aware of it when analyzing your competitor’s pages, because you may not be looking at what the search engine is looking at. So, what I do when analyzing competitor’s pages for Google and Yahoo is I always look at the search engine’s “cached” copy of the page if available. You can be assured, then, that you are always looking at the same page that the SE is.
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Tagged as: SEO, Optimization Tips
Ten Step SEO
Posted by Aaron on 19 May 2005
I read a lot abouut how to Optimize your site for the search engines, and god knows there is plenty out there. The problem is that no one really KNOWS all the best practices. Even the big SEO companies who claim to know the secrets, have wiz-bang software and have special relationships with the engines (yea, right!) don’t really know.
sidenote-
They do know how to sell their services though. In fact, here is a great article on some of those big SEO firms from Rank Smart:
Why The Big SEO Company Is Killing The True SEO
But, back to the point. Over the next couple of weeks I will be posting a ten-step SEO program comprised of best practices for your site, as I see them, for travel websites. No guaranteed top ten Google spots, no guarantee that my collegues and counterparts won’t disagree with some of them (please post comments if you do), and it’s not meant to replace your proffessional SEO consultant (especially if that consultant is me). Just common sense things you can do to make your site more search engine friendly. It will have a slant towrad the travel industry as well, which is sometimes hard to come by in the general SEO media.
We’ll start tomorrow - stay tuned!
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Tagged as: SEO, Optimization Tips
Executive Travel Job Listings from Travel Career Connexxions
Posted by Aaron on 16 May 2005
