Six SEO Guidelines Recommendation for You

Key recommendation 1

Adopt a balanced approach to SEO which creates a long-term plan and an effective process to maximize your performance in the key areas of index inclusion, on-page optimization and link-building.

We believe that successful SEO is all about deploying the right resources to achieving maximization across these six areas (highlighted in bold):

It’s about maximizing the inclusion and visibility of a brand online as users search for the brand and product-related information – is your brand visible in the SERPs.

It’s about maximizing the volume of quality visitors to destination sites from the search engines through encouraging them to click through to your pages.

It’s about maximizing your position in the SERPS pages for both natural listings and sponsored or paid listings.

It’s about maximizing the return on your investment to achieve visibility and click through by selecting the right approaches to SEM and the right execution.

An expert in on-page optimization or link-building will not generate the best results without sound planning based on detailed key phrase analysis.

Similarly, these approaches will be unsuccessful if the company does not overcome the initial technical challenges of index inclusion.

This lack of visibility makes it difficult to make a definitive business case for SEO, although it is fairly obvious what a sought-after number one position on Google would do for most companies.

It is nevertheless impossible to predict and guarantee positions and click volumes from SEO, because the impact of future changes to the algorithm is unknown. Ditto competitor activity – you don’t know what they’ll be doing in future.

So, for a given investment of £1, $1 or €1 it is difficult to estimate the returns compared to paid- search, or indeed traditional advertising, or direct mail, where more accurate estimates are possible.

However, we will see that estimates of long-term returns from SEO can and should be made.

Key recommendation 2

SEO is a long-term strategy. To identify the correct investment requires a long-term cost/benefit analysis. If this doesn’t occur, SEM strategy is often imbalanced in favor of SEO.

Technical disadvantages?

Technical constraints may also limit your SEO capabilities – for example, if there is not the right IT resource, knowledge or technology available to implement the changes to site structure and content markup needed for SEO.

For example, websites created entirely using Flash cause readability problems for search engine robots, so onsite optimization is somewhat redundant.

Content disadvantages?

There is a clear need for better education among content authors. They need to know what key phrases to use, and where to use them, whenever they add and update content.

Balance is required when authors create pages, since they are being created for both search engines and humans.

Copy and language which is effective for SEO can be different to naturally written copy, although the search engines seek to identify and reward natural language. There needs to be a compromise and subtle balance between the two so that pages are intelligible to users, but are also great search engine fodder.

The mantra is to write for users, but to label content accurately for Googlebot.

Because of these problem areas many companies focus their online marketing strategy on PPC.

Ad buying and planning remains the staple diet of marketers, so buying PPC ads comes naturally.

Indeed, PPC is often the first step into the world of search for many ‘offline’ marketers, the lowest hanging fruit. ROI from paid-search can be excellent, but you mustn’t allow these potential problem areas – or the ease of buying PPC ads – to distract you from the joys of organic search optimization.

Key recommendation 3

SEO is not purely a technical discipline to be conducted by a specialist team or agency. It requires a different style to traditional copywriting which requires training of content owners and reviewers.

Paid-search advantages

 Predictability. Traffic, rankings, returns and costs tend to more stable and more predictable  than SEO. It is more immediately accountable, in terms of ROI, while SEO can take much  longer to evaluate.

 More straightforward to achieve high rankings – you simply have to bid more than your competitors, although Google also takes the Quality Score of your ad into account. SEO requires long-term, technically complex work on page optimization, site restructure and link- building, which can take months to implement and results to occur.

Faster. PPC listings appear much faster, usually in a few hours (or days if editor reviews required).

Flexibility. Creative and bids can also be readily modified or turned-off for particular times.

 The results of SEO can take weeks or months to be achieved. Content modifications to existing pages for SEO are usually included within a few days. PPC budgets can also be reallocated to in line with changing marketing goals (eg: a bank can quickly switch paid- search budget from ‘loans’ to ‘savings’).

Automation. Bid management systems can help financial predictability through using rules to control bidding in line with your conversion rates to reach an appropriate cost per sale.

 However substantial manual intervention is required for the best results for different search ad networks.

Branding effect. Tests have shown that there is a branding effect with Pay Per Click, even if users do not click on the ad. This can be useful for the launch of products or major campaigns.

Paid-search disadvantages

Competition. Since Pay per Click has become popular due to its effectiveness, it is competitive and because it is based on competitive bids it can get expensive. CPC/bid inflation has led to some companies reducing PPC activity. Some companies may get involved in bidding wars that drive bids up to an unacceptable-level – some phrases such as ‘life insurance’ may exceed £10 per click.

Higher costs. IF SEO is effective it will almost always deliver a lower CPC.

Favours big players. For companies with a lower budget or a narrower range of products on which to increase lifetime value it may be not possible to compete. Large players can also get deals on their media spend through their agencies.

Complexity of managing large campaigns. PPC requires knowledge of configuration, bidding options of the reporting facilities of different ad networks. To manage a PPC account may require daily or even hourly checks on the bidding to stay competitive – this can amount to a lot of time. Bid management software can help here.

Missed opportunities. Sponsored listings are only part of the SEM mix. Many search users do not click on these, so you cannot maximise the effect.

Click fraud is regarded by some as a problem, especially in some sectors. Click fraud is covered in the detail in the Econsultancy Best Practice guide to Paid-search.

What you will find in this guide

Structure of this guide on SEO Best Practice

We have seen that many factors influence successful SEO (SEO). To help simplify our explanation of best practice, E-consultancy has identified 6 key groupings of success factors for SEO which are summarized for quick reference in Figure 5. Within each of these areas, detailed Recommendations of best practice for all significant ranking factors are explained.

Six groupings of success factors are used to structure the recommendations in this best practiceguide:

Success factor 1: SEO planning and strategy

How to develop a structured plan to evaluate and improve SEO, covering these topics:

 Setting goals through demand analysis and conversion modelling.

 Auditing current performance including competitor benchmarking.

 Keyphrase analysis and selection.

 SEM strategy – integration between SEO, PPC and other online marketing.

 Evaluation and improvement process.

 Resourcing.

Success factor 2: Index coverage

How to achieve index inclusion in the different search engines covering these topics:

 Site submission – how to get a new site listed in the search engines.

 Google Sitemaps – an essential tool for evaluating and improving index coverage.

 Evaluating site index inclusion and robot indexing activity.

 Site inclusion and page exclusion – how to use Robots.txt and Meta tags to control.

 Domain strategy – approaches to distribute content across different domains including issues such as top-level domain variants, sub-domains, geolocation (international domains), domain hijacking and canonicalization.

 Time-related content issues including the Google sandbox effect, content freshness and link velocity.

 Indexing of dynamic content including problems with URL rewriting and Session ids.

Success factor 3: On-page optimization

In this section we make recommendations on how you should create documents which the search engine will assess as being highly relevant to a particular search term a search user has entered as their query. The most basic test of relevance is the number of times the search phrase appears on the page. However, there are many factors which are also applied. In this section we will review:

 Within page keyphrase factors including keyword density, synonyms and position

 Page markup keyphrase factors including syntactical accuracy, <title> tags, <meta> tags, <a href=> hyperlink tags and <img> alt tags.

 Document-level keyphrase factors such as the inclusion of keyphrases in the domain and document file name.

An additional guide on on-page optimization is provided in Appendix

1. Copywriting for SEO – a guide for content owners and reviewers.

Success factor 4: Link-building

In this section we show why the links between pages are at least important as on-page optimization in determining results from SEO. We will review the principle of PageRank, pioneered by Google to assess the relevance of pages based on their link popularity. PageRank has many implications for the way sites should be built and pages are linked, and we describe six principles you need to be aware of. Although PageRank is today not given as much weighting in generating search results, many of these principles can still be applied to give better results from SEO.

We will also recommend approaches on the six main strategies for external link-building from third party sites:

1. Natural link-building through quality content

2. Requesting inbound-only links

3. Reciprocal linking

4. Buying links

5. Creating your own external links

6. Generating buzz through PR

Success factor 5: A structured process for SEO

In this section we bring together all the techniques detailed earlier in the report and recommend the best overall approach to SEO. We have identified 10 classic approaches to SEO which are part of a typical SEO project.

The ten processes or activities are:

1.      Improve index inclusion.

2. Revise site architecture and linking strategy.

3. Internal linking strategy.

4. External link-building.

5. Improve page template effectiveness.

6. Improve SERPS effectiveness.

7. Refine SEO for homepage and other key pages.

8. Creation of themed pages for target keyphrases.

9. Partitioning of existing content between different pages.

10. Optimize other existing pages.

Success factor 6: Conversion efficiency

The main part of this report has focused on how to attract quality visitors to a website. But of course, to be of value overall, SEO must meet the marketing objectives of a site.

In this final section we review how to best devise landing pages of the site to meet this goal. We also look at the implications of structuring these pages. The principles we will explain for effective landing pages for SEO also support the aims of other e-communications such as paid-search, online advertising, affiliate marketing and e-mail marketing.

The main topics we will cover are:

Setting balanced objectives for landing pages.

Understanding different types of landing pages.

Balancing usability, accessibility and persuasion.

Measuring landing page effectiveness.

Ten guidelines to improve landing page efficiency.

Features of this guide

We have incorporated a range of features to help make this guide an effective learning tool:

1.      Key recommendations. Guidance on issues which an organization should pay attention to in their SEO strategy.

2.      Tips. Practical recommendations to improve results.

3. The Stats. Boxes which summarize research that supports a success factor.

4. Links. Links to tools, articles and portals found within the body text, footnotes and in the    resources section at the end of the guide.

5. SEO Ranking success factors boxes. Designed for easy reference, these cover all of the major factors which affect SEO results. These are mainly positive factors which will improve factors, but associated negative factors are also referred to.

Each box often contains several related best practice ranking factors. These boxes have been designed to be consulted at a glance to understand best practice without reading too much text.

The ranking success factors are structured based on the experience of the author and the review team, but as part of the review process each factor has been checked against other existing lists of ranking success factors13.

Keeping up-to-date with the latest developments in SEO

Part of the fascination of being involved with online marketing is the pace of change. The rate of change is certainly greatest for SEM and often it has the largest impact. Marketing techniques which are effective today may no longer be effective next year, or even tomorrow…

Engineers at the likes of Google and Yahoo constantly try to improve the relevance of search results, while staying one step ahead of the spammers. For this reason algorithms never stay the same for very long, and marketers must continually be on their toes, to react to changes.

Updates to the algorithms used by search engines change the positions of the listings, so you might be top of Google today and on the third page tomorrow, in theory. This is sometimes referred to as the ‘Google Dance’. It keeps some marketers awake at night.

Google’s „Florida Update‟ caused dramatic changes to the natural listings, with some websites dropping out of the rankings altogether. And this is why it pays to be ethical, to think about the future, and to avoid any grey areas.

A big part of managing the opportunity and risk of search engine marketing is keeping informed about the latest developments and, in particular, identifying the developments that matter since there are many changes every week. Some changes are more serious than others.

The effects of these changes are not always immediately understood by search marketers. Given the rate of change, it is important that someone is permanently responsible for monitoring and improving SEO (in-house or outsourced).

Try not to think of SEO as a short-term project. SEO is more aligned to ‘Grand Strategy’: a series of smart micro-moves undertaken to achieve a bigger business goal in the future. Alexander the Great would have been a good search marketer.

Key recommendation 4

Ensure there is ongoing commitment to SEO and responsibility for it within your organization rather than it being treated as an initiative.

Going forward…

To help in keeping up-to-date, Econsultancy is planning to regularly update each of its best practice guides at least once year.

With each new version of the best practice guide, the latest developments will be clearly highlighted.

In the interim period, the most significant changes which affect SEM practice will be posted to the new Econsultancy blog. As well as this, each guide will highlight the best sources to keep up-to-date about a particular topic.

Reference: http://econsultancy.com