A lot of SEO companies will stress paid search engine placement for your keywords, while we don’t discount that as a part of some SEO campaigns it won’t mean a lot if all of the traffic driven to your site doesn’t find the content they were looking for. That’s where knowing how to develop and implement your content comes in.

Of course, content strategies will vary based on the kind of site that you have. One thing that all content strategies should contain; however, is in -depth search engine optimization research. Every piece of content on your site should be crafted with your key words, competition, and potential customers in mind. While it takes a lot of work up front, it pays off with big SEO returns after launch.

A big no-no is simply regurgitating what you have found elsewhere. Not only do search engines frown upon this, but if your “borrowing” isn’t done following copyright laws with proper citation, you may find yourself in legal trouble. Keep in mind that if you create content (whether it’s blog posts, articles, sales text, or even just meta tag descriptions) that is unique to your site, uses your identified keywords (in moderation) and is relevant to your site and your customer’s needs, you will reap great SEO rewards.

I’m not going to bother writing yet another of those articles. Personally I HATE this tag. Not because of the tag itself, its really nice and non-offensive. No I hate it because of all the inane questions, bad information, and scammy tactics that are the results of this tag. If your wanting some information on the current state of the tag here are 3 wonderful examples if your wondering.

Here is Matt Cutts from Google saying that “Google doesn’t use the keyword meta tag in web search”
What’s The Best Keyword Meta Tags Formula? by Shaun Anderson (hobo)
Even Yahoo, who supported the tag much longer than anyone else are dropping support (or are they?).

So with no search engines of note using the keyword meta tag to influence rankings anymore what should we do with it? The easy answer is to forget all about it. In large part that is what I have done on a lot of our sites and the sites we manage. So far we haven’t noticed any negative effects at all.

But, there is one use that I will highly recommend for the keyword meta tag. Misspellings.

Currently Yahoo and most likely the others as well are indexing the keyword meta tag as normal text with a really low ranking factor. Because of this I would recommend using the keywords tag for common misspellings of your business name, product name, or anything else that you would rank for normally. Since you wouldn’t want to use the misspellings on your page hiding them in the keyword tag allows the search engines to relate the misseplling to your page.

Either that or just forget about them. Thats what I do.

Best practice is to take those old URL’s, and all their traffic and inbound links, and redirect them to a new working URL. This results in a win/win for your users and your search engine rankings.

That is where the 301 server redirection comes in. Without getting technical a 301 redirect is a HTTP response from the server that means that the page has permanently moved to a new URL. Setting up 301 redirection is pretty straight forward and easy to manage.

301 Redirects and SEO

The permenant redirection indicated by a 301 error is honored by search engines. What this means is that when a search engine encounters a 301 redirect while crawling the web they will delist the old broken URL and update all the incomming links to the new URL.

Here is a short video by Mike Cutts from Google explaining how Google treats 301 redirects and anchor text.

301 Redirects Best Practices

Currently what we suggest to all our clients is that any page that gets search engine traffic or that has a significant number of inbound links get a 301 redirect to a working page with similar or the same content. This provides the best experience for surfers and maximizes the SEO value of their existing inbound links.

Any old pages that don’t get traffic or that have little to no inbound links should then be sent to a well designed and helpful 404 error page. Since there is little value in these pages to be lost the purpose of this method is to maximize the user experience for those who stumble upon one of these pages.

Another popular alternative is to redirect these lesser used pages to the home page. Doing this allows you to direct the inbound links and search engine rankings to a valuable page on the website.

The downside of this method is that potential customers may follow a link expecting to find something and instead find themselves on your home page. This isn’t the best user experience and may result in a lost customer.

Redirects on Apache Servers

The simplist and most common ways to set up 301 redirects is through the .htaccess file in the home directory of your web server. Unlike javascript redirects .htaccess redirects are invisible to the surfer because they are executed by the server when the page is delivered.

.htaccess Single Page Redirects

Single page redirects are best used when the content on the old page is still available at a new location. This way not only do you maintain all the inbound links and pagerank but visitors who arrive through external links find the information they were expecting.

When writing the redirect rule for a single page redirect you leave off the http://www and instead just include the path that would appear afterwords. For exampe to redirect from the old page of http://www.site.com/old/page.html to http://www.site.com/new/page.html you would use …

Redirect 301 old/page.html http://www.site.com/new/page.html

Other 301 Redirects

There are many other ways to set up 301 redirects besides using an .htaccess file. Steven Hargrove has a great resource that covers all of them here. If possible I highly recommend using .htaccess though because of how easy it is to set up and maintain.

Descriptions should be targeted at the surfer to entice them to your listing because most search engines give low ( if any ) weight to the description tag for ranking purposes. The primary value of the description tag is that it allows you to partially control how your listings display in results. If you provide compelling, unique, and accurate descriptions you will attract more search visitors.

An optimized description meta tag should follow these simple guideleines.

1. Unique description tag for every page
2. Use your primary keyword phrase once in the description
3. Accurately describe the page to reduce bounce rate

Unlike in the title tag there really are no “advanced SEO” tips for the meta description. Search engines, with the exception of Yahoo, place low to no ranking value on the description meta tag. Instead spend a few minutes creating a unique description that will appeal to searchers and then move on to something that will provide greater SEO returns.

The only time I would suggest revisiting the description tag is if you’re receiving significantly lower search engine traffic than your search position should be providing. In that case, some optimization of the description may result in a higher click through rate.

Again, I wouldn’t consider this unless I was in a top 5 position. Before that any time spent optimizing the description could be better spent building links or developing content to increase your rankings.

Those four links would normally be …

http://www.sample.com

http://sample.com

http://www.sample.com/index.php (or whatever)

http://sample.com/index.php

So what we have are in essence four different web pages, each gathering their own backlinks, but each one most likely having the exact same content. As a website owner or SEO this is obviuosly not something you want. The search engines also don’t want 4 versions of every single page cluttering up their databases.

This is where canonicalization comes in. Canonicalization gives you the power to choose which version you want to have the search engines use. It’s important that you make this choice for the search engines though because if you don’t, they will. While Google and other search engines are pretty good about deciding which version is best, its still better for us to retain as much control as possible.

To do this we will be using the canonical tag.

This tag is used inside of the tags and will indicate to search engines which of the versions you want them to link to. You are then free to begin building links to your preferred version without worrying that some site somewhere will add links to the wrong one that you won’t get credit for.

I know there are probibly a few more questions but instead of repeating information Google has provided here are the links.

Matt Cutts on “SEO advice: url canonicalization”
Google Webmaster Central Blog on “Specify Your Canonical“

Normally, whether or not you have a sitemap, a search engine discovers the contents of your website by following links. Those links can be on outside websites, or they can be on your own website. As long as there are links pointed to a page and your website has good content odds are very good that a search engine will quickly discover the page all on their own.

This brings up the question of whether or not a sitemap is necessary. If a search engine will find everything without one why bother. My personal opinion is that if a sitemap can be created automatically, like through a plugin or module, then go for it. However if you have to create one manually I have a hard time justifying that much work for something of negligable use.

The reason I belive that is because if your site is structured in a way that a sitemap is necessary for search engines to find their way around you have already failed. One of the core foundations of a solid SEO strategy is to have an easy to navigate website. Since search engines navigate the same way as surfers if a search engine can’t find it, neither can your customers.

Adding a sitemap to a good website will likely produce no results at all. Adding a sitemap to a poor website may alert search engines to content they couldn’t find before. However that page is highly unlikely to ever show up in search results because it would lack incomming links. I have yet to see a study that showed that the presence of a sitemap resulted in any SEO advantages that wouldn’t be better fixed in other ways.

I’m not going to bother writing yet another of those articles. Personally I HATE this tag.  Not because of the tag itself, its really nice and non-offensive.  No I hate it because of all the inane questions, bad information, and scammy tactics that are the results of this tag.  If your wanting some information on the current state of the tag here are 3 wonderful examples if your wondering.

Here is Matt Cutts from Google saying that “Google doesn’t use the keyword meta tag in web search”

What’s The Best Keyword Meta Tags Formula? by Shaun Anderson (hobo)
Even Yahoo, who supported the tag much longer than anyone else are dropping support (or are they?).

So with no search engines of note using the keyword meta tag to influence rankings anymore what should we do with it?  The easy answer is to forget all about it.  In large part that is what I have done on a lot of our sites and the sites we manage.  So far we haven’t noticed any negative effects at all.

But, there is one use that I will highly recommend for the keyword meta tag.  Misspellings.

Currently Yahoo and most likely the others as well are indexing the keyword meta tag as normal text with a really low ranking factor.  Because of this I would recommend using the keywords tag for common misspellings of your business name, product name, or anything else that you would rank for normally.  Since you wouldn’t want to use the misspellings on your page hiding them in the keyword tag allows the search engines to relate the misseplling to your page.

Either that or just forget about them.  Thats what I do.

An optimized title tag will follow these three simple guidelines …

1. Title tag should be unique, readable to humans, and accurately describe the page’s content.
2. Title tag should include your primary keyword phrase that the page is being optimized for
3. Title tag should be 64 characters or less to work best in all search engines.

A lot has been written about the optimal way to do titles in order to squeeze the most SEO juice out of them. Personally I feel that if you just follow those three simple guidelines you will be getting 99% out of the tag. If you want to go out and try and get that last 1% here are a few more suggestions that may help.

1. Place your keyword phrase as early in the title as possible
2. Place your site/company name at the end since you already rank well for that (hopefully)
3. Experiment with special characters in the title. It won’t help SEO but may make your site more noticeable in search results.

That’s pretty much it for the title tag. Despite its importance it is a very simple tag to get right. Just remember the 3 simple guidelines and keep the title readable for your users.

The robots meta tag is very powerful in that it can be used to prevent a page from being indexed in search engines. According to Google “When we see a noindex meta tag on a page, Google will completely drop the page from our search results, even if other pages link to it”.

Normally when used the robots meta tag will look like:

If you want to prevent a page from being included in the search engines use

Additional Robots Tags

There are a couple of other operators that can be used with the robots meta tag if desired. If you choose to use one or more of these they are each used separately in their own tag.

No ODP Data

Occasionally search engines will display information from the Open Directory Project in search results instead of using the meta tags on the page. Many webmasters, us included, prefer to prevent this to retain more control over our listings. To do that use the following robots meta tag.

No Yahoo Directory

This is essentially the same as the NOODP robot tag, except aimed at the Yahoo directory. Our clients usually don’t have as many problems with the Yahoo directory but if you would like to be safe the meta tag is

Research and Planning

Many SEO campaigns have failed before even beginning because of insufficient research and planning. A good SEO campaign will begin research well before the first change is made to the website or the first link acquired. A great SEO campaign will continue research on a regular basis to keep up with changes in the industry and competition.

When doing research there are three main areas that we focus our attention on. Traffic stats and analytics for the existing website (if any), industry trends and best practices, and the top competitors for our targeted search spaces. We want to have a solid understanding of what is working, what needs improvement, and what works for our competitors as early in the process as possible.

On Site SEO

Search engines determine how to rank your website largely by reading the code on the page and following links. Ensuring that search engines can find your content and that the page loads correctly and quickly can greatly improve your rankings. More importantly it will improve your customers experience and result in better conversion rates and customer loyalty.

For this reason one of the main focuses of an SEO campaign is to optimize the website itself. This is done mostly by cleaning up the code, organizing the navigation and content structure, and writing original title and descriptions for each page. On site SEO also includes the creation or editing of original, high quality content. A website without original content that has been optimized first for your customers, and secondly for the search engines will have a hard time ranking.

Off Site SEO

Search engines use a lot of off site factors as indicators of trust and quality. In essence they view links from outside sources as “votes”. A large part of the SEO campaign will be spent trying to gather as many of these votes as possible. There are many different methods used to gather links but the most common include social media, article directories, gaining inclusion into high quality relevant directories, and press releases.

Even though there are many different options to explore not all of them are available or effective in all cases. That’s why it is so important to have already completed the initial research before beginning off site SEO. It is actually possible to accidentally incur penalties in the search engines by making mistakes or being overly aggressive at off site SEO.  Remember that slow and steady wins the race.

How They Work Together

Research, on site, and off site SEO are all required elements and all work together in a good SEO campaign. Through research competitive search keywords are discovered. The on site SEO then optimizes existing content, or creates new content targeting those keywords. Finally social media and link building from off site SEO are used to promote that content. Rinse and repeat, building up the rankings of the website over time and across multiple keywords.

I hope this has given you some basic information on the three different elements of a search engine optimization campaign. I know it was a pretty general overview but I plan to publish more in depth articles in the near future. If you have any questions or comments please leave them below and I’ll be sure to answer them. Thanks for reading.