Dear Client,
I’m writing to recap our conversation yesterday regarding improving your website’s visibility in the search engines. The following is a detailed description of SEO (search engine optimization) techniques as they apply to your website and practices in general.
As we discussed, efforts in SEO can be broken into two basic categories, external and internal. External efforts are those actions that take place outside of the website and are designed to drive traffic to the site. Internal efforts include structural and contextual changes on the website that are designed to improve the relevance of the site to search engines and subsequently, pull traffic into the site.
External SEO Efforts
Also known as SEM, or search engine marketing, external efforts take shape in a broad comprehensive marketing campaign that targets other websites, directories, news agencies, etc. Several examples of external marketing efforts include:
- Press releases written for and distributed to online PR channels – these are specific to online media in that they contain dynamic web content that may not necessarily translate to print.
- Content contributions to popular, high traffic, relevant websites – an example would be contributing articles to a legal blog, where the topic is specific to a choice keyword/key term (i.e. real estate law) and the article contains a link back to a corresponding website page that is geared towards the same keyword/key term.
- Utilizing social media outlets like facebook.com and linkedin.com (among many others) to create additional traffic channels to the site from other high traffic sites.
Internal SEO Efforts
We covered all the internal page structure elements that need to be in place to best position a page for search engine relevance. Regarding specialty SEO pages, it’s important to remember that no single page can perform well for many keywords/key terms. To that end, each page will be built around a single word or term. The page we looked closely at was for real estate. Following are the page elements that need to be in place and revolving around the single keyword or term. [some specific instructions are for Adobe Contribute website template, but can be applied universally]
- Page name: “keyword or term”.php – for example “realestate.php” or “real-estate-closing-negotiation.php”
- Found in Template Properities
- Page title: titleBar_pageName – “keyword or term” i.e. “real estate”
- Page title (extra optional): title_pageMsg – short message, perhaps an abbreviated versions of the meta description, including keyword or term
- Meta Description: meta_description – a summary of the page under 250 characters, including the keyword or term. This description can be pulled and displayed in search results
- Meta Keywords: meta_keywords – “keyword or term” and synonyms, along with other relevant terms like South Carolina or private practice, under 200 characters. Remember that plural forms aren’t necessary.
- Found in the body or content of the page
- Page Title: This is the first editable region on the page. It is significant in that it is a Header 1(code <h1>), telling the search engine that the text here is the header for the content to come. You can think of this in terms of an outline. Header 1, Header 2, Header 3
- Section Title: These editable regions have been set to be Headers 2. To continue with the outline idea, break the content of the page into sections and give them each a Section Title that contain the keyword or term or a synonym. If you’d like to subdivide the page further, manually enter a Header 3, 4 and so on within the Section Text region of the page. Be sure to keep the outline logical without skipping a header, for example Header 2 then Header 4. This structure is significant because it meets the accessibility guidelines of the Section 508 and enable text readers to better deliver the information.
- Use of keyword or term in the copy: consider using each the following styles or forms at least once
- Bold
- Italic
- Hyperlink
- to an external, popular, relevant site – do not use “click here” use “keyword” as it appears in the natural flow of a sentence
- also link back to internal pages, such as the Practices page
- Header – covered above
- Image name and image alternate text (alt text)
- Site map: after creating the page, be sure to edit the site map (sitemap.php) to include the new special SEO page just created. The significance of this is to make sure the page isn’t buried deep in the site where search engines assign a lesser value to the page. Note that the sitemap link in the footer of the home page (and every page) makes each link just two levels away from the root domain.
Blog
Internally, we also discussed the value of a blog. Blogs (derived from “web log”) is a database-driven, server-side application that allows for the easy creation and distribution of editorial content. Blogs are built to catalog articles or posts chronologically and have been constructed to syndicate the content automatically. An example of syndication is the use of RSS (real simple syndication, also known by other names), whereby anyone out on the web can subscribe to receive real-time updates of content on your site. This content can be received by an individual users’ pc or automatically published to another website. For this reason, it’s important to include a link back to your site inside each article.
A great deal of the value of a blog lies in the frequency of updates. Search engines record how frequent content on your site is updated and adjusts their return frequency accordingly. Frequently updated sites are crawled by search engine spiders more frequently and are subsequently considered more relevant than sites that sit stagnant. So the combination of frequent updates and the cumulative mass of relevant content on the site is a powerful tool to improve the site’s ranking with search engines over time.
Per adding a blog to the site, I would purpose customizing the design to match the site and integrating special features to maximize the reach and functionality of the blog. Again, the real value of a blog is frequent content contributions. So someone or several people within the organization would need to commit to a frequent or semi-frequent updates to get the most out of it. Publishing an article a week would be advised, even if just two paragraphs centered around a single keyword.
I hope this was helpful and please feel free to contact me with any questions or comments.
Best regards,
Dominic
Dominic Taverniti is the owner of Applied Web Vitals, a web design and development company specializing Dreamweaver templates and the Adobe Contribute CMS. Please feel free to contact us any time to explore your next web design or development project.
As we mentioned in an earlier post, Applied Web Vitals is developing a line of website templates for the Adobe Contribute platform. These Contribute templates will be designed for plug-in-play use and will incorporate the latest SEO standards as well as clean, light XHTML and CSS code.
