I am going to start posting tips on how to do an SEO analysis of your website. My qualifications include 5 years SEO experience since 2003. My background is Sales, but it is Technical Sales and I had to understand how SEO is done and what is important in order to sell it. I also have a strong background in recruiting and I believe there is a place where these skills can be combined hand in hand.

Today's SEO tip is about about Site Indexing.

To review your site indexing on Google type in the search box the following with no spaces:

site:www.sitename.com and see how many results you get.

Now type in the search box site:sitename.com (without the www's) and see how many results you get.

If there is a difference in the number of results you have a site indexing problem in Google. What this means is you have orphaned pages or duplicate content pages. This causes problems in getting high rankings for keywords you want your site to be found under. To correct this you need to have your Web Developer do a 301 redirect where they redirect the incorrect URL to the correct URL.

If you only have results for one of the above you may not have any indexing problems. Ideally you do not want to find results for both searches. You only want to see one list of results which means there is nothing to redirect.

11-19-2010 Today I am adding two more tips. The first is an SEO sitemap. Your site does not just need a sitemap; it needs a sitemap.xml To see if your site has a site map type in the following in the URL address box, http://www.yoursite.com/sitemap.xml

If your sitemap shows up then you have an XML sitemap. An XML sitemap is like a roadmap that shows the end user and the search engine spiders what is where on the site. It is kind of like a table of contents that shows what the site consists of. Some sitemaps are better than others. A good SEO Webmaster can assist you in designing a good sitemap.xml.

There is also something called a Robots.txt. The robots.txt can be found by typing in http://www.yoursite.com/robots.txt The robots.txt is important for showing the search engine spiders what to pay attention to and what to ignore. You want to ensure the search engine stays on your site as long as possible so please prioritize for the spider what is important and what can be ignored. For example a contact us page is not a page that will have relevant keyword information the spider needs to know about.

11-27-2010 Google Keyword Tool, https://adwords.google.com/o/Targeting/Explorer?__u=1000000000&...

The purpose of this exercise is to discover as many keywords as possible to use for optimizing your website for SEO. Just because a keyword gets more searches than another keyword does not mean it is the best keyword to optimize for. Some of the keywords are more generic than
others and if they are too generic and you optimize for them you will get lots
of traffic to your site that may be unqualified. For example if you optimize for staffing
agency and you are a Technical Staffing Firm you may not want someone calling
in and taking up your time for an Accountant position.

The Google Keyword Tool is very insightful for identifying the most searched upon keywords in your industry. Go to the above URL and type in a keyword you believe someone will search on. This will bring up a listing of several other keywords that you may not have thought of. Select all of the keywords from the list you believe are relevant to what your website is about. Then run a separate search using the keyword tool on each of the keywords you selected. This may bring up even more keywords for you to use. If you select a star for each of the keywords you are interested in you can then select download stars only and it will download your selections into an EXCEL Spreadsheet for you. The Google Keyword Tool will show how many searches were performed monthly on each of the keywords you have selected. Global Searches are the number of searches done worldwide. Local Searches are the number of searches done in the United States.

It is important to identify the keywords that are most important to your website before optimizing for SEO. The Google Keyword can help you do this. You can also look at competitors’ sites and see what keywords they are optimizing for, but you need to know how to read the source code in order to discover this. Reviewing source code will be discussed in a future posting.

11-30-2010 Firefox Add-on for SEO

http://tools.seobook.com/firefox/seo-for-firefox.html

If you are not using Firefox as your web browser download Firefox and then download the SEO Book add-on. This is extremely useful in reviewing sourcecode of websites.

Once this application is downloaded open Firefox and open the website you want to review. SEO Book will, at a glance, show SEO Site Information. Once you are on the home page of the website you want to review, Right Click and Select SEO Firefox. This will bring up a menu. In the menu select Look Up This Page. What I review here is the Pagerank, Google Cache Date, Age of Site, and Yahoo Backlinks. There is another option on the menu for reviewing some of the sourcecode information. Right Click to open the menu again and select SEO Xray, This will show you Title, Meta Description, and Meta Keywords. These are extremely important in reviewing how the keywords are prioritized on the site.

More on the importance of these stats later.

12-1-2010 Theming Keywords to pages on your website

Now that you have selected keywords for your website rankings it is important to theme those keywords to different pages on the site. When theming keywords to the pages of your
website you need to prioritize them in order of importance. The most important keywords should be themed to the home page of your website. Because you want to be ranked for lots of keywords you should be theming the internal pages of your website with keywords also. Write your website like you are writing chapters in a book where each chapter is about a specific topic and one chapter flows naturally to another. For example, if you are a technical staffing agency the most important keywords for your home page may be technical staffing, technical staffing agency, technical staffing Orlando, technical staffing agency Orlando, technical staffing Florida, and so forth.

I would not recommend using staffing or staffing agency as keywords on this page as they are too general and may bring unqualified traffic to the site. Using IT Staffing as a keyword on the home page is not in your best interest either as it is not directly related to the technical staffing keywords. A separate page on your website can be used for IT staffing keywords, a separate page for engineering staffing keywords, a separate page for embedded programmer keywords and so forth. Prioritizing and grouping keywords where they are very specific and relevant to the copy on the page is what will get the page ranked.


December 14, 2010 Title and Metatags

Reviewing the title and metatags on a web page can easily be done using the Firefox SEOBook SEO Tool. Simply go to the webpage you want to review, point your curser anywhere on the page, as long as you are not in a flash portion on the page, and do a right click. Then select SEO For Firefox and SEO XRay. Here it will show the Keyword Density, Title, Meta Description, and Meta Keywords.

It is important to know your keywords and their order in advance to doing this review. Your title should be one or two keywords only and those keywords should be positioned in order of importance to the page. If your page is written for Technical Recruiter keywords you will want the keyword technical recruiter to show in the title on the page. You will also want the technical recruiter keyword to be included in the description and listed first in the keywords.

The description should be a brief compelling reason why someone would want to be reading your page. It is like a mini advertisement. Google will use the description when someone does a search for the page so make sure it is compelling enough to get the user to click on your URL. For example,”technical recruiting in Dallas, Texas for IT and engineering professionals” could be your description of this page. Do not use technical staffing agency offering computer and engineering professionals if your page is about recruiting. You want the page to rank for technical recruiting keywords not technical staffing so the keyword “technical recruiting” should show up in your description.

Do not include keywords that have to do with anything other than technical recruiting. This means technical staffing, it staffing, engineering staffing, all staffing keywords are out. Only use keywords for technical recruiting on this page. Technical recruiting, technical recruiting company, technical recruiting agency, technical recruiting firm are good keywords for this page.

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404 Error Page

If the name of a URL on your website is changed or abandoned the old URL is considered a broken link.  If the search engine spider tries to crawl the old (broken) link it will hit a dead end and promptly leave your site.  You want to keep the search engine spider on your site as long as possible to get high search engine rankings.  To ensure this does not happen place a custom 404 error page on your site.  Whenever the spider hits a broken link it will be redirected to the 404 error page and it will continue to crawl your website.

Canonicalization

Canonicalization usually refers to home pages. The most common examples of home pages would be:

    * www.mypage.com

    * mypage.com/

    * www.mypage.com/index.html

    * mypage.com/home.asp

Technically, all of these URLs are different, but have exactly the same content. So, a search engine spider could penalize your site for having duplicate content.

Malware Penalty

To run a quick check for Google Malware Penalties on you site go to this URL.  http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=no-ip.pl/

It is important to periodically check your website for Malware Penalties caused by hosting malicious software.  This can happen to you if your website is hacked.

Branded Search Term

Check to see if your site shows up when searching for your brand name or domain name. If your site does not appear your site may be penalized by the search engines.

Duplicate Content

It is important to keep your website content completely original. Hosting and publishing others content will get your site penalized in search engines.

Alt Image Tags

Because the search engine spiders cannot read what a picture on your website is about, it is important to describe the pictures with relevant keywords.  This is another chance to highlight your keywords to the search engine spider.  Assuming you now have the Firefox SEO tools installed, to look at your alt image tags place your curser on an image on your site and do a right click and select “view image info”.  Then look to see if your image has been named.  You can also go to the source code of the page and do a Control F and type in alt to see if the image is named.  If the image is not named or you do not feel the keyword phrase is relevant change the keyword to that is more relevant to the content on the page and one that is a potentially searchable keyword.

Keyword Rich H1 Tags

Placing a targeted keyword in an H1 tag on each page will help the search engine determine the relevance of the page.  To look to see if you have H1 tags that are keyword rich go to the source code of the page, do a Control F, and type in H1.  This will take you to the H1 tags and here you can look to see if you are using a keyword in the H1 tag. 

Hidden Text

It is important not to use any hidden text or small pixel text on your site. This could get your site penalized in search engines.

This is all for today.  In the next post I will discuss linking.