Content is king, so be sure to have good, well-written and unique content that will focus on your primary keyword or keyword phrase. Be sure you have a unique, keyword focused Title tag on every page of your site. And, if you MUST have the name of your company in it, put it at the end. Unless you are a major brand name that is a household name, your business name will probably get few searches. Don’t design your web site without considering SEO. Make sure your web designer understands your expectations for organic SEO. Doing a retrofit on your shiny new Flash-based site after it is built won’t cut it. Spiders can crawl text, not Flash or images. Check the link to your home page throughout your site. Is index.html appended to your domain name? If so, you’re splitting your links. Outside links go to domain.com and internal links go to domain.com/index.html. Search engines want natural language content. Don’t try to stuff your text with keywords. It won’t work. Search engines look at how many times a term is in your content and if it is abnormally high, will count this against you rather than for you. Links from .edu domains are given nice weight by the search engines. Run a search for possible non-profit .edu sites that are looking for sponsors. Cater to influential bloggers and authority sites who might link to you, your images, videos, podcasts, etc. or ask to reprint your content. You’re better off letting your site pages be found naturally by the crawler. Good global navigation and linking will serve you much better than relying only on an XML Sitemap. To get the best chance for your videos to be found by the crawlers, create a video sitemap and list it in your Google Webmaster Central account. If you have pages on your site that are very similar (you are concerned about duplicate content issues) and you want to be sure the correct one is included in the search engines, place the URL of your preferred page in your sitemaps. Some of your most valuable links might not appear in web sites at all but be in the form of e-mail communications such as newletters and zines. SEO is not a one-shot process. The search landscape changes daily, so expect to work on your optimization daily. Pay attention to the context surrounding your images. Images can rank based on text that surrounds them on the page. Pay attention to keyword text, headings, etc. Search engines like unique content that is also quality content. There can be a difference between unique content and quality content. Make sure your content is both. Get the owner or CEO blogging. It’s priceless! CEO influence on a blog is incredible as this is the VOICE of the company. Response from the owner to reader comments will cause your credibility to skyrocket! Use absolute links. Not only will it make your on-site link navigation less prone to problems (like links to and from https pages), but if someone scrapes your content, you’ll get backlink juice out of it. Videos that show up in Google blended search results don’t just come from YouTube. Be sure to submit your videos to other quality video sites like Metacafe, AOL, MSN and Yahoo to name a few. When considering a link purchase or exchange, check the cache date of the page where your link will be located in Google. Search for “cache:URL” where you substitute “URL” for the actual page. The newer the cache date the better. If the page isn’t there or the cache date is more than an month old, the page isn’t worth much. Links (especially deep links) from a high PageRank site are golden. High PR indicates high trust, so the back links will carry more weight. There are two ways to NOT see Google’s Personalized Search results: Use captions with your images. As with newspaper photos, place keyword rich captions with your images. If you absolutely MUST have your main page as a splash page that is all Flash or one big image, place text and navigation links below the fold. Be aware that by using services that block domain ownership information when you register a domain, Google might see you as a potential spammer. When link building, think quality, not quantity. One single, good, authoritative link can do a lot more for you than a dozen poor quality links, which can actually hurt you. Check for canonicalization issues – www and non-www domains. Decide which you want to use and 301 redirect the other to it. In other words, if htdomain.com is your preference, then domain.com should redirect to it. If content is king, then links are queen. Build a network of quality backlinks using your keyword phrase as the link. Remember, if there is no good, logical reason for that site to link to you, you don’t want the link. If you absolutely MUST use Javascript drop down menus, image maps or image links, be sure to put text links somewhere on the page for the spiders to follow. Frames, Flash and AJAX all share a common problem – you can’t link to a single page. It’s either all or nothing. Don’t use Frames at all and use Flash and AJAX sparingly for best SEO results. Your URL file extension doesn’t matter. You can use .html, .htm, .asp, .php, etc. and it won’t make a difference as far as your SEO is concerned. When optimizing your blog posts, optimize your post title tag independently from your blog title. Be sure links to your site and within your site use your keyword phrase. In other words, if your target is “blue widgets” then link to “blue widgets” instead of a “Click here” link. videos that show up in Google blended search results don’t just come from YouTube. Be sure to submit your videos to other quality video sites like Metacafe, AOL, MSN and Yahoo to name a few. Not only should your links use keyword anchor text, but the text around the links should also be related to your keywords. In other words, surround the link with descriptive text. You get NOTHING from paid links except a few clicks unless the links are embedded in body text and NOT obvious sponsored links. Optimize the text in your RSS feed just like you should with your posts and web pages. Use descriptive, keyword rich text in your title and description. Understand social marketing. It IS part of SEO. The more you understand about sites like Digg, Yelp, del.icio.us, Facebook, etc., the better you will be able to compete in search. See if your hosting company offers “Sticky” forwarding when moving to a new domain. This allows temporary forwarding to the new domain from the old, retaining the new URL in the address bar so that users can gradually get used to the new URL. Add viral components to your web site or blog – reviews, sharing functions, ratings, visitor comments, etc. Surround video content on your pages with keyword rich text. The search engines look at surrounding content to define the usefulness of the video for the query. SEO is useless if you have a weak or non-existent call to action. Make sure your call to action is clear and present. Give link love, Get link love. Don’t be stingy with linking out. That will encourage others to link to you. The bottom line in SEO is Text, Links, Popularity and Reputation. Make sure your site is easy to use. This can influence your link building ability and popularity and, thus, your ranking. Use keywords and keyword phrases appropriately in text links, image ALT attributes and even your domain name. Don’t be obsessed with PageRank. It is just one isty bitsy part of the ranking algorithm. A site with lower PR can actually outrank one with a higher PR. If your site content doesn’t change often, your site needs a blog because search spiders like fresh text. Blog at least three time a week with good, fresh content to feed those little crawlers. Focus on search phrases, not single keywords, and put your location in your text (“our Palm Springs store” not “our store”) to help you get found in local searches. Got a new web site you want spidered? Submitting through Google’s regular submission form can take weeks. The quickest way to get your site spidered is by getting a link to it through another quality site. Give each page a focus on a single keyword phrase. Don’t try to optimize the page for several keywords at once. Use the words “image” or “picture” in your photo ALT descriptions and captions. A lot of searches are for a keyword plus one of those words. Broaden your range of services to include video, podcasts, news, social content and so forth. SEO is not about 10 blue links anymore. Enable “Enhanced image search” in your Google Webmaster Central account. Images are a big part of the new blended search results, so allowing Google to find your photos will help your SEO efforts. Check your server headers? Search for “check server header” to find free online tools for this? You want to be sure your URLs report a “200 OK” status or “301 Moved Permanently ” for redirects? If the status shows anything else, check to be sure your URLs are set up properly and used consistently throughout your site.



 

DAO (Digital Asset Optimization); with the acronym DAO floating around everywhere these days it might lead you to wonder; is DAO replacing search engine optimization? The answer is no, in fact DAO can best be described as the evolution of Search Engine Optimization (SEO), SEO isn’t dead, but it is rapidly evolving. Over the past few years emphasis has shifted from a focus on “on page elements” to the off-site criteria. It began with Google’s PageRank. PageRank is defined as a link analysis algorithm that assigns a numerical weighting to a website, with the purpose of “measuring” its relative importance on the World Wide Web (wikipedia.com 02/12/08). In simpler terms, Google counts every external link to a website as a vote for that website, it also measures how relevant each one of those voting websites is to the content of the linked website; in essence we are measuring the popularity of a website. What does PageRank have to do with DAO? DAO is all about moving the focus of our optimization efforts from the text on a page to more relevant assets of a website regardless of where that takes us. It is about helping the searcher find the most relevant website based on the criteria and content that is important to them, not just the text on a page.

The bottom line is that companies must figure out how to best adjust their Internet marketing strategy, which includes but is not limited to website optimization (SEO), paid search (SEM), email marketing, Web 2.0 & social media optimization, link building, and affiliate marketing strategies to maintain a competitive advantage. The best way to achieve this is to focus the right balance of your resources on standard text optimization as well as the optimization and promotion of all other digital assets. You might be asking yourself – when is it the right time to start making this shift? The answer is simple – right now! The search engines already have their systems in place to measure the relevancy of a website’s digital assets and they are constantly focusing on improving these systems and making them a more prevalent part of their search systems. The only question is how long it will take for the users to fully realize that they have these resources at their disposal.

Both Google’s Universal Search and the new Ask3D interface show users more information from more sources (news, images, products, video, etc) in the first page of results than we have ever seen before. This shift in how search engines present the search results illustrates the need to consider more media types than standard text documents. The growth of Universal search means the kinds of search results SEO consultants have become accustomed to and have been optimizing for are either on the way out or on the decline. Figuring out new ways to optimize any electronic file that can be crawled, indexed, categorized and sorted is where the opportunity lies. This is about a lot more than just optimizing social media, it’s about “the big picture”, having the ability to optimize the Internet as a whole, making all content easier to find via search rather than simply having to rely on the text within the website. These days it is becoming more common for businesses to produce an array of different content types, and search engines are doing their best to index that content. A search engines success is directly related to its ability to adapt to changes in the market, this means that those of us who use these search engines to market our websites must adapt as well. With such intense competition, and so much money at stake, the leading search providers will continue to make the user experience better thus making it easier to find whatever it is we seek.

The trend in search is shifting from optimizing for a slow, one-dimensional engine, and is moving towards a highly sophisticated integration of elements, including image, video, consumer reviews, social networks, social ratings, podcasts, and much more. This means we must begin to adjust what needs to be optimized from the platform to the actual asset itself. This is what makes DAO the future of Internet marketing. DAO views the platform as merely the vehicle which carries the content directly to the searcher, as opposed to SEO which focuses almost solely on bringing the platform (a website) to the searcher, and waiting (or hoping) for the searcher to discover the content. For example, by understanding how videos can be optimized, a search campaign can be successful on Google or YouTube. We no longer need to use text optimization as the only method to reach potential visitors, all the while hoping that once they arrive the more “sophisticated” content will actually close the deal. So, the future of SEO as defined today is destined to change. The days of success being optimization for 10 text links on a standard results page will be over soon.

So long as billions of people continue to use search engines on a daily basis, there will be progression in the modes of optimization we use to improve a websites visibility to the search engines, helping to enhance their presence on the Internet. Companies need to consider all of the digital assets that they have to work with in order to give both the search engines and the customers the information they’re looking for in the formats they’ll respond to. Optimizing comprehensively starts with an inventory of a company’s digital assets. Text, images, audio and video should all be considered when determining what we need to optimize, we no longer need to wait for the customer to find us through our use of text optimization so we can impress them with our other digital assets. Matching digital assets with channels of distribution provides marketers with even more opportunity to reach customers since each channel can drive traffic independently as well as improve a websites standard search visibility. Digital asset optimization is not just a better definition of the future of search marketing; it is the future of search marketing.