5 Quirky Tips for Web Site Optimization:
Little Things Mean A
Okay, you’ve just gone live with your retail site, selling services or products over the web. You’ve joined an “elite” community of one billion other web sites and you’re trying to figure out how to make a little noise in the loudest, most omni-present marketplace ever there was. The world wide web. The W3. The big game. The show.
Hate to burst your bubble but you’ve got a lot of work ahead of you to build your unknown site to profitability. Here’s a sobering fact: 94% of all web ventures implode within 12 months of launch. Most of these, of course, are undercapitalized from Day One, lack any sort of business plan and lack management that knows how the digital marketplace functions. It’s nothing like the 3-D world in which a local store drops a weekly quarter-page advert in the local Picayune. So, even if you’ve been marketing since mirror balls were all the rage, you’re in a new ball park now.
And every little bit of your web site and everything you do to market and monetize your site will be tracked, scrutinized, policed, monitored, recorded and stored by mindless bots that crawl the web. Your new venture has to be bot friendly and human eyeball friendly. Tip the scales too far in one direction or the other and your site isn’t optimized – optimized for search engine indexing or optimized for improved conversion ratios. In other words, you could be doing better.
Little Things Mean a
No “so-called” SEO expert has a clue how search engines assess the quality and topicality of a site. Lots of theories but, in a recent study of Google ranking factors, 31 SEO pros were asked to rank various factors such as site accessibility and quality of inbound site links.
Of the two dozen or so ranking factors assessed by the panel of experts, not one single ranking factor received 100% consensus as a critical factor in how and why a site is spidered, assessed and, finally, cataloged in the SE index.
Tons of theories, lots of debates (some quite heated on SEO blog sites) and plenty of “sure-fire” strategies to “Get you on page 1 of Google.” Big whoop. Want to see your site on page one of Google? Use your URL as your search words.
Okay, enough ranting. There are some strategies that, under testing using Google’s own diagnostics and metrics, seem to have a positive effect on site performance. Small sites improve in reach (number of visitors factored with number of page views) in a matter of weeks and large sites see PR improvement and some of that link love all site owners are after.
It’s not the big things that separate you from web-based profits. On the W3, often it’s the little things, the quirky tactics, that make the difference between a site that looks good to spiders and humans. In other words, a successful site.
Five Quirky Tips for Improving Site Performance – All FREE
Of course, you have to do the big stuff. Create the site’s content architecture, choose the site’s look, create user-friendly navigation and all of the other macro-design elements that define a quality site, regardless of the product or service.
And, if you have deep pockets or an extensive knowledge of Flash animation and design or CSS technology, you can create a site that has visual impact – zip, zing, kaboom – even if you’re site sells rat traps in bulk. This is all pretty much the standard in the Era of Web 2.0.
But once the big stuff is taken care of and you’ve priced the creation of a Flash-based site (if you have to ask you can’t afford it), there are some small, quirky kinds of things that seem to have an impact, at least on traffic and reach rankings.
So, before you take that second mortgage on the farm to pay a hotshot site designer, try these steps. They don’t cost anything and there’s at least a consensus among SEO pros that these strategies help, or at least, they can’t hurt site performance. You decide.
1. Embed an ultra-optimized page deep in your site. This page will be indexed by search engine bots and, because it’s optimized for bots and not people, it’ll simply be a page of HTML code optimized for bot consumption only.
To a human, this page is meaningless code with tags and HTML conventions designed as bot bait to rank highly with search engines. This is the page that will appear on the first or second SERP – the link on which visitors will click. But wait, visitors don’t want to look at code. They want pizzazz or understated elegance or shock value.
So, when a visitor clicks on the deeply-embedded, ultimately-optimized site page, s/he is immediately redirected to pages designed for human consumption. This way, you can focus on perfectly optimizing one page for SERPs while developing other pages for human views.
Ahh, but bots don’t like redirects, right? They indicate something suspicious. Wrong. Redirects are used all of the time. When you post to a blog thread, you’re often redirected to a “thank you for you submission” page before returning to the blog itself. Bots encounter redirects all the time. Just make sure your super-optimized bot bait agrees with the rest of the site’s content.
You will get slammed if the redirect takes a professional CPA from a link promising the latest in CPA news (whatever that may be) to your faux flower on-line boutique. That’s a bad idea. However, if the redirect stays true to the site text, it’s an acceptable practice by consensus of SEO professionals.
2. Embed text links. One of the most difficult things for a new site owner to do is to get all site pages indexed. You may have 200 pages on your site, but if only five of them have actually made it into the search engine index, you aren’t getting your due.
Easy to fix if you don’t abuse the practice. Bots follow links. Keeps ‘em moving forward instead of spidering the same page in perpetuity. You don’t think bots are smart do you? They follow links.
Create an intra-site link structure that will lead the spider deeper and deeper into your site, but be careful. An overabundance of these embedded text links is confusing to humans.
Try at your own risk: If you believe in tempting fate, you can create links that don’t appear to humans but do appear to bots. Simply create the link then change the color of the type to the color of the text that surrounds it. Humans don’t know there’s a link there unless they accidentally mouse over it. But bots will find those links. Of course, you may also get slammed for trying to deceive visitors, but some SEOs do employ this quirky tactic with success. Toss of the coin, here. Your call.
3. Use your prime keywords in headers. HTML code offers a range of type sizes from
Word of caution: Everything in moderation. There’s a debate raging (okay, it’s not raging) among SEOs about the use of this tactic. If overused, it’s called header stuffing and it’s as bad as body text with a 10% keyword density.
4. Italicize, underline and bold keywords. Yep, it’s a little thing but spiders do give more weight to these indications of content value or differentiation. Quirky, incremental and free. And while a step like this won’t set your site on a jet-fuelled rocket ride to page 1 of search engine SERPs, it’s the compilation of these little things that do have an impact on site performance with both SE spiders and site visitors.
5. Do NOT use the same keywords as the stiffer competition. Yes, this runs counter to every SEO download e-book you read. All the SEO pros tell you to go with the keywords that work for successful sites. But consider the logic behind that strategy.
Let’s say you’re a car dealer – a regional business trying to reach a geo-specific demographic. If you use the same keywords as CarMax and all of the other leaders in this market segment, your site will be buried under dozens of links to bigger and better known competitors.
Instead, employ “second tier” keywords – lesser used keywords. They won’t be used as often by search engine users but when they are, your site, optimized for these second tier keywords, show up on page 1 of Google’s SERPs. You can even use Google’s Keyword Generator to develop a list of lesser-used keywords. You eliminate the bigger competition. The trade-off is fewer search engine users entering the magical combination of keywords to bring your site to the top.
Another tactic is to employ “long-tail” keywords – keyword phrases. In the case of our car dealer above, a keyword phrase like “quality used cars
Conclusion? Don’t follow the conventional wisdom. It’s so…so conventional. Be creative. Don’t think outside the box – eliminate the box completely.
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