The real deal on SEO

Search Engine Optimization is riddled with fallacies, secrets akin to the Freemasons and magical tricks to thwart the indexes that only a select few can do without fail. But much of it is 'smoke and mirrors'. The fact is the search engines are not that smart, even Google with it's massive search algorithm and secret rules is just a robotic index like any other and the biggest problem an SEO company faces is the number of links available under any given keyword.

Many SEO companies will taunt you with a first page 'guarantee' but what they don't tell you up front is that this is often times for 'long tail' keywords. Long tail keywords are something like "your keyword" + "your city" + "your state" or "your keyword" + "support keyword". Now in my opinion after 11 years in the industry the long tail keywords are just as valuable as the short tail "your keyword" as at least 70% of quality web site traffic can be derived from the long tail. But SEO companies should make this clear to you before they offer the first page guarantee, if for no other reason then to keep the industry righteous. And to give the client an understanding of what to expect so that there is no confusion.

Getting a first page ranking on the search engines is actually not that difficult though by the common pricing standard of SEO companies you would think it's nearly impossible. The fact is there are some simple rules to follow that will almost guarantee first page ranking on all of the search engines and I will tell you what they are right now.

• Use many keywords and spread them out to pages specifically relating to that keyword don't limit yourself to one or two keywords (use similar keyword in the same genre or category)
• don't try to rank a web site on may different genre of content build separate sites for separate things (ie. fishing lures and computer products should not be on the same site it confuses the indexes on what your site is actually about) if you must build a single website with very different content use sub domains like fishing.mydomain.com or computers.mydomain.com. Or, if you can't do that, at the very minimum separate them by folders mydomain.com/fishing mydomain.com/computers. This helps the search engines figure out what is going on, on your site.
• Make sure your site is constructed well that you don't have broken links, that images show up, and that all of your HTML is correctly put together with proper opening and closing tags
• Use alt text relating to your keywords
• Use clean minimally repetitive META tags
• Put as much text relating to your keyword as you can on the pages of your site
• Make sure your site links from every page to every page (or at least every top level page)
• Build, Build, Build a site that never grows is not interesting to the Search Engines
• get links from as may other web sites (preferably similar to yours) as you are able
• wait (search engine indexes are not fast it takes time to get first page listings)

Here are a couple of things you absolutely should not do

• Don't buy a whole bunch of back links if you do purchase back links do one or two a month
• Don't point a bunch of domains at the same web site do one to three at the most (you are better off building separate sites with different content and template)
• Don't get crap links from sites that are nothing but outbound links
• Don't do crazy redirects and cloaking to try and fake out the search engines
• Don't try to fake out the search engines at all they may not be smart but they're not idiots either
• Don't use any software that promises you 100's or 1000's of back links
• Don't listen to everything you hear about SEO there are a thousand different ways to take your money and 99% of them either don't work or can actually harm your search engine listing, or can confuse you enough to make you make bad decisions

No you probably don't have time to do this yourself. Thats why you hire an SEO company to do it for you. Fine, but make sure you hire an SEO company who is going to do it, and yes an SEO company that is going to do all of this is going to be very expensive. Not necessarily as expensive as some but very likely more then you WANT to pay.

It takes a manual SEO company in the range of 130 hours to get any given web site 'up to snuff' and at an average hourly rate of $100.00 an hour you are looking at $13,000.00 to reach perfect first page SEO either all at once or over a couple of years of service separated out by $300.00 or $400.00 a month payments.

Most SEO companies do much of this in the first month or so and then continue to charge you monthly hoping that you stay with them long enough to make their $13,000.00 goal knowing that your results will get better with time even if they are not working very hard after their initial progress. If they are worth their salt they will continue to try and generate new back links for your web site every month.

Are there cheaper less time consuming options? Just one SpiderLoop It does much of the above for one much lower monthly fee. You should still hire a web developer who understands SEO someone who can make sure your web site is SEO ready by checking for broken links and images, verifying your sites HTML and adding or changing content once every couple of months. And you should still ask your business associates and vendors to link to your site. But with SpiderLoop you can cut down your personal SEO work time to an hour or two a month, and not pay huge fees every month. 

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This weblog is sponsored by SpiderLoop SEO control panel.
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Yield Launches Free SEO Product, Updates Premium SEO Solution

Yield Software has launched a new FREE product called SEO Analyzer. To use the tool, simply go directly to YieldSoftware.com and look for SEO Analyzer. Type in the URL you wish to analyze and your email, then click Submit.

First impression? SEO Analyzer tool works fast. Many free tools are slow and you can practically write a thesis while it loads. But this one is super-fast.

SEO Analyzer is also easy to understand. Do you remember getting started in SEO and you had to learn all about HTML tags, links (inbound/outbound/internal etc), domain age, etc? SEO Analyzer is clear as day. A clear day. Sunny skies. No clouds.

Some of the recommendations are subject to debate. Long discussions and arguments have taken place in the SEO community over things like using hyphens to separate words in URLs. If you're new to SEO, welcome to the confusing world of best practices.

SEO Analyzer also serves up suggestions that are good for usability, even though they don't directly involve rankings, per se. For example, meta descriptions, at least in Google's case, do not directly affect rankings. But they are included in the search results and could persuade a searcher to click on a link.

While SEO Analyzer is a helpful product, Yield Software offers a more robust solution if you want to get really in-depth with your SEO. The solution is called Natural Search Optimizer. It's part of Yield's premium search marketing suite, but Yield is now offering Natural Search Optimizer as its own stand-alone product. Pricing starts at $49 per month per domain.

"Yield Software's new stand-alone version of our Natural Search Optimizer works daily to track and tune web pages to drive more qualified traffic to company websites, products and services," said Matt Malden, founder and CEO of Yield Software.

With the new offering comes new features. Upgrades include inbound link tracking, traffic monitoring and page rank trend analysis for keywords across the Google, Yahoo, and Bing. The upgrades are included in both the stand-alone version and for the module included with the Yield Software suite.

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ASP.NET 4 SEO Improvements (VS 2010 and .NET 4.0 Series)

[In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu]

This is the thirteenth in a series of blog posts I?m doing on the upcoming VS 2010 and .NET 4 release.  Today?s post covers some of the improvements being made around Search Engine Optimization (SEO) with ASP.NET 4.

Why SEO?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is important for any publically facing web-site.  A large percentage of traffic to sites now comes from search engines, and improving the search relevancy of your site will lead to more user traffic to your site from search engine queries (which can directly or indirectly increase the revenue you make through your site).

Measuring the SEO of your website with the SEO Toolkit

Last month I blogged about the free SEO Toolkit we?ve shipped that you can use to analyze your site for SEO correctness, and which provides detailed suggestions on any SEO issues it finds. 

I highly recommend downloading and using the tool against any public site you work on.  It makes it easy to spot SEO issues you might have in the site, and pinpoint ways to optimize it further.

ASP.NET 4 SEO Improvements

ASP.NET 4 includes a bunch of new runtime features that can help you to further optimize your site for SEO.  Some of these new features include:

• New Page.MetaKeywords and Page.MetaDescription properties
• New URL Routing support for ASP.NET Web Forms
• New Response.RedirectPermanent() method

Below are details about how you can take advantage of them to further improve your search engine relevancy.

Page.MetaKeywords and Page.MetaDescription properties

One simple recommendation to improve the search relevancy of pages is to make sure you always output relevant ?keywords? and ?description? <meta> tags within the <head> section of your HTML.  For example:

One of the nice improvements with ASP.NET 4 Web Forms is the addition of two new properties to the Page class: MetaKeywords and MetaDescription that make programmatically setting these values within your code-behind classes much easier and cleaner. 

ASP.NET 4?s <head> server control now looks at these values and will use them when outputting the <head> section of pages.  This behavior is particularly useful for scenarios where you are using master-pages within your site ? and the <head> section ends up being in a .master file that is separate from the .aspx file that contains the page specific content.  You can now set the new MetaKeywords and MetaDescription properties in the .aspx page and have their values automatically rendered by the <head> control within the master page.

Below is a simple code snippet that demonstrates setting these properties programmatically within a Page_Load() event handler:

In addition to setting the Keywords and Description properties programmatically in your code-behind, you can also now declaratively set them within the @Page directive at the top of .aspx pages.  The below snippet demonstrates how to-do this:

As you?d probably expect, if you set the values programmatically they will override any values declaratively set in either the <head> section or the via the @Page attribute. 

URL Routing with ASP.NET Web Forms

URL routing was a capability we first introduced with ASP.NET 3.5 SP1, and which is already used within ASP.NET MVC applications to expose clean, SEO-friendly ?web 2.0? URLs.  URL routing lets you configure an application to accept request URLs that do not map to physical files. Instead, you can use routing to define URLs that are semantically meaningful to users and that can help with search-engine optimization (SEO).

For example, the URL for a traditional page that displays product categories might look like below:

http://www.mysite.com/products.aspx?category=software

Using the URL routing engine in ASP.NET 4 you can now configure the application to accept the following URL instead to render the same information:

http://www.mysite.com/products/software

With ASP.NET 4.0, URLs like above can now be mapped to both ASP.NET MVC Controller classes, as well as ASP.NET Web Forms based pages.  You can even have a single application that contains both Web Forms and MVC Controllers, and use a single set of routing rules to map URLs between them.

Please read my previous URL Routing with ASP.NET 4 Web Forms blog post to learn more about how the new URL Routing features in ASP.NET 4 support Web Forms based pages.

Response.RedirectPermanent() Method

It is pretty common within web applications to move pages and other content around over time, which can lead to an accumulation of stale links in search engines.

In ASP.NET, developers have often handled requests to old URLs by using the Response.Redirect() method to programmatically forward a request to the new URL.  However, what many developers don?t realize is that the Response.Redirect() method issues an HTTP 302 Found (temporary redirect) response, which results in an extra HTTP round trip when users attempt to access the old URLs.  Search engines typically will not follow across multiple redirection hops ? which means using a temporary redirect can negatively impact your page ranking.  You can use the SEO Toolkit to identify places within a site where you might have this issue.

ASP.NET 4 introduces a new Response.RedirectPermanent(string url) helper method that can be used to perform a redirect using an HTTP 301 (moved permanently) response.  This will cause search engines and other user agents that recognize permanent redirects to store and use the new URL that is associated with the content.  This will enable your content to be indexed and your search engine page ranking to improve.

Below is an example of using the new Response.RedirectPermanent() method to redirect to a specific URL:

ASP.NET 4 also introduces new Response.RedirectToRoute(string routeName) and Response.RedirectToRoutePermanent(string routeName) helper methods that can be used to redirect users using either a temporary or permanent redirect using the URL routing engine.  The code snippets below demonstrate how to issue temporary and permanent redirects to named routes (that take a category parameter) registered with the URL routing system.

You can use the above routes and methods for both ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC based URLs.

Summary

ASP.NET 4 includes a bunch of feature improvements that make it easier to build public facing sites that have great SEO.  When combined with the SEO Toolkit, you should be able to use these features to increase user traffic to your site ? and hopefully increase the direct or indirect revenue you make from them.

Hope this helps,

Scott

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